Monday, June 28, 2010

Fw: Tropical Update 6/28

here it comes.... oil oil everywhere

Disaster Zone 1

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Monday, June 28, 2010 2:33 PM

Subject: Tropical Update 6/28

Alex has entered the Gulf of Mexico...

Since my update on Friday afternoon, TD1 was upgraded to TS Alex early the following day. It made first landfall on Belize City, Belize as a 50kt tropical storm, tracked northwest across the Yucatan Peninsula, and entered the southern Gulf of Mexico late Sunday night. Toward the end of the trip across the peninsula, it weakened slightly to a Depression, but almost immediately regained TS strength upon entering the warm Gulf waters. At 15Z today, the intensity was 50kts and 989mb.

As of this writing, the bulk of the deep convection is located to the east of the low-level center, and it looks fairly ragged and disorganized, as one would expect after spending nearly a full day over land. However, Alex is forecast to become a minimal CAT2 hurricane as it approaches the western Gulf, making landfall early Thursday morning near the US/Mexico border. One thing I'll point out is that model guidance has been gradually shifting the landfall point further and further north with each new run. I'd suspect that the official forecast track will follow that trend and nudge slightly northward with each advisory.

In the US, coastal areas can expect a storm surge up to 6' near Brownsville and Corpus Christi, and minimal up to at least the TX/LA border. In the coming days, larger and larger swells and waves will make their debut in the north-central Gulf; certainly a negative impact on the oil leak situation. Instead of the typical 3-4' swells offshore of LA, MS, AL, and northwest FL, swells of 8-10' will make their way up there by Wednesday.

For the latest on Alex, please visit
http://einstein.atmos.colostate.edu/~mcnoldy/tropics/atlantic/

Brian

--  *===========================================*    Brian McNoldy, Research Associate III        Dept. of Atmospheric Science          Colorado State University            Fort Collins, CO 80523                 970.491.8558 http://einstein.atmos.colostate.edu/~mcnoldy/ *===========================================*

Gulf of Mexico Presents Unprecedented Toxicity Problems

Gulf of Mexico Presents Unprecedented Toxicity Problems

If you`re living in the U.S., particularly within a thousand miles of the Gulf, you need to detoxify your body now. Here`s why: Crude oil is packed with a toxic chemical called benzene. Even in small amounts, benzene is associated with leukemia, Hodgkin`s Lymphoma and other serious blood and immune system diseases. The EPA`s "safe level" for benzene is 4 ppb (parts per billion) and benzene is being found in Gulf air at levels of 3,000 ppb. Crude oil is being smelled hundreds of miles away, and make no mistake, if you can smell oil, you`re breathing highly toxic benzene.

With the oil, numerous toxic gases are also gushing from earth and gases that everyone near the Gulf is being exposed to include hydrogen sulfide and methylene chloride. The EPA`s allowable limit for hydrogen sulfide is 5-10 ppb (parts per billion), but on May 3rd air levels of 1,192 ppb were recorded. A former oil company CEO says these levels pose serious, even fatal, risks to adults and unborn children. Hydrogen sulfide acts like carbon monoxide and cyanide gases - it inhibits cellular respiration and oxygen uptake, and causes cellular suffocation. As for methylene chloride, the body changes it to carbon monoxide - and it`s known to cause liver damage, skin damage and cancer. The EPA`s safe level for methylene chloride is 61 ppb - and it`s being found in the air at levels of 3,000 ppb.

Most people know that the chemical dispersant BP is using is highly toxic. It`s so toxic that the EPA ordered BP to use a different and less toxic dispersant - an order which BP ignored. Currently, over a million gallons of these toxic chemicals have been dumped into our oceans. With the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the same dispersant caused serious respiratory, liver, nervous system, kidney and blood damage in people - and reports that clean up crews in the Gulf are falling ill are plenty. On the manufacturer`s label, it says that no toxicity testing has been done, but these chemicals being used in enormous and uncontained quantities are obviously very toxic.

All of this sounds bad, and it is, but here`s the kicker: as part of the earth`s interconnected ecosystem, rain water comes from the oceans. So, it shouldn`t be a surprise that scientists are predicting severe destruction across the U.S. from toxic rains - and it appears the first cases are being reported about 400 miles from the Gulf. In fact, hundreds of acres of Tennessee farm land are at risk.

The crops have small, raindrop-sized burn marks on them and while the mainstream media is reporting crop damage, they haven`t yet made the connection between the toxic, chemical-ridden rains and the potential crop failure. It`s being reported that these raindrop-sized burn marks are affecting everything in sight, and no plant is immune. Dead birds are also being found nearby. These crops may fail and if they do survive, it`s likely they`ll be toxic to consume because plants being watered with toxic chemicals will absorb those chemicals into their cells.

So, what can you do? Detoxify your body now and continue to do so regularly in the months and years to come. These chemicals in the air - and likely soon in the drinking water and in crops that do survive - present a very real danger inside our bodies. Thankfully, there are methods to remove these chemicals - but it`s up to you to take the steps to do so.

More:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/...
http://www.prisonplanet.com/may-lev...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGxG...
http://www.eutimes.net/2010/05/toxi...
http://www.wreg.com/news/wreg-myste...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corexit

Sunday, June 27, 2010

The Coming Gulf Coast Firestorm: How the BP oil catastrophe could destroy a major U.S. city

The Coming Gulf Coast Firestorm: How the BP oil catastrophe could destroy a major U.S. city

It's hurricane season in the Atlantic, and that means Mother Nature could be whipping up fierce storms and sending them charging into the Gulf Coast any day now. In a normal hurricane season, that's bad enough all by itself... remember Katrina? But now there's something even more worrisome in the recipe: There's oil in the water.

So what happens when a Katrina-class hurricane comes along and picks up a few million gallons of oil, then drops that volatile liquid on a major U.S. city like Galveston or New Orleans?

Now, before we pursue this line of thinking any further, let's dismiss the skeptics out there who think oil can't drop from the sky because oil doesn't evaporate. Actually, if you look at the history of hurricanes and storms, you'll find thousands of accounts of lots of things that don't evaporate nonetheless falling out of the sky. The phrase "raining cats and dogs" it's entirely metaphor, you know: There are documented accounts of all sorts of things raining down from the sky: Fish, frogs, large balls of ice, and so on.

If rain storms can pick up fish out of the ocean, then drop them on land, then they certainly have the capacity to pick up oil, too.

Besides, as any chemist will tell you, the various petrochemicals found in crude oil evaporate even without a storm picking them up! Oil, in other words, does evaporate into the air. Or, more accurately, some of the lighter chemicals in crude oil evaporate even at temperatures of around 100 degrees (F). Those are Gulf Coast temperatures.

These chemicals burn

Now, these lighter chemicals that more easily evaporate also happen to have lower flash points, meaning they catch on fire more easily and at lower temperatures than other elements in the oil. The flash point for gasoline, for example, is much lower than diesel fuel. That's because gasoline is "more flammable" and is a lighter fuel than diesel.

The EPA classifies oils into Classes A - D. Class A is the lightest kind of oil, which the EPA describes as follows (http://www.epa.gov/oem/content/lear...)

"These oils are highly fluid, often clear, spread rapidly on solid or water surfaces, have a strong odor, a high evaporation rate, and are usually flammable. They penetrate porous surfaces such as dirt and sand, and may be persistent in such a matrix."

That same EPA document makes it quite clear that the more volatile oils can evaporate from crude oil, rendering the remaining oil heavier and more "tar-like."

And we already know these oils can catch on fire. That's the whole point of tapping crude oil, of course: To pump it into engines then catch it on fire in order to turn the energy of that mini-explosion into force (to drive the eight pistons in your gas-guzzling SUV, for example).

How the fire happens

So let's say the oil blowout continues, and the Gulf of Mexico is carrying millions of gallons of crude oil as a massive hurricane approaches. It's a hot July day in the Gulf of Mexico, with temperatures soaring towards 110 degrees, accelerating the evaporation of volatile oils which get mixed in with hurricane-force winds.

The hurricane makes landfall in New Orleans, let's say, dumping potentially hundreds of thousands of gallons of what is essentially "volatile fuel" on the city of New Orleans. Now, at first it's just a wet, slippery toxic mess that kills trees and grass. But what happens after the storm when the sun dries out the city?

All the dead trees killed by the oil turn into kindling. The sun evaporates off the rain water, leaving behind fuel. A few days of sun baking and you have a city doused in fuel, ready to burst into flames. It's every fireman's worst nightmare. The whole city is essentially turned into a giant match.

Now, sure, the more volatile fuels might evaporate, but as they do, they'd fill the city with explosive fumes. One spark, one fire, one lightning strike and your whole city literally goes up in flames. The BP oil spill, in other words, provides the fuel that could turn an ordinary hurricane into Mother Nature's arson attack on an entire city.

Like a nuclear bomb

This would not be an ordinary city on fire, either: It would be a city doused with volatile fuels that soaked it to the core. The sewers would explode like massive terrorist bombs, ripping to shred any underground infrastructure (fiber optics, water delivery, electrical infrastructure, etc.). The pavement itself would be on fire, as would parks, grasslands and forests. The city would burn from top to bottom, and there would be no point even trying to put out the flames. All we could do is evacuate and watch it all burn to the ground.

And in the aftermath, you'd still have oil covering the beaches, oil in the ocean, and the threat of more firestorms yet to come. It could be just the first of many such incidents striking the Gulf Coast.

Think this couldn't happen? Sure, and BP said the oil was a "tiny" little leak that didn't matter, either. They said the oil rigs would never explode. They said they would cap the blowout. They said they would protect the shores. And all along the problem just got worse and worse until even the press noticed that these corporate criminals just couldn't stop lying.

Now, BP is at least $20 billion in the hole in an effort to compensate some of the Gulf Coast businesses for the damage they've caused. But how will they compensate people if an entire city burns to the ground?

The answer? They won't. That would be the end of BP. Immediately bankruptcy. B.P. = "Bankruptcy Protection," after all.

No more payments go out to anyone. BP goes belly up just like all the fish being murdered by CorExit dispersant chemicals in the Gulf right now. The company goes down in flames just like New Orleans (or some other major city on the coast).

