You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
And this is k i AM six forty Bill Handle here on a taco Tuesday, September twenty four, as we're possibly awaiting a regional war breaking out in the Mideast.
Very bad stuff, all right. I want to talk about plastic recycling for a moment.
There's an interesting lawsuit that has just been filed by the State of California suing Exon Mobile, accusing it of misleading the public about the effectiveness of plastic recycling.
Now, let's start with the fact that Exon.
Mobile is a huge producer of the raw materials that create plastic bottles. Petroleum byproducts is what they use to create bottles.
So here's Exon Mobile saying that.
We are producing plastics and wheat which can be recycled, and we're promoting the fact that they are being or should be recycled. Well, Attorney General Rob Bonta of the State of California said or alleges that Exon Moobile is engaged in a decades long campaign of deception that cause an exacerbated the global plastic pollution crisis. So the City of California is arguing it's your fault. You've lied to us that this is recyclable and it's not being recycled.
Five to six percent a quote of these plastic bottles are being recycled, and that's in the US. It's about nine percent worldwide, they do a better job. So I have my bottle of diet coke. Here my plastic bottle of diet coke, and there it is plastic bottle recycled, the little recycle sign on there, the little little icon. And here's what ends up happening in the world of recycling. And I am a fanatic recycler. That's one thing where
I am environmentally conscious. I put plastic bottles, cans, cardboard, and especially cardboard because now we all have tons of it because we buy online. And those I break down and put them in a recycling bin. And my guess is the cans and the cardboard gets recycled. The rest of it is a waste of time. Why bother because it's not being recycled. And this is the argument that Robbont is making. It gets excellent. You're saying that this is recyclable and it's not being recycled.
Therefore you are a bunch of liars.
Therefore, we're holding you responsible for destroying the environment.
What they're saying is it's recyclable.
It is California's fault for not having enough programs out there to recycle.
Ain't our fault.
We manusfacture the stuff that can be recycled. That's why we put the little recycled or we tell the manufacturers put the little recycled icon on there, because that's what we can produce. And some plastics are recyclable, some are not. Packaging some is some isn't. But we have a government here that says it's your fault, and I tell you assuming that.
And I haven't.
Gone really into this because I don't when we do one undor two segments. You know, I don't spend time reading eighty one hundred pages of reports per segment. It's if it can be recycled and the packaging says this is recyclable, and it's not being recycled, then the problem is much bigger than Exxon Mobile saying we recycle or
you should recycle, and this is recyclable. And these plastic bottles and this is a god awful mess because they break down into these microplastics, the nanoplastics, And we reported yesterday, we said yesterday and maybe last week that these tiny little bits of plastic, almost microscopic, are in everything all of us, all the plants in the air, what we eat, our environment, in the fish, in the cattle that we eat.
It's in everything on this earth.
And there was a study just came out that said the Earth's oceans contain more than one hundred and seventy trillion pieces of plastic, which is going to take hundreds of years to break down.
So we are full of plastic. It's that simple.
And the state of California is suing Exonmobile. It's your fault, why because you've been telling us that this is recyclable and there isn't enough recycla What you really have to tell us is that it is not recyclable. Well, it is recyclable, but it's not being recycled, and therefore it's your fault. And Exon Mobil is throwing it right back in California's face and saying you're dreaming. Don't tell us about recyclable. All we make is the product. You're not
doing it. By the way, California isn't alone last year New York suit PepsiCo accusing Pexico of polluting the Buffalo River.
And as you can imagine, the lawsuit against Exon.
Mobile is cheered by the environmental advocates and it's no surprise that is happening here in California. So am I going to take my bottle of diet coke plastic bottle this time around?
And am I going.
To recycle it? Yes, because it's a habit. Is this going to be recycled in anything?
Probably not? And what do they recycle it in? Well?
I think do they we package it into other plastic bottles. I just think they make little pellets out of it, and they use playground playground equipment with it or the flooring of playgrounds. I don't know, all right, recyclable, I think plastic. I think paper bags are a different story in terms of recycling the cardboards certainly, certainly.
