The Dirty Deeds of Bag Nags

As we all join in the Moral Equivalent Of War (meow!) to Save the Planet, it's inevitably necessary that "sacrifices must be made."  President Obama, who spends the winter basking in the tropical heat of the Oval Office at taxpayer expense previously warned Americans that:

We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.

Cars, comforts, toilet paper - all the comforts of modern life must be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.  But a little inconvenience is a small price to pay for keeping Mother Earth healthy, right?

Not necessarily.  Turns out that some of these "small" comforts we can easily do without have very sound reasoning behind them.  The Washington Post reports:

Nearly every [reusable shopping] bag examined for bacteria by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University found whopping amounts of bugs. Coliform bacteria, suggesting raw-meat or uncooked-food contamination, was in half of the bags, and E. coli was found in 12 percent of the bags.

Running the bags through a washer or cleaning them by hand reduced bacteria levels to almost nothing, the study reported, but nearly all shoppers questioned said they do not regularly, if ever, wash their reusable bags.  [emphasis added]

Why do you suppose that might be?  Well, considering the drumbeat of environmentalist horror against detergents that actually work, not to mention railing against water consumption and high hot-water temperatures, it should come as no surprise that the same sort of person who obsesses over bringing reusable bags to the grocery store would not be the cleanest of housekeepers.

A few far-left kooks catching E. coli is not the worst thing in the world.  Trying to force E. coli breeding farms down the throats of the rest of us, now, that's another story.  The study the Post cited came into existence because the California legislature is considering a ban on single-use plastic bags - yes, that's right, outlawing the very innovation that allows you instantly and cheaply throw away leaky chicken juices and crunched tomatoes from your grocery run.

And speaking of your groceries: Have they considered exactly who would be worst hit by this stupidity?

The fatties who gorge on processed foods would not be affected: packaged goods come in their own sealed packages and a quick ride in a dirty shopping bag won't do them any harm.  It is precisely those people who are trying to be healthy - buying fresh fruits and vegetables, which don't come pre-packaged - who'll be catching the diseases.

Our forefathers had a healthy appreciation for hygiene, and knew a life-saving innovation when they saw it.  The old slogan of "Better living through chemistry" was no sort of a joke, it was a literal truth appreciated by all.

Alas, for today's radical environmentalists a better world is one with fewer people in it; death by E. coli is a feature, not a bug.

How far we have fallen, where instead of knowing and defending our technological achievements, we instead reach for "Worse dying through government"!