Report: Toxins found in whales bode ill for humans

Oh, but much worse for whales and anything else that lives in/off of the sea, I can assure you. We're all that really matters though.

Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.

A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.

Whoops. Wonder what new technology they will invent to attempt to clean up what the old technology left behind.

The researchers found mercury as high as 16 parts per million in the whales. Fish high in mercury such as shark and swordfish — the types health experts warn children and pregnant women to avoid — typically have levels of about 1 part per million.

The whales studied averaged 2.4 parts of mercury per million, but the report's authors said their internal organs probably had much higher levels than the skin samples contained.

"The entire ocean life is just loaded with a series of contaminants, most of which have been released by human beings," Payne said in an interview on the sidelines of the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting.

Payne said sperm whales, which occupy the top of the food chain, absorb the contaminants and pass them on to the next generation when a female nurses her calf. "What she's actually doing is dumping her lifetime accumulation of that fat-soluble stuff into her baby," he said, and each generation passes on more to the next.

We've been doing a good job, these last few hundred years. Look at how quickly we can devastate millions of years of slow, beautiful development.

I guess this is the article's main point:

"You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species. I suspect this will shorten lives, if it turns out that this is what's going on," he said.

As if we deserve any less than a slow death of new, untreatable diseases from new forms of pollution.

Finally, down at the bottom, the author gets to what really matters in the overall non-anthropocentric picture:

The consequences of the metals could be horrific for both whale and man, he said.

"I don't see any future for whale species except extinction," Payne said. "This is not on anybody's radar, no government's radar anywhere, and I think it should be."

Cause no government cares. Those of Japan, Norway and Iceland are trying to empty the oceans of whales and there are lots of other piece of shit governments lining up behind them, awaiting the chance to engage in "scientific" whaling or whatever they try to call it. Filthy murder pirates. Fuck them all.

104,000 gallons an hour

That's how much oil is once again blowing out of BP's broken pipe five thousand feet under the ocean. And it looks like this:

Got milk?

Cause this is where it comes from.

The logical and necessary result of viewing life as a commodity.

We can't die off fast enough.

Don't worry about anything, everything is actually improving

Despite increasing populations, burgeoning pollution, global warming, a hole in the ozone layer, virtually all bodies of water being tainted, increasing human-driven extinction, the several genocides over the last century, nuclear warfare, biological warfare, America's explosive prison population (380,000 in 1975, well over two million now, the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with black people eight times as likely to be jailed than white people, meaning that one in three black people will be imprisoned at some point), rising oceans, disappearing islands, destruction of coral reefs, nuclear power with its essentially permanently destructive/dangerous fuel/by-products, globally increasing factory farming, globally increasing corporate genetically modified monocrop chemical farming, vanishing rainforests, profound overfishing and the advent of mountaintop removal mining, among other things, the New York Times, and I'm sure a ton of other capitalist cheerleaders, can still push a book whose essential message is that for the rest of this century, “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

Wow. Wow, wow wow.

Prosperity is a problem (exploitation of resources in fundamentally unsustainable ways, taking way more than we need, living in artificial ways, producing nearly unimaginable amounts of waste, the necessary disparities in wealth that one must have for prosperity - workers, servants, beneficiaries, ruling class, etc.), and technology is THE problem.

Technology is how we got here. FUCK. All of this ever-"advancing" technology (more specifically, human use of it) is the source of this destruction, this pollution, this annihilation, and all the things that will come that we do not yet understand - the unforeseen consequences of our "intelligence."

Technology doesn't really solve anything, except how to best fuck something up.

What a great message for the today's world - "go on with whatever you're doing, everything will be more than fine, it will be great." This is so fucked. Have fun with that.

Relying on the argument that "people have always said that the world is going to shit and it hasn't" is majorly flawed in two primary ways - first, they were right. Today's planet is in remarkably worse shape than anyone could have predicted even a hundred years ago. Secondly, people predicting that we are fucked (I am one of them) have the privilege (an ironic term, to be sure) of looking back and ahead in a time that is demonstrably worse, especially in an ecological sense, than at any point in human history. And we are only accelerating from this point, as we have been for several hundred years, most markedly since World War II.

I fucking hope I am wrong. I really do. I want to be wrong about this, but I feel it deep within that I am not. We are fucked, and we are taking out a whole lot more with us on our way out.

A perfect illustration of the fundamental problem with humanity

I was reading this story, and I really don't even know why, about the newest Taser. The story itself really doesn't fucking matter; what's important is what one of the pieces of shit who runs the company said with regards to how people use the products this company makes. And it's not really a reflection on him that concerns me. Sure, fuck the dude, he's garbage, he's helping pigs and troops to fuck up people (750,000 in fifteen years) all over the world, but that doesn't really matter here. That's fucking petty in terms of what his words say about the human species. I feel his remarks cut to the core of what is wrong with us: we simply won't stop.

What I keep wondering is: Who would inflict that kind of pain? And under what circumstances? We all know that our tools change our behavior. Give us cars, and we’ll go new places; give us iPhones, and we’ll check our e-mail way more often. So when we hear stories about grandmothers and kids and handcuffed prisoners and even runaway sheep getting tased, I asked Smith, what does that say about the stun gun’s impact?

He and his colleagues gently ducked the question, saying it was up to individual police forces and military units to teach their troops how and when to use the electroshock weapons. “All we can do is build in as many features as we can think of,” said Brian Beckwith, vice president of product development.

