"All Better!"

The Federal Government last estimated that only 26% of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon Disaster remained in the Gulf. It had all just naturally disappeared, they reckoned. Shucks, the experts said, it just cleaned itself right up, and took all that toxic dispersant with it.
Well, maybe. They didn't actually test for it so much as poke around briefly, throw up their hands, and announce whatever their handlers wanted them too, namely that it was "all better", regardless of actual evidence or science.

Indeed.

"..it has "already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm...There’s absolutely no evidence that there’s any significant concentration of oil that’s out there that we haven’t accounted for,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lead agency in producing the new report.

Anyway, some actual scientists have concluded actual studies, rather than issue press releases from oil lobbyists, and announced that the numbers may be slightly different: more like as much as 79% of the oil and its toxic byproducts still remain in the subsurface waters of the Gulf. They found a evidence of a significant concentration of oil out there that was not accounted for.

"One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless," said UGA marine scientist Charles Hopkinson, the senior investigator in the effort. "The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade."

Federal researchers involved in preparing the earlier estimate couldn't be reached for comment late Monday. Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington and New Orleans also couldn't be reached for comment.

“We were the Meat poets, baby. We got down
to the bone."

Henry Charles Bukowski, (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994)

Happy Birthday, Hank

a race of lost children

A dramatic rise in the percentages of seven-year old girls hitting puberty. Sometimes it even happens much, much earlier...

Of course, there's also the rise of the seven-year old self-obsessed anarcho-conservative speed freak-worshiping hypocrites:

...Since the day Johanna was born, we've worked to indoctrinate her into the truth of Objectivism. Every night we read to her from the illustrated, unabridged edition of Atlas Shrugged—glossing over all the hardcore sex parts, mind you, but dwelling pretty thoroughly on the stuff about being proud of what you've earned and not letting James Taggart-types bring you down. For a long time we were convinced that our efforts to free her mind were for naught, but recently, as we've started socializing her a little bit, we've been delighted to find that she is completely antipathetic to the concept of sharing. As parents, we couldn't have asked for a better daughter.
That's why, when Johanna then began berating your son, accusing him of trying to coerce from her a moral sanction of his theft of the fruit of her labor, in as many words, I kind of egged her on. Even when Aiden started crying.
-Eric Hauge, McSweenys

On one hand, I respect his willingness to engage in the experiment. On the other,
I can easily imagine her growing into this maladjusted woman, who clearly felt Morally Entitled to some damn McNuggets.

Which brings us back to the breast-endowed, menstruating children, which seems to be (like autism) a byproduct of genetic mutation with myriad causes; two of the biggest perhaps being the consumption of bio-engineered, antibiotic, hormone and industrial-chemical saturated foodstuffs, and a World Ecosystem now choking on the molecular level with plastic molecules and their derivative compounds.
These two overlap pretty heavily these days, since the Petro-Chemical and the Pharmaceutic Sydicates share the same profit interests...


Welcome to Rapture, Children...tell it to the Little Sisters.

________________________

third helpings of discontent

Decadence:

The finest tinned meat products.

A cookbook for Exotic Meats

Cooperate Espionage and Secret Muffin Recipe.

The high price of Strange Delicacies.

The growing popularity of the Ladies Brunch Burger, now with chocolate-covered bacon.

3-D Porn
_________________________

Rottenness:

Gulf Spill all better? Don't fucking kid yourself...

Sick soldiers and toxic smoldering trash fires.

Chinese "carrier-killer" missiles.

NJ closes Public Libraries, and thoughts on the American Dark Age.

Christopher Hitchens discusses cancer diagnosis.
___________________________

Bittersweet:

Space, Alien Life, Human Evolution and Potential Destiny:

"Since we don’t know how our own life emerged and haven’t discovered any elsewhere, we still have no idea whether life is common in the universe or if we are unique. We can be certain that we are not the culmination of life forms here, because we are less than halfway through the Sun’s lifespan. In the six billion years to come, there are likely to be creatures as far beyond humans as we are beyond microbes, and science as far beyond our present understanding as quantum theory is remote to a chimpanzee."

-Seminars on Long-Term Thinking Series

it will get weirder still...

The Excellent Meat Hook

New Cosmological Model proposed.
Fermi Paradox Odds
Tesseract 101
Robot surgeons and short-order cooks.

101 Bacon Flavored Products
Teens turning to shamanism.

Biggest Book in the world.
Oldest University restored.

Will Wal-Mart, not Whole Foods, save organic farming?

rays of black sunshine

Gulf Dead Zone biggest in the world.
Scientists "aren't sure if the development has anything to do with the Gulf oil spill."
Of course it's no big deal, since the oil spill is already magically all better!
If you only count what you can see on the surface and not all the stuff soaking into the beaches and wildlife.

“50% to 75% of the material that came out of the well is still in the water,” said John Kessler of Texas A&M University, who led an on-site study. “It’s just in a dissolved or dispersed form,”... It may be everywhere, infused, inculcated, in the ecosystem blood stream, but it is otherwise, apparently, not in evidence.

In any case the Oceans are dying...


Racism and Hypocrisy:
Even as the United States is caught up in a pile of rhetoric concerning the children of immigrants, Israel does precisely the awful and deports children to "preserve the country’s Jewish identity."

“We all feel and understand the hearts of children,” said Benjamin Netanyahu. “But on the other hand, there are Zionist considerations and ensuring the Jewish character of the state of Israel.”

The Oregon Health Dept shuts down a child's lemonade stand because she did not acquire the proper business license and threaten to fine her $500.

Also, an outbreak of bubonic plague.


Price of Bread to rise further.

Witch stories of Mexico.

new comic day

Alan Moore Interview

Superman comic saves family from greedy villains.

Fables Covers

The Evil Overlord Checklist

a little solar weather...

"Solar Tsunami" Plasma Wave hits earth sometime today...
Depending on who you listen to it could cause either a wave of communications blackouts and other unforeseen electromagnetic interference or just some pretty lights in the sky...
Either way, it's probably a bad time to be going on a space-walk to fix the failed cooling system on a rickety space station.

"A blast of violent space weather could hit the Earth tomorrow following two massive explosions on the Sun. NASA astronomers witnessed a huge flare above a giant sunspot the size of our planet and linked to an even larger eruption across the surface of Sun.
By chance, the explosions were aligned towards Earth, sending a solar tsunami racing millions of miles across space.
Experts estimate a wave of supercharged gas called plasma will reach us this Tuesday when it will buffet the natural magnetic shield protecting Earth.
It could trigger spectacular displays of the aurora or northern and southern lights."

...but then again:

"This eruption is directed right at us," said Leon Golub, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
"It's the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time."

Scientists have warned that a really big solar eruption could destroy satellites and wreck power and communications grids around the globe if it happened today.
Nasa recently warned that Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”.
The Daily Telegraph disclosed in June that senior space agency scientists believed the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013.

It remains unclear, however, how much damage this latest eruption will cause the world’s communication tools."

The rational part of me knows that the nature of these sort of cosmic events is almost wholly unexplained, even the structure of the sun itself a mystery, every theory being displaced by something more complex and bizarre before the old math is even finished being worked out, and no expert can really estimate or predict fuck-all any more than a psychic octopus or a coin toss.

But I am a gambler, and for the other part of me those odds are good enough, and has readied the bug-out bags.

Seeing the Lights...

Cuts of Pork

Know Your Meat!

Radioactive Wild Boar!

Meat-eating fueled human evolution, making us smarter.


"The belly is the giver of genius."
- Perseus