Smelly Hippies Take Charge Of Your Trash

Dude...That Odor Aroma Isn't Patchouli, It's Methane Gas...


Picture me with my ever greying, ever balding head tilted back toward the heavens laughing hysterically at the ironic twist of things out there in the so-called Governments operating on the left coast in California these days.

According to this news article, people in the bastion of the sensitive, liberal, politically correct world of San Francisco are putting their recyclables where their mouths and ideals should be---in the regular trash receptacles.

Apparently people out there are too busy these days singing "Kumbaya" and burning incense out in 'Frisco' to take the time to separate their left over bean Kurd and tofu from their cardboard and cellophane...

Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents' trash to make sure pizza crusts aren't mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

And if residents or businesses don't separate the coffee grounds from the newspapers, they would face fines of up to $1,000 and eventually could have their garbage service stopped.

The plan to require proper sorting of refuse would be the nation's first mandatory recycling and composting law. It would direct garbage collectors to inspect the trash to make sure it is put into the right blue, black or green bin, according to a draft of the legislation prepared by the city's Department of the Environment.

The program is designed to limit the amount of food and foliage that goes into the city-contracted landfill in Alameda County, where the refuse takes up costly space and decomposes to form methane, one of the most potent of greenhouse gases. It will also help San Francisco, which city officials say currently diverts 70 percent of its waste from landfills, achieve a goal set by the Board of Supervisors to divert 75 percent by 2010 and have zero waste by 2020.

Does anyone but me see the stupidity or at least some less than small bit of irony in this story?

First of all, let me say this and get my daily dose of profanity out of my system...

In my considered Redneck opinion, this idiot named Gavin Newsom, the current Mayor of San Francisco, apparently has "shit for brains", so anything coming out of his mouth or any other bodily orifice is likely to contain the very methane gas he's complaining about.

Now, as to the substance of Mayor Newsom's proposal...the dreaded punitive $1000 "fines" he's proposing for breaking the San Francisco's garbage police's rules will, as I've said all along, make matters worse, not better.

While it is true that as long as you can throw away anything you want to for $30 per month people are going to do it...at least at the same time you can control what honest GOD fearing people do with their trash and refuse by providing the service at a reasonable cost.

Cheep, affordable garbage service virtually guarantees at least some minimal level of compliance, while expensive fees, time consuming rules, and giant fines only guarantee that the roadside and adjacent vacant properties will become impromptu landfills and garbage heaps.

Get it?

Further, I have some personal experience with this subject while living on the Georgia coast--where both the city and later the county attempted to eliminate dumping by imposing mandatory garbage collection fees.

The county did it through the addition of the garbage collection fee in land owners' property taxes, while the city simply added the fee to your monthly water/sewer bill. I guess that the theory was that if you didn't pay the trash bill inclued in your tax bill or water bill, the government would take your house or turn off your water as a result... but can you guess what actually happened?

First of all, the trash service we received across the board was ABYSMAL because the customer had no choice in contractors (there was no competition) AND, virtually no one recycled because the government contracted collection companies and government provided collection personnel made it impossible to understand their ever changing rules about how and what you could recycle, and when and where you had to put things out on the curb for collection.

Further, just like Mayor Newsom's apartment dwellers in the news story, there is a whole culture of citizens--some call them the homeless (urban outdoorsmen) or the "working poor" who don't pay rent and don't own real property.

They do, however, own a number of old refrigerators, sofas, flourescent light bulbs, single tennis shoes, and they all eat a good deal of McDonalds cheeseburgers packaged in foam, cardboard, plastic, and paper.

Guess how much the waste disposal fees collected on property tax and water bills influenced their trash disposal practices.

Can you say ZERO?

In fact, I believe that it actually made things worse in Glynn County Georgia because outside of our singular exception of our little island, there was garbage EVERYWHERE... strewn up and down along the streets, and laying in piles on the sidewalk and on every out of the way place.

To make matters worse, the city trash collectors and the county trash contractors would not pick up anything if the pile was mixed refuse.

If you legally put out a pile of leaves and branches for collection on Thursday and some moron came by and tossed a load of household garbage or an old toilet into your pile without your permission, the City workers or the county's anointed contractor would simply drive past and ignore it.

Meanwhile, as the days and weeks went by the pile would grow bigger and Bigger and BIGGER until three times in five years I had to call the City and beg them to bring a CREW OF MEN, a FRONT END LOADER and A DUMP TRUCK to the alley behind my rental property and remove sofas, the guts of a PIANO, and tons of other stuff that total strangers piled on my property.

To add insult to injury, the city told me that unless I put up a fence across the back of my property, at MY EXPENSE, that they would charge me the next time the lovely residents of the city and county chose to use my property as a landfill rather than following the law and using the taxpayer financed waste disposal system they had so carefully engineered.

Government in action...ya got to love it...

Now as to Mayor Newsom's genius ideas and proclamations.

IF SOMEONE DOESN'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY FOR TRASH SERVICE, THEY PROBABLY ALSO DON'T CARE ABOUT PAYING YOUR $1000 FINE WHEN THEY'RE CAUGHT MIXING THEIR DIGITAL CAMERA BATTERIES WITH THEIR TAMPONS AND LEFT OVER FRENCH FRIES.

Further, if you cancel their trash service, do you think that they're actually going to stop eating and buying cigarettes and beer at the grocery store and suddenly produce ZERO refuse...just because you command that they do so?

You, Mayor Newsom, are an idiot, elected in a land of full of blithering blooming idiots, and you're lucky that people don't treat you like they did Governor George Wallace and Presidents Lincoln, Ford, and Reagan.

If I were you, Mr. Newsom, I'd be out picking out a new Tux to wear to your next public appearance, and it'd weigh significantly more the the twenty outfits you already have hanging in your closet right now (can you say BODY ARMOR?)

That will be all...for now...