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The Bulletin: December 5-11, 2024

The Bulletin: December 5-11, 2024

The Argument for Assisted Collapse – George Tsakraklides

Total Grid Collapse Strikes Cuba (Again) | ZeroHedge

Yes, Climate Change Is Probably Going To Kill You

Reductionism Doesn’t Work Holistically

It was always about the oil

#294: The perils of extremes | Surplus Energy Economics

Lavrov Warns Europe The New Cold War Is Turning ‘Hot’ | ZeroHedge

Full Lavrov-Tucker Interview: US & Russia Need To Cooperate ‘For The Sake Of The Universe’ | ZeroHedge

‘Scary’ drought empties one of Bosnia’s largest lakes

Chevron Cuts Permian Capex for 2025 | OilPrice.com

Money is a Claim on Energy – Nate Hagens (The Great Simplification)

The war whores of the military-industrial complex are lighting the world on fire

Global Food Prices Hit 19-Month High As Upward Momentum Sparks Fears Of Stickiness | ZeroHedge

The Three Types of Elites – Charles Hugh Smith’s Substack

Ecological Overshoot: Humanity’s Countdown to Extinction

Too Many Elephants In The Room: The Overpopulation Taboo (Readers’ Poll) – George Tsakraklides

Car tyres shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment – urgent action is needed

Lead In Gasoline May Have Caused Over 150 Million Excess Cases Of Mental Health Disorders, New Study Shows | ZeroHedge

Escobar: The Syria Tragedy & The New Omni-War | ZeroHedge

‘An existential threat affecting billions’: Three-quarters of Earth’s land became permanently drier in last 3 decades | Live Science

Grey Swans Are Circling – Charles Hugh Smith’s Substack

The Fall of Assad & What it Means for The Middle East (w/ Alastair Crooke) | The Chris Hedges Report

Oil, Power, and Statecraft: The Geopolitics of Energy in a Changing World | Art Berman

Disarming Propaganda | how to save the world

The future of extraction, energy dominance, and federal lands under Trump – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Shortcut Brains | Do the Math

Ray Dalio predicts global debt crisis, backs Bitcoin, gold

De-Banked: It’s Only a Matter of Time Before It Happens to You

Grass, Roots, and Politics

World Coal Demand and Exports Set for New Record Highs in 2024 | OilPrice.com

East vs. West: A Global Dollar Dump Is Inevitable And The US Must Prepare

How Lead Poisoning Was Discovered in Flint’s Water

How Lead Poisoning Was Discovered in Flint’s Water

The toxic water supply in Flint, Michigan, which exposed up to 42,000 children under 2 years of age to lead poisoning, was a major media story a few years back. Ingestion of high dosages of lead, particularly among infants, results in cognitive impairment, attention and mood disorders, and aggressive behavior. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s account of that urban man-made disaster reads both as a detective story and as an exposé of government corruption in her book “What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City.”

She brings the reader along as she uncovers Flint’s calamity within the context of her experience as a Christian Iraqi immigrant living in one of America’s poorest cities. Flint, the eighth-largest “majority-minority” city in the U.S. (57 percent black, 37 percent white), is where a kid born will live 15 years less than one born in the neighboring communities.  As a pediatrician working at Flint’s Hurley Hospital, one of the few public hospitals left in the country, her advocacy was driven by its  “mandate to serve the community above all.”

Although she had been an environmental activist in college, her story reveals how even the most vigilant of us must recognize that “the eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know.” She begins her journey blithely comforting her patients’ concerns about the quality of their drinking water: “The tap water is just fine.”

Her concerns only surface when she found out, by chance, that when Flint had to switch its water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River to lower its costs, government agencies were not properly checking for lead in the water supply. Her fellow health advocate, Marc Edwards, a self-described conservative Republican and civil-engineering professor from Virginia Tech, explained to her that even though the federal law required proper inspections, “The EPA and the states work hand in hand to bury problems.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Budget Cuts and Negligence Poisoned the Drinking Water in Flint, Mich.

Budget Cuts and Negligence Poisoned the Drinking Water in Flint, Mich. 

    Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder in 2011. (Michigan Municipal League / CC BY-ND 2.0)

Calls for the resignation of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder are intensifying in the face of evidence that he allowed 100,000 residents of the city of Flint to continue cooking, drinking and bathing in water known to be contaminated with lead.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is among those demanding that Snyder leave office.

“There are no excuses,” Sanders said in a statement released Saturday. “The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint’s water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead. Gov. Snyder should resign.”

“[F]amilies will suffer from lead poisoning for the rest of their lives,” Sanders continued. “Children in Flint will be plagued with brain damage and other health problems.”

Reports say the problem began in spring 2014, when the cash-strapped city switched water sources, hoping to save money. Corrosive water drawn from the Flint River stripped lead from pipes, resulting in high levels of the toxic metal appearing in the blood of children. Subsequently, the city switched sources again.

Julia Lurie at Mother Jones magazine reported that cases of Legionnaires’ disease in the area have spiked over the past year and a half, with 10 people dying out of a total of 87 cases. Marc Edwards, a scientist at Virginia Tech who helped expose the water’s lead contamination, told the Detroit Free Press that there’s a “very strong likelihood” that the change in water supply enabled the disease’s recent surge.

The New York Times reports:

In the last three weeks, a panel appointed by Mr. Snyder reported that state officials had for months wrongly brushed aside complaints about the contamination. The governor apologized for the state’s performance, Michigan’s top environmental regulator resigned, and federal agencies announced that they were investigating.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

State of Emergency Declared in Michigan City After Lead Found in Children’s Blood

State of Emergency Declared in Michigan City After Lead Found in Children’s Blood

Flint, Michigan– “The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster,” said the city’s mayor Monday evening, as she declared a state of emergency over evidently staggering levels of lead in the city’s tap water. Mayor Karen M. Weaver has requested federal assistance to deal with the fallout from over a year’s worth of tainted water delivered to Flint residents and, allegedly, falsely declared safe by government officials.

In September, news broke that lead contamination was on the rise in Flint. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha of the Hurley Medical Center concluded that since the water supply switched from the Detroit system to Flint River in April 2014, the number of infants and children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had doubled, from 2.1% to 4%. While the rise seems small, it is statistically significant. Even so, Attisha warned: “My research shows that lead levels have gone up. I cannot say it’s from the water. But that’s, you know, the thing that has happened.

The World Health Organization sayslead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.

The high levels of lead have been attributed to old pipes and plumbing, which researchers say rubs off more into Flint River water than it does other sources. Because the water itself is more corrosive than other supplies, it erodes the pipes it flows through, picking up lead along the way.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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