Couldn't make this stuff up if you tried.

“That was some weird shit.” 
George W. Bush, commenting on Trump's inaugural address 

The news is so nutty these days it will make your head hurt. But that doesn't mean you can't laugh. You can and you should, just don't take any of it too seriously. So we're on a first class ticket to armageddon, might as well enjoy the ride.

A lot of smoke and fire regarding the incredibly bumbling Tulare dairy farmer turned congressman Devin Nunes. You want a primer on how to f*ck up a bipartisan investigation, watch this guy.

I like what Frank Bruni, or rather what his anonymous source said about the Central Valley congressman; “No one is asking him to bring the potato salad to the Mensa picnic.”

I don't think rural people are any less intelligent that city folks, I just think this particular one is.

Sean Spicer had a good one today, commenting on the latest New York Times revelations of the White House spoonfeeding their boy Nunes classified information that he could publicly share with the President the next day in a big silly show.

“I never said we would provide you answers. I said we would look into it.”

Have you read about the strings Nunes pulled for his relatives back in the Azores? Pushing treasonous if you ask me for a politician trying to deliver one so hard for the hometown folks, especially when they live an ocean away.

The Trump craziness hits all levels, especially the alt-facts war on established science. Yesterday Rep. Lamar Smith, chairing a little clusterfrick of climate deniers and skeptics, said that Science Magazine was not a credible or objective publication. Science, which is both peer reviewed and a publication of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science.

These people, paid shills of the Mercers and the Heartland Institute, want to throw just enough faerie dust around to stop legitimate inquiry in its tracks and allow their industrial polluting compadres to run roughshod over America and the rest of the world.

Map of the flat earth - scripture condemns the globe theory

Yesterday came word from Scott Pruitt at EPA that he was over ruling his own scientists and allowing the usage of the banned insecticide chlorpyrifos, which has been found to cause major health problems including learning and memory declines. This strikes particularly hard at farm workers applying the insecticide and also young children who may be exposed through drinking water.

Chlorpyrifos is made by the friendly folks at Dow Chemical. According to this article at Scientific American, it fundamentally changes children's brains. Now we are getting downright evil.

The brains of 20 children exposed to higher levels of chlorpyrifos in their mother's blood (as measured by serum from the umbilical cord) "looked different" compared to those exposed to lower levels of the chemical, says epidemiologist Virginia Rauh of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, who led the research published online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 30. "During brain development some type of disturbance took place."
The 6 young boys and 14 little girls, whose mothers were exposed to chlorpyrifos when it was commonly used indoors in bug sprays prior to the ban, ranged in age from seven to nearly 10. All came from Dominican or African American families in the New York City region. Compared to 20 children from the same kinds of New York families who had relatively low levels of chlorpyrifos in umbilical cord blood, the 20 higher dose kids had protuberances in some regions of the cerebral cortex and thinning in other regions. "There were measurable volumetric changes in the cerebral cortex," Rauh notes.

Hudgins sent something over worth reading.  A little cerebral for me but you smart folks will probably get it.  Situational Assessment  2017 - Trump Edition

Schiff and the concept of information laundering. Schiff is an ex U.S. Attorney. He will dismember Nunes a sinew at a time.

Collateral Damage

Alexandra Dapolito Dunn

The EPA announced yesterday that it would not ban the poison chlorpyrifos, Trump administration won't ban pesticide tied to childhood brain damage.

I was bored last night. I read the entire report. It is a document riddled with twisting and wiggling, the administration doing everything possible not to honestly address the existing scientific studies and warnings regarding the pesticide. They kicked the can down the road a little ways.

I have written about chlorpyrifos several times before. Not going to rehash it. Study after study points to it being extremely damaging to childrens' nervous and endocrine systems. But Dow, now named Corteva, is a big contributor, what are you going to do?

I noticed that the announcement was signed by Alexandra Dapolito Dunn, Assistant Administrator, Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. I looked her up.

What do you know, the EPA administrator is not a scientist at all but was a lawyer and political scientist who was once counsel for the American Chemistry Council. What a shock! Bought and paid for, as they say...

