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Yoho preface

Hank is a pseudonym for my good friend with an IQ of 170 and an inordinate fondness for AI searches. When I consult him in his specialty area, his opinions are gold. In other fields, he returns my questions with search results, which annoys me. I made the mistake of asking him about plastics, and he came back with 40 references and nothing further. They purport to show the horrors of macro- and microplastics. I analyzed these and other references through the lens of my background and judgment and reached an opposing opinion.

Hank is intellectually honest and able to change his mind. I hope he will leave a comment, and if he does, I will pin it to the top.

Introduction: The Rockefellers invented the climate change fraud

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. —Commonly attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda. It means that something can be accepted as true if it is so outrageous that people cannot fathom someone would lie about it.

What follows in this first part is from my Nov 2024 post HERE, most of which was initially in a post by Unbekoming.

They fueled the story with nine hundred ninety (990) nonprofit organizations. Every time you hear a “climate change” scare story, that person is a Rockefeller stooge who is being paid. He may not know it, but his profession has been entirely corrupted. The following italicized excerpt is from Jacob Nordangård’s Rockefeller: Controlling the Game (2024).

The whole thing was their idea; they took a silly but interesting theory and amplified it with hundreds of millions of dollars. They founded institutions and linked their survival to promoting climate change and population reduction. They adopted one likely politician after another.

The Rockefellers have created 990 climate change activist organizations. They give them directions and financing and launch them into the world. The Rockefellers started, financed, organized, and militarized the Green Movement. By the late 40’s, the family was all in, on the same page. In the 50s, they began to stand up countless institutions, committees, university departments, university institutes, foundations, and policy shops gathered around this one idea:

Man is now degrading his environment at a terrifying rate. The cumulative effects of advancing technology, massive industrialization, urban concentration, and population growth have all combined… not only to create imminent danger to the quality of human life, but even to pose threats to life itself. —Rockefeller Foundation, 1969 Annual Report

By 1998, the Rockefeller family had swept the table clean of any opposition to this one idea. Any scientist not on board with the agenda was imperiled. Any university department not working towards this one artificial goal was in danger of being marginalized. Infiltration had begun into every media organization, every major corporation’s entertainment division. This, as stated below, would be a generational goal. For everyone. Or get off the bus.

What is evidentiary, what can be proved in a court of law, rather than opinion, however, is that the Fabians started the idea of this whole one-world, no nation-state. It is clear, too, that after the First World War, the Fabians roped in the second generation of Rockefellers. It was a major catch. It meant they had America. And it was spiritual. It was meant to change mankind, to kill off Homo Sapiens and turn us into Homo Universalis.

The New Man would be non-Christian, quietist, and self-obsessed. The economy would trend towards zero growth, if not de-growth. There is a preponderance of data, many publications that laid out their plans. They twisted education away from practical science, engineering, and building things toward social movements, the humanities, the arts, and pleasure. With Laurance Rockefeller’s money and organizational skills, they devised and invented the discipline of cybernetics, from which the internet flows.

The first Rockefeller, as almost everyone knows, was John D., by all accounts, a deeply unpleasant individual who, after his private army killed protestors, was advised to go into charity in a big way to rescue his reputation. Which he did, managing to dodge the trustbusters and Teddy Roosevelt and build his empire over the corpses of his competitors. And then, as advised, he began to buy the media. The Luce empire of Time-Life fell into step. From the 60s on, Time-Life stood astride the media world, attracting the best, the authority on every subject. I was trained there and trained well, but all the writing was done back in New York, in the Time-Life building in Rockefeller Center. It was massaged to fit the message. I wanted to write and left.

By the second generation, the family had found its purpose, the meaning for all the wealth, the path forward. John D., according to Sir Stephen Wilkinson, who has studied him all his life, believed to his core that God had favored him with so much wealth because he was good; his Baptist faith, coupled with titanic wealth, made him a modern priest. His family and his heirs would be a Royal Priesthood leading mankind to a new paradise. How the family must have fallen upon the Fabians, with their starry titled members, Bertrand Russell, all the Huxleys, H.G. Wells, Emmeline Pankhurst. How seductive socialism is to the intellectual class. It gives them the right, being so smart, to order humanity. To choose for the rest of us. Few of them could run a corner store.