New Year, they just make it into a pulp start over. Yeah, that's what we do here, is we make everything into a pulp and recycle everything. Jokes stories. Yeah, that's a good point. That's what we do, all right.
Here is the dilemma I want to share with you, And this is in reference to Gavin Newsom signing a bill into law yesterday, and it has to be with students and cell phones.
Now, a couple of things we absolutely know.
One is that cell phones in schools, students do not pay attention to classes, lectures, or anything that's going on in the classroom when they have their cell phone and they're always either texting each other or looking things up, or going on whatever sites or chatting or whatever they do, and it disrupts school.
We know that. We know that school is disrupted.
We know that grades go down, we know the attention span of students in class goes way down, and it truly affects the quality of the education. Okay, number one, So that's easy. How do we get rid of that? We ban We ban cell phones.
That's it. That makes it easy. Then we have the whole issue of students are.
Going to do better, which they are, They're going to come out actually reading.
They are. However, let's look at the other side of the.
Coin, and that is whenever there is an active shooter, or there's a problem, or a kid gets hurt on the playground or has a medical issue, there's a cell phone boom. You call mom or Dad or you call nine to one one. How many times have we heard in various in every active shooter scenario in the last several years, someone in the classroom, someone at the schools picked this, Some students picked up their phone dial one one or call their parents. How do you reconcile safety
and cell phones? Which is one side of this coin. The other side is the quality of education that almost collapses because of cell phones. So Newsom signed to bill yesterday will require California school districts to restrict or ban student cell phone use. By the way, we have the largest CA to twelve population in the country, and this is naturally one of the forefronts or the first laws and the nation.
Naturally it is. It's called the Phone Free Schools Act.
Requires the thoul in school districts in California, charter schools, county education offices to draft student cell phone policies by July one, twenty twenty six. Now this is a fun one. It's not banning cell phones in schools. What it is is creates a process.
To set up task forces. Actually, it says to local schools.
Figure out how cell phones should be banned.
It's up to you. That's it. The only thing the law.
Does say is schools have to restrict phone use in order to support pupil learning and well being.
Wow, tell me that's not open ended.
That's crazy, Newsom wrote in a statement after signing the bill.
Which quite often happens.
We know and sometimes that he says nothing, Sometimes he signs, Sometimes he sends a veto message.
Well, this is a I have signed message.
We know that excess to smartphone use increases anxiety, depression, other mental health issues. Absolutely true, and we have the power to intervene. Absolutely true. The new law will help students focus on academic, social development and the world in front of them, not their screens when they're in school.
Probably true.
However, let's talk about the safety of students having cell phones, which I don't think anybody can argue. A student with a cell phone has the ability of calling authorities, calling home, virtually immediately telling the cops we're hiding in this classroom.
We're in number one thirty.
Eight, and we have the door barred, and we're in the corner near the closet, and they know what's going on. Now, the police, I have a much more sophisticated way of entering school. They have floor plans now, and they know the way schools are set up, where how classrooms are set up. Well, how important it is for them to know what's going on inside the classroom when there is an active shooter or when there is a problem. But what if the students don't have access to phone calls?
Are they're doing better in school? How do you reconcile that? And I don't think it could be reconciled now. The technology is there, right people go. One of them is, sure, use your cell phone and we're going to block it. School's going to be a building where you can't use it until someone unblocks it.
That's a possibility that works.
But then what if the administration doesn't know that there is someone there and is a threat and people will only find out when we have a shooter right outside the classroom walking and stocking the halls. The other way of doing it is simply collecting phone call the phones at the beginning of the school day. So the state of California and this is a neat bill because what
it has said is it doesn't have specifics. It says school can't ban a pupil from having a cell phone when a licensed physician or surgeon says the student needs the device for health related reasons. Okay, so that's an exception. If you need the device, doctor says you need it, there's a doctor's note.
You can have a phone. Also, students in certain.
Individualized education programs, they can bypass the restrictions.
And students will be.
Allowed to access the phones during emergencies.
Okay, how about this.
