Garbage Truck Cameras to Document Recycling Habits

September 17, 2010

National Post

By Laura Baziuk

Officials in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley plan to use camera-equipped garbage trucks to film what gets dumped in order to make sure people are recycling properly.

Since the introduction last year of a three-bin system, providing garbage, recycling and yard waste bins, waste contamination has become a big problem, said Peter Rotheisler, manager of waste reduction at the Central Okanagan Regional District. While the system has helped to keep more material out of the landfill, it costs about $300,000 a year to pull out any materials in the wrong place.

The cameras will be able to record what is thrown out so city staff will have proof of bad behaviour.

“We’ re not watching people…. We’re looking for material types — paper, carboard, garbage — in the wrong spot,” Mr. Rotheisler said.

Mixing things like cardboard, batteries or electronics in with the garbage will net a warning from the city, a fine of up to $100, or even the cancelling of curbside pickup, he said.

In terms of privacy, garbage doesn’t have any rights, said Michael Vonn, policy director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, but trash can reveal a lot about its owner.

Mr. Vonn said the association will keep an eye on the program: “This is a slope. We’re not sure how slippery it is.”

Both Kelowna and the Regional Electoral Area have approved the new monitoring system, and garbage cameras could start rolling as soon as next year.

Garbage trucks in the region’s five cities — Kelowna, West Kelowna, Peachland, Lake Country and the Regional Electoral Area — already have video cameras.

Brock Macdonald, executive director of the Recycling Council of B.C., said improperly sorted recyclables eat up precious landfill space, and he applauded the district’s enforcement plans.

“Folks are generally not motivated well to do the right thing,” he said. “Once you know how to do this stuff, it’s not that difficult.”

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White House’s Latest Global Climate Scam

September 17, 2010

Fox News

From the administration that brought you “man-caused disaster” and “overseas contingency operation,” another terminology change is in the pipeline.

The White House wants the public to start using the term “global climate disruption” in place of “global warming” — fearing the latter term oversimplifies the problem and makes it sound less dangerous than it really is.

White House science adviser John Holdren urged people to start using the phrase during a speech last week in Oslo, echoing a plea he made three years earlier. Holdren said global warming is a “dangerous misnomer” for a problem far more complicated than a rise in temperature.

The call comes as Congress prepares to adjourn for the season without completing work on a stalled climate bill. The term global warming has long been criticized as inaccurate, and the new push could be an attempt to re-shape climate messaging for next year’s legislative session.

“They’re trying to come up with more politically palatable ways to sell some of this stuff,” said Republican pollster Adam Geller, noting that Democrats also rolled out a new logo and now refer to the Bush tax cuts as “middle-class tax cuts.”

He said the climate change change-up likely derives from flagging public support for their bill to regulate emissions. He said the term “global warming” makes the cause easy to ridicule whenever there’s a snowstorm.

“Every time we’re digging our cars out — what global warming?” he said. “(Global climate disruption is) more of a sort of generic blanket term, I guess, that can apply in all weather conditions.”

It’s unclear why Holdren prefers “global climate disruption” over “climate change,” the most commonly used alternative to “global warming.”

Asked about the speech, Holdren spokesman Rick Weiss said only that the Office of Science and Technology Policy has been transparent about Holdren’s remarks.

“The PowerPoint for Dr. Holdren’s Oslo presentation has been public on our website since the day after he returned,” he said.

Click here to see the presentation.

In a 2007 presentation, Holdren suggested a similar phrase change — “global climatic disruption.”

The explanation he gave last week was that the impact from greenhouse gas emissions covers a broad “disruption” of climate patterns ranging from precipitation to storms to hot and cold temperatures. Those changes, he said, affect the availability of water, productivity of farms, spread of disease and other factors.

He’s not the first scientist to publicly veer away from “global warming.” NASA published an analysis on its website in 2008 explaining that it avoids the term because temperature change “isn’t the most severe effect of changing climate.”