The seduction of great wealth is pretty much irresistible. Everyone falls. The last time I was “in society” was at a wedding hosted by the Bostonian Cabots – so ancient they arrived in the New World in 1498. Famously, “The Lodges only talk to the Cabots, and the Cabots only talk to God.” That’s how grand they are. Their wealth spread out that weekend was like entering heaven; everything was so beautiful and absolutely perfect in every detail. It was a lush, sinking feeling, utterly seductive to the ego. Any Clinton, Gore, Obama, Kerry, Bush, any impoverished scientist, any ambitious university administrator, every fundraiser, every marginalized military man, would fall over like an ambitious 20-year-old faced with her first billionaire. Take me; I’m yours.

And that’s what happened. That’s how they did it: by inviting likely servants to their houses and hunting lodges, donating buildings, buying the land for the U.N., funding organizations, appealing to vanity and greed, and above all, the human desperate need for significance. They created a super-class unmoored to reality and entirely 100% destructive of human life. It was systematic, a fierce, unstoppable, detailed two-hundred-year plan. Each generation would make its contribution.

It started with the felt need to reduce the population and turn man into something other than what he is. To stress, environmentalism, neo-Malthusianism, and the ‘saving of the planet’ were the motivators for each of the following actions. If you accepted Rockefeller funding, you toed the line. There were too many people; the Earth’s carrying capacity was breached; the planet was dying; and we need a new form of humanity. These ideas all came out of the Fabian stable and metastasized through the culture like the most delicious poison. Every intellectual at every university began promoting this idea. It was heady, exciting. It celebrated Man, not some faceless, distant Deity. Fabians hated Christianity and wanted, above everything, to replace it. But first, they had to command every institution of civil society.

The Plastic Panic is an identical psyop.

“We’re eating a credit card’s worth of plastic every week! Microplastics fill our bloodstream, lodge in our organs, and poison our children! The oceans choke under an island of plastic the size of Texas! We all have kilos of the stuff at arm’s reach all day, and we are drowning in it!” AAARRGGHH…

These claims saturate environmental advocacy, news coverage, and social media. They generate funding for nonprofits, sell books and documentaries, and fuel a growing industry of plastic alternatives and “detoxification” products. But how much of this represents genuine health threats, and how much is manufactured panic designed to demoralize and control?

The answer matters. If plastics pose serious health risks, we need to address them. If the threat is exaggerated or fabricated, we’re wasting resources that could address real problems while empowering yet another layer of fear-based social control.

Plastics are synthetic polymers

They are long chains of repeated molecular units derived from petroleum. The most common types include polyethylene (bags, bottles), polypropylene (food containers), polyvinyl chloride (PVC; pipes, packaging), polystyrene (foam cups), and polyethylene terephthalate (PET; beverage bottles). These materials are chemically stable, which is why they’re useful and why they persist in the environment.

The health concerns fall into three categories: microplastics (particles smaller than 5 millimeters), nanoplastics (particles smaller than 1 micrometer), and chemical additives that leach from plastic products. Additives include plasticizers such as phthalates, stabilizers, flame retardants, and bisphenol A (BPA).

Human exposure occurs through ingestion (food and water), inhalation (dust and fibers), and skin contact. Microplastics enter the food chain when larger plastic items break down in the environment or shed from synthetic textiles during washing. They’re found in seafood, salt, bottled water, and tap water. Nanoplastics can theoretically cross biological barriers that block larger particles, including the blood-brain barrier and placenta.

That’s the basic framework; here is the evidence:

The Credit Card Claim: A Case Study in Nonsense

The “credit card eaten per week” caper originated from a 2019 study commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund and conducted by the University of Newcastle, Australia. The study claimed that people consume approximately 5 grams of plastic per week, equivalent to the weight of a credit card.

This number came from a meta-analysis that aggregated estimates from multiple studies measuring microplastics in food and water. The researchers made several questionable assumptions: they assumed 100% of detected particles were actually plastic rather than contamination, used the highest estimates when studies disagreed, and included speculative exposure routes with limited evidence.

Five grams per week equals 260 grams per year, or roughly half a pound. Over a decade, that’s 5 pounds. Over 50 years, 25 pounds of plastic accumulate in the body. If the assumptions above were accurate, we would become plastic statues, or at a minimum, our digestive systems would become visibly clogged with synthetic material.

