Wild radioactive pigs!

With radiation you get wild boars, radioactive reindeer,

With the 'modification' of the Voting Rights Act, you get 'problems' and voter suppression.

Predicted flash points: China and oil.  Who do you want in the White House to deal with it?

A journey to the heart of the modern ‘Red Pill’ misogynist movement.

Insults and rape threats. Writers shouldn’t have to deal with this

Feminists don't hate men. But it wouldn't matter if we did

Algae? I think we could manage that....

Biofuel breakthrough: Quick cook method turns algae into oil

ANN ARBOR—It looks like Mother Nature was wasting her time with a multimillion-year process to produce crude oil. Michigan Engineering researchers can "pressure-cook" algae for as little as a minute and transform an unprecedented 65 percent of the green slime into biocrude. "We're trying to mimic the process in nature that forms crude oil with marine organisms," said Phil Savage, an Arthur F. Thurnau professor and a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan.

Can we stop ourselves from poisoning the earth?

We use our oceans both as a pantry and as a toilet. We drill without knowing how to plug the holes. We genetically modify without testing.  Will we die before we learn we are poisoning ourselves and future generations? ... don't answer that.

 Following Garbage's Long Journey Around The Earth

 Study: Plastic in 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' increases 100-fold

The lesson of the Gulf of Mexico is forgotten...

Rules relaxed for reporting offshore oil and gas accidents: 

The North Sea safety regulator has lightened up the rules for reporting accidents offshore even as one operator in the field, Total, struggles to halt a gas leak that has been going on for over a month. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has introduced a new regulation that says injuries need only be reported if workers are out of action for over seven days. The former level was three days.

Exclusive: Shale causes rise in waste gas pollution

(Reuters) - The shale energy boom is fuelling a rise in the burning of waste gas after years of decline, a World Bank source told Reuters ahead of the release of new data, giving environmentalists more ammunition against the industry.

Monsanto's attempts to stifle reporters:

One year after the BP oil disaster

The Gulf fishermen can see what the dispersants and oil did to the seafood industry.

But we knew this already...

Scientists find Corexit made BP Gulf catastrophe worse is not news

BP funded scientists now admit what scientists in other countries have found and EPA adviser warned last July, that toxic Corexit, of which the government and BP applied 2 million gallons throughout the Gulf of Mexico region, made the catastrophe worse, an ongoing catastrophe according to residents, independent researchers, and now, even BP paid scientists.

The scientists, supported by a 10 million dollar BP grant, presenting their reports last week, said they were struck by the studies so far according to the New York Times. Throughout the past year, however, since the oil rig exploded, experts in the fields of public health and toxicology have said that the combined BP oil and Corexit was 11 times more lethal than oil alone.

Have no idea if this is true or not. It almost sounds like The Onion wrote the headline:

Top ex-oilfield executive says Gulf op a depopulation event. 100,000 now sick.

Ex-oilfield executive of 25 years, now human rights defender Ian Crane stated Friday during Voice America “In Discussion” radio program that the Gulf of Mexico operation was a planned population reduction event. During the program, key Gulf advocates disclosed that over 100,000 Gulf people are already plague victims, hundreds of millions more will be impacted, and BP has paid enormous sums of money to keep Gulf activists from having a voice nationally.

“BP has made sure that activists are not campaigning on a national level. They are keeping them local so the corporate world is not threatened,” Crane told show host, David Gibbons.

If cats reported the news

No. Not for a long time, kitty. Oil in your seafood from the Gulf or radioactive isotopes in your fish from the Pacific?... neither one, thank you.

Dr. Susan Shaw - Marine Environmental Research Institute from Blackbird Media on Vimeo.

Schwarzenegger's scandal and his actual screwing of California. Thanks, Ahnuld. And speaking of sexual oopses .... 19 best unintentionally sexual church signs (h/t to Marcellina of The Practice Room)

Research Suggests Weight Gain Is Contagious

Congress to vote on extending Patriot Act

Threatening kids who want to debate the Constitution?

Partisan teachers:

When it comes to grading, Republican and Democratic professors at one unnamed elite university put their ideologies into practice, a new study finds: Republicans welcomed inequality, handing out more very high and very low grades, and Democrats’ grades grouped more tightly around the average.

Republicans also gave black students lower grades than their colleagues. In both cases, the researchers stressed, there was no way to know which approach better reflected students’ performance.

The reason behind the Rapture prediction. And after apologies, Camping is now giving another date....

The choices!

Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is already pre-oiled for your benefit. Seafood from the Pacific is already cooked and can be eaten in the dark...

I think the Mayans messed up

And it should be 2011 that the world ends. Or at least unravels. Or idiots take over....

Supermoon!

Radiation from Japan reaches California... just a little bit.

