These chemicals were found to be dumped in the Flint River. How long and were the people exposed to them?

October 6, 2021
By Ron Fonger

Flint - The state of Michigan (click here) says a Flint chemical company with a permit to discharge into the Flint River appears to be responsible for contaminated stormwater or groundwater that has found its way into the city’s storm sewer system.

The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy issued a violation notice on Sept. 21 to Lockhart Chemical Company after testing of groundwater and storm sewers in and around the plant on James P. Cole Boulevard showed elevated levels of PFAS, 1,4-dioxane, arsenic, vinyl chloride, and other chemicals....

PFAS 

October 9, 2020 - But over time, evidence (click here) has slowly built that some commonly used PFAS are toxic and may cause cancer. It took 50 years to understand that the happy accident of Teflon’s discovery was, in fact, a train wreck.

As a public health analyst, I have studied the harm caused by these chemicals. I am one of hundreds of scientists who are calling for a comprehensive, effective plan to manage the entire class of PFAS to protect public health while safer alternatives are developed.

Typically, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency assesses chemicals for potential harm, it examines one substance at a time. That approach isn’t working for PFAS, given the sheer number of them and the fact that manufacturers commonly replace toxic substances with “regrettable substitutes” – similar, lesser-known chemicals that also threaten human health and the environment....

1,4-Dioxane 

...1,4-Dioxane (click here)  is a likely contaminant at many sites contaminated with certain chlorinated solvents (particularly 1,1,1-trichloroethane [TCA]) because of its widespread use as a stabilizer for chlorinated solvents (EPA 2013a; Mohr 2001). Historically, the main use (90 percent) of 1,4- dioxane was as a stabilizer of chlorinated solvents such as TCA (ATSDR 2012). Use of TCA was phased out under the 1995 Montreal Protocol and the use of 1,4-dioxane as a solvent stabilizer was terminated (ECJRC 2002; NTP 2016). Lack of recent reports for other previously reported uses suggest that many other industrial, commercial and consumer uses were also stopped...

