Sponsored by the Gazette, Fox, Channel 5, Chamber of Commerce and the Real Estate Developer Cartel in City Hall and the County Commissioners. Springs Spree is designed to put a prettier face on their complete disdain of any citizen who has less than a 7 figure annual income. The Colorado Springs and El Paso County Gestapo are out in force to make sure the piglets of the Elite aren't offended by seeing anybody who is homeless or appears to be Not Wealthy. Gives them a chance to use their tazers and billy clubs on people who commit the heinous dual crime of being a) Persons of Limited Means and b)Uppity enough to believe we're equal to the Rich with full rights of citizenship. They'll have advirtizing booths promoting their "success" stories such as their development of a Toxic Waste Dump, "Gold Hill Mesa" where they're poised to sell McMansions built on heaps of POISON to gullible people who have a credit line. Knowingly poisoning somebody would usually be considered an act of murder or even Terrorism, but not so in Colorado Springs, where the Police and Judiciary are firmly in the pockets of the Real Estate Developers. Meanwhile, my next door neighbor sits on his porch with his oxygen mask. The dust they stir up, laden with Mercury, Arsenic, Sodium Cyanide, Lead, even a trace amount of gold... wafts over OUR neighborhood, filling the tender lungs of OUR children and elderly and disabled or even strong and healthy (for now) neighbors. Meanwhile, the Chambers of Commerce, City Hall, Real Estate Board, County Commissioners, Princess Lisa Czeladtko, Tim Leigh, Sallie Clark, Karen Cullen, none of them have to worry about that (Or Do They? more to come) because their money and their tame Judiciary at the local, state and federal levels shield them from prosecution for this murderous act. Besides, the West Side is nothing but poor people anyway and the sooner us Untermenschen die off the better it will be for The Rich Elitists. And as long as they can draw attention away from their crimes by their attacks on the Homeless People the more ill-gotten money they can stuff in their own pockets. As usual, nothing to see here, citizens, keep moving, nothing to see. Fox and the Gazette and News 5 and other Right Wing Hate Media will make sure to bury the REAL story in their usual hypocritical manner. And the fact they're poisoning their OWN children and grandchildren through their outrageous Greed, doesn't make a fucks worth of difference to them either.
Tag: Toxic Waste
Town in Georgia has arsenic that residents didn’t know…
Sounds familiar, yes? but the Georgia in question is the former Soviet Republic. And like our own Poison Hill, "Gold Hill Mesa Estates" McMansions starting at a quarter million here in Colorado Springs, houses built on top of a toxic waste mound, it was about mine waste. The other part of the story in the opening paragraph which some "capital is god" proponents would find shocking... Georgia, two and a half decades after the "fall of communisim" has been living under the freest of free market capitalist regimes in the world, has only 60% of the wealth they had under the Soviet Union WHAT? Wasn't the Economic Strangulation of Communism replaced with the much better (so we're told) Capitalism, replete with all the formerly publicly owned mines, gas wells and other industries having been turned over to International Colonialist Corporations didn't bring them a net profit but instead a net LOSS? My my my my my my my my... seems a certain set of Capitalist Propagandists have been busy little bees, spreading lies all over the place...