The 'small government' Republicans would like to make the IRS the uterus police.

The NRA goes off half-cocked.

The reason the neocons were begging Obama to attack Libya. Wait for it.....Surprise!! Oil.

Washington DC doesn't give a fuck about the jobless.

Ann Coulter declares that radiation is good for you... which explains everything about her.

Unraveling....

Are we running out of oil?

Fracking. And what it is doing to us. (h/t Mahakal)

Huck Finn censorship and racism.

Forewarned is forearmed about Fox News.

Frantic editing on Sarah Palin's blog.

They think we'll eat seafood from the Gulf?

Stop telling us it's all clean now.

MATTHEW HINTON / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE Oil was spotted in West Bay just west of the Southwest Pass of the Mississippi River, seen at top left, by the Gulf of Mexico Friday October 22, 2010.

These people have oil in their bodies

Cruising these here internetal tubes

You never know what you will find....

Exclusive: Gulf oil dispersant contained extremely toxic carcinogen

New Rule: Rich People Who Complain About Being Vilified Should Be Vilified

Dalek mysteriously appeared at elementary school

How it felt to shelter from the Blitz

Solved: mystery of the meteor-shedding asteroid

Downhill With the G.O.P.

Aurora saturnalis: halos at the poles of the ringed planet

Blog sprinkles

The Chinese just have to do everything better:

The jam on the main north-south motorway into Beijing has been blamed on a set of roadworks that is intended to alleviate congestion caused by thousands of trucks bring coal and perishable goods into the city.

At its farthest extent trucks joining the back of queue in Inner Mongolia were taking several days to reach their destination, crawling along at about 2mp/d – or miles per day, the measure of speed on the clogged section.

Fantastic ancient art work:

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

Just looking for a scapegoat to beat to death and hang in the village square:

This is teabaggery crowd in America today.

Oh happy news!! New microbe discovered eating oil spill in Gulf!!.... Wait a minute.... If you read down to the last paragraph, who is funding these marvelous scientists who have discovered this microbe? (my bold):

Scientists also had been concerned that oil-eating activity by microbes would consume large amounts of oxygen in the water, creating a "dead zone" dangerous to other life. But the new study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67 percent, while within the plume it was 59 percent.

The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP. Other support came from the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Oklahoma Research Foundation.

Ah. Prostituted scientists. So why on earth should I believe you guys, then? And ignore the crude dumped in the local landfills.... and ignore the guy who was telling the truth months ago:

What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing -- and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true.

"Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response," he told me at the time. "There's no such thing as an effective response. There's never been an effective response -- ever -- where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water.

"Most of the oil that goes into the water in a major spill stays there," he said. "And once the oil is in the water, the damage is done."

Steiner was also one of the first scientists to warn that much if not most of BP's oil was remaining underwater, forming giant and potentially deadly toxic plumes.

Credo Action: We need to cut military spending, not Social Security:

Sign our petition to the members of the deficit commission telling them to make recommendations that significantly lower military spending, allow the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% to expire, and modify health care reform to include a robust public option to lower costs.

Putting Glenn Beck into perspective using MLK.

Omg.... Sean Connery is 80.

Marcellina of The Practice Room has a link showing how far it is from Ground Zero to the 'mosque'.

You do that. I'm sure you'll learn something: Conservatives Across The U.S. Plan Parties To Read The Constitution Out Loud

Obviously because it's fun! Sloth and Gluttony Hard to Shake Even For the Healthy

If we were listening to Ray Bradbury we'd be packing our bags right now!

New solar system looks much like home

The newly discovered solar system may contain the largest number of planets ever found orbiting another star.

Although... if you look at the space junk we've left in our wake just around Earth, I'm sure the other star systems hope we won't figure out how to space travel....

Anyway... we're all gonna diiiiiieeeeeee! Or lose all our invested money which comes down to the same thing....

This is what we've been telling you all along

But did you listen? NoooOOOOooOOOOooo.

While officials claim most of the oil from America's worst-ever spill has disappeared, fishermen hired by BP are still finding tar balls—and being instructed to hide their discoveries.

Two weeks ago, as federal officials prepared to declare that some three-quarters of the estimated 5 million barrels of oil released into the Gulf over three months had disappeared, Mark Williams, a fishing boat captain hired by BP to help with the spill cleanup, encountered tar balls as large as three inches wide floating off the Florida coast

Reporting his findings to his supervisor, a private consulting company hired by BP, the reply, according to his logbook came back: "Told—no reporting of oil or tar balls anymore. Don't put on report. We're here for boom removal only," referring to the miles of yellow and orange containment barriers placed throughout the Gulf.