“Changes to precipitation patterns and sea levels are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone,” the report said.

But Republicans predicted that re-branding the issue would have limited effect on the legislative effort. GOP strategist Pete Snyder said he doubts the term is going to change hearts and minds.

“Are they going to change the name of weathermen to disruption analysts?” he quipped. GOP lawmakers already exploited a terminology change of their own by re-branding the “cap-and-trade” bill as “cap-and-tax.”

Holdren’s “global climate disruption” isn’t the most convoluted term to grace the climate debate, however.

According to the NASA article, early studies on the impact humans had on global climate referred to the relationship as “inadvertent climate modification.”

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Bring Your Own Towel

September 17, 2010

Telegraph

By Harry Wallop

HFCS Getting Rebranded To Trick Consumers

September 17, 2010

Natural News

By Ethan A. Huff

Consumers have largely ignored every marketing effort by the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) to “health-wash” high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as being the same as all other forms of sugar. But the group refuses to give up. According to the Associated Press, CRA is now petitioning the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow it to change the name of the highly-processed, controversial sweetener to “corn sugar” in yet another attempt to convince the public to accept it.

No matter how you look at it, HFCS is a highly-processed, unnatural form of refined sugar that inflicts a heavy burden on the liver. Besides being derived from corn, of which the vast majority is genetically-modified (GM), HFCS is linked to metabolic syndrome, heart diseaseand type-2 diabetes.

Last year, studies also found that at least half of commercial HFCS contains high levels of toxic mercury due to the extensive chemical refining process necessary to produce the sweetener. Nearly a third of the HFCS-containing breads, cereals, sodas and other consumer foods tested as part of the study showed up positive for mercury.

Despite the overwhelming evidence showing that HFCS is harmful to health, CRA is determined to convince the public otherwise. Its new marketing slogan claims that “whether it’s corn sugar or cane sugar, your body can’t tell the difference. Sugar is sugar.”

Consumption of HFCS has reached a 20-year low, and will likely continue to fall. Several large food producers, including Hunt’s ketchup and Snapple, have already removed the sweetener from their products, and many others will likely follow suit to meet consumer demand.

But most producers are replacing HFCS with refined cane or beet sugar, which is not much better. In fact, the majority of beet sugar grown in the U.S. is GM as well, but a recent court ruling may change that.

The best forms of sugar are those in their natural, whole form. The refining process removes many necessary co-factors that help the body to process the sugar properly, which leads to disease. So stick to things like raw sugars, raw honey and whole stevia leaf extract when enjoying a sweet treat.

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Vitamin D Triumphs over Vaccines In Latest Study

September 17, 2010

Natural News

By Mike Adams

If scientists discovered something that worked better than vaccines at preventing influenza, you’d think they would jump all over it, right? After all, isn’t the point to protect children and adults from influenza?

A clinical trial led by Mitsuyoshi Urashima and conducted by the Division of Molecular Epidemiology in the the Department of Pediatrics at the Jikei University School of Medicine Minato-ku in Tokyo found thatvitamin D was extremely effective at halting influenza infections in children. The trial appears in the March, 2010 issue of theAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Am J Clin Nutr (March 10, 2010). doi:10.3945/ajcn.2009.29094)

The results are from a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study involving 334 children, half of which were given 1200 IUs per day of vitamin D3. In other words, this was a “rigorous” scientific study meeting the gold standard of scientific evidence.

In the study, while 31 of 167 children in the placebo group contracted influenza over the four month duration of the study, only 18 of 168 children in the vitamin D group did. This means vitamin D was responsible for an absolute reduction of nearly 8 percent.

Flu vaccines, according to the latest scientific evidence, achieve a 1 percent reduction in influenza symptoms (http://www.naturalnews.com/029641_v…).

This means vitamin D appears to be 800% more effective than vaccines at preventing influenza infections in children.

