A little compilation to forward in retaliation to all your “Gud Bless Thu Yu-Ess-Aye” relations & acquaintances:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Lame-as-F@#k Congress | ||||
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This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Republican Venality, Assholes, Outrage
A little compilation to forward in retaliation to all your “Gud Bless Thu Yu-Ess-Aye” relations & acquaintances:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
Lame-as-F@#k Congress | ||||
www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
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This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It)
If, like a near-majority of your fellow Americans, you’re currently taking at least one prescription drug on a long-term basis, Vanity Fair‘s article on “Deadly Medicine” will make you feel a little sick(er):
Once upon a time, the drugs Americans took to treat chronic diseases, clear up infections, improve their state of mind, and enhance their sexual vitality were tested primarily either in the United States (the vast majority of cases) or in Europe. No longer. As recently as 1990, according to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, a mere 271 trials were being conducted in foreign countries of drugs intended for American use. By 2008, the number had risen to 6,485—an increase of more than 2,000 percent. A database being compiled by the National Institutes of Health has identified 58,788 such trials in 173 countries outside the United States since 2000. In 2008 alone, according to the inspector general’s report, 80 percent of the applications submitted to the F.D.A. for new drugs contained data from foreign clinical trials. Increasingly, companies are doing 100 percent of their testing offshore. The inspector general found that the 20 largest U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies now conducted “one-third of their clinical trials exclusively at foreign sites.” All of this is taking place when more drugs than ever—some 2,900 different drugs for some 4,600 different conditions—are undergoing clinical testing and vying to come to market.
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Some medical researchers question whether the results of clinical trials conducted in certain other countries are relevant to Americans in the first place. They point out that people in impoverished parts of the world, for a variety of reasons, may metabolize drugs differently from the way Americans do. They note that the prevailing diseases in other countries, such as malaria and tuberculosis, can skew the outcome of clinical trials. But from the point of view of the drug companies, it’s easy to see why moving clinical trials overseas is so appealing. For one thing, it’s cheaper to run trials in places where the local population survives on only a few dollars a day. It’s also easier to recruit patients, who often believe they are being treated for a disease rather than, as may be the case, just getting a placebo as part of an experiment. And it’s easier to find what the industry calls “drug-naïve” patients: people who are not being treated for any disease and are not currently taking any drugs, and indeed may never have taken any—the sort of people who will almost certainly yield better test results. (For some subjects overseas, participation in a clinical trial may be their first significant exposure to a doctor.) Regulations in many foreign countries are also less stringent, if there are any regulations at all. The risk of litigation is negligible, in some places nonexistent. Ethical concerns are a figure of speech. Finally—a significant plus for the drug companies—the F.D.A. does so little monitoring that the companies can pretty much do and say what they want.
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One big factor in the shift of clinical trials to foreign countries is a loophole in F.D.A. regulations: if studies in the United States suggest that a drug has no benefit, trials from abroad can often be used in their stead to secure F.D.A. approval. There’s even a term for countries that have shown themselves to be especially amenable when drug companies need positive data fast: they’re called “rescue countries.” Rescue countries came to the aid of Ketek, the first of a new generation of widely heralded antibiotics to treat respiratory-tract infections. Ketek was developed in the 1990s by Aventis Pharmaceuticals, now Sanofi-Aventis. In 2004—on April Fools’ Day, as it happens—the F.D.A. certified Ketek as safe and effective. The F.D.A.’s decision was based heavily on the results of studies in Hungary, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.
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The approval came less than one month after a researcher in the United States was sentenced to 57 months in prison for falsifying her own Ketek data. Dr. Anne Kirkman-Campbell, of Gadsden, Alabama, seemingly never met a person she couldn’t sign up to participate in a drug trial. She enrolled more than 400 volunteers, about 1 percent of the town’s adult population, including her entire office staff. In return, she collected $400 a head from Sanofi-Aventis. It later came to light that the data from at least 91 percent of her patients was falsified…. Nonetheless, on the basis of overseas trials, Ketek won approval.