Of course, the scenario I'm describing here is theoretical, and I hope it's a worst-case scenario, too. But it is possible. Catastrophe is what happens at the intersection of poor planning and bad luck. BP has given us poor planning, and now Mother Nature may be about to deliver a heavy-handed dose of bad luck in the form of a seasonal hurricane that takes oil from the Gulf and dumps it on land.

We can only hope that these two elements do not collide on our shores. For if they do, we may witness loss on a scale our world hasn't seen since the dropping of atomic weapons on civilian populations in World War II. If a hurricane drops oil on New Orleans (or any other Gulf Coast city) and it goes up in flames a few days later, the aftermath will, indeed, resemble the effects of a nuclear bomb explosion.

You probably don't want to be anywhere near that. Needless to say, if it starts raining oil in your neighborhood, that might be a good time to grab whatever you value and get outta Dodge.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

THE PRESIDENT'S OIL SPILL SPEECH

President Obama delivered his first Oval Office speech on the heels of his latest visit to the Gulf region - the fourth since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in April. With such an environmental and economic crisis present, the president needs to exert leadership to protect our precious coastal resources and clean up the spill, says Nicolas Loris, a research assistant at the Heritage Foundation's Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.
His message was the wrong one, says Loris. Instead, he continued to politicize the crisis by pushing for cap and trade legislation and to establish a separate claims fund -- financed by BP -- that will do very little to address the issue at hand. President Obama is right in saying that the Gulf region will bounce back, but not with the policies of cap and trade and banning offshore drilling that he's suggesting.
The President has been using the oil spill to push cap and trade and "clean" energy investments forward:

But global warming legislation -- placing caps on carbon dioxide emissions -- would do nothing to improve clean-up or to prevent future spills.
It would distract from the very efforts to clean up and stop the oil that must be the top priority now.
Nor would emissions caps magically create new problem-free sources of alternative energy.
Instead, global warming legislation would raise energy costs for all Americans and kill much needed jobs.

Under a regime like the President proposed, higher energy costs would spread throughout the economy as producers everywhere try to cover their higher production costs by raising their product prices, further impacting Americans. The result will be a much slower economy and lost jobs at a time when the top priority for Americans is economic growth. This is hardly the bounce back for the Gulf's economy, says Loris:

Implementing the House-passed Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill would put a chokehold on Louisiana's economic potential, reducing the state's economy by $8.33 billion in 2035.
Beginning in 2012, job losses will be 21,832 higher than without a cap-and-trade bill in place.
And the number of jobs lost will only go up, increasing to 31,468 by 2035.

Source: Nicolas Loris, "The President's Oil Spill Speech," Heritage Foundation, June 15, 2010.
For text:
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/06/15/the-presidents-oil-spill-speech/
For more on Energy Issues:
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=22

Here we go again:
Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Ocean Circulation Group Models

The College of Marine Science - USF, Ocean Circulation Group maintains a coordinated program of coastal ocean observing and modeling for the West Florida Continental Shelf (WFS). Modeling includes a West Florida Shelf version of ROMS nested in the Navy's operational HYCOM. We are also diagnosing model output from the Navy's HYCOM, from NCSU's SABGOM ROMS, and also from the NOAA RTOFS. All of these model-based, oil spill trajectory forecasts, each updated daily with new wind forecasts and new satellite derived oil location reinitializations are provided below.

· WFS Model Forecasts
· WFS Model Oil Spill Trajectory Hindcast/Forecast (superimposed with winds) New!
· WFS ROMS Oil Spill Trajectory Hindcast/Forecast (with surface currents and SST) New!
· WFS ROMS model Oil Spill Subsurface Trajectory Hindcast New!
· Global HYCOM based Oil Spill Trajectory Hindcast/Forecast New!
· Navy GOM HYCOM based Oil Spill Trajectory Hindcast/Forecast New!
· SABGOM based Oil Spill Trajectory Hindcast/Forecast New!
· RTOFS based Oil Spill Trajectory Hindcast/Forecast New!
· Four-panel view of four oil spill trajectory models New!

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Big Pharma's Bald-Faced Lies on Medical Science

Here, Dr. Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD, shares shocking information about the underbelly of medical science to help you understand how, and why, the "scientific method" has become so manipulated and willfully distorted by the drug industry.

Sources:

Video Transcript

Dr. Golomb is one of those rare commodities. She has earned an MD and a PhD and, is an associate professor of medicine, and associate professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California at San Diego. But she is a rare commodity because she has integrity, and has not sold out to the drug companies while most other researchers have.

"I was initially perplexed by the disparities I saw between the published evidence, review papers, guidelines, and follow-up papers after trials were published," she explains, when asked how she became interested in the topic of Big Pharma distorting scientific evidence.

She had been researching statins (cholesterol lowering drugs), and she was perplexed by how people could come to the conclusions they were coming to, based on the data. "I would ask my colleagues, how could they have read this paper and come to this conclusion?"

Over time, as she began examining the evidence relating to conflict of interest and published results, she discovered there were forces at play that lead to disparities between:

the evidence that was published, relative to the "truth" of that evidence, and
the secondary representations of that evidence and the evidence that was published originally

"There is actually widespread evidence, even within the medical literature, showing that these forces can lead to qualitative differences in the conclusions relative to the fact," Golomb says.