To further support this, what really needs to be done is a clinical trial directly comparing vitamin D supplements to influenza vaccines with four total groups:

Group #1 receives a vitamin D placebo
Group #2 receives real vitamin D (2,000 IUs per day)
Group #3 receives an influenza vaccine injection
Group #4 receives an inert injection

Groups 1 and 2 should be randomized and double blind while groups 3 and 4 should also be randomized and double blind. The results would reveal the comparative effectiveness of vitamin D versus influenza vaccines.

Unfortunately, such a trial will never be conducted because vaccine pushers already know this trial would show their vaccines to be all but useless. So they won’t subject vaccines to any real science that compares it to vitamin D.

Vitamin D also significantly reduced asthma in children

Getting back to the study, another fascinating result from the trial is that if you remove those children from the study who were already being given vitamin D by their parents, so that you are only looking at children who started out with no vitamin D supplementation before the trial began, the results look even better as vitamin D reduced relative infection risk by nearly two-thirds.

More than six out of ten children who would have normally been infected with influenza, in other words, were protected by vitamin D supplementation.

Also revealed in the study: vitamin D strongly suppressed symptoms of asthma. In children with a previous asthma diagnosis, 12 of those receiving no vitamin D experienced asthma attacks. But in the vitamin D group, only 2 children did.

While this subset sample size is small, it does offer yet more evidence that vitamin D prevents asthma attacks in children, and this entirely consistent with the previous evidence on vitamin D which shows it to be a powerful nutrient for preventing asthma.

Vaccine pushers aren’t followers of real science

Now, given that vitamin D3 shows such a powerful effect in preventing influenza — with 800% increased efficacy over vaccines — shouldn’t CDC officials, doctors and health authorities be rushing to recommend vitamin D before flu season arrives?

Of course they should. But they won’t. Because for them, it’s not about actually preventing influenza and it never has been. The vaccine pushing camp is primarily interested in using influenza as an excuse to vaccinate more people regardless of whether such vaccines are useful (or safe).

Even if vitamin D offered 100% protection against all influenza infections, they still wouldn’t recommend it.

Why? Because they flatly don’t believe in nutrition! It runs counter to their med school programming which says that nutrients are useless and only drugs, vaccines and surgery count as real medicine.

The vaccine pushers, you see, aren’t followers of real science. You could publish a hundred studies proving how vitamin D is many times more effective than vaccines and they still would never recommend it.

They are promoters of medical dogma rather than real solutions for patients. They promote vaccines because… well… that’s what they’ve always promoted, and that’s what their colleagues promote. And how could so many smart people be wrong, anyway?

But that’s the history of science: A whole bunch of really smart people turn out to be wrong on a regular basis. That’s usually how science advances, by the way: A new idea challenges an old assumption, and after all the defenders of the old (wrong) idea die off, science manages to inch its way forward against the hoots and heckles of a determined dogmatic resistance.

This attitude is blatantly reflected in a quote from Dr John Oxford, a professor of virology at Queen Mary School of Medicine in London, whose reaction to this study was: “This is a timely study. It will be noticed by scientists. It fits in with the seasonal pattern of flu. There is an increasing background of solid science that makes the vitamin D story credible. But this study needs to be replicated. If it is confirmed we might think of giving vitamin D at the same time as we vaccinate.” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne…)

Did you notice his concluding remark? He wasn’t even considering the idea that vitamin D might replace vaccines. Rather, he’s assuming vitamin D only has value if given togetherwith vaccines!

You see this in the cancer industry, too, with anti-cancer herbs and nutrients. Any time an anti-cancer nutrient gains some press (which isn’t very often), the cancer doctor will say things like, “Well, this might be useful to give to a patient after chemotherapy…” but never as a replacement for chemo, you see.

Many mainstream doctors and medical scientists are simply incapable of thinking outside the very limiting boxes into which their brains have been shoved through years of de-education in medical schools. When they see evidence contrary to what they’ve been taught, they foolishly dismiss it.