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As the months ticked by, and the number of people taking the drug climbed steadily, the F.D.A. began to get reports of adverse reactions, including serious liver damage that sometimes led to death. The F.D.A.’s leadership remained steadfast in its support of the drug, but criticism by the agency’s own researchers eventually leaked out (a very rare occurrence in this close-knit, buttoned-up world)… [O]ne day before the start of a congressional hearing on the F.D.A.’s approval of the drug, the agency suddenly slapped a so-called black-box warning on the label of Ketek, restricting its use. (A black-box warning is the most serious step the F.D.A. can take short of removing a drug from the market.) By then the F.D.A. had received 93 reports of severe adverse reactions to Ketek, resulting in 12 deaths…
The world is flat!…. -lining…
Globalizing Pharmaceuticals: “Like Agribusiness, Not Research”Post + Comments (17)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Assholes, We Are All Mayans Now
The NYTimes reports that “Republicans Block U.S. Health Aid for 9/11 Workers“:
Republican senators blocked Democratic legislation on Thursday that sought to provide medical care to rescue workers and others who became ill as a result of breathing in toxic fumes, dust and smoke at the site of the World Trade Center attack in 2001.
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The 9/11 health bill, a version of which was approved by the House of Representatives in September, was among several initiatives that Senate Democrats had hoped to approve before the close of the 111th Congress. Supporters believe this was their last real opportunity to have the bill passed…
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There are nearly 60,000 people enrolled in health monitoring and treatment programs related to the 9/11 attacks, according to the sponsors of the bill. The federal government provides the bulk of the money for those programs.
The article prompted a great many comments, of course, including this highlighted gem from skater242 — nj:
While it is true that the Federal Gov’t should bare some responsibility for the cost of caring for those who cared so much for us, I feel that enough is enough already.
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Having lived a block away from the site, i have hundreds of pictures of rescue workers in shorts, short-sleeve t-shirts, no headgear, no breathing devices/filters, nothing on their hands or any other exposed area where toxic materials can easily seep into the body and for this carelessness, i am supposed to pay for these people’s healthcare for the rest of their lives?
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Aren’t most covered thru their jobs? Therefore their healthcare should be paid for by their carriers and not by the taxpayer who, incidentally supports their assault on the pension systems of NY State?
Pivoting from platitudinous piety to victim-blaming to dumping responsibility on some anyone-not-me amalgam of talking points — all in four sentences!
Building intelligent bots to churn out this kind of anti-American slush would be a waste of money, when there are morans who’ll do the same job for nothing.
Yeah, But What Have They Done for Me LATELY?Post + Comments (143)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Our Failed Media Experiment
It’s possible that Julian Assange is a rapist, or at least a guy with a dubious history of respecting his sexual partners’ wishes. That would not make Wikileaks as an organization any less worthwhile, or less significant. And the outrage so loudly trumpeted by some of the worst of the Media Villagers — people like Marc Thiessen and David Brooks — only makes it more likely that Wikileaks is doing an important job, and that Assange deserves some credit. Last week, when Assange’s arrest was still “immanent”, David Samuels at the Atlantic online published a piece on “The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange” which deserves wider dissemination:
… Assange may or may not be grandiose, paranoid and delusional – terms that might be fairly applied at one time or another to most prominent investigative reporters of my acquaintance. But the fact that so many prominent old school journalists are attacking him with such unbridled force is a symptom of the failure of traditional reporting methods to penetrate a culture of official secrecy that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11, and threatens the functioning of a free press as a cornerstone of democracy.
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The true importance of Wikileaks — and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder — lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. Since 1997, Assange has devoted a great deal of his time to inventing encryption systems that make it possible for human rights workers and others to protect and upload sensitive data. The importance of Assange’s efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award for the Wikileaks investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, which documented the killing and disappearance of 500 young men in Kenya by the police, with the apparent connivance of the country’s political leadership.
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Yet the difficulties of documenting official murder in Kenya pale next to the task of penetrating the secret world that threatens to swallow up informed public discourse in this country about America’s wars. The 250,000 cables that Wikileaks published this month represent only a drop in the bucket that holds the estimated 16 million documents that are classified top secret by the federal government every year…
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It is a fact of the current media landscape that the chilling effect of threatened legal action routinely stops reporters and editors from pursuing stories that might serve the public interest – and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. Every honest reporter and editor in America knows that the fact that most news organizations are broke, combined with the increasing threat of aggressive legal action by deep-pocketed entities, private and public, has made it much harder for good reporters to do their jobs, and ripped a hole in the delicate fabric that holds our democracy together.