What percentage of a partially eaten donut would YOU bet…
That the chemical spill which has currently gotten Monument evacuated... is going to be neatly and safely taken care of and that you're not going to be in any danger from it? Because the Chemical Industry, especially those divisions most closely tied to the Military, are betting a hundred percent of Your Ass that if they have a Chernobyl or Fukushima or Bhopal or Texas City happen say, in Downtown Colorado Springs, they'll be able to cover it up as neatly as they have their other little boo-boos. What's that? Texas City? Oh, yeah. Not only were they experiencing a chemical spill, and arresting people for taking pictures, draining the equivalent of the weeks worth of water used in Texas City, Galveston Co Texas in sheer liquid volume of volatile petrochemicals. Volatile means they react with other chemicals very quickly, sometimes explosively. The volatility of some, like Raid and Black Flag insectides, is such that they even kill (most of) the roaches in any given area. Oh, that volatile. This was done by BP at the same time their little boo-boo Earth Day present from last year was going full blast. Still is, but reporting on the damage is being covered up like cat droppings in the litter box. On the scene police brutality to keep nosy citizens from seeing first hand what's killing them, to a neat little YouTube channel where soothing music and deep mellow voices assure us that all is well, no need to worry, the Smart People are working on it, nothing to see here, citizen, all is Hell... But that's not the boo-boo I'm talking about. Some people still think about that and are still trying to get answers and get those answers to US. No, children, The Boo-Boo in question was a long time ago. End of World War 2 long time. A cargo ship being loaded at Texas City (Oh, did I mention also that that volatile chemical leak went directly to the Gulf too? No? Bad Me, very Naughty) But there was a huge stack of fertilizer on the pier. The fertilizer is Ammonia Nitrate. One of the most nitrogen rich naturally occuring chemicals. Nitrogen increases volatility as well. Plants need nitrogen in the soil to metabolize other chemicals like Oxygen, Water, carbon dioxide, sugars, starches, fiber and proteins. One way to increase nitrogen is to use legume crops on a rotation basis, beans, peas, peanuts, clover... Another is to add Anhydrous Ammonia. Much like Ammonia Nitrate it has a higher percentage of its mass in Nitrogen. Difference being Ammonia Nitrate has one extra nitrogen atom in the molecule and Anhydrous has one less hydrogen atom than the ammonia you're accustomed to using to clean your glass. And then there's Nitric Acid. Used in, among other things, production of fertilizer, refining metals, making Explosives ooooo... Bet some of the smarter readers were wondering when I was going to bring it back to all that Ammonia Nitrate, just a' sittin' on the dock of the bay, in the very Hot Texas Sunshine, high
A Language experiment for the ages… literally
This is an old project I had read about in the early 80s,in OMNI magazine, a project to make a symbolic representation of the huge enormous danger of toxic waste... that could be read and understood by a society ten or twenty thousand years from now. With the full expectation that our Great Civilization isn't going to be here by that time, but our nuclear waste and other poisons WILL. The notion that the storage containers in which the crap is kept would need constant maintenance over the thousands of years, that's another problem but, you see, they had hoped that somebody would figure out how to arrange that. 30 years down, 19,970 to go on solving that. Then there's the problem of how to word the message. There's a famous "curse" on the dead bodies of the "immortal" kings of Egypt, "Who disturbs this tomb will be eaten by the scorpion, the crocodile, the Hippo, the Jackal and the vultures" or something like that. People just don't speak Fluent Cop or perhaps don't recognize it when they see it, What it meant was "This property under surveillance, any trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law". Which was, being taken out, cut into little tiny pieces and fed to the hippo, the scorpion, the buzzards, the jackals... No body, no name, no magic, no immortality for you dude. But, you see, there's the notion that a Future Indiana Jones cowboy archaeologist, Lara Crofts or whatever, will see the sign, say "Wow, it's protected by a mighty curse... there must be something really cool in there". Of course, our Priest-kings, like Sarah and Glenn and Rush, have declared it blasphemy to speak words against the way nuclear and other toxic wastes are handled. For they wish us to say that it is good, it is good, amen amen... 20,000 years ago the dominant human tribe on earth were Neanderthals. They left trash piles with broken up cooked bones, fireplace leavings, broken spears, and... coprolites. Fossilized feces. OK so it's more like "freeze dried" than fossilized, but their crap outlasted them by ten thousand years. Pictures on the walls that people thought were just stupid and childish, because the mammoths, the sabre-tooth tigers, etc... well, who among us has seen a living mammoth? anybody? Buehler? anybody? But of course, we'll find a way to contain all that nasty waste, and OUR civilization is going to be the first one to go the distance, we'll be speaking 20th century English a thousand years from now, we saw it on Star Trek so we know it must be so. For WE are the mightiest and greatest and noblest civillization ever. On the sands of Far Samarkand...
Dit Fromage!