A Perfect Example of Drawing the Wrong Conclusion from Published "Scientific Evidence"

Early in the interview Dr. Golomb cites a perfect example of the qualitative difference between the scientific facts amassed and the conclusions drawn.

"FDA analysts now have access to clinical trials whether or not they are published because of the clinical trial registries that some journals now require. (That doesn't actually require that those results then be published, but at least now there is opportunity for the FDA to get access to those studies, and sometimes to the evidence from the studies.)

So the FDA conducted an analysis of antidepressant drug trials and found that of 38 trials for which the evidence appeared favorable, 37 had been published. Whereas of 36 trials for which the evidence did not appear favorable toward antidepressant drugs, 22 were not published at all, and 11 were published in a way that misleadingly conveyed the outcome as though it was favorable.

So that research, the "published evidence," would be that over 90 percent of publications were favorable, relative to "truth" (at least as determined by the FDA analysts), which was about 50 percent.

… So that's an example of how the evidence we see can be dramatically different from the evidence that was procured, and there are actually a number of mechanisms that lead the evidence that was procured to already have disparities, generally favoring treatment benefits, relative to truth."

Many of the critics against natural or alternative health claim that we have abandoned the scientific method, and I think nothing can be further from the truth.

I have enormous respect for the scientific method, and I think when it is done properly it can clearly provide us with profound and valid truths that can guide and direct our treatment protocols.

But what many people fail to appreciate is that much of the research published has been deeply influenced and severely tainted by tremendous conflicts of interest and profit-driven motives.

Dr. Paul Offit, for example, an infectious disease specialist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, has been quoted as saying:

"Science is not a democracy where people's votes decide what is right. Look at the data, look at science and make a decision based on science that has been published."

But what he is really advocating with this statement is blind faith in "facts" that may have been produced in the midst of, and sorely skewed by, massive conflicts of interest.

You Won't Find What You Purposefully Avoid Looking for

Dr. Golomb was previously the scientific director for the Department of Veteran Affairs and on the Research and Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' illnesses. This experience also predisposed her to being more sensitive to issues that many other physicians are not attuned to.

"Part of the reason I got interested in the Gulf War area was because I was already concerned about the way inferences were drawn about that condition… I had seen the conclusions of the Institute of Medicine and the Presidential Advisory committee reports relevant to Gulf War illness at that time, and… inferences were basically absence of proof of a connection between organic factors and illness, which is interpreted as "proof of absence" of a connection…

But no one had looked, and therefore no one had "proved" that the exposures they had received were related to their illness. They then concluded that there couldn't be a relationship.

But you couldn't conclude there was "no relationship because there was no evidence" because nobody had looked, or even asked if it was biologically possible and therefore merited more inquiry."

This seems to happen more frequently than you might think. Absence of proof of a connection between a toxic exposure and disease tends to morph into "proof of absence of a connection."

But in reality, the absence of proof is oftentimes little more than a refusal to investigate the matter in any serious way.

"It was clear that some of the exposures Gulf War veterans had, had strong biological plausibility as precipitants for their illness, and I outlined… a research plan that would help to evaluate whether in fact there was a cause of relationship.

…I suggested that we look at the genetic variants of the enzymes that detoxify some of the chemicals they were exposed to, on grounds that if these chemicals were causally linked to illness, [then] people who have sluggish variants of these detoxifying chemicals should be more likely to be ill, and sure enough, they are. And people who had higher levels of exposure to these chemicals would be more likely to be ill, and sure enough, they are."

Why is There so Little Independent Research When We Know Profit Motives Drive Conclusions?

Not surprisingly, based on Dr. Golomb's investigations into statin drug studies, ALL of the large randomized control trials of statin drugs have been funded by drug companies. And when you consider that the pharmaceutical industry makes about half a trillion dollars annually, it's easy to see how statin drug research may have been clouded by conflict of interest.

So why is there not more independent research being done?

"It's very expensive to do those studies," Golomb explains. "The only other source of funding for reasonable sized studies is the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

We approached the NIH to conduct a study to see whether coenzyme Q10 might mitigate muscle side effects of statins, and we were told by NIH officers that they wouldn't even consider to do the study unless we ask the drug company to supply the statin…

So I contacted the NIH and I said, "I'm really trying to have a career free of drug company conflict of interest, would it be such a problem to have one study that doesn't have a drug company involved in it?"

And they said, somewhat reasonably, that their interest is in leveraging their funding and therefore, no, they would not consider an application unless we asked the drug company to supply the drug, which of course already set some level of conflict of interest."

So, unfortunately, the need of the government to leverage their investment has the unfortunate side effect of also producing ties to industry. Clearly, a pharmaceutical company is not going to jump at the chance to give their drug to an independent researcher who may find that the drug has significant problems.

If they voluntarily supply the drug, they're naturally going to want to have a say in what results are published at the end.

How the Publication Process Can Easily Add to the Problem

But looking at the funding, and hence the potential for direct conflict of interest, of the research in question is not the only problem we face when trying to decipher the truth of any given study.

Once the data has been collected, there's a whole other set of variables that come into play, with respect to submitting them to peer-reviewed journals.