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The idea that Wikileaks is a threat to the traditional practice of reporting misses the point of what Assange and his co-workers have put together – a powerful tool that can help reporters circumvent the legal barriers that are making it hard for them to do their job. Even as he criticizes the evident failures of the mainstream press, Assange insists that Wikileaks should facilitate traditional reporting and analysis. “We’re the step before the first person (investigates),” he explained, when accepting Amnesty International’s award for exposing police killings in Kenya. “Then someone who is familiar with that material needs to step forward to investigate it and put it in political context. Once that is done, then it becomes of public interest.”
The issue, of course, is that among the DC media aristocrats, “the traditional practice of reporting” has been reduced to “dutiful stenography of this news cycle’s talking points”. And the battle between those media professionals who consider themselves courtiers and those who prefer the role of gadfly hasn’t changed much since the original Gilded Age, when Finley Peter Dunne said that it was the job of reporters “to afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted.”
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Free Markets Solve Everything, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
In blogging, as in much else, marrying well can make life a lot easier.
Case in point:
Through marriage to my wife I gained cousinhood with Captain Peter Willcox, who at this point in an adventurous, well-lived life, is master of the Greenpeace ship M.V. Arctic Sunrise.
Which means that because of the family connection, I get Peter’s episodic updates, his Captain’s Blog.
What follows is his latest, from a Gulf of Mexico cruise designed to assess both the damage and decision making about the Deep Horizon disaster that will define the Gulf ecosystem for decades.
First, a work about Peter: He grew up on boats (next door to my wife-to-be, as it happens in a lefty, multi-racial sort of cooperative housing development in Connecticut, right on Long Island Sound. It was the kind of place where children learned how to sail at about the time they started walking and were allowed to skipper on their own from the moment they proved competent enough.
From there, Peter got involved in water-borne environmentalism on the queen of the Hudson River, the sloop Clearwater (one of Pete and Toshi Seeger’s many give-backs to the community), and then he joined up with Greenpeace. There he rose to become captain of the Rainbow Warrior — and was in command when French terrorists spies government-employed-murderous-thugs sunk the ship with two limpet mines, killing one crew member, Fernando Pereira.
In other words, Peter has been there and back again, and has some very hard-won knowledge of what the real world is like — a view barred to those who cannot tear Galt’s glasses from their eyes.
So — what’s in the latest of Peter’s dispatches?
Nothing to make one happy.
Here’s a sample:
Corexit is mostly what BP has used on the spill. There are a few things to know about Corexit. One is that is was banned in U.K. over ten years ago because it is so toxic, as in poisonous to humans and sea life. According to the label on the product, it will irritate the eyes, it is not to be inhaled, and it can cause harm to red blood cells, your kidney and liver. The OSHA data sheet states: component substances have a potential to bioconcentrate, that human health hazard is acute. Nice stuff.
Also, according to EPA data, Corexit ranked far above other dispersants for toxicity, and far below other dispersants in effectiveness in handling Louisiana crude.
Corexit was also used on the Exxon Valdez spill. Now read carefully: Almost all the clean up workers who worked on the Exxon Valdez spill are dead. According to CNN, who made efforts to warn the people of the Gulf about Corexit, the average lifespan of an Exxon Valdez spill worker is 51 years. That’s almost 30 years less than that of the average American. There were 11,000 people involved with the Exxon Valdez spill.
[Update: CNN did not “report” these numbers. Someone being interviewed on a CNN program made these claims. CNN did report that an attorney with access to Exxon summaries of worker health files told the network that 6,722 out of 11,000 records showed health problems.]
The whole thing is below the jump. Don’t read it if you have a short fuse. You will detonate.
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One last note: Peter isn’t a journalist and doesn’t claim to be one.
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He’s an environmentalist, one with decades of experience with ocean issues. You can judge for yourself how well he gets the story below. FWIW, here’s my take, as a sometime journo:
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Peter lays out not just what he knows, but also from whence he gets his data. He distinguishes between that data and interpretation. He makes no secret of his presumptions, his starting point, and he clearly sees players who fill the roles of villain and fool. I’m passing on this report both because it looks to me to be solid (and troubling as hell) and because Peter has given us all the apparatus we need to dig into his claims if we are so minded.
This is, if you were wondering, very different from what much more “credentialled” MSM pundits do. As soon as I have time, I’m going to write up a couple of recent offenders to illustrate the point, but truth is, no one reading this blog needs the crayon sketch.
Read on. Peter’s got some serious sh*t to say.
What follows is Peter Willcox’s most dispatch. It’s a shipboard update, and you are getting it as is, with minor proofing from me.