And that's it, right the fuck there: "All we can do is build as many features as we can think of." No concern for what comes after. Not a bit. That's something that's been demonstrated time and again throughout human history, particularly in relatively modern times - guns, gasoline engines, chainsaws, pesticides, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, on and on, ad nauseam. These things have positive uses? I don't care if that's true, cause the reality is that that doesn't happen and every one of these things runs away from us and we stand around like it's some big fucking mystery how it got that way. Again and again, every fucking time.

People are truly, on a biological level, complete idiots. We've got these big brains that let us build whatever we come up with, rarely questioning if we even should. That's where the idiocy lies - doing without thinking of the consequences. That happens large (oil extraction), that happens small (heroin use). We are so, so stupid. We will not learn. Individuals may, but the species will not.

People love to think of themselves as this brilliant, exceptional and mighty species. All those animals that are so "low," they don't incorporate slow, all-encompassing death and destruction into their daily lives.

Draw a deep breath, look around and take in the incredible wreckage we've laid to the planet with our creativity and intelligence.

"Modern man, pathetic example of earth's organic heritage."

Bye bye Arctic

Who cares. It's just a bunch of ice anyway. Ice sucks. You can't drive on it. And I get all the ice I need from my freezer. Plus the beach will get a lot closer to my house.

Some 80 percent of Arctic ice may disappear in 30 years, not 90 as scientists had previously estimated, according to a new study on the impact of global warming.

"The amount of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice at the end of summer by then could be only about 1 million square kilometers, or about 620,000 square miles," said researchers who authored the study published Thursday.

"That's compared to today's ice extent of 4.6 million square kilometers, or 2.8 million square miles," they added, warning the development "raises the question of ecosystem upheaval."

The scientists made their projections based on models that took accounted for changes in Arctic ice, which saw "dramatic declines" at the end of summer in 2007 and 2008, when the ice surface dropped to 4.3 and 4.6 million square kilometers (1.7 and 1.8 million square miles), respectively.

The models pointed to a "nearly ice-free" Arctic in just 32 years, with some of the models making the same prediction for 11 years from now.

"A mammoth garbage pit in the Pacific"

There are actually two. That's just the one closer to America. Here is a story from the San Francisco Chronicle, published last year.

Some highlights:

• "The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a stewy body of plastic and marine debris that floats an estimated 1,000 miles west of San Francisco, is a shape-shifting mass far too large, delicate and remote to ever be cleaned up, according to a researcher who recently returned from the area."
• "Charles Moore, the marine researcher at the Algalita Marina Research Foundation in Long Beach who has been studying and publicizing the patch for the past 10 years, said the debris — which he estimates weighs 3 million tons and covers an area twice the size of Texas — is made up mostly of fine plastic chips and is impossible to skim out of the ocean."
• "'The Garbage Patch is not a solid island, as some people believe,' Moore said. Instead, it resembles a soupy mass, interspersed with large pieces of junk such as derelict fishing nets and waterlogged tires — 'an alphabet soup,' he called it."
• "The plastic moves just beneath the surface, from one inch to depths of 300 feet, according to samples he collected on the most recent trip, he said."
• "By Moore's estimation, the 'floating landfill' is also simply too far from land to conduct any meaningful cleanup operation. It's about 1,000 miles west of California and 1,000 miles north of the Hawaiian Islands — a week's journey by boat from the nearest port. It swirls in a convergence zone located about 30 to 40 degrees north latitude and 135 to 145 west longitude."

Like I said, that's just the one closest to America. If you examine the two together and the updated research in this article, it's much more horrifying. For example:

A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Yeah, sweet.

Here's what the whole thing looks like:

Humans have got no right. I don't think discussions of ethics and philosophy will sway our species though. The title of that graphic just above is pretty right on, huh? That's the human motto, really.

To be installed in the pantheon of shittiest tattoos:

How has this wondrous image managed to elude wide mention in the hall of bad tattoos?

It should be right next to Earth Crisis Face, Misfits Face, The Dragon, Hair Metal Back, and Dead Wife. Some would say Mr. Cool Ice, but that shit rules.

bonus: Here are a bunch of other Star Wars tattoos, all brutal as shit.

Getting Babies Purposely Wasted

So this happened. An eighteen-year-old kid in Texas made his two- and four-year-old nephews smoke weed. He also apparently gave them cocaine. Really. Best of all, he fucking videotaped it. Of course. Another sign that people are evolutionary aberrations ill-equipped to handle the world they've created - the seeming compulsion to self-document criminal actions. There are so many stories, over and over, about people getting busted for doing things because they felt the need to tape it. What's hard to understand that you produce the best possibly evidence against yourself when you do this? That does not seem to impede some people though. If nothing else, these tapes (almost invariably making their ways to the internet) have provided a great deal of fleeting entertainment for the online masses. Without a doubt, this is the best one. Fuck yeah.

o rly?

studies to demonstrate the obvious. guess you need them though, cause people love to forget the obvious.

holding on

look. some people at yale got together to assuage fears that "going green" will precipitate economic decline in america. no, quite to the contrary, they proffer - "Even under worst case assumptions the economy would continue to grow." it's a pretty confined set of assumptions and excludes things like the economy collapsing because it's fundamentally predicated on petroleum or world war three coming because those whose fortunes are tied to petroleum refuse to try their hands at new methods of exploitation/money making. so yeah, yale economists are telling us that the shitty industrial party can just drag on forever. clinging to false ideas, lies and bad dreams cannot change the coming reality.