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” – Bertrand Russell

Medical journals as guardians of ignorance

Medical journals largely function not as beacons of scientific truth but as defenders of pseudoscientific dogma. To have your paper published in most journals, your paper must meet the expectations and beliefs of that journal’s editor. Thus, the advancement of scientific knowledge reflected in each journal is limited to the current beliefs of just one person — the editor of that journal.

Truly pioneering research that challenges the status quo is almost always rejected. Only papers that confirm the presently-held beliefs of the journal’s editorial staff are accepted for publication. This is one reason why medical science, in particular, advances so slowly.

Studies that show vitamin D to be more effective than vaccines will rarely see the light of day in the scientific community. It is to the great credit of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, in fact, that it accepted the publication of this paper by Mitsuyoshi Urashima. Mostmedical journals wouldn’t dare touch it because it questions status quo beliefs about vaccines and influenza.

Medical journals, you see, are largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And Big Pharma doesn’t want to see any studies lending credibility to vitamins, regardless of their scientific merit. Even if vitamin D could save America billions of dollars in reduced healthcare costs (which it can, actually), they don’t want vitamin D to receive any scientific backing whatsoever because drug companies can’t patent vitamin D. It’s readily available to everyone for mere pennies a day.

In time, it will be recognized as superior to vaccines for seasonal flu, but for now, we must all suffer under the foolish propaganda of an industry that has abandoned science and now worships a needle.

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Asian Spice May Cure Alzheimer’s

September 17, 2010

Natural News

By Ethan A. Huff

Nature is full of various herbs and spices that protect against disease and even treat and cure it. And according to Chris Kilham, an ethnobotanist and Fox News’ “Medicine Hunter”, turmeric root — also known in its extract form as curcumin — is one such powerful spice that appears to both prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and even cure it.

“People who develop Alzheimer’s disease get a sticky plaque in the brain called amyloid beta,” explained Kilham to Dr. Manny Alvarez in a recent Fox News interview. Such plaques either develop as a result of Alzheimer’s, or they are the direct cause of it. But either way, they are directly related to the degenerative process.

However studies show that turmeric actually eliminates these plaques, both when they are first starting to form and even during the late stages of their advancement.

“What we have in turmeric is something that appears to inhibit the development of Alzheimer’s disease…and actually help to reduce the occurrence of plaque in the brain if you have it,” noted Kilham. “We know in animal studies, when animals actually have amyloid beta plaque in their brains and they’re given turmeric root…that plaque is reduced.”

Observational studies have also shown that people groups who eat large amounts of turmeric virtually never get Alzheimer’s.

“In countries where people consume a lot of [turmeric], there’s a very low incidence ofAlzheimer’s disease,” emphasized Kilham. “In India and Southeast Asia, it’s a rare disease. And [in the U.S.] it’s very, very common.”

According to Kilham, drug companies are hard at work trying to develop drug versions of turmeric, but he recommends eating real turmeric whenever possible, and taking turmeric extract supplements if eating the spice in food is not an option.

“A challenge that we face is that drug companies…can’t patent turmeric root,” he said. “So they will continue to try to develop something else. [But] eating turmeric, eating its extracts…appears to be protective against one of the most horrific and debilitating diseases we know.”

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Johnson & Johnson to Buy Vaccine Group

September 17, 2010

The Raw Story

US cosmetics and pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson said on Friday it intends to acquire Dutch vaccine maker Crucell, which isactive in developing countries, for about 1.75 billion euros.

“The companies expect that Crucell’s strength in the manufacture, discovery and commercialisation of vaccines would create a strong platform for Johnson & Johnson in the vaccine market,” the two firms said in a statement.

“Under the terms of the negotiations… Johnson and Johnson or an affiliate would acquire all outstanding equity of Crucell that it does not already own for approximately euro 1.75 billion (2.30 billion dollars),” it added.

Johnson & Johnson already owns 17.5 percent of Crucell.

The US firm said it would keep Crucell’s headquarters in Leiden in the Netherlands and preserve jobs at the Dutch company, which employs 1,300 people.