"We've already alluded that there are funding disparities, and that less favorable studies – if they are drug company funded – are less likely to be submitted for publication. And then there are issues at the level of the journal.

It would be nice to think of medical journals as these bastions of truth and light that have no bias, but in fact, they're businesses, and they make their money, in many cases, from drug company advertisement, and also from sales of the glossy reprints of the drug favorable articles to industry.

And interestingly, several former editors and chiefs of major medical journals, Richard Smith of the BMJ (British Medical Journal), Richard Horton of the Lancet, and also a couple of former editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine have written books and opined heavily on the favorable impact of drug company influence on medical publishing.

There are strong conflicts by the journal to publish drug company favorable articles in order to reap those hundred thousand dollars or so in reprint sales for the favorable articles, and also to keep the drug companies happy so that they continue to get drug company advertising."

This is an important point that I don't want you to miss: There are drug reps whose sole responsibility is to "educate" physicians about new drugs, and one of their primary tools is to provide reprints of favorable studies.

This is not something that they can simply photocopy in their office, because that would be copyright infringement. So they actually have to pay for that reprint from the journal, and that's exactly what Dr. Golomb refers to here as "reprints."

In many cases, these reprints can amount to income in the six figures, over and above the income the journal generates from the drug company's advertisements in the journal.

This profit-driven motive to publish shoddy studies of dangerous drugs creates a major conflict of interest within the journal itself.

"The evidence that this has an impact comes from several sources," says Golomb. "One was the Annals of Internal Medicine that, some years ago, published an article on the impact of drug company advertising on physician behavior... and the article was not flattering to drug company advertising.

Somebody tracked the impact on the Annals revenues… before the article, and after the article, and... they estimated that they lost $1-1.5 million in advertising revenue over the ensuing several years as an apparent consequence of having published that unflattering article.

… And there is direct evidence now as well, of drug companies rejecting unfavorable articles -- articles unfavorable to industry, based on factors other than article quality."E

Two additional problems that have flourished within scientific publishing are the issues of ghostwriting, and duplicate publications. I expounded on both of these issues in this previous article.

Although it is considered a serious ethical breach to publish the same clinical trial more than once, this is in fact what has happened with some drug trials, which Golomb discusses in this interview.

Why is this problematic?

Because, for example, if you were to do a meta-analysis, where you review all available studies on a particular drug, you'd be mislead to believe that there are far more favorable studies than there really are. And if that republished study was flawed or the results manipulated through conflicts of interest to begin with, then what you end up with is essentially scientific fraud.

Then there's the process of gaining favorable reviews by other experts – another area fraught with potential conflicts of interest. To learn more about the ins and outs of the peer review process, I urge you to listen to the interview in its entirety, or read through the transcript.

In it, Dr. Golomb discusses the policies in place regarding conflict of interest; why these policies so often fall short; and how pharmaceutical companies manage to circumvent these policies to still publish their sometimes downright imaginary findings.

Some of her stories detail the devastating collapse of the entire system that occurs far more often than anyone could possibly imagine.

But she also discusses the potential for reforming the system. Part of rescuing the honor and validity of the scientific method is to put an end to the indoctrination by pharmaceutical companies that occur from day one in every medical school.

"… Most of the physicians who are doing the training are conditioned by the existing literature and the existing "expertise," which is influenced by all the factors that we've just mentioned.

So they legitimately believe the benefits of these drugs -- often to a degree that's not even supported by the published randomized trial evidence, because it will also be supported by the follow-on review papers, commentary expertise, and guidelines.

But medical students have actually been on the vanguard of trying to make change and the American Medical Student Association actually developed a policy of trying to rate the impact of conflict of interest in the classroom.

My understanding is that this was motivated initially by a medical student at Harvard who had listened to their lecture on statins, and somebody in the classroom had raised their hand and asked the question about statin adverse effects and it was answered in such a derisive and dismissive way that this other student looked up the lecturer online and discovered that he had all these conflicts of interest with statin industry.

That ended up prompting the student group to try to take action."

Isn't that always how real change starts? With just one person, asking the right questions, expecting answers, and being willing to look deeper rather than accept something as "truth" at face value.

It's unfortunate, but the science based system we currently have has some fatal flaws.

It's virtually impossible to expect a publicly traded pharmaceutical company, which has a major obligation to its stockholders, to simultaneously have the patient's best interest at heart. As Golomb says, the two are fundamentally incompatible. And yet this is THE source of the vast majority of the funding for all our science-based evidence.

Remember, the end consumer here is you – if you take any type of drug.

So although these issues may seem far removed from your life, they absolutely affect a vast majority of you, every single day. The decisions about what drugs to prescribe are being made based on the research published. Oftentimes individuals will decide they want to take a specific drug based on a TV advertisement they just saw, which also spouts claims derived from this scientific process.

Knowing what you know now, after listening to this interview, how comfortable do you feel about taking Paul Offit's advice to just "make a decision based on science that has been published"?

Hopefully, this interview will cause you to think a little deeper about the process of the scientific model in general, and how to evaluate scientific evidence in particular.