Captain’s Blog
Gulf of Mexico 2010
5
That’s a wrap! One more tour in the bag. The panic filled weekend at Galveston, trying to get ready for that leg is slowly becoming a memory. The near sleepless nights of doing multiple CTDs are fading away. And, we saved the best for last!
After we unloaded the EARS gear in Gulfport, we waited a couple days for the truck to show up from California with a submarine. We expected them sooner, but it took a day for someone in their logistics department to realize that Gulfport is in Mississippi and not Arizona. A supporter loaned us his sub for the work. A very nice supporter!
The Deep Worker 2 is the big brother to the Deep Worker we used in the Bering Sea three years ago. Its really just two Deep Workers bolted together. The advantage is you can take down a less trained person in the other chamber. I say less trained, because the “passenger” is still responsible for maintaining her or his own life support.
The idea is to take mostly scientists and a journo or two down to the bottom to see what — if any — damage was caused by the BP oil spill.
The sub crew cleaned up the sub from its cross-country ride in a container. We then gave it a couple test dives in Gulfport harbor to make sure it was working.
Our first dive was a bit of an eye opener. Many years ago, when I was on the Sirius, we bought a large jet rhib called the Hoolie. It weighed close to 2.5 tons I am guessing. Now the Sirius was a great roller. That boat could roll you head off your shoulders, and needed extra lines at the dock to keep her steady. It was there I realized that for moving weights of more than one ton around on deck, four tag lines are required, not two.
The first launch / recovery we did with only two. But give us credit of learning, or remembering fast. The rest of the time, we used four tag lines, and we were all able to breath a lot easier (as in breath at all). The first dive was plagued by bad visibility and poor communications.
Arctic Sunrise is a noisy boat. I am not referring to what those of us living on board have to listen to. I am referring to the underwater noise generated by the ship’s equipment. When we were on the Espy in the Bering Sea three years ago, we were able to mount the comms antenna on a long pole that went in the water to a depth below the keel. But it turned out the Sunrise was too noisy for this. We used our pole (made in Galveston) to hold the sonar for location of the sub, but had to shift the comms to the jet boat.
The vis got better, the comms got better, and most of the dives were very successful. I am happy to report that the Alabama Alps, the underwater ridge about twenty miles north of the BP accident did not show any signs of being damaged by oil. There is more testing need to be done before the scientists are confident about their conclusions, but this is what our first looked showed.
I wish I could be as optimistic about everything else in the Gulf. My biggest worry now is for the people who live near and work on the Gulf.
Maybe the biggest impression I got from the spill is that BP was very quick out of the gate in protecting its interests, without any concerns what so ever for the health of the people living on the Gulf. As fast as BP was at controlling the damage, our governments, State and Federal, are completely clueless, and still do not know what they are doing. Still,… today.
Corexit is mostly what BP has used on the spill. There are a few things to know about Corexit. One is that is was banned in U.K. over ten years ago because it is so toxic, as in poisonous to humans and sea life. According to the label on the product, it will irritate the eyes, it is not to be inhaled, and it can cause harm to red blood cells, your kidney and liver. The OSHA data sheet states: component substances have a potential to bioconcentrate, that human health hazard is acute. Nice stuff.
Also, according to EPA data, Corexit ranked far above other dispersants for toxicity, and far below other dispersants in effectiveness in handling Louisiana crude.
Corexit was also used on the Exxon Valdez spill. Now read carefully: Almost all the clean up workers who worked on the Exxon Valdez spill are dead. According to CNN, who made efforts to warn the people of the Gulf about Corexit, the average lifespan of an Exxon Valdez spill worker is 51 years. That’s almost 30 years less than that of the average American. There were 11,000 people involved with the Exxon Valdez spill.
[As above: CNN did not “report” these numbers. Someone being interviewed on a CNN program made these claims. CNN did report that an attorney with access to Exxon summaries of worker health files told the network that 6,722 out of 11,000 records showed health problems.]
When you try to get precise numbers on the spill, it is tough. Lots of numbers exist. But what I have found indicates 275 million gallons of crude oil leaked out of the busted well (Exxon Valdez spill was 11 million). BP used 2 million gallons of Corexit. On May 20th, the EPA told BP to stop using Corexit. BP at that time said that they had a quarter million gallons in inventory, and they were going to keep using it. This is going to be a fatal decision.