The credit card claim fails basic physics. Plastic particles large enough to add up to 5 grams a week would be visible, would likely affect the texture of food and water, and would be evident in stool samples. None of this occurs.

But we see nothing like this. Autopsies don’t reveal pounds of plastic in intestines or organs. The particles are too small to obstruct anything, and most pass through the digestive system. Some studies find microplastics in tissue samples, but these are micrograms or nanograms—amounts measured in millionths or billionths of a gram, not the grams claimed by the WWF study.

When challenged, the study’s defenders argue that the 5-gram figure represents “potential” exposure across all routes, including inhalation and skin contact, not just ingestion. But this moves the goalposts. The original claim specifically emphasized eating and drinking plastic, and the news coverage portrayed it that way. The public absorbed “you’re eating a credit card weekly,” not “you might be exposed to credit card-equivalent plastic through multiple theoretical routes with uncertain absorption.”

This is how manufactured panics work. Start with a striking, memorable claim. Base it on questionable extrapolations from limited data. Ignore obvious logical problems. Rely on the public’s limited scientific literacy and short attention span. By the time critics dissect the claim, millions have already absorbed it as fact.

Microplastics in the Body: Detection vs. Harm

Studies have detected microplastics in human blood, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, and placentas. This sounds alarming until you consider what detection means. Modern analytical methods can find trace amounts of almost anything in biological samples. The question isn’t whether microplastics are present but whether they’re present at levels that cause harm.

A 2022 study in the journal Environment International found microplastic particles in blood samples from 77% of 22 subjects tested. The concentrations ranged from 0 to 7.1 micrograms per milliliter. The authors suggested that these particles could travel through the bloodstream and lodge in organs.

But the study had problems. First, the sample size was tiny—just 22 people. Second, the authors couldn’t rule out contamination during sample collection and analysis, a known problem in microplastics research, as plastic is ubiquitous in laboratories. Third, they detected particles but didn’t show that those particles caused any biological effects. Detection doesn’t equal toxicity.

A 2023 study claimed to find microplastics in the lung tissue of deceased donors. Again, small sample size, contamination risk, and no demonstration of harm. The particles were there, but so what? Lungs also contain dust, pollen, vehicle exhaust particles, and industrial pollutants. Do microplastics add meaningfully to this total burden?

The placenta studies raise similar questions. Finding microplastics in placental tissue from 4 out of 4 placentas examined (a 2020 Italian study) suggests widespread exposure. But the study found twelve (12) plastic particles across four placentas—an average of 3 particles each. All four babies were born healthy and developed normally. Where’s the harm?

This pattern repeats throughout the microplastics “literature.” Detection, yes. Ubiquitous presence, yes. Demonstrated harm at detected levels, no.

The Endocrine Disruption Fable

The more scientifically credible health concerns involve chemical additives, particularly endocrine disruptors like BPA and phthalates. These compounds can interfere with hormone signaling at very low doses, potentially affecting development, reproduction, and metabolism.

BPA, used to make polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins, mimics estrogen. Studies in rodents show that BPA exposure during development can alter brain structure, affect behavior, and increase cancer susceptibility. Some human studies link BPA exposure (measured by urine metabolites) to obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and reproductive problems.

Phthalates, used to make plastics flexible, also disrupt hormone signaling. Animal studies link phthalate exposure to reduced testosterone, altered genital development in males, and reproductive tract abnormalities. Human epidemiological studies find associations between phthalate exposure and reduced sperm quality, earlier puberty in girls, and behavioral problems in children.

At first glance, the evidence looks more substantial than the microplastics data. But several problems complicate the picture.

First, most human evidence comes from observational studies that measure phthalate or BPA metabolites in urine and look for statistical associations with health outcomes. These studies cannot prove causation. People with higher BPA exposure might differ from those with lower exposure in multiple ways—diet, socioeconomic status, other chemical exposures, and genetic factors. Teasing out BPA’s specific effect is difficult.

