Ethanol and Meteorites... what could possibly go wrong?

Corn ethanol is useless, but we could have told you that...

Something else I'll need to beat to death when it shows up at my door...

The blind leading the blind.  What ignorance is doing to teaching evolution.

Cereal that looks you in the eye.

Oops... the NYPD attempts to hashtag its way to popularity.

Is the seafood you're eating illegal?

Tracking the meteorites that have hit Earth.

Pre-oiled? Or glow in the dark?

Tuna contaminated with Fukushima radiation found in California:

Bluefin tuna contaminated with radiation believed to be from Fukushima Daiichi turned up off the coast of California just five months after the Japanese nuclear plant suffered meltdown last March, US scientists said. Tiny amounts of caesium-137 and caesium-134 were detected in 15 bluefin caught near San Diego in August last year, according to a study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. The levels were 10 times higher than those found in tuna in the same area in previous years, but still well below those that the Japanese and US governments consider a risk to health. Japan recently introduced a new safety limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram in food. The timing of the discovery suggests that the fish, a prized but dangerously overfished delicacy in Japan, had carried the radioactive materials across the Pacific ocean faster than those conveyed by wind or water.

If you don't want that tuna, have some fish without eyes.

 Going vegan makes more and more sense....

Yum yum

Eyeless shrimp, fish with oozing sores... enjoy your ocean and your seafood courtesy of BP.

The end of the beginning?

Or the beginning of the end? Factories stall worldwide, U.S. jobless claims rise

Nearly 50% of the Young People in Greece and Spain Are Unemployed

Robert Reich

Iceland

The Republicans' Farcical Candidates  A Club of Liars, Demagogues and Ignoramuses

New Hampshire GOP Speaker Discourages Students From Voting Because They’ll Vote ‘Liberal’

Hurricane season 2011.

Deliberate pushing of minorities into subprime mortgages.

Strange.  A rich man who realizes he doesn't create jobs (demands from the customers does) and wants to be taxed more.

And, btw, we are killing our oysters.

One year after the BP oil disaster

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

It adds a certain piquant flavor...

One reason I have cut back on seafood... the choices are pre-cooked radioactive fish from the Pacific or pre-oiled polluted and toxic seafood from the Gulf

New Study Says FDA Underestimated Seafood Contamination Risk After BP Oil Spill

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....

Blog sprinkles

It's the end of the world!!! Sell everything and meet me on the mountain top in your best bed sheets!

Dear Human...

Trying to escape Chernobyl and failing...

Uh oh... Mongolia is the new frontier for mining...

Making passports almost impossible to get?

Only 4 shrimp a week? Who the hell eats only 4 shrimp at a sitting? Seafood from the Gulf has oil. And dispersants. And chemicals. Which are not going away any time soon.

Sneaking about the closed Post Office Railway in London.

Do not piss this woman off:

Mysterious Vesta.

Help Greenpeace sort through the BP documents.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann starts June 20th:

Pictures of alternate energy.

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 read the news today, oh boy....

Harassing three year olds for gender bending.

Well... the one family, one child thing really really worked, didn't it? Estimated 96 million women missing from the population of Asia.

Redefining Capitol Hill speak.

Romney says his Massachusetts health care isn't like Obama's even though it is.

Dinna go to warp speed, Scottie!! It'lla kill yeh!

Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans worry scientists. ... It concerns a lot of regular citizens, too, you know.... as well as fish, crabs, shrimp....

Love wins.

Before you order that fish dinner

Take a test to see how 'green' your seafood is.

I don't think he's lost

I think he's hiding:

A 5.5m long minke whale has been spotted more than 1600km (994 miles) from the Atlantic Ocean, deep inside the Amazon rain forest. The whale ran aground earlier this week but after being freed with the help of vets and biologists it disappeared shortly afterwards.

Because of this:

The UK, Australia and New Zealand have sharply criticised Japan for the launch of its largest ever whaling expedition. The hunting fleet has instructions to kill up to 1,000 whales. Humpback whales will be hunted for the first time in over 40 years.

Swim for your lives! You're food!



Update 11/20: P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula has the last word.

They tried to make a break for it

But now they will be just breakfast...

Stuttgart, Germany (AHN) - A group of crayfish almost successfully escaped from being served as a sumptuous meal for seafood lovers until they were captured by on-lookers.

According to a local paper, the crayfish were already scuttling down the street when they were noticed by authorities on-lookers who promptly informed authorities.

Police lost no time in rounding up the fugitive crayfish returning them to the Asian restaurant where they had escaped by squeezing through gaps in the grating at the top of the tanks.

Watch out. Just when you think you've caught them all, a few escape and alert their friends! Don't say I didn't warn you.

Put down that fork!

Until you know exactly where that seafood and pork have been!:

At least 1 million pounds of suspect Chinese seafood landed on American store shelves and dinner plates despite a Food and Drug Administration order that the shipments first be screened for banned drugs or chemicals, an Associated Press investigation found.

The frozen shrimp, catfish and eel arrived at U.S. ports under an "import alert," which meant the FDA was supposed to hold every shipment until it had passed a laboratory test.

But that was not what happened, according to an AP check of shipments since last fall. One of every four shipments the AP reviewed got through without being stopped and tested. The seafood, valued at $2.5 million, was equal to the amount 66,000 Americans eat in a year.

FDA officials stuck the pond-raised seafood on their watch list because of worries it contained suspected carcinogens or antibiotics not approved for seafood.

No illnesses have been reported, but the episode raises serious questions about the FDA's ability to police the safety of America's food imports.