The school collects the phones, which a lot of schools do at the beginning of the school day, but you.
Can access them if.
If there's an emergency. I don't know if it can be reconciled at all. And this is these are at least this one. Yesterday I talked about unintended consequences when bills are passed. At least this one is so vague, it is so non se consequential. It says, we agree cell phones should be banned, but you have to look at where it shouldn't be banned, and you have to set up studies that determine that schools should figure out a way to ban these phones. And it's you guys
figure it out. Okay, thank you, there's the law. It's the you guys figure it out law. Now let me tell you about a flight of a Boeing Triple seven that it was an American Airlines and the captain Dan.
Carey was alerted.
You hear that, you know that blaring pull up, pull up, pull up, when planes are descending too low. It's with a siren, and that's what he heard. Oh going too low, pull up. He was a thirty two thousand feet and he heard it. So what the hell happened? Well, it's a kind of electronic warfare that now hundreds of civilian pilots are encountering every single day. It's GPS spoofing. Pilots use GPS for navigation.
That is the way it works now. That is the.
Primary way that airlines that airplanes are navigating. And these are fake signals spoofing that tells pilots a whole bunch of things. You're in the wrong place. All kinds of glitches are happening. You have to descend, you have to ascend. The airplane is not working well, and it takes the pilot a way to figure out. Primarily, the big problem right now seems to be navigation. The rest of it is just coming. And so what the pilots are being done is being being trained for this GPS.
Spoofing, and they sort of have to know.
I was watching a documentary yesterday again I love these things, and it's about the Cold War. And there was one incident nineteen eighty three in which the Russian, the new Russian version of NORAD and that is trying to figure out American missiles, nuclear ballistic missiles coming into Russia.
And there it showed on his screen.
The guy was running that particular department at the time, he was the overnight guy, and there he sees on his screen four missiles from the United States coming in, nuclear missiles coming in to attack the US. And he decided, you know, I don't trust the computer. I think the computer's wrong on this. Even though I'm being told that's what's happening. It doesn't make a lot of sense. If the US were going to attack RuSHA, it wouldn't do
it with four or five missiles. It would do it with hundreds of missiles.
And so he stopped it cold. He wouldn't go up.
Up the food chain, basically stopped World War II from happening.
By the way, he lost his job.
Instead of being a hero, he was nailed for it because he embarrassed the higher ups who had put in this system that was faulty. The point is he didn't trust the computers.
He didn't trust his system.
And the shame of it is when you think of airplanes, and I've said this and this is a universality.
Always trust the instruments. Always trust the instruments.
They are far more effective than anything the eyeball can do.
For example, the horizon. John F.
Kennedy Junior boom went right into the augured into the sea because he was looking at the horizon and he lost it. The instruments tell you where it is, and he wasn't paying attention. So pilots are now trained when it comes to these glitches, don't trust the instruments, go to.
Your gut feeling.
For example, Captain carry, Now this was an easy one.
Right pull up, pull up, pull up. I'm a thirty two thousand feet Where am I going to pull up from? No? I don't have problem here.
But when you have, for example, the GPS telling you you're off course when in fact you are on course, how do they deal with it?
Well, one is training and now.
There's but that's something else pilots have to deal with on top of everything they have to deal with, on top of the fact that they're working overtime, on top of the fact that falling asleep, on top of the fact there aren't enough pilots out there, on top of the fact that they're not now hiring pilots with fewer hours in the air, so it is not being a pilot today is far more difficult and a lot more tiring than it used to be and dealing with now
in this case the GPS spoofy are there end a rounds? Yeah, they have other ways of figuring out navigation. There are there are systems that are in place that use things other than GPS.
I mean, GPS is fairly new. You know.
Airplanes have been flying overseas and have been flying along distance a lot longer than GPS has been around. But we're going to as a matter of fact, it all goes down to straight dead reckoning no airplanes. If you look at some older airplanes, there's a little bubble on top of the cockpit and they used to use when it was you know, instruments were fairly new and pilots were all trained to take a sexton and look at the night sky and navigate dead reckoning.
