A
storm is brewing and it is threatening to blow all the Flying Monkeys
back to OZ. Meteorologists and Neocons alike are similarly concerned
that TS Issac, currently gathering strength near Haiti, will gain speed
and make landfall near Tampa on Monday, just as the Conservative Clowns
are pitching their tents in preparation for the Big Top circus.
"Tampa is a very low-lying city and it wouldn't take a major hurricane to cause significant problems. You can be sure that the attention this storm is going to receive will be exponentially larger than the actually storm. In our twitterized world, every radar image, satellite photo and new track will be analyzed and reanalyzed 100 times over."
Republican pundits have mixed feelings about Isaac. On the one hand it's a welcome distraction from the Todd Akin "legitimate rape" debacle and reminder that VP wannabe Paul Ryan walks hand-in-hand with Akin's idiotic anti-woman policies. On the other hand, they're facing a possible natural disaster that might, um, land houses on all their sisters.
You have to wonder if Isaac causes serious damage, will this crop of compassionate conservatives make pithy comments to the victims of this storm as they did when Katrina battered New Orleans? Will Tom Delay crawl out of his hidey-hole to ask the now-homeless children if they're having fun in their new shelters, because it's like "going to camp"? Will Brunhilda Barbara Bush pile her wrinkles into a forced smile and purr that the victims are really better off now because they were living in such shabby conditions anyway?
Will House Majority Leader Eric Cantor recant his Ayn Rand-inspired vow to deny states Federal disaster relief monies if a slew of his own are impacted by the fury of wind and water?
But I digress ...
There is a good possibility the storm will shift to the west and wreak no more havoc than a strong thunderstorm on the Tampa Bay area. But that trajectory could spell another kind of disaster, with consequences more dire than merely loosening the hairpieces off a few blowhard Teabaggers.
Corporate media is designed as an amnesiac, making us forget all the serious nastiness of the recent past by filling our brains with inane quasi-news of golf organizations admitting women to their boy's club, or presidential birth certificates, so it's difficult to remember all the seriously nasty, unresolved problems that lie just below the surface of our lives (or our waters), waiting to do perilous damage.
What happens, dear Truthseekers, if Isaac hits the Deepwater Horizon-infected waters of the Gulf?
BP execs and their mouthpieces in Washington assure that the dispersants they applied broke the oil into appetizer-sized morsels, then oil-hungry microbes simply gobbled up the 200 million barrels of crude that expanded in billowy plumes, blanketing the sea floor in 3,850 square miles of toxic ooze. Many doubt the veracity of this assertion, especially given the oil company's historical flaunting of government regulations despite repeated code violations and general lack of honesty in regards to safety measures and drilling practices.
Naomi Klein of The Nation wrote this in January of last year:
"Unified Area Command, the joint government-BP body formed to oversee the spill response, came out with a fat report that seemed expressly designed to close the book on the disaster. Mike Utsler, BP's Unified Area Commander, summed up its findings like this: 'The beaches are safe, the water is safe, and the seafood is safe.' Never mind that just four days earlier, more than 8,000 pounds of tar balls were collected on Florida's beaches -- and that was an average day. Or that gulf residents and clean-up workers continue to report serious health problems that many scientists believe are linked to dispersant and crude oil exposure."According to experiments performed by scientists at the University of South Florida, there is good reason for alarm. When it was out in the gulf in August (of 2010), the WeatherBird II collected water samples from multiple locations. Back at the university lab, John Paul, a professor of biological oceanography, introduced healthy bacteria and phytoplankton to those water samples and watched what happened. What he found shocked him. In water from almost half of the locations, the responses of the organisms "were genotoxic or mutagenic" -- which means the oil and dispersants were not only toxic to these organisms but caused changes to their genetic makeup. Changes like these could manifest in a number of ways: tumors and cancers, inability to reproduce, a general weakness that would make these organisms more susceptible to prey -- or something way weirder.
"Paul explained that what was so 'scary' about these results is that such genetic damage is 'heritable,' meaning the mutations can be passed on. 'It's something that can stand around for a very long time in the Gulf of Mexico,' Paul said. 'You may be genetically altering populations of fish, or zooplankton, or shrimp, or commercially important organisms.' Is the turtle population going to have more tumors on them? We really don't know. And it'll take three to five years to actually get a handle on that."
Can you imagine what fresh hell could be unleashed if Isaac whips the mutant muck into an inky soup? One problem with predicting the scope of such an event is that deep ocean waters are still a final frontier of science; scant research is available on the nature of the ecology of the ocean's depths, or what biochemical consequences result from the mixture of oil, seawater, and dispersants.
Corexit was the chief chemical employed by BP to cover-up their crime, dumping 1.8 million gallons of the stuff into the Gulf, and its effects on lower life forms is now under investigation, as reported by ABC News:
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