Category: Disastrous

Polluting our kids’ brains

~ susie

We all know this. And it’s not as if the establishment would be willing to rock this particular boat when there are campaign contributions to be had:

As many as one in six children nationwide has a neurodevelopmental disability, including autism, speech and language delays, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that ADHD alone affects 14 percent of children, although experts debate whether it may be overdiagnosed. In any case, the number of children needing special education services has increased 200 percent in the past 25 years. In a 2000 report, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that 3 percent of brain disorders are caused outright by environmental toxicity and an additional 25 percent by environmental exposures interacting with genetic susceptibilities.

Every day, America’s pregnant women and young children are exposed to a trifecta of suspected neurotoxicants in the form of pesticides (mostly via food and water but also home, lawn, and farm applications), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH (mostly via exposure to vehicle exhaust), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs (flame retardants, mostly in upholstered furniture and electronics). The CDC routinely samples Americans for these and other industrial by-products in our bodies, so we know their reach is pervasive. But we are not all equally exposed, and some of us appear to be more vulnerable to them for reasons that may include genetic susceptibility, poor nutrition, stress, and age.

What happened to the Hurricane Sandy money?

~ susie

062812_4822_NJACE Award

I think this will turn out to be quite a story.

TRENTON — In advance of an expected 2016 presidential campaign, Chris Christie’s administration is stepping up efforts to control the Republican governor’s image at all costs — even skirting sunshine laws that permit public access to government records.

Getting the Christie administration to release its grip of records tracking use of federal Sandy recovery money has been particularly difficult for watchdog groups and media outlets, including the Asbury Park Press.

The Fair Share Housing Center recently received the first detailed information about housing recovery programs supported by federal grants — only after suing the administration for not complying with a public records request.

The Press has yet to receive Sandy recovery information the newspaper first sought four months ago. The Press asked for internal administration records from the contract bidding that resulted in Christie and his family starring in TV commercials for the $25 million “Stronger Than the Storm” tourism campaign.

In September, state officials told the Press a search had “identified hundreds of potentially responsive documents’’ and promised to begin sharing the information “on a rolling basis” starting in the second week of October.

For two months after the deadline, nothing was forthcoming — until some of the documents were released Friday, just hours after this story first appeared on the newspaper’s APP.com website. State officials said more information would be available later this month.

Not only are they blocking info on the federal funding, IIRC, we still don’t have an accounting of the private donations raised by the Springsteen-BonJovi-Billy Joel concert — which is being handled by Mary Pat Christie, former Wall St. banker and the governor’s wife.

The next time a wingnut says we had a ‘quiet’ hurricane season

~ susie

And that proves there’s no global warming, remind him the world is a much bigger place than the United States:

European winter storm claims nine lives (via AFP)

Icy winter storms with hurricane-force winds Friday lashed northern Europe, where the death toll rose to nine while hundreds of thousands were left without power or stranded by transport chaos. Emergency services across the region battled to evacuate…

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New York train crash kills 4, injures dozens

~ susie

Of course, the maintenance on the train system has been, uh, underfunded for years now. I read they were begging for the money. I heard one report that the brakes failed:

New York train crash kills four, injures dozens (via AFP)

A train hurtled off the tracks in a New York suburb, killing at least four people, injuring dozens and coming perilously close to plunging into a freezing river. It was still unclear why the train veered off the rails in the Bronx at around 7:20 am (…

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Where were you when poverty became acceptable?

~ odd man out

I’ve been thinking of JFK and of those hard-luck cases who work at places like McDonald’s and Walmart. (There but for the grace of God and the wearing of a clown uniform go I.)

Those who are old enough can recall exactly where they were 50 years ago when JFK was killed, but I’ll bet few of them recall when the fight to eradicate poverty, a key factor in Kennedy’s New Frontier spiel, turned into acceptance of the widening gap between rich and poor. No, worse than that — acceptance of the idea that government’s main job is to ensure the rich get richer at the expense of the rest of us.

The union-busting Ronald Reagan had something to do with it, but there wouldn’t have been a Reagan without the legions of working-class white voters who thought Reagan had their interests at heart.