So not only should have the people who made Corexit know better, but so should have our government. Why did not anybody think to call up someone in Alaska, and ask, “what happened when you tried to clean up form the Exxon Valdez spill?
Bob Naman is a chemist at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile. According to Naman, the poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from this toxic mix are making people sick. PAHs contain compounds that have been identified as carcinogenic, mutagenic (an agent that tends to increase the frequency or extent of mutation), and teratogenic (of, relating to, or causing developmental malformation). (I am afraid we all know what carcinogenic means.) BP sprayed Corexit out of airplanes and injected it into the geyser where the oil was gushing out of the bottom. Says Naman,”the dispersants are being added to the water and are causing chemical compounds to become water soluble, which is then given off into the air, so it is coming down as rain, in addition to being in the water and beaches of these areas of the Gulf.”
The second week of August while we were checking sponges at Dry Tortugas, WKRG New 5 took a water sample from the area to test for dispersants. The sample literally exploded when it was mixed with an organic solvent separating the oil from the water. Naman, who analyzed the sample said: “We think that it most likely happened due to the presence of either methanol or methane gas, or the presence of Corexit”.
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Hugh Kaufman, an EPA whistleblower and analyst, has reported this of the effects of the toxic dispersants:
“We have dolphins that are hemorrhaging. People who work near it are hemorrhaging internally. And that’s what dispersants are supposed to do … And, for example, in the Exxon Valdez case, people who worked with dispersants, most of them are dead now. The average death age is around 50. It’s very dangerous, and it’s (Corexit) an economic protector of BP, not an environmental protector of the public.”
By the middle of last summer, the Alabama Department of Public Health said that 56 people in Mobile and Baldwin counties had sought treatment for what they believed were oil disaster-related illnesses. Have you heard the expression “tip of the ice berg”?
Yesterday morning, NPR said 1/3 of Gulf residents are showing some sign of trauma. People lost jobs, their homes, and their lives. And if BP is as good as Exxon was in fighting judgments, it will be years before some deserving people see any money. When I was up in Alaska three years ago, some people still have not bee paid (20 years later). Health care professionals see problems with anxiety, sleeplessness, and depression.
This morning NPR did a piece on the difficulties faced by people in the small fishing communities. They drew similarities between the Exxon spill and the BP spill as opposed to natural disasters like Katrina. The report claims that natural disasters tend to pull communities together, while man made ones divide communities.
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Katrina did not cause people to lose their way of life. An Iraq veteran who had been shrimping, lost his family when after he lost his job, the BP compensation payment only came to $1,700 for six month. He had been paid mostly in cash, and was unable to document his income. He feels like a failure, and has contemplated suicide.
Steve Pico tracked the problems of the Price William Sound communities after the Exxon spill. “The communities were blindsided, they did not realize what was happening to them until the suicides started, divorces started and domestic violence became acute.” Now he is seeing the same issues start sooner in the Gulf than they did in Alaska. After four yeas in Alaska, there were seven suicides. There are already two in the Gulf.
And all while this was going on, our governments were saying: “come on down! The water is fine”. President Obama went swimming for the cameras. What was he thinking? It was this type of attitude that caused scenes like this one: families swimming and sunbathing on a beach, while ten meters away, people in has mat suits were digging up the beach to try and get to the oil.
Instead of protecting us, and talking about the dangers of the over use of dispersants, our governments were saying: “the BP spill is no big deal! You can swim in the ocean!” I ask again, what could they have been thinking?
I think we can all understand that BP’s complete aim was to limit their exposure to liability. This is a company that has shown repeatedly it gives not a damn for the public health. But where was our Surgeon General? Where was the EPA?
But it is not just people who are suffering. The toxicity levels of the petroleum found in Pensacola Bay at frightening. In referring to Pensacola Bay, Heather Reed, the environmental expert for the city of Gulf Breeze said, “the numbers are off the chart. It’s extremely toxic to human health.”
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Lab workers had to dilute the sample 20 times just to get a reading. Reed said samples are usually diluted only once.
“The oil is very well preserved,” Reed added. “It smells very strong when pulled out of the water. It made me nauseated.” Reed in late September discovered a significant amount of oil buried in submerged sediment near Fort McRae in Escambia County while conducting independent research.
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“The oil was in about 3 feet of water and was buried pretty deep in the sediment,” Reed recalled. “The mats where between 6 inches and a foot in diameter, but some were more than 2 feet in diameter. I kept digging and finding more and more. “Finding this submerged oil is very alarming to me because it’s in such large mats,” Reed explained. “I believe it came into (the bay) in June with the initial impacts.”