Ah, photography and cheese, together again. In French. New concept, Calendar Girls posing with ... CHEESE! It doesn't translate very well, culturally, or didn't. "Say Cheese" becomes "Dit Fromage! Dit Fromage!" Warning, the webpage is in French. So for those right wing types who are still pissed off at the French for not just allowing McDonalds to take over their country... Too bad. You lost, EU won, get over it. So the French have taken up the American bastardization of what was French technology in the first place, photography. Maybe now the Americans will take up something more than a mere shadow of French raw milk cheese. Instead of cheese made from Pasteurized milk. Which doesn't make too much sense, since cheese is rotten milk in its beginning, why Pasteurize out the bacteria and fungi which make it if you're just going to put them back later? You know, that was the "beef" McDonalds AND the Texas Cattle Raisers and Breeders Association had with them? Not so much a really well-deserved bit of Anti-American cultural snobbery. But the French and everybody else in the EU demanded (How DARE those Foreign Sovereign Nations make demands of American CorporaFascist Rulers about doing business in their pipsqueak country which has been a nation for a thousand years longer than America?) that the milk and meat served come from EU inspected sources. That would include having EU approved inspections in "our" Meat Factory mass-produced Concentrated Animal Feeding Enterprises. Which are themselves a spectacularly bad idea and once (hopefully) American politicians grow enough balls to shut them the Hell down, it'll be a toxic waste disposal operation. In fact it already is. In a grim bit of Karma, the boson (very large aquifer) under the Permian Basin (where the Bush family has some really deep oil and gas wells that go BELOW the water level of the boson and where Bush has his ranch, now for sale, directly in the middle of the Permian Basin at Crawford) now has traces of the antibiotics from the CAFE raised animals in it. This boson is called "fossil" water because it's been developing ever since the Permian Basin was under a shallow sea, which hasn't been for the past 63 million years or so. Now the boson (until they fractured the rock above and to the side of it drilling for oil) HAD been feeding from water which took 10,000 years to percolate down through the limestone. Carbon filtering done Right, man. So people from the east slope of the Rockies, as far north as southern Kansas and as far westEAST (damn that was sloppy) as at least the Dallas area are paying extra for filtration and purification of what used to be the purest source of fresh water in America. So we don't have to drink the Bush family bullshit. Literally. The French and most of the rest of the EU didn't want any part of that kind of destruction visited on their people for the sake of
“Clean” Coal on defensive, downplaying REAL Clean power
So they're spending a few hundred million nationwide promoting their bid for MORE unsupervised unregulated Mountaintop Removal Coal (and other minerals) Extraction, with the accompanying subsidies they'll get if WHEN the Tame Departments of Interior, Defense and Energy and the even Tamer Congress grant them the Official Clean Energy Okey-Dokey. They downplay wind and solar as not being viable ("the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow") AND claim that even when they're used they'll "need" to Strip Mine and destroy the environment for the metals. Which is bullshit on several levels, there's far more recyclable metals ready for harvest than can be gotten from any level of mining in the conceivable future. One Industry LIE down the tubes. With Solar and Wind producing their PEAK output at the same times of day that the PEAK demand is, there isn't actually any need to build MORE coal power plants or start new strip mines. AND the production of Wind and Solar is going up even with a tiny fraction of a percentage of the Public Subsidies that the Coal, Oil and Gas industries have enjoyed for more than a century. Almost a century and a half. The Railroad Act, the Public Utilities Act, to name a couple. Military and civil grants to develop technologies specifically to use the products they're first stealing and then selling. To their own Publicly Subsidized utility companies. And having the Military simply TAKE any coal, oil and gas that's not offered at a price the Oil and Gas and Coal companies demand. The Police State apparatus they use to keep the Workers doing what Workers do and Corporate Leeches DON'T (which is, say it with me class: Actual WORK) by suppressing Unions and other private organizations, and also suppressing any Public Regulation of their own Workplace Safety and Environmental Protection. The Mountaintop Removal mining which they also claim is safe and doesn't affect anybody downstream has been proven wrong so many times it's hardly worth mentioning, but the "Clean" Coal companies keep consistently LYING about it that it has to be mentioned. The Male small-mouth bass turning into Female small-mouth bass downstream from their "safe and clean" mountaintop removal operations is just one example. The Mining Company TOXIC "gold hill mesa" Waste Dump here in Colorado Springs and is being sold as a "Traditional Colorado Springs Community" yeah, right, if you count the many times the mining industry has poisoned this area of Colorado and everyplace downstream from it... sure, that's a "Tradition" that the Mining Corporations and their Real Estate Accomplices have long practiced. Another prime example of how "safe" their industry is to the people who, unlike the Corporate Executives, don't make money off them poisoning us. BUT... the fact that they're running these ads and the very nature of these ads means they've got a chance of LOSING their fat Government Subsidies and they Know It. That's another project for the TeaBags, too, Stop Sucking up to the Energy Corporations and start