Second, the doses matter. Rodent studies often use doses far higher than typical human exposures. A rat receiving BPA at 50 milligrams per kilogram of body weight daily is experiencing something very different from a human whose exposure might be 0.1 micrograms per kilogram daily. Extrapolating from high-dose animal studies to low-dose human exposures requires assumptions about dose-response relationships that may not hold.

Third, humans rapidly metabolize and excrete these compounds. BPA’s half-life in the body is approximately 6 hours. Phthalates last slightly longer but are still cleared from the body within days. This means that a single urine measurement—the method most studies use—captures only recent exposure.

Fourth, regulatory agencies have been responding. After concerns emerged about BPA, manufacturers reformulated many products, particularly baby bottles and infant formula containers. BPA exposure has declined in many populations. Phthalate regulations have also tightened. If these compounds posed major threats, we should see health improvements as exposures decline. The evidence for such improvements is nonexistent.

Fifth—and this is critical—the effect sizes are minuscule. Studies might find that doubling BPA exposure correlates with a 10% increase in obesity risk or a 5-point decrease in IQ. These effects, if real, are tiny compared to other factors affecting these outcomes. Diet, exercise, genetics, education, socioeconomic status, and other environmental exposures certainly dwarf any plausible effect of BPA or phthalates. And fluoride’s effects on IQ, for example, are obvious and measurable.

The Pacific Plastic Island That Wasn’t

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has become an icon of environmental propaganda—a swirling mass of plastic debris supposedly the size of Texas, visible from space and choking marine life. Documentaries show heartbreaking images of seabirds with bellies full of plastic, turtles entangled in fishing nets, and ocean surfaces carpeted with bottles and bags.

This is pure propaganda and a pack of lies.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch exists, but it’s a diffuse area where ocean currents concentrate marine debris, mostly consisting of tiny particles suspended in the water column or floating just below the surface. Satellite imagery does not show anything. Ships sailing through the area report seeing occasional debris, but not the dense accumulation portrayed in environmental campaigns.

The claim that there is an “island” the size of Texas is ridiculous. The affected area is large, but the plastic concentration is low—approximately 5 kilograms of plastic per square kilometer of ocean surface according to a 2018 study in Scientific Reports. That’s about 10 pounds spread over an area roughly equivalent to 140 football fields. You could swim through this area and see no plastic.

The documentary A Plastic Ocean used falsified imagery and staged scenes to sell the lies. The footage showing beaches covered in plastic came from areas affected by the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, not from normal ocean accumulation. Dead birds shown with plastic-filled stomachs were staged—plastic was inserted into the carcasses to create fraudulent photos.

This doesn’t mean ocean plastic is harmless. Fishing nets and other large debris do entangle marine animals. Some seabirds and sea turtles do ingest plastic items, mistaking them for food. Microplastics enter the aquatic food chain. But the scale and impact have been grossly exaggerated to disturb us and steal our money.

Why the lies? Follow the money. Environmental organizations raise hundreds of millions of dollars annually using ocean plastic as a fundraising tool. The Ocean Cleanup project alone has raised over $35 million. Plastic cleanup and recycling initiatives create jobs, consulting contracts, and speaking opportunities. Politicians use plastic bans to signal environmental virtue. Activists gain influence.

Everyone in this activist ecosystem benefits from maximizing the perceived threat. Nobody makes money from a calm, measured assessment showing that ocean plastic, while undesirable, ranks far below overfishing and agricultural runoff as threats to marine ecosystems.

Plastics are just hydrocarbons, so they degrade.

A key claim in the plastic panic narrative is that plastics persist in the environment for hundreds or thousands of years, essentially forever in human terms. This is horseshit.

Plastics are hydrocarbons—molecules consisting primarily of carbon and hydrogen, often with oxygen, nitrogen, or other elements. Like all organic compounds, they’re susceptible to oxidation, UV radiation, mechanical breakdown, and biological degradation.

Sunlight breaks down plastics through photodegradation. UV radiation cleaves chemical bonds, fragmenting larger pieces into smaller ones. This process is why plastics left outdoors become brittle and crack. In the ocean, sunlight degrades floating plastics into progressively smaller particles.

Mechanical forces—wave action, abrasion against rocks and sand, temperature cycling—physically break down plastic debris. A plastic bottle doesn’t last millennia in the ocean. It fragments into progressively smaller pieces over years or decades.