Of course they don't do that anymore, but that was part.
You know.
I wonder if pilots are still trained in that. I don't think so. I don't think so.
I think there's too many redundancies in the GPS. I have to look that up, by the way, I really do. I'll do that during the break. Hey, siri, are pilots trained in dead reckoning anymore?
Yeah?
Pilots are still trained in dead reckoning? Okay, Hey, pretty impressive.
All right.
I want to share something with you, and this has to do with a kind of tourism, and it's called glacier tourism.
And there's a guy, no I.
Think three years ago, Zach Sheldon was watching was up near Valdez Glacier in Alaska, and he was watching these huge chunks of ice breakoff and go into.
Into the ocean. Calved.
It was actually next to a lake at Calved in the lake below. And then he's looking there and they find two bodies clinging to a canoe, a third about one hundred and fifty feet away. They were too close to the glacier's edge and they got caught up in the ice. Not necessarily ice falling on top of them, but the wave that was created and they're too close and you don't want to go in the water, not in that temperature. They were boating on Valdez Lake, two Germans and an Austrian.
And why did they go? Because they wanted to see these glaciers. They're fast disappearing.
Glacier tourism has exploded in recent years, and.
There's a bunch of reasons.
One to fulfill a bucket list stream And I will tell you, and I've said this before, if you're going to go on cruises, there's three or four places in the world you.
Want to go to. One of them Alaska the inland.
Passage where part of it you go into Glacier Bay or other to see the glaciers. And guess what, there ain't many glaciers left. Climate change has just wiped out glaciers. If you ever go to Juno, and i'd been. My first Alaska trip was maybe thirty five years ago on a cruise and you get off and you spend the day. Juno Mendenhall Glacier is the big glacier outside of Juno. And when I went there thirty five years ago, it was a few hundred yards from the town, the outskirts
of the town. I mean walk right there today, it's five miles away. It has retreated, it is shrinking, and you can see what's going on. So one reason is to fill a bucket list dream. Another to get close to a natural phenomenon. This is absolutely gorgeous.
Some for adventure, but I'll tell you what.
Another reason has come up, another motivation to see the glaciers before they disappear. And it's called last chance tourism. Usually tourism is you want to be the first or one of the first, you know, sailing across the stretch of water, if you're crazy enough, first.
One, climbing a mountain. Now it's about lasts.
Glaciers are becoming the poster child for last chance destinations. And even under the best case scenario. According to recent papers that have been done best case scenario, half the world's glaciers will be gone by twenty one hundred, and they become more accessible as they melt, they're more dangerous, they're becoming more unstable.
Last month, for example, there was an American.
Tourist died when an ice cave collapse in Iceland, and it was at the Brio Breo Meta Ameda Quarter Joe Cool Glacier in Iceland, and the reason he died is because the guide spent so much time pronouncing the name of the glacier that he couldn't quite get out in time trying to understand what happened.
And there are deaths all over the.
World, and it is really unfortunate. It's been a lot of years since I've been to Alaska, and now there's eight zillion cruise lines as that go up there, and I don't know how many go into.
These various glacier lakes. Used to be you go into Glacier Bay.
Now you've got four four ships allowed in there because it's just so dangerous and you have to you can't get that close. So that is that certainly is fairly safe. And I could take a big cruise line that close. Although you can hear the calving and you hear what appeared to be right here rifle shots and that's the ice that's moving. Is kind of interesting, but it doesn't I mean, these are national parks. Doesn't stop anybody for taking a canoe and going up there and dying, and
so it's a shame. I think you can still take a helicopter out of Juno and land on the men in the Hall glacier and they're pretty careful. The guides go out in the morning and they make sure that they're safe places and there are the area is flagged off, but it's kind of neat walking around on top of a glacier. Now, unfortunately you fall through and it's it's a heartbreaker. That's just one of the issues of climate change.
And you know, thank goodness, I'm not going to be around twenty thirty forty years from now because that's one of the things that you're just not going to have the advantage of doing it.
It's a shame. It is a shame. You know, glaciers are melting. They are all right.
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