Planetary Death By 300 Million Titleists

Three hundred million golf balls are lost every year, or so they say. Me, I swear I don't have any more than 178 which are un-accounted for from this past calendar year, so don't look at me!

Research teams at the Danish Golf Union have discovered it takes between 100 to 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose naturally. A startling fact when it is also estimated 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States alone, every year. It seems the simple plastic golf ball is increasingly becoming a major litter problem.

The scale of the dilemma was underlined recently in Scotland, where scientists -- who scoured the watery depths in a submarine hoping to discover evidence of the prehistoric Loch Ness monster -- were surprised to find hundreds of thousands of golf balls lining the bed of the loch.

It is thought tourists and locals have used the loch as an alternative driving range for many years. The footage shot by underwater robotics team SeaTrepid, can be seen below.

With an increasing number of golf balls discarded each year, the Danish Golf Association devised a number of tests to determine the environmental impact of golf balls on their surroundings.

COMMENT: Reader Rich Morrical asks: This might be a dumb quetion but if the millions of golf balls being lost every year are not bio degrading, than aren't they just like rocks? Are they really hurting the environment?

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Manlaw #176: More Power is Always Better. Always.

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I have good news, and bad news for the fine citizens of River Creek in Northern Virginia. Good news: Greg Blache was NOT the dumbell wielding “psycho” that challenged a dog walker to a fight as my email “source” implied here on Friday.

My apologies to Coach for the bad intel, although I sort of had admiration for an ornery ol' coach if that story was true.

The bad news: there apparently IS a guy who power walks with dumb-bells in River Creek and he IS a psycho. Give him wide berth. He's just not a Redskins coach.

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John Witzke is on Billick Brian's ass. Good work...

Czabe,

Our favorite EXPERT color analyst referred to Dwayne Jarrett as "Jarrett Smith" *twice* today, and that was just while under Redzone Channel surveillance. Who knows how many times he did it all together.

Which makes me wonder at what point do we start tracking the buffoonery of the White Gumbel?

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Peter King can't resist talking about the Fort Hood shootings. As usual, his take is one dimensional, illogical, and purely liberal at heart.

My heart goes out to the victims of the Fort Hood and Orlando shootings and their loved ones. Senseless, senseless incidents. I will not go quietly into the night on this one. America needs to do something about idiots with handguns. How many more Fort Hoods and Orlandos do there have to be before our political leaders have the guts to severely restrict access to murderous weapons?

National Review Online comments: “Good point. An Army base is no place for weapons.” And, to add insult to injury, we know what the Associated Press reported, here: “Packed into cubicles with 5-foot-high dividers, the 300 unarmed soldiers were sitting ducks.”

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While we are pissing off liberals..... John Hinderaker at Powerlineblog makes a great point about self described "Democrats" vs. self described "liberals." Writes Hinderaker...

The basic asymmetry of American politics is that there are more conservatives than there are Republicans, while there are more Democrats than there are liberals. This is why Nancy Pelosi wasn't able to persuade anything like a unified caucus to vote for her government takeover of health care, and why Democratic Congressmen were competing for permission to vote against the bill.

Why is it, though, that while conservatives outnumber liberals by anywhere from one and a half to two to one, depending on the poll, there are significantly more Democrats than Republicans? There are a number of answers, but one of them is that conservatives, as a group, are insufficiently loyal to the Republican Party.

Back in our far-left days, we used to claim that there was no difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. ("Don't play good imperialist/bad imperialist" was one mantra.) That was stupid. Today, there are some on the right who say there is little or no difference between the parties--you hear this, for example, from some in the tea party movement. This is equally stupid. There are important differences between the parties, and the most practical thing conservatives can do in the political realm is try to build up the Republican Party.

Of course the Republicans aren't perfect. Of course they spent too much money when they controlled Congress. But the history of the Republican Party is, on the whole, a proud one--far more so than that of the Democratic Party. This is a theme to which I intend to recur in the months to come.

In the meantime, let's leave it with this: we were often critical of President George W. Bush. When he left office, I gave him a B- grade overall. But President Bush would have vetoed Pelosicare. This is the stark difference between our political parties: the Democrats are hell-bent on dismantling free enterprise and advancing government power over every aspect of our lives; the Republicans are not.

Conservatives cannot afford to be neutral or indifferent as between the parties, nor can they afford the narcissism of third-party vanity campaigns. Conservatives must work every day to strengthen the Republican Party--it's the only hope we have. And, yes, strengthening the party will sometimes mean drawing the line at a Dede Scozzafava. But purity is not our object here; victory is.

REACT: On this I agree. Voting Republican is an imperfect, but necessary act. And like any sports team you root for, they disappoint nearly as often as they play to their full capability. As for "democrats" who are conservative, I know many of them. It drives me nuts. They live their lives, conservatively. They believe in conservative priciples.

But because they have been browbeaten by friends, family, and social circles to be good "democrats" they simply cannot come to grips with where their true political ideology lies. Thus, they usually pick one or two supposedly "deal breaking" aspects of a broader Republican platform (abortion, gun control, e.g.) and use that as their excuse to vote the other way.