NY hospitals agree to stop flushing pharmaceuticals down the drain and polluting watershed

NY hospitals agree to stop flushing pharmaceuticals down the drain and polluting watershed

Five health care facilities have signed an agreement with the New York Attorney General's Office to settle charges that they polluted the state's watersheds by dumping pharmaceutical products down sinks and toilets.

In 2008, and Associated Press investigation revealed that the drinking water consumed by more than one-sixth of the U.S. population is contaminated with trace (but potentially biologically active) amounts of over-the-counter and prescription drugs. While some of these chemicals enter sewage systems after being excreted by people taking the drugs, many of them were traced back to a common practice in hospitals and other health-care facilities: disposing of unused pharmaceuticals by flushing them down sinks or toilets.

After state tests of New York watersheds revealed widespread pharmaceutical contamination, the Attorney General's Office launched an investigation. Eventually, five facilities -- Putnam Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Holmes in Putnam County, and O'Connor Hospital, Countryside Care Center, Margaretville Memorial Hospital and Mountainside Residential Care Center in Delaware County -- were charged with numerous federal and state violations, including failure to properly track, label, store and dispose of drugs. The hospitals and nursing homes were found to have improperly dumped antibiotics, antidepressants, hormones, painkillers and other pharmaceutical products directly into the state water supply.

The watersheds contaminated supply water to New York City's eight million residents, as well as another one million people in several counties to the north.

Each facility will pay a fine of between $3,500 and $12,500. Although state law does not prohibit the dumping of all pharmaceuticals down the drain -- only some -- the facilities have agreed to end the practice completely.

Ten other health care facilities in the state are also being investigated for watershed pollution through drug dumping. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo called the practice "an emerging threat."

The Environmental Protection Agency has classified pharmaceutical products as "contaminants of growing concern."

Sources for this story include: www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticl....

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Maybe I can use this blog on with this iPod
or maybe not!!!!!

Food Holds the Ultimate Leverage, Part II (Opinion)

Food Holds the Ultimate Leverage, Part II (Opinion)
In Part 1 we learned that controlling the food supply equates to having enormous leverage over the masses. During the Great Depression days, Americans were kept alive because of their ties to the rural farming communities. Families could grow food or rely upon their relatives to help sustain them. But in this world where we are clueless about where our food comes from or how to produce it, we have become extremely vulnerable. And, as food prices rise many will have little choice other that to shift to a diet of cheap, fatty, mass-produced foods loaded with sugar, salt, and synthetic chemicals, already a staple of the nation's poor.

Junk food, already a major contributor to obesity, diabetes and heart disease, is often the only food available to those living in the inner cities because decent supermarkets and decent foods are beyond their reach both geographically and financially. And as this blight continues and our economy deteriorates even more, the middle class will soon join their ranks.

When you walk down the street, look at people. What you will see are people wasting their bodies just like we waste our land. You will see bodies that are fat, weak, unhappy, sickly and gross - basically, the cash crop for the manufacturers of the pharmaceuticals. Our bodies have become nothing more than a shipping carton used to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.

The people will eat what the corporations decide what they should eat. They will become detached from what really provides life; they will become the slaves of the producers, and mindless zombies. The concept of the new model farms is to turn us all into machines. How can you mechanize production without mechanizing consumption?

So, the first step is to have the communities take back local food production and in the process, reclaim our lives which have been subjugated by corporate culture and brainwashing. We need to go back to the values that sustain a community. We need to re-connect with nature and life and to realize that our existence relies upon our relationship with God and each other. We need to realize that we all have the same Father making us all brothers and sisters in the truest sense of the words. It is this realization that will save us.

If not, then we will continue in an economy that focuses on technology, weapons, bling, and drugs. We will continue to be deprived of clothing, food, shelter and water. We will continue to fight wars just to acquire resources that we never owned anyway. If we adopt the consciousness that we are caretakers and not owners why would there be a need for war? The resources were here long before we got here and will be here long after we are gone. That makes God the true owner.

So, if a nation has a resource we don't have and we have a resource they don't have and we trade, this will bring harmony, peace and abundance and no need for wars. The problem is that no one can exploit anyone for money in a culture like this. The horror!

Aloha

Food Holds the Ultimate Leverage, Part I (Opinion)

Food Holds the Ultimate Leverage, Part I (Opinion)
He who controls the food supply can and will have leverage and control over the people. If we take back our agriculture and can buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of the corporations that control a food system that is fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse just like our financial system.

If we continue to allow the corporations to decide what we eat and how food is raised, harvested and distributed, then we will bear the burden of high prices and shortages and become dependent on cheap, mass produced food loaded with sugar, fat and salt. We will open the door to more obesity, diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure.

Already the effects of climate change, droughts and rising fossil fuel costs have wreaked havoc on the environments of millions. One sixth of the world's population, or approximately one billion people, subsist on less than $1 per day. And out of this number, about 160 million people get by on less than 50 cents a day. How would you like to be in a situation where 60% of your income was spent on food?

Food riots have brought about food rationing; 33 million Americans ( one in nine) are on food stamps and in 20 states, as many as one in eight are on food stamps. With an average monthly food stamp benefit of $113.87 per person, many, many people are without adequate food. Even more depressing is the fact that Congress allocated $54 billion for food stamps in the current fiscal year, up from $39 billion, but in the new fiscal year, costs are estimated at $60 billion.