There is also problems with Chinese pork:

CHENGDU, China, Aug. 9 — A highly infectious swine virus is sweeping China’s pig population, driving up pork prices and creating fears of a global pandemic among domesticated pigs.

Animal virus experts say Chinese authorities are playing down the gravity and spread of the disease.

So far, the mysterious virus — believed to cause an unusually deadly form of an infection known as blue-ear pig disease — has spread to 25 of this country’s 33 provinces and regions, prompting a pork shortage and the strongest inflation in China in a decade.

More than that, China’s past lack of transparency — particularly over what became the SARS epidemic — has created global concern.

Tom Legg of The Daai Tou Laam Diary : (my bold)

But don't expect the Chinese government to really get serious about product safety. How many product safety scares have there been in the last few years? From fake baby formula to tainted fish to fake soy sauce to tainted bean curd sheet to a bridge that collapsed because there was no steel reinforcing-bar used.

If the CCP wants to product their people from eating hormone-laden pork, then that is their prerogative. If they instead want to ban products from the US as a tit-for-tat over negative press coverage of Chinese product safety issues, it shows the Chinese government is childish and easily manipulated by foreign powers. Like a recalled Chinese toy, press the right buttons and watch the CCP leaders dance. Watch the CCP spokesperson trotted out to blame it all on the US media. (This of course is the same lap dog US media that willingly served up the story on Mattel as model Chinese operator days before the first toy recall.)

Did you really expect the CCP to clean up their own house? The folks who trashed Premier Wen's Green GDP? The folks whose tactics to combat corruption hearken back to the Ming Dynasty with the substitution of video games for the study of Confucian classics? We aren't talking about leaders with a great ability to look in the mirror and see the problems staring back at themselves.

But to really clean house would come at too steep a price for many cadres and their cronies. So the CCP's option is to keep letting Chinese die at home and face negative press abroad and hope that enough exports keep getting out to keep the currency flow positive and enough skim from IPOs and LCs to keep investment bankers like former Goldman Sachs man US Treasury Secretary Paulson happy, so that their grip on power in Beijing is kept firm.

China goes for the gold

Or maybe the lead and the toxic chemicals...

LOS ANGELES - The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it is checking whether shipments of Chinese seafood on an agency watch list were properly cleared for public consumption without being tested for banned drugs or chemicals.

Agency officials said that while they believe the shipments were screened correctly, they wanted more details. That review comes in response to findings The Associated Press published Tuesday that at least 1 million pounds of frozen shrimp, catfish or eel raised in Chinese ponds were on an agency watch list but were not diverted to a lab.

Wait a minute! There's more:

NEWARK, N.J. - A tire importer said Thursday it would recall 255,000 Chinese-made tires it claims were defective because they lack a safety feature that prevents tread separation.

The recall involves half the number of tires that the importer, Foreign Tire Sales Inc., had identified in June as possibly posing a risk.

The models involved are steel-belted radial replacement tires for pickups, vans and sport utility vehicles that consumers bought from early 2004 through mid-2006, Foreign Tire Sales said.

The small company, based in Union, estimated the recall would cost it $20 million, spokesman Andrew D. Frank said. It was ordered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in June to recall as many as 450,000 tires that it bought from Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co. since 2002.

There seems to be a pattern here...

Fish from China recalled.

Apparently it was so dark or something that this:



looked like this:



Recall of fish from China recalled because two people poisoned:

The seafood importer began a voluntary recall after reports that two Chicago-area people became ill after eating soup that contained the fish, according to a statement.

The frozen shipments were packed in 22-pound boxes that were sold to wholesalers in California, Illinois and Hawaii beginning in September. Each of the 282 boxes was labeled "Monk fish, gutted and head off, Product of China," the company said.

But the Food and Drug Administration confirmed Thursday that its tests of the fish had found potentially lethal amounts of tetrodotoxin, a substance usually associated with the skin and certain organs of the puffer fish.

"Clearly, we are concerned. We are taking it very seriously," said FDA spokeswoman Kathy McDermott.

The fish recall was the latest in a list of problem products from China, a leading exporter of food and food ingredients.

Not to be paranoid or anything, but does anyone else see a kinda... trend?

Dirt, worms, and leaves

Is what we'll be eating in just a bit. LOCALLY grown dirt, worms, and leaves:

Citing concerns over the domoic acid poisoning that has already sickened hundreds of birds, state health regulators on Friday urged people not to eat certain types of seafood — including shellfish and sardines — caught by recreational fishermen off most of the Southern California coast.

The warning also covers the organs of commercially sold lobster and crabs as well as those caught by recreational anglers.

Health officials typically issue a warning against eating mussels about May 1. Officials say they know of no one who has been sickened. But this year, regulators decided to expand the quarantine after finding high concentrations of domoic acid in some samples of other shellfish, said Lea Brooks, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Health Services.

Friday's warning comes as hundreds of sick or dead marine birds are being washed ashore up and down the coast, their conditions linked to a particularly virulent outbreak of the naturally occurring domoic acid toxin, scientists say.

The seafood warning pertains to bivalve (two-shelled) shellfish such as oysters, clams and scallops, as well as anchovies taken off the coast of Los Angeles, Orange, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

The warning applies to seafood caught from shore and boats.

The fishing season for some of the creatures covered by the warning is ending. But other species now quarantined, such as mussels and Pismo clams, are harvested throughout the year, according to state sportfishing regulations.

So...now we can't eat chicken?

Mercury in seafood, hormones in beef, pork has diseases... and chicken has arsenic?!!

Arrrgghh! What's left? Ground earth worms or sauteed snails just don't sound as appetitizing....