Latest BP offer: Fire the employees who wear protective gear while cleaning up their toxins
Because it looks bad on television reports if people around the world see that their Toxic Waste is actually Toxic Waste. There's more to it than just threatening their (Temporary) Workers, those who are being forced to choose between risking their lives for the Good Image of BP and starving, losing their homes, money and eventually their freedom. There are unenforceable laws on the books in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida that make it illegal to be unemployed and in debt, and they're punishable by confinement at Hard Labor. Meaning, they'll be GIVEN, with no charge to the company, as Slaves, administered by BP affiliate corporations like WackenHut and Corrections Corporation of America. Private prisons built partly with Inmate Slave Labor by another Affiliate Corporation, Halliburton KBR. Seems the TeaBags and other Corporate Suck Groups back Governors Jindal, Crist, and Rick GoodHair (and probably the Alabama and Mississippi governors) to be able to annul and over-ride Supreme Court Decisions, like the ones which made the Vagrancy Laws and Debt-as-a-crime laws unenforceable. They're already using Texas and the other states' Prisoners, unpaid Inmate Slave Labor, pressed into working on the oil spill. And using Public Funded Police and courts as Private Enforcement of their "right" to censor reporting on the Real Story. The Horror Show story, not the commercials for Sea World showing happy, sparkling clean Healthy Pelicans and other marine animals being released onto a sparkling, pristine beach. Meanwhile, Lake Pontchartrain, staple of the non-Oil industries in Acadiana... contaminated. Those of you who have traveled east on I-10 recognize that as "that huge freakin' lake with the bridge over it" The link at the top is a video that was aired on Olberman and a petition to the President to actively enforce workplace safety laws over the objections of BP. As it looks now, the Chairman of BP is Bitch SlaPping the Obama administration and the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy. That SHOULD get even the far-right lunatic fringe on board, because the last time the British bitch slapped the U.S. Navy was during the war of 1812. (by American naming standards and by U.S. military tradition) Meanwhile Queen Bess2 addressed the UN and laid a wreath at the 9-Eleven monument. Maybe she should be publicly offered a plate of Fresh Caught Gulf Seafood. I hear the Sea Turtle Flambee is excellent. She could legally dine on Endangered Species for the first time in 50 years. Peasant under Glass excluded.
The Toilet Paper Bears – A Fitting Analogy for once.
So, leave aside the notion that male bears tend to eat their offspring. It's a little too graphic for the anthropomorphists But one of their new themes is Poppa Bear and Little Bear in a rowboat fishing. Little Bear gets impatient. Then has the bright idea to drop a piece of the Overpriced-and-not-any-better-than-any-other-brand of toilet paper into the water.Which is so absorbent that it dries up the whole lake. All the fish are gasping for water to breathe, flopping around in their death throes. Somehow, in the insane popularity contest that passes for "awww, wook at the cute animals" the fish aren't given fake smiles, humanized eye placement and faces, and the other pond dwellers who are sometimes anthropomorphized, like the frogs, aren't represented. BUT... That's not the truly relevant part. It's part of the relevance though, that's why I included it. The fact is, though, in our Throw-Away Society, where everything including Human Beings is disposable, paper products are among the worst offenders. First they take out the native, healthy, sustained ecosystem forests and put in "better managed" forests where all the trees are planted at the same time, no underbrush to get in the way of the Organized, Efficient Harvesting of them when the Corporate Owners decide it's their turn to die, and the Corporatists who will no doubt object to this analogy are going to say "Why, oh why, can't we get all "our" workers organized like that, where they'll perform their jobs efficiently for our profit and then die off in an orderly manner, instead of being, you know, Human?" Of course the planting of tree-farms where forests used to be not only allows for the Dehumanized Workers and their more-valuable-to-the-company machines to access the "product" for maintenance and harvest, it also hastens erosion and provides no nutrition for the animals, either the Cute and Fuzzy winners of the Insane Popularity Contest, like the deer and the bears and the rabbits (Did you know there's actually been a recent extinction event, a species of RABBIT? It's true... you might think to yourself "Self, how does a species that breeds like, well, Rabbits, go extinct?") and the squirrels and chipmunks which are "good" animals, and the slugs, beetles, very large species of cockroach, vultures, rattlesnakes, worms, you know, the ones that are much harder to paint as Furry People, aren't normally eaten directly by people and it takes more than a couple of very quick and short sentences using only one-and-two-syllable words, to describe how they fit into the "food chain" far less the enormously complex and beautifully orchestrated Ecosystem. Then at the other end of the process (middle actually, the "profitable" output of it still has to be shipped, marketed and then "disposed of properly" whatever the hell THAT means) the process of shredding the once-living trees into pulp, instead of long fibers (remember, they're not aiming for quality, they're aiming for the Corporate Trifecta: Fast, Cheap and Disposable) then glued back together, pressed into paper and rolled