Biological degradation also occurs. Microorganisms can metabolize some plastics, though slowly. Researchers have identified bacteria and fungi capable of breaking down polyethylene, PET, and polyurethane. These organisms aren’t abundant enough to solve plastic waste problems, but they demonstrate that plastics aren’t biologically inert.

The “persists for 1,000 years” claim is based on extrapolations from incomplete data. Scientists observe that plastics don’t degrade quickly in landfills, where oxygen and sunlight are limited. They extrapolated this slow degradation rate across centuries. But landfill conditions differ dramatically from surface environments where UV exposure, mechanical action, and oxidation operate.

More realistic estimates suggest that the most common plastics degrade substantially within decades in environmental conditions, not millennia. They don’t disappear completely—they fragment into smaller particles—but the original item doesn’t persist intact for 1,000 years.

“Plastic lasts forever and accumulates endlessly” creates existential dread. “Plastic fragments over decades into progressively smaller particles that eventually oxidize” is less alarming.

The funding and advocacy ecosystem for these two manufactured “issues.”

The parallels between plastic panic and climate change “advocacy” are obvious. Both rely on:

Massive nonprofit infrastructure. Hundreds of globalist nonprofits focus on plastic, many of which are funded by the same foundations that fabricate and spread climate lies—Rockefeller, MacArthur, Packard, Hewlett, and others. These foundations coordinate messaging, fund research supporting predetermined conclusions, and amplify media coverage.

Apocalyptic framing. Modest problems become existential threats. Plastic pollution becomes “the plastic crisis.” Ocean debris becomes “a Texas-sized island choking the Pacific.” Microplastics become “invisible killers in your blood.”

Solutions that expand bureaucratic control. Plastic bans, regulations, taxes, and monitoring programs create new government authority and consulting opportunities. Like carbon credits and renewable energy mandates, plastic regulations generate revenue for connected interests while doing nothing to address root causes.

Suppression of dissenting voices. Scientists who question the magnitude of plastic threats find their funding cut and their reputations attacked. Journalists who investigate exaggerated claims face accusations of denialism or industry shilling. The conversation permits only one direction: more alarm, more regulation, more funding.

Substitution of manageable problems for intractable ones. Plastic pollution is easier to address than antibiotic resistance, the ubiquitous medical corruption, pharmaceutical drug fraud, or the resulting chronic disease epidemic. It’s visible, measurable, and amenable to simple solutions (or at least solutions that appear simple). Politicians and activists can “do something” about plastic while ignoring more complicated problems.

This pattern suggests that plastic panic serves purposes beyond environmental “protection.” It employs activists, bureaucrats, and researchers. It gives politicians easy virtue-signaling opportunities. It distracts from genuine threats. It accustoms people to accepting restrictions on consumer products and lifestyle choices in the name of crisis management.

Whether this pattern reflects coordinated conspiracy or emergent behavior from aligned incentives is difficult to determine. The outcome is the same either way.

Yoho comment: Based on every evil agenda that I’ve studied that was constructed of whole cloth by the globalists, this was, too.

Relative Risk: What Actually Threatens Health

Assume for the moment that plastics pose modest health risks through endocrine disruption and microparticle toxicity. How do these risks compare to other threats?

Conventional medical error and malpractice kill an estimated 250,000 Americans yearly, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. Hospitals spread antibiotic-resistant infections. Overtreatment causes iatrogenic harm. Prescription medications kill tens of thousands through adverse reactions and interactions. The healthcare system itself, when used in approved fashion, is the leading cause of death (see Butchered by “Healthcare”).

Air pollution kills approximately 100,000 Americans yearly and millions worldwide. Particulate matter, ozone, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide damage the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. These effects are well-established, dose-dependent, and far larger than any plausible plastic effect.

Obesity and metabolic disease affect more than 40% of American adults. Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease, and related conditions kill hundreds of thousands yearly and reduce the quality of life for millions. These conditions primarily result from diet and lifestyle, not environmental toxins.

Pharmaceutical contamination in water supplies exceeds plastic contamination in concentration and biological activity. Trace amounts of antibiotics, hormones, antidepressants, and other drugs enter waterways through human excretion and improper disposal. Unlike plastics, these compounds are designed to be biologically active at low doses.