Lasy year Crucell produced more than 115 million vaccine doses in more than 100 countries, with the most of the treatments going to developing countries.

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Recession is Causing Towns to Stop Polluting Water Supply with Fluoride

September 17, 2010

Information Liberation

By Chris

Who said the recession is all bad? On the bright side, it’s forcing some towns to stop adding fluoride to their water supplies. A small town in Alabama has decided to stop fluoridating their water due to economic reasons, they say it will save them 50k a year.

“I guess we wound up saving about 50-thousand dollars a year in the production of our water, and we’re a small system so 50-thousand dollars a year is a big savings,” said Joe Beasley, Red Bay Water and Gas Department.

Apparently, they actually looked at the science, so perhaps they felt the recession was as good an excuse as ever to stop force drugging everyone.

“They had officials look at several studies and never found any evidence that supported keeping the fluoride in the water.”

The Montgomery Advertiser reports 18 other water systems in Alabama have also put their forced drugging program on hold.

Goode said that unlike some states that mandate by legislation that public water systems add fluoride to their water, Alaba ma does not.

“Water systems may decide to discon tinue fluoridating, which is a concern for the department and the communities.”

Yes, what a terrible tragedy that the government doesn’t mandate by law people’s own tax money be used to forcibly drug their water supplies.

He told the members of the committee that the state might be “losing the battle on fluoridation.”

Williamson said that the economy might be causing some systems to decide that it is too costly to maintain the equip ment that provides the fluoride, or they have done away with the service all together.

“That’s a problem,” he said.

A problem for the state, yes. A problem for the people, no.

There is absolutely no evidence fluoride helps anyone, in fact, the opposite is true. To quote from an excellent exposé:

The history of forcing fluoride on humans through the fluoridation of drinking water is wrought with lies, greed and deception. Governments that add fluoride to drinking water supplies insist that it is safe, beneficial and necessary, however, scientific evidence shows that fluoride is not safe to ingest and areas that fluoridate their drinking water supplies have higher rates of cavities, cancer, dental fluorosis, osteoporosis and other health problems. Because of the push from the aluminum industry, pharmaceutical companies and weapons manufacturers, fluoride continues to be added to water supplies all over North America and due to recent legal actions against water companies that fluoridate drinking water supplies, precedent has been set that will make it impossible for suits to be filed against water suppliers that fluoridate. There is a growing resistance against adding toxic fluoride to our water supplies, but unfortunately, because fluoride has become “the lifeblood of the modern industrial economy”(Bryson 2004), there is too much money at stake for those who endorse water fluoridation . The lies of the benefits of water fluoridation will continue to be fed to the public, not to encourage health benefits to a large number of people, but to profit the military-industrial complex. - The Fluoride Conspiracy

A chronicle of the abuse of power and of the manufacture of state sponsored medical propaganda, The Fluoride Deception reveals how military and industry scientists and public health officials buried information about fluoride’s potential for harm, while promoting its use in dentistry.

The book reveals that fluoride pollution was the greatest legal threat facing the Manhattan Project and how a group of powerful Cold War industries, who all faced extensive litigation for fluoride pollution, collaborated with officials from the National Institutes of Dental Research, laundering fluoride’s public image.

We’ll sit with the famous doctor who reported in the 1950′s that fluoride was a systemic poison, with tens of thousands of citizens uniquely sensitive to even tiny doses. We’ll walk the cobbled streets of Donora, Pennsylvania, in the aftermath of the nation’s most notorious air pollution disaster in 1948, and meet the scientist who blamed fluoride for the deaths. And, when a superstar toxicologist is fired in 1995, after discovering that fluoride affects the central nervous system, we’ll uncover a stunning connection to the WWII atomic bomb program. Today that scientist joins a growing number of health experts who call fluoride a venomous and hydra-headed poison. They suspect its involvement in a host of modern illnesses, including arthritis, bone cancer, and emphysema, and a spectrum of central nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and attention deficit disorder.

