
Tuesday’s Times
The Toxic Assault Continues To Threaten All Life
OK, no politics today. Well almost. The confirmation hearings on Brett Kavanaugh begin today. Recall he’s an anti-choice, anti-environment, pro-corporate, anti-employee, ultra right judge. Expect fireworks form some of the democrats. Expect him to be confirmed anyway. I’ll comment more later as proceedings continue. I’m not holding my breath on this though.
Topic: Poisoning — Some of the Many
So now today’s topic: Toxic Earth. It has been confirmed by several scientific journals that there are man-made toxins everywhere on Earth.(sorry no citations, they do exist) There are chemicals at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest place in the ocean and on top of Mt Everest, the highest point. There are thousands of tons of micro beads of plastic in all the oceans. These are the result of partial breaking down of the plastic garbage expelled in the oceans by countries around the world. There are floating islands of plastic larger than the state of Texas in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. I’m not sure about the Indian Ocean except there’s a Malaysian jetliner at the bottom, somewhere. But being that it surrounds India and India is notorious for poisoning its rivers, there are probably plastic islands there as well. This plastic contamination is killing indigenous species in and on the oceans. Birds, whales, fish, turtles, clams, lobsters, all have been killed or have plastic in their bodies when forensically examined. Yech! Dead birds and whales, plasticized fish, yum! BTW I don’t like or eat fish, several billion folks do.
Chemical Manufacturers Everywhere
Recall that in Bopal, India in 1984 the chemical, methyl isocyanate(MIC) was released from a Union Carbide plant that killed, officially about 4,000 people. This was after 40 tons were released into the immediate vicinity. The real numbers of dead and injured are shocking. Estimates range from 8–15 thousand dead and around 200 thousand injured, many unable to work or do much of anything since. This is corporate poisoning on a massive scale. The attacks of September 11, ’01 killed under 3,000 and injured a few thousand more.
There are plants manufacturing the same lethal chemicals such as MIC and far more lethal chemicals around the world. I’m surprised people weren’t killed outright in Huston last year after hurricane Harvey dumped record rainfall flooding many of the petrol-chemical plants in the vicinity. It was an environmental disaster. It’s just that corporate executives and governments don’t give a shit as long as the bottom line registers profit. Other places around the globe don’t even give a shit for their people as evidenced in Bopal.
The US government is sneakier. They contaminate people with radiation. The reactors that produced fissionable materials for atomic weaponry are poisoning people more slowly than MIC or cyanide(a byproduct when MIC mixes with water) as in Bopal. We have much higher incidents of various cancers from people that lived near reactors or downwind from above ground testing of nukes. They die early painful lives. This is what I mean when I speak of a toxic Earth. It’s now toxic for all inhabitants. Also no on in leadership positions seems to give a flying fuck about this. I’ll laugh heartily when they(CEO’s, leaders) start getting painful cancers they die from. All the profit in the world will save them. Ha Ha Ha!
There are countless manufacturers of extremely nasty toxin here in the US. The somewhat better regulations have probably save some American lives over the years. It doesn’t, by any means, say that it can’t happen here because it most certainly will at some point. Statistics, or risk assessment indicates a spill will happen. If I was one of those risk assessment statisticians I wouldn’t allow those plants to be built, anywhere on Earth. Which goes to show profit is worth more than life, any life, and that, of course, includes people.
More, But Why Bother?
Why bother? I bother to write about existential threats to Earth and all her children. I want people to know what’s being done in the name of profit. I want good folks to know that industrial capitalism is violence in many guises killing people and non human species on a grand scale. I want people to know the the 6th Mass Extinction Event is what we’re all immersed in. I want citizenry to know they’re being poisoned. I want people to know that change is coming whether they instigate it or crashing ecosystems render life as we know it now impossible, after a collapse of unimaginable magnitude.
Finally
Don’t lose all hope. Get ‘woke’ as they say and do something. Maybe the youth of today will start to do what my boomer generation failed miserably to do. I’m thinking the energy corporations played a big part of subverting the education that I had in junior high and high school. Science was big then because of the cold war. Education seems to follow the trends of the day and the government needed scientists, engineers, mathematicians to design all sorts of bad shit to threaten the Soviet Union with. And voila!, I’m still here to write about it. I wasn’t annihilated in a nuclear exchange, The youth don’t need to be annihilated on a toxic, burning, Earth, unable to grow crops.
So get ‘woke’, tell your friends to see what’s really happening to our beautiful Earth and her non-human children. Be curious, ask pesky questions, ya know, the difficult ones that aren’t easily avoided. Get a real answer. Understand the subject well before confronting stupid politicians or corporate whores sent to press conferences, After all this is our home. There isn’t any other place in the near future that gives people an out. Humankind needs to take the ‘kind’ of humankind and be kind to each other and non-human people too. I hope this gets solved soon as time grows short for us all. Peace, The Ol’ Hippy