Alcohol and tobacco kill approximately 500,000 Americans yearly. These are voluntary exposures to known toxins, and they dwarf any plastic risk.

If plastic additives double your (relative) risk of some health outcome, but that outcome has a baseline risk of 1 in 10,000, your (absolute) risk increases to 2 in 10,000. The former is how it is reported, and a deception, and the latter is real. You’ve gained 0.01 percentage points of risk. Meanwhile, obesity might increase your risk of the same outcome by 500%, smoking by 1,000%, and a medical error might kill you outright.

Resource allocation matters. Every dollar spent addressing plastic pollution is a dollar not spent improving medical care, reducing air pollution, or addressing metabolic disease. Every hour of public attention focused on microplastics is an hour not spent uprooting medical corruption.

If plastics posed risks approaching those of these other factors, prioritizing plastic reduction would make sense. But the evidence suggests plastics rank near the bottom of the list of health threats.

So What’s Going On?

The plastic narrative serves multiple agendas:

Creating new markets. Companies selling plastic alternatives, water filters that remove microplastics, and “detoxification” products benefit from plastic panic. Fear drives consumption.

Expanding regulatory authority. Plastic bans and regulations create new bureaucratic structures, consulting opportunities, and enforcement mechanisms. Government agencies expand their reach.

Distracting from genuine threats. As long as the public focuses on plastic straws and shopping bags, they’re not examining pharmaceutical industry practices, agricultural subsidies that promote obesogenic foods, or the ruined academics in healthcare that kill hundreds of thousands yearly.

Providing employment and status for activists. The environmental movement employs millions globally. These people need causes to justify their positions. Plastic pollution offers an endless source of urgency, research projects, conferences, and media opportunities.

This is the big one: facilitating demoralization. When people believe that invisible particles in their blood threaten their children, that the oceans are dying, that civilization chokes on its own waste, they feel helpless and defeated. Demoralized populations are easier to control. They accept restrictions, regulations, and authoritarian interventions they might otherwise resist.

None of this means plastic waste is desirable. Marine debris harms some wildlife (but provides homes for others). Littering is ugly. Better waste management would improve the quality of life. But these are aesthetic concerns, not health crises.

Framing plastic as a health crisis serves the interests of advocacy groups, regulators, and politicians. It has no measurable impact on public health.

What the Evidence Supports

Microplastics are ubiquitous. They’re in food, water, air, and human tissues. This reflects the widespread use of plastic materials and their fragmentation in the environment.

Detection doesn’t equal harm. Finding microplastic particles in blood or organs doesn’t demonstrate toxicity. Modern analytical methods can detect trace amounts of many substances that cause no health effects.

Chemical additives pose modest, uncertain risks. BPA and phthalates can disrupt endocrine function in animal studies, and some human evidence suggests associations with health problems. But the effect sizes are small, causation is unproven, and exposures have been declining.

The dose makes the poison. Plastics and their additives show toxicity at high doses in animal studies. Human exposures are orders of magnitude lower. Extrapolating from high-dose animal data to low-dose human effects requires false assumptions.

Ocean plastic and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are psyops. There is no Texas-sized island visible from space. Marine debris can harm wildlife, but compared to how it is portrayed, it is a minor phenomenon.

Plastics degrade. They don’t persist unchanged for millennia. UV radiation, oxidation, and mechanical forces break them down over decades.

Relative risk is a bald-faced lie used to inflate study conclusions. Even if plastics pose some health risks, those risks are tiny compared to those posed by medical error, air pollution, metabolic disease, and other established threats.

Is there a smoking gun suggesting central coordination of the plastics lies?

There are patterns consistent with coordination, but much of the evidence is circumstantial. Documentary proof, such as we have for climate, is scant. There, you can literally trace the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding through 1,000 nonprofits for decades.

Suggestive patterns:

• Same foundation players (Rockefeller, MacArthur, Packard, Hewlett) are funding both climate and plastic “advocacy.”
• These overlapping donor networks also fund the Ocean Cleanup project and similar initiatives. Ask yourself: Do the global psychopaths give a rat’s ass about the ocean?
• Coordinated messaging rollout; the “credit card” claim appeared simultaneously across multiple organizations in 2019.
• WWF commissioning the Newcastle study is advocacy-driven research, not independent science.
• The lavish documentary A Plastic Ocean suggests professional coordination, not grassroots concern.