[snip]

The miraculous disappearance of the oil and the pending transfer of $20 billion to Ken Feinberg, who is independently overseeing the claims fund, have resulted in the oil giant cutting back its response operations. With a recent halving of the Vessels of Opportunity program, which hired fallow charter and commercial fishing boats, captains and deckhands are now less reticent to describe their experiences.

Link via Bryan of Why Now?

For those idiots who are now saying the oil is gone in the Gulf

Do you think we're stupid?

Incoming BP CEO: Time for 'scaleback' in cleanup

Just because we can't see it on the shores doesn't mean it isn't there.

You can't pour MILLIONS and MILLIONS of gallons of poisonous crude and MILLIONS and MILLIONS of horribly toxic dispersant into a sea and have it just 'disappear'. BP thinks if it can get the media to start talking about the amazing fact that the oil seems to be gone, we will forget about the disaster? Demand less money from them? Decide nature will clean it all up? Decide it wasn't that big of a mess?

Are you fucking kidding me?

The Gulf is ruined.

Not in anyone's lifetime today will the Gulf return to what it was before this 'spill'. Gulf sea creatures will have been made extinct. The water has been poisoned. The surviving fish and crustaceans are inedible. People are out of work. Health problems are obvious. Beach real estate prices are plummeting.

A seemingly feel-good story showed up this week on the nation's front pages and newscasts: The oil that befouled the Gulf of Mexico for 86 days is vanishing from the surface, leaving workers with little to clean.

But scientists warn the oil's ecological impacts are shifting, not ebbing, thanks to massive volumes of dispersants that have kept the crude beneath the waves.

"This is a management decision, to use dispersants," College of William and Mary marine science professor Robert Diaz said yesterday. "It doesn't make the oil go away, it just puts it from one part of the ecosystem to another."

That dispersed oil now hovers, diluted in the water column, posing a challenge for scientists to track and measure the subsea plumes. Mapping the long-term effects of the nearly 2 million gallons of dispersant used by BP PLC may well be equally difficult, given the array of unanswered questions that surround the products' rapid breakdown of oil droplets and their chronic toxicity.

In other words, while dispersants may have helped spare the Gulf's birds, the chemicals are likely shifting dangers to other species lower in the food chain. The National Research Council described dispersant use in 2005 as "a conscious decision" to direct hydrocarbons to one part of the marine ecosystem, "decreasing the risk to water surface and shoreline habitats while increasing the potential risk to organisms in the water column and on the seafloor."

Update: 7/31: McClatchy gets it right: When will oil spill be cleaned up? Maybe never

Update: Firedoglake.

Update: Nasa photo of Gulf on July 24th.

More of why we need to trust BP.....

BP is trying to buy off scientists

“We’re all employees of the state of Mississippi, and none of us really felt comfortable about testifying on the other side -- even if what we said was scientifically accurate,” Griffit says.

News of BP’s efforts to secure the consulting services of university faculty spread rapidly over the weekend, following a report in the Press-Register of Mobile, Ala., that provided details from contracts being offered to scientists. The newspaper said it obtained a copy of such a contract, noting that the agreement restricted consultants from discussing or publishing their research for at least the next three years.

At a time when many have already accused BP of low-balling or playing down the extent of the oil spill’s impact, many denounced the notion of professors gathering potentially damaging data for the company and letting BP sit on it for years.

“The idea that some scientists are willing to be bought off has caused quite a stir, and I guess the other thing is people don’t think too highly of BP trying to do that,” says Bob Shipp, head of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama.

The debate surrounding professors working for BP is not dissimilar from concerns often raised about professors conducting paid drug research for pharmaceutical companies. The fact that BP is pursuing faculty members who work sometimes within eyeshot of the spill's impact, however, appears to have given the conversations additional intensity.

BP pumped in unusual chemicals before rig explosion:

A contractor working on the Deepwater Horizon when it exploded testified yesterday that the day before the explosion, BP had pumped an unusual chemical mixture into the well -- a mixture that later rained down on the rig like "snot."

Leo Lindner, a drilling fluid specialist for M-I Swaco, told the panel investigating the causes of the explosion that BP decided to mix two chemicals the company had a surplus of -- two chemicals that aren't usually mixed -- and pump them into the well to flush out the drilling mud.

"It's not something we've ever done before," he said.

Lindner said BP wanted to use 400 barrels of the mixture, more than twice the amount of fluid usually used, because the company had hundreds of barrels of the chemicals and wanted to get rid of them.

And BP badly photoshopping the 'control center'.

The Gulf of Mexico

Now solidifying thanks to BP!

Thanks, BP!

Whistle blower to testify on oil spill worst fear:BP deliberately sinks oil with Corexit as cover up

I almost forgot Caturday....

Now with oil....

Pony and balloon show

Proving that BP is indifferent to the oil disaster.

Update: Via Bryan of Why Now?, a transcript.