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Man Fined $5,000 for Growing Vegetables

September 17, 2010

The Sovereign Independant

By The Avalon Round Table

A Georgia resident who has been an organic farmer for years is now facing $5000 dollars in fines for growing too many vegetables on his OWN land. That’s right.

Steve Miller, who has sold some of his produce at local farmers markets, as well as growing food for himself, is likely the victim of an Online Aerial Invasion of Private Property. This invasion of property is probably due to the fact that unless visited or inspected by an official, there would be no way for there to be an accurate or factual accounting of what was going on at Mr. Millers property. The question is, “Does Steve Miller legally posses a reasonable expectation of Privacy on his own Private Property?

Recent reports of Local & State Officials and Bureaucrats using online mapping software have now become mainstream tools for assessing fines and generating money for cash strapped local & state budgets. Does it seem right that anywhere that Google Maps & Bing Maps can go is legal to use as a source of information. If a person was bathing in their pool, with every expectation of privacy, and someone peeked over a fence, wouldn’t that constitute a criminal offense?

Is the expectation of privacy something the government wants to destroy altogether?

Is government today at a point where the end justifies the means? In January and February, when he received his first citations, Steve was able to get the property re-zoned allowing him to grow his garden – a right MOST AMERICANS believe he already had. The Declaration of Independence states one’s inalienable right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Isn’t growing your own personal food supply an exercise of that right to Life and Liberty? No Constitutional Government can assess any fee for exercising theseinalienable rights.

In the recent past, Victory Gardens were encouraged. They were the pride of one’s back yard, and of a Nation that was self-sufficient. The television seriesThe Victory Garden on PBS, documents gardening and provides gardening tips and features vegetable gardens as a great personal achievement.

Historically, Victory Gardens in World War II were encouraged to keep the supply of food at a maximum – and personal growing increased the industrial supply to the military.

Are people going to let this FASCIST TAKEOVER to continue – even growing a garden in the privacy of our own personal property be taken away? If the answer is NO – then what are you prepared to do about it?

You can watch the video aired on WSBTV in Georgia – County Sues Farmer for Excessive Crops

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What’s Happening to the Oil in the Gulf?

September 17, 2010

Washington’s Blog

BP and the government decided that millions of gallons of dispersants should be dumped into the Gulf to sink and hide the oil.

They succeeded in sinking it. As ABC, CBS and NPR note, huge quantities of oil are blanketing the ocean floor, killing virtually all of the sealife which lives there.

And giant new underwater plumes have been found in the water column itself.

But officials don’t want to hear about them. As one member of the oil spill recovery team said:

“My biggest concern is there’s [a plume of oil] five miles by 30 miles out there that was reported and no one responded. The Coast Guard said for days that they wanted to run tests, and if they don’t test it when it’s called in, they’ll never find it”

But didn’t the oil-eating microbes eat alot of the oil? No … they mainly ate gas.

And the oil is not staying underwater.Oil is suddenly emerging in many parts of the Gulf.

Oil “patties”, 1 to 3 inches across, have been discovered floating along the seawall in Alabama.

16 miles of beaches in Louisiana have been hit. And scientists say that the oil will arise and wash ashore in pulses, and will hit sensitive areas like coastal marshes.

As the Christian Science Monitor notes, oil can remain hidden under sand for decades:

Yet it takes only minutes of digging into the sand [at Louisiana's Grand Isle State Park] to reveal a menace that experts say permanently threatens this picturesquelandscape: pools of crude oil lurking less than a foot below the surface. …

Twenty-one years after the Valdez spill, oil remains submerged in the beaches of Prince William Sound in Alaska.

The same is true in Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay, where a 1969 spill released 175,000 gallons of diesel fuel; 41 years later, sampling shows oil three to eight inches below the land’s surface.