From Noam Chomsky, with my boldings:

We don’t use the term “working class” [in America] because it’s a taboo term. You’re supposed to say “middle class,” because it helps diminish the understanding that there’s a class war going on.

It’s true that there was a one-sided class war, and that’s because the other side hadn’t chosen to participate, so the union leadership had for years pursued a policy of making a compact with the corporations, in which their workers — say, the autoworkers —- would get certain benefits like fairly decent wages, health benefits and so on. But it wouldn’t engage the general class structure. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why Canada has a national health program and the United States doesn’t. The same unions on the other side of the border were calling for health care for everybody. Here they were calling for health care for themselves and they got it. Of course, it’s a compact with corporations that the corporations can break anytime they want, and by the 1970s they were planning to break it and we’ve seen what has happened since.

How’s that “compact with the corporations” working for you now, former labor unionists and ex-members of the middle class?

Footnote: The income gap between rich and poor has been growing since the 1970s. Ninety-five percent of the gains made in recovery from the 2008 crash have gone to the richest one percent of Americans.

More unusual weather

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

The American climate-deniers contingent is quite happy to ignore the effects of global warming that we’ve outsourced to other parts of the world:

ROME — The Mediterranean island of Sardinia, prized by the jet-set for its white sand beaches and crystal-clear seas, was a flood-ravaged mud bath Tuesday after a freak torrential rainstorm killed at least 17 people, downed bridges and swept away cars.

Italian Premier Enrico Letta declared a state of emergency and set aside 20 million euros ($27 million) for emergency relief, saying the priority was reaching remote areas, saving the lives of those still unaccounted for and providing for those left homeless.

The island, which draws royals, entrepreneurs and ordinary tourists alike during the dry, peak summer months, received more than 44 centimeters (17.3 inches) of rain in 24 hours Monday — half the amount it normally receives in a year, officials said.

Still conflicted about the Keystone pipeline? Read this.

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

No one likes to talk about the dangers:

Jason Thompson used to love fishing in the lake he can see from his window in Mayflower, Arkansas, but these days, when he throws a line out into the water, the lure he reels back is covered in a sour, stinking black tar, the skirt of the jig stuck uselessly together. When he brings the fingers that touched the line up to his nose, he gets a whiff of the same putrid stench that filled the air for weeks after the oil pipeline burst—the smell that still rises out of the ground every time it rains.

Thompson hasn’t been fishing much. Ever since Exxon Mobil’s Pegasus pipeline burst in March and spilled an estimated 210,000 gallons of Canadian heavy crude oil two miles from his house, he’s had headaches of preternatural intensity, so bad they wake him up in the middle of the night. He has nosebleeds, and hemorrhoids even though he’s only 36; there’s a rash on his neck that has only gotten worse in the eight months since the spill; and some days he feels so weak that he can hardly get out of bed. He estimates that he has lost almost 35 pounds since the rupture, falling from a fit 220 down to 185. When he went to see a doctor in April, he was told he has a mysterious spot on one lung—but he hasn’t been able to afford to go back.

Hundreds of people in this working-class town of 2,200 have complained of symptoms like Thompson’s. And their maladies—respiratory disorders, nausea, fatigue, nosebleeds, bowel issues, throbbing headaches—echo the ones that appeared in Marshall, Michigan, where an Enbridge Energy pipeline burst in 2010. The two pipelines were carrying the same kind of oil: a heavy crude, or bitumen, mined in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, which is thicker and rawer than the oil extracted in the United States. This is also the oil that would flow in record quantities through the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, if President Barack Obama decides to approve it.
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Expect increasingly violent cyclones, weather experts warn

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

The reporter is full of shit, because of course there are scientists who directly link global warming to these increasingly frequent extreme storms. But that’s how successfully the plutocrats have backed off the media from doing their jobs:

Expect increasingly violent cyclones, weather experts warn (via AFP)

Meteorologists have yet to formally link global warming to typhoons like the one that devastated the Philippines, but they expect increasingly extreme weather phenomena due to a rise in ocean temperatures. The trail of death and destruction left in…

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