Shelved.

methylene deathylene - © Robert Sommers 2017

I am not an economist. I have no idea how the new tax cut will eventually shake out. I have my suspicions, but they won't even buy you a cup of coffee, especially at today's inflated prices. I hope that like a broken clock, the Republicans are right this time and that the net effects will not merely shift more money over to the upper 1% but have positive implications for the rest of us. Time will tell. They certainly took care of their base.

I may not be a number cruncher but I am a cancer survivor. Kidney, bladder and ureter, for a long and protracted period.

And if I may be permitted to vent one last time before everybody gets warm, toasty and christmasy, I want to deliver a piece of coal to Scott Pruitt over at the EPA. Of course, these people really love coal but maybe not where I want them to put it.

The EPA has decided to postpone a ban on three chemicals, methylene chloride and N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP), both ingredients in paint strippers, and trichloroethylene (TCE), used as a spot cleaner in dry-cleaning and as a degreasing agent. The former is estimated to have killed over 56 people since 1980 who were stripping bathtubs, stripping furniture or glueing carpet. Bad shit.

It has been several years since the E.P.A. first declared these applications of the three chemicals to be dangerous. The agency itself has found TCE “carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure” and has reported that it causes developmental and reproductive damage.
“Potential health concerns from exposure to trichloroethylene, based on limited epidemiological data and evidence from animal studies, include decreased fetal growth and birth defects, particularly cardiac birth defects,” agency officials noted in 2013.
Methylene chloride is toxic to the brain and liver, and NMP can harm the reproductive system.

The EPA recently wrote that it was adopting a "commonsense, balanced approach (that) carefully protects both public health and the environment while curbing unnecessary regulatory burdens that stifle economic growth for communities across the country.” I fail to see how this is helping the mission. Screw economic growth when you are getting in bed with death merchants.

The new regulatory plan moved the chemicals from the proposed rule category to “long term action." Which apparently means never to be heard of again.

"All three chemicals have been extensively studied and associated with both illness and death," Daniel Rosenberg, senior attorney at the National Resource Defence Council (NRDC), wrote in his blog. "The next death(s) due to inhalation of methylene chloride will truly be on the hands of Scott Pruitt, Nancy Beck and President Trump."

These three substances were a part of a list of ten that were required to be studied and regulated by the TSCA provision of the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act.

A ban was scheduled to take place the day before President Trump's inauguration but the HSIA, or Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance, successfully lobbied to shelve and then put the ban in a permanent deep freeze.

I am not a religious man and have zero faith in a hereafter. But if I am wrong on that, like maybe I will be wrong on the tax cuts implications for our economy, I hope these there is a special place in hell for these evil, despicable people.

This stuff hits home hard with me. My cancer was attributed to my exposure to benzene and methyl ethyl ketones. I treat this poison very seriously. I wish this administration would as well. Time and again they side with industry as opposed to the health and well being of the American public.

Shit is flying at the EPA. Literally.

*
Postscript  12/21/17- The EPA is shelving the ban on the brain damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos, which was scheduled to go into effect earlier this year, until at least 2022. It is an obvious coincidence that Dow Chemical, the maker of the nerve agent, was actively fighting against the ban and gave our President Trump a million dollar donation at his inauguration.

“Unfortunately for millions of parents and their young children, Scott Pruitt is the head of the EPA,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “If it were someone else it’s quite possible current and future generations of kids would have been spared from being exposed to chlorpyrifos and the neurological deficits it triggers.”

Eat your poison

The headline blurts out "Organic food no better for you than the average fodder"... or some similar dissembling. Here's the headline at Business Insider; New Study Shows It's A Myth That Organic Foods Are Healthier. Or this one from U.S. News and World Report," Organic Foods Not Healthier or More Nutritious, Study Says.

When you start looking at what the study actually says, of course the information and message is quite different. You also have to wonder about the scientific discipline and methodology currently practiced at Stanford.

Dr. Crystal Smith Spangler, a researcher at Stanford, published this study titled Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives?: A Systematic Review in today's issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

She and her team reviewed evidence comparing the health effects of organic and conventional foods.They analyzed 17 studies in humans and 223 studies of nutrient and contaminant levels in foods.

Her conclusion; The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods. Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Now I am of course not a scientist, I only play one on the internet. Neither am I a champion of organic food, necessarily. But I am a skeptical person who prefers to read the study for himself and not let stupid news organizations tell me what something says.