The sources of the plastic nonsense are less clear than those for climate because:

• The plastic thing is newer; it was ramped up in 2015-2019 vs. the climate’s multi-decade buildup
• It is a smaller financial scale costing hundreds of millions vs. hundreds of billions for climate
• It is more diffuse and could be emergent behavior from aligned incentives rather than top-down coordination. But I doubt it, given the rest of the evidence.

The outcome is the same regardless and follows the familiar pattern. Take a real phenomenon: in this case, plastic waste. Fabricate a massive lie: Texas-sized ocean trash islands. Make alarming claims about health effects: “You are consuming a credit card weekly.” Promote those claims through coordinated media campaigns. Attack skeptics. Propose solutions that expand bureaucratic control and create new revenue streams. Repeat.

The plastic threat has been inflated far beyond what the evidence supports, and it serves only the interests of human parasites working in nonprofits and government and their hidden overlords.

A few key references

1. Leslie HA, et al. Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood. Environment International. 2022;163:107199. [Study finding microplastics in blood of 77% of subjects tested]
2. Jenner LC, et al. Detection of microplastics in human lung tissue using μFTIR spectroscopy. Science of the Total Environment. 2022;831:154907. [Microplastics found in lung tissue of deceased donors]
3. Ragusa A, et al. Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta. Environment International. 2021;146:106274. [Italian study finding microplastic particles in 4 placentas]
4. Lebreton L, et al. Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating plastic. Scientific Reports. 2018;8:4666. [Quantification of plastic concentration in Pacific gyre]
5. Senathirajah K, Palanisami T. How much microplastics are we ingesting? Estimation of the mass of microplastics ingested. University of Newcastle Australia report for WWF. 2019. [Source of “credit card per week” claim]
6. vom Saal FS, Hughes C. An extensive new literature concerning low-dose effects of bisphenol A shows the need for a new risk assessment. Environmental Health Perspectives. 2005;113(8):926-933. [Review of BPA endocrine disruption evidence]
7. Swan SH. Decrease in anogenital distance among male infants with prenatal phthalate exposure. Environmental Health Perspectives. 2005;113(8):1056-1061. [Human study linking phthalate exposure to developmental effects]
8. Makkar H, et al. A review on the biodegradation of synthetic and natural polymers in the environment. International Journal of Pharma and Bio Sciences. 2016;7(1):273-280. [Review of microbial plastic degradation]
9. Vandenberg LN, et al. Hormones and endocrine-disrupting chemicals: low-dose effects and nonmonotonic dose responses. Endocrine Reviews. 2012;33(3):378-455. [Discussion of low-dose endocrine disruption and dose-response relationships]
10. Rochman CM, et al. The ecological impacts of marine debris: unraveling the demonstrated evidence from what is perceived. Ecology. 2016;97(2):302-312. [Critical review separating demonstrated vs. perceived impacts of ocean plastic]

Synthesis

I thought the plastic panic stunk from the first time I heard it, but I didn’t have the receipts about it until I did the work.

About Hank’s AI ideas: Internet searches are increasingly being corrupted by globalist data destruction and the distortion of research funding, adulterating results. You can still recover deleted academic papers through Anna’s Archive or the Wayback Machine if you have the original URL. However, amid the globalist agendas, it is increasingly difficult to discern the truth.

These circumstances make good judgment irreplaceable. If you do not use it, searches devolve into GIGO: garbage-in-garbage-out. It is worse than that—I see it as GIDO, which is garbage-in-dogshit-out, and yes, I’m pissed.

Editing credit: Jim Arnold (Liar’s World Substack) and Elizabeth Cronin.

Stop worrying, reduce your stress, and ignore the lies. You will not be killed by microscopic robots that suddenly become conscious and “decide our fate in a millisecond” (the Terminator movie plot line about the Skynet computer waking up). The world is not warming, so forget about that. Plastics will not turn us into sickly frog people. My suggestion is to relax and take care of your family, dogs, and cats. Since there is a genetic bond between our species, they make us happy. Try to stop being angry. (I have trouble with that.} …
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