The large factory farms have wiped out the small farmers. Our soil has been poisoned with enormous quantities of pesticides, and contaminated animals in overcrowded stockyards are fed a flowing and endless supply of antibiotics, steroids, and growth hormones. The garbage that has been pumped into the water systems has caused algae build up and mass dying of fish in the rivers and streams.

Because of the blight of changing weather patterns and chemical pollution, crop yields in the Northeast are rapidly becoming less and less. And the Food Modernization Act, another gift from the Washington politicians that serve the big corporations and not the people, means that the small farms will soon be a thing of the past.

The entire economy built around food is unsafe and unethical and it is the food that is the greatest place for communities to start taking back power. Look at reality. The national food system is collapsing. The Central Valley of California produces more than 50% of what we eat. So what happens when gasoline hits $5 a gallon or a heavy drought blankets the cropland? Chaos happens! This unstable system of food production must be replaced with small, diverse sources that will provide a greater food security.

There was a study done by Cornell University to determine whether or not New York state could feed itself. What they found was even if all agricultural land was used and food distribution was optimized to minimize the total distance that the food needed to travel, New York state could only meet 34% of their total food needs.

What's even worse is that New York City, that relied upon New Jersey for food supplies, now has to face the fact that the, if you will pardon the expression, "Garden State" has had their farms give way to housing developments. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the upstate farming communities in New York have been gutted by industrial farming.

Stay tuned for Part 2

Sunday, June 06, 2010

WHO scandal exposed: Advisors received kickbacks from H1N1 vaccine manufacturers

WHO scandal exposed: Advisors received kickbacks from H1N1 vaccine manufacturers

A stunning new report reveals that top scientists who convinced the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare H1N1 a global pandemic held close financial ties to the drug companies that profited from the sale of those vaccines. This report, published in the British Medical Journal, exposes the hidden ties that drove WHO to declare a pandemic, resulting in billions of dollars in profits for vaccine manufacturers.

Several key advisors who urged WHO to declare a pandemic received direct financial compensation from the very same vaccine manufacturers who received a windfall of profits from the pandemic announcement. During all this, WHO refused to disclose any conflicts of interests between its top advisors and the drug companies who would financially benefit from its decisions.

All the kickbacks, in other words, were swept under the table and kept silent, and WHO somehow didn't think it was important to let the world know that it was receiving policy advice from individuals who stood to make millions of dollars when a pandemic was declared.

WHO credibility destroyed

The report was authored by Deborah Cohen (BMJ features editor), and Philip Carter, a journalist who works for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London. In their report, Cohen states, "...our investigation has revealed damaging issues. If these are not addressed, H1N1 may yet claim its biggest victim -- the credibility of the WHO and the trust in the global public health system."

In response to the report, WHO secretary-general Dr Margaret Chan defended the secrecy, saying that WHO intentionally kept the financial ties a secret in order to "...protect the integrity and independence of the members while doing this critical work... [and] also to ensure transparency."

Dr Chan apparently does not understand the meaning of the word "transparency." Then again, WHO has always twisted reality in order to serve its corporate masters, the pharmaceutical giants who profit from disease. To say that they are keeping the financial ties a secret in order to "protect the integrity" of the members is like saying we're all serving alcohol at tonight's AA meeting in order to keep everybody off the bottle.

It just flat out makes no sense.

But since when did making sense have anything to do with WHO's decision process anyway?

Even Fiona Godlee, editor of the BMJ, had harsh words for the WHO, saying, "...its credibility has been badly damaged. WHO must act now to restore its credibility."

Yet more criticism for WHO

The BMJ isn't the only medical publication criticizing WHO for its poor handling of conflicts of interest. Another report from the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly also criticized WHO, saying: "Parliamentary Assembly is alarmed about the way in which the H1N1 influenza pandemic has been handled, not only by the World Health Organization (WHO), but also by the competent health authorities at the level of the European Union and at national level." It went on to explain that WHO's actions led to "a waste of large sums of public money, and also unjustified scares and fears about health risks faced by the European public at large."

The funny thing is, NaturalNews and other natural health advocates told you all the same thing a year ago, and we didn't have to spend millions of dollars on a study to arrive at this conclusion. It was obvious to anyone who knows just how corrupt the sick-care industry really is. They'll do practically anything to make more money, including bribing WHO scientific advisors and paying them kickbacks once the vaccine sales surge.

The vaccine industry and all its drug pushers are, of course, criticizing this investigative report. They say WHO "had no choice" but to declare a pandemic and recommend vaccines, since vaccines are the only treatment option for influenza. That's a lie, of course: Vitamin D has been scientifically proven to be five times more effective than vaccines at preventing influenza infections, but WHO never recommended vitamin D to anyone.

The entire focus was on pushing more high-profit vaccines, not recommending the things that would actually help people the most. And now we know why: The more vulnerable people were to the pandemic, the more would be killed by H1N1, thereby "proving" the importance of vaccination programs.

People were kept ignorant of natural remedies, in other words, to make sure more people died and a more urgent call for mass vaccination programs could be carried out. (A few lives never gets in the way of Big Pharma profits, does it?)