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Reed on Sept. 30 revisited the site and another near Barrancas Beach with BP and Coast Guard officials to inform responders of her discovery. She also discovered oil present at Johnson Beach, Fort Pickens and Orange Beach through research she conducted in September. The topography near Fort McRae helped preserve the submerged oil. Because the area is a secluded cove, very little water flows through it – resulting in low oxygen levels. “(The oil) is in an anaerobic environment, so there is not a lot of bacteria to break it down,” Reed explained.
Reed said that similar samples that might possibly remain submerged in the Gulf of Mexico could be extremely damaging to the marine ecosystem. “I am concerned about upwelling events,” Reed said. “Strong currents draw up nutrient rich water and sediment from the sea floor that nourishes plankton and other organisms that are the foundation of the marine food chain.
“If an upwelling event brings up any oil material with these toxicity levels, it could be harmful to any animals near the upwelling plume.”
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“I would not recommend going into the water”, she said.
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She explained that the effects near the beach would be different because of more aeration. Though no oil has been reported on Gulf Breeze shores or in local bayous, those areas could be at risk.
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“We don’t have any barriers, the Coastwatchers aren’t patrolling anymore, and there has been no communication to the city of this oil entering the bay,” Reed said. If oil entered any of the Gulf Breeze bayous, Reed explained that it would sink and become submerged just as it had near Fort McRae. “It would definitely sink and be preserved,” Reed said. “And it would be very difficult to find.
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This has been a very difficult letter to write. I am not a dispassionate journalist. Writing this drives my blood pressure up 20 points easily.
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I have seen many ugly situations during my life. Many of them, like the U.S. Government’s purposely experimenting on Marshall Islanders to study the effects of radiation, I have partly shrugged off because they happened so long ago (50 years in that case). But the BP spill and its effects on the people of the Gulf are happening now. Today. And tomorrow, and for the next 20 years. There are people there who need help right now.
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And we know it. We know that like the Exxon Valdez spill, the people who did the actual clean up will pay for it with lost years of their lives. And BP will give out some money now, and then spend 20 years keeping itself and its lawyer’s rich, while the people of the Gulf suffer. And if their track record is anything to go by, this won’t be the last time.
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My last night at sea, I went up to the bridge tonight at 18.00 to relieve Ivo, our chief mate from Croatia for dinner. I looked back on the deck, and Wendy, our cook is writing in her journal. She is not cooking dinner, because Neil, the world’s coolest R.O. is making pizza. Johanne from Denmark is re-sizing the pilot ladder; until (on a Sunday evening) it is so dark she cannot see any more.
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The rays of sunset are making spokes across the sky from the higher cumulus clouds. This is such a beautiful place, despite man’s best efforts over the last six months. I really want to go home and see my family. This has been one of my toughest tours in many years: the constant organizing for the next day’s activities, a crew who all worked very hard, without enough down time to catch their breath. And in the backs of our minds, constantly the knowledge that while we were not always seeing oil float around on the surface, we were witnessing a huge disaster.
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But in spite of all that, I do not want Veracruz to poke its head over the horizon after lunch tomorrow. I could do this job forever.
Images: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Shipwreck, 1805.
George Seurat, Bathers in Asnières, 1883-1884.
Captain’s Blog: Gulf of Mexico Oil Damage/Worse Than You Thought updatePost + Comments (58)
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The December issue of Foreign Policy has an article by Paul Farmer, of Partners in Health, entitled “5 Lessons From Haiti’s Disaster
What the earthquake taught us about foreign aid“. It begins:
1. Jobs are everything. All humans need money — they need it to buy food and water every day. And no matter how hard the government or the aid industry tries, people will want for all three things until they are employed…
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2. Don’t starve the government. The international community doesn’t know best. Local people do. NGOs like the one that I am lucky to work with cannot replace the state — nor can the United Nations or anyone else. We don’t have the expertise, and we won’t stay forever. We don’t have the same stake in building a community that the locals themselves have… On this, almost everyone agrees.
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Some donors argue that the Haitian government is rife with corruption and mismanagement — and that infusing it with money will only make matters worse. But we need to strengthen the public sector, not weaken it. And that will take a working budget….
I swear, this reminds me of a massive political disaster currently afflicting some other country, one which used to be proud of its “global pre-eminence”.