I am also a person who fought cancer for many years, losing an organ and a few assorted body parts in my struggle, who made the decision to forego pesticides in my environment many years ago.

Let's look a little deeper at her data synthesis:

Only 3 of the human studies examined clinical outcomes, finding no significant differences between populations by food type for allergic outcomes (eczema, wheeze, atopic sensitization) or symptomatic Campylobacter infection. Two studies reported significantly lower urinary pesticide levels among children consuming organic versus conventional diets, but studies of biomarker and nutrient levels in serum, urine, breast milk, and semen in adults did not identify clinically meaningful differences. All estimates of differences in nutrient and contaminant levels in foods were highly heterogeneous except for the estimate for phosphorus; phosphorus levels were significantly higher than in conventional produce, although this difference is not clinically significant. The risk for contamination with detectable pesticide residues was lower among organic than conventional produce (risk difference, 30% [CI, −37% to −23%]), but differences in risk for exceeding maximum allowed limits were small. Escherichia coli contamination risk did not differ between organic and conventional produce. Bacterial contamination of retail chicken and pork was common but unrelated to farming method. However, the risk for isolating bacteria resistant to 3 or more antibiotics was higher in conventional than in organic chicken and pork (risk difference, 33% [CI, 21% to 45%]).

And the limitation: Studies were heterogeneous and limited in number, and publication bias may be present.

So, what do we know? We know that the study doesn't say that it is a myth that organic foods are healthier. Because even this limited study shows lower pesticide contamination.  It shows that organic produce is 30 percent less likely to be contaminated with pesticides than conventional fruits and vegetables. That sounds pretty good to me. Or are pesticides now supposedly good for you? Or horrors, could the scientists be way off on what denotes a maximum or critical exposure?

Two studies found that children who ate conventional produce had higher levels of pesticide residues in their urine, and the levels fell when the children switched to organic foods. But,the authors suggest that it's not clear whether there would be clinical consequences to the residues. Perhaps they should experiment on their own families and get back to us, especially after this loud "all clear."

We know that conventional food has more bacteria resistance to antibiotics. Isn't that a broad indicator that could be labeled as an indices relating to health as well?

"I think different people will make different decisions based on our findings," said study author Dr. Crystal Smith-Spangler, an instructor at Stanford University School of Medicine and a physician-investigator at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, in California. "We thought we'd find more significant differences, but there are many reasons why someone might consume organic foods. Health is one, but they may be concerned about the environment, animal welfare practices or taste, and we weren't evaluating that."

I don't see anywhere in the study where the authors make the claim that eating pesticide laden food is as safe as eating food free from contaminates. Did I miss something? Pesticides have been linked to many childhood diseases and disorders including attention deficit disorder, cancer, infertility and birth defects.

While I suppose a case could be made for the relative nutritional merits of the organic versus conventional debate; very similar except for higher phosphorus in the organic, I think that this study is a scattershot cobble of anecdotal evidence without even a clear baseline definition of what organic means, nor a reasonable amount of clinical research evaluated related to humans.

I was looking at a paper today by Harvard Doctor Chensheng Lu, a critic of Ms. Spangler's study,  published in 2005, titled Organic Diets Significantly Lower Children’s Dietary Exposure to Organophosphorus Pesticides.

It reports the following:

The National Research Council (NRC) report Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children (NRC 1993) concluded that dietary intake represents the major source of pesticide exposure for infants and children, and this exposure may account for the increased pesticide-related health risks in children compared with adults. However, direct quantitative assessment of dietary pesticide exposure in children to support this conclusion is no simple task: Several studies (Adgate et al. 2000; Fenske et al. 2002; Gordon et al. 1999; MacIntosh et al. 2001) have analyzed pesticides in representative samples of children’s food, and only two have used biologic monitoring to specifically examine dietary exposures (Curl et al. 2003; MacIntosh et al. 2001). The paucity of exposure data renders the debate over pesticide-related health risks in children controversial (Flower et al. 2004; Garry 2004; Reynolds et al. 2005). Nevertheless, those studies have provided valuable information on dietary pesticide exposure among children and have prompted the needs to improve research methods in order to better assess children’s exposure to pesticides through dietary intake.