How the scam really worked

Here's a summary of how the WHO vaccine scam worked:

Step 1) Exaggerate the risk: WHO hypes up the pandemic risk by declaring a phase 6 pandemic even when the mortality rate of the virus was so low that it could be halted with simple vitamin D supplements.

Step 2) Urge countries to stockpile: WHO urged nations around the world to stockpile H1N1 vaccines, calling it a "public health emergency."

Step 3) Collect the cash: Countries spend billions of dollars buying and stockpiling H1N1 vaccines while Big Pharma pockets the cash.

Step 4) Get your kickbacks: WHO advisors, meanwhile, collected their kickbacks from the vaccine manufacturers. Those kickbacks were intentionally kept secret.

Step 5) Keep people afraid: In order to keep demand for the vaccines as high as possible, WHO continued to flame the fears by warning that H1N1 was extremely dangerous and everybody should continue to get vaccinated. (The CDC echoed the same message in the USA.)

This is how WHO pulled off one of the greatest vaccine pandemic scams in the last century, and it worked like gangbusters. WHO advisors walked away with loads of cash, the drug companies stockpiled huge profits, and the taxpayers of nations around the world were left saddled with useless vaccines rotting on the shelves that will soon have to be destroyed (at additional taxpayer cost, no doubt) or dumped down the drain (where they will contaminate the waterways).

Meanwhile, nobody dared tell the public the truth about vitamin D, thereby ensuring that the next pandemic will give them another opportunity to repeat the exact same scam (for yet more profit).

The criminality of the vaccine industry

The bottom line is all this is a frightening picture of just how pathetic the vaccine industry has become and how corrupt the WHO and the CDC really are. What took place here is called corruption and bribery, folks. Kickbacks were paid, lies were told and governments were swindled out of billions of dollars. These are felony crimes being committed by our global health leaders.

The real question is: Why do governments continue to allow public health organizations to be so easily corrupted by the vaccine industry? And who will stand up to this profit conspiracy that exploits members of the public as if they were profit-generating guinea pigs?

The next time you hear the WHO say anything, just remember: Their advisors are on the take from the drug companies, and just about anything you're likely to hear from the World Health Organization originates with a profit motive rather than a commitment to public health.

Oh, and by the way... for the record, there has never been a single scientific study ever published showing that H1N1 vaccines worked. Not only was the H1N1 pandemic a fraud to begin with, but the medicine they claimed treated it was also based on fraud. And now we know the rest of the story of why it was all done: Kickbacks from Big Pharma, paid to advisors who told WHO to declare a pandemic.

Sources for this story include:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineF...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...

Saturday, June 05, 2010

Starting Out in Volunteer Water Monitoring | Monitoring and Assessing Water Quality | US EPA

Starting Out in Volunteer Water Monitoring

PDF Version (4 pp, 837K, About PDF)

Some US EPA resources on the World Wide Web…

What is Volunteer Monitoring?

Across the country, volunteers monitor the condition of streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, coastal waters, wetlands, and wells.

They do this because they want to help protect a stream, lake, bay or wetland near where they live, work, or play. Their efforts are of particular value in providing quality data and building stewardship of local waters.

Volunteers make visual observations of habitat, land uses, and the impacts of storms; measure the physical and chemical characteristics of waters; and assess the abundance and diversity of living creatures—aquatic insects, plants, fish, birds, and other wildlife. Volunteers also clean up garbagestrewn waters, count and catalog beach debris, and become involved in restoring degraded habitats. The number, variety, and complexity of these projects are continually on the rise.

Volunteer monitoring programs are organized and supported in many different ways. Projects may be entirely independent or may be associated with state, interstate, local, or federal agencies; with environmental organizations; or with schools and universities. Financial support may come from government grants, partnerships with business, endowments, independent fundraising efforts, corporate donations, membership dues, or a combination of these sources.

Volunteers Provide Quality Data

Friday, June 04, 2010

agroecology

Principles


The goal of agroecology is to develop and manage sustainable agroecosystems.
We are now in the process of preparing a broad, web-based, definition of agroecology and sustainability for use by researchers, educators, development workers, decision-makers, consumers, and farmers. We focus on the following questions:
	What is agroecology? What are agroecosystems? What is sustainability? What are the agroecological principles that guide development of sustainable agroecosystems? How do we measure sustainability in agroecosystems? What are the best agroecological indicators of sustainability?
At this point in the project, we have the following materials available: An Ecological Definition of Sustainable Agriculture Principles of Agroecology & Sustainability A Comparison of Ecosystem Properties in Agroecosystems General Principles for the Conversion Process Ecological Sustainability in Traditional Agroecosystems Case Studies Agroecology Glossary

Organic Growing Guides

Vegetables

Arugula	Asparagus	Beet	Bok Choy	Broccoli	Brussels	Cabbage	Carrot

Cauliflower	Celery	Chard	Chili	Collard	Cress	Cucumber	Eggplant

Endive	Kale	Kohlrabi	Leek	Lettuce	Mustard	Okra	Onion

Parsnip	Peppers	Potato	Radicchio	Radish	Rhubarb	Rutabaga	Scallion

Shallot	Spinach	Squash	Tomato	Turnip	Zucchini