Indeed, workers are just doing cosmetic clean-ups. They are pressure washing rocks with hot water so they look clean, just as they did with the Exxon Valdez spill. And the government’s targets for “cleaning up” beaches is very lax:

John Tarpley, chief scientific support coordinator for NOAA, says the agency’s goal is to clean beaches so they have “1 percent of oil or less.”

Oil that’s left in the environment can also seep into groundwater used for drinking by Gulf coast residents.

As CNN reports, we might be facing a worst-case scenario in Florida:

LARRY MCKINNEY, HARTE RESEARCH INST. FOR GULF OF MEXICO STUDIES: … [T]hey do tend to support some of our greatest concerns about the fate of these underwater plumes that were discovered back in June, and that is that they could be picked up and this conveyor belt that is upwelling in Desoto Canyon and bringing this oil from the deep waters up to the shallow, and thatseems to be what the Florida State folks are saying. …

JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR:… [T]he USF study said, quote, “These findings, although preliminary, suggest that subsurface oil may be emerging on to the west Florida shelf through the Desoto Canyon.” So this is not just restricted to the extremely deep water. There’s enough welling as you mentioned before. How widespread could this become?

MCKINNEY: Well, it depends on how big those plumes are and how long they persist, but that conveyer belt moves water rather quickly. And so the fact that the Florida state folks are finding oil up on that shelf at the distance that they’re finding it is disturbing from that regard. That means that that oil plume could be moving up on the shelf and that’s sort of a worst case scenario. We would not like to see that at all.

While the government denies that they are connected with the oil spill, there have beenmassive fishkills in Louisiana (and see this). Oil can be seen at fishkill sites (and see this), and the EPA has discovered high levels of nickel near the biggest fishkill. There have also been kills of starfish and other sea animals, including whales and dolphins:

As I have previously noted, independent scientists state that the EPA’s toxicity tests for the Gulf oil and dispersant were a joke.

And as McClatchy points out, the EPA’s toxicity findings don’t hold up in the real world:

[University of South Florida chemical oceanographer and lead scientist on the mission David Hollander's] team took water samples and fed them to marine plankton in experiments onboard the research vessel in August. Even in greatly diluted form, a lower concentration than what the EPA considers acute toxicity, the oil in the water caused a toxic effect…

The findings raised new questions about what concentrations and what compounds federal scientists should be concerned about, he said. “In spite of the low concentrations, something is in there.”

A marine biologist warns that in a worst-case scenario – the effects on the Gulf could be catastrophic:

[Marine biologist Edith] Widder, senior scientist and CEO at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association, compared the spill to pushing on a light switch. If the switch flips, she said, the rich diversity of species in the Gulf will be replaced by a system in which the only things able to survive are jellyfish and bacteria.

Instead of admitting that there is a problem, BP and the Coast Guard’s spin doctors have come up with code words for oil: instead of “oil sheen”, they call it “fish oil”; instead of “oil mousse”, they call it “algae”. And alot of black oily substances are just labeled “mysteries“.
And fishermen, shrimpers and crabbers are still catching contaminated seafood, although the authorities don’t want to hear about it. And the authorities don’t seem to be thrilled at independent scientists who are finding contamination in seafood, either:

There have also been reports of continuing health problems in Gulf coast residents. See thisand this.

But at least BP has stopped spraying dispersant in the Gulf … right?Unfortunately, numerous vessel of opportunity program participants have said it is still being sprayed (see this and this). And there allegations have been confirmed by chemists and photographers.

Okay, but at least the well has been capped, so that no new oil flows into the Gulf … right?

Its hard to know.

BP has shut off 16 out of 17 of its underwater cameras. The only remaining camera shows a small – but continuous – stream of leaking materials:

There are still problems with the well. See this, this, and this, and Admiral Thad Allen is now saying that the relief well might not be completed until October.

But remember, one of the world’s top oil industry accident experts says that the well maynever be killed.

I hope and pray that the relief well is successful. But if there were insurmountable problems in capping the well, do you think we would hear about it before the November elections?

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