Dr. Lu told Reuters that the conclusion that organic food isn't healthier is "premature." He said people should still consider the differences when grocery shopping.

    "If I was a smart consumer, I would choose food that has no pesticides," Lu said. "I think that's the best way to protect your health."

Hey, maybe Spangler is on to something? Maybe poison is good for you. I think that she does us no favors with this haphazard study.

"May 2, 2012 — Prenatal exposure to a pesticide used on many crops may be linked with abnormal changes in a child's developing brain, scientists report.
Compared to children with low prenatal exposure, those with high exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos had abnormalities in the cortex (the outer area of the brain), says Virginia Rauh, ScD, professor and deputy director of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
The cortex helps govern intelligence, personality, muscle movement, and other tasks.
"In areas of the cortex, we detected both enlarged and reduced volumes that were significantly different from the normal brain," she tells WebMD. "This suggests the process of normal brain development has been disturbed in some way."
The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' Early Edition.
In 2001, the U.S. EPA banned the residential use of chlorpyrifos. It still allows it on crops. It can also be sprayed in public places such as golf courses.
Some environmental advocates have petitioned the EPA to ban agricultural use.
Rauh's team selected 40 children from a larger group of 369 children, followed from birth.
All had been born between 1998 and 2001, before the household-use ban. Rauh had sent their umbilical cord blood samples to the CDC to analyze pesticide levels.
For this study, she selected 20 children with high prenatal exposure and 20 with low prenatal exposure. She took MRIs of their brains when they were about 6 to 11 years old.
Overall brain size did not differ much between the two groups. However, the high-exposure group had enlargements in many areas and reduced volumes in other areas.
The findings reflect those from animal studies, Rauh says.
In other studies, Rauh has found higher exposure to the pesticide is linked with lower IQs and a decline in working memory in children.
The pesticide works by blocking an enzyme needed by pests -- and people -- for proper nerve functioning. It belongs to a class known as organophosphates.

Terrakill

Line up, Swamis

Sanoguy sends a pretty disturbing post over regarding the EPA, New EPA documents reveal even deeper proposed cuts to staff and programs. Ceding environmental responsibility to the states will work about as well as ceding medical insurance and Medicare to the states, that is, not at all.

For one thing, the states are already underfunded, some of them don't even regulate their environment, many of the problems are of federal conception e.g. Keystone, and you also get airborne pollutants and polluted waters that don't exactly respect state lines. Is Missouri supposed to sue Arkansas if they receive a nasty toxic drift?

This is a deliberate and cynical ploy by the administration and the industrial polluters they represent. I believe that we will be fixing the deliberate environmental evil promulgated by this administration for decades.

I wrote about the overturn of the federal ban against the insecticide chlorpyrifos the other day, an overturn of the evidence of its own staff scientists. Now I find out that the agency won't even look at the issue again until 2022. Nasty people.

Bought and paid for

David Bernhardt - Tami Heilemann

Interesting story in the New York Times yesterday. The current nominee for Interior Secretary, David Bernhardt, intervened to block an endangered species report that dealt with the effects of pesticides on a multitude of animals, including foxes and sparrows. 

Scientists at the Department of Fish and Wildlife had produced the reports after years of study and analysis.

Their analysis found that two of the pesticides, malathion and chlorpyrifos, were so toxic that they “jeopardize the continued existence” of more than 1,200 endangered birds, fish and other animals and plants, a conclusion that could lead to tighter restrictions on use of the chemicals.
But just before the team planned to make its findings public in November 2017, something unexpected happened: Top political appointees of the Interior Department, which oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, blocked the release and set in motion a new process intended to apply a much narrower standard to determine the risks from the pesticides.

I'm not a religious man, but find myself wishing for a place in the afterlife called hell, a fitting place for the David Bernhardts of this world. And their cronies at Dow Chemical.

Dow, which was recently renamed Corteva, donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration committee. E.P.A. and Interior Department records show that top pesticide industry executives had regular access to senior agency officials, pressing them to reconsider the way the federal government evaluates the threat pesticides cause to endangered species. 

A Dow spokesman said the shift in policy was unrelated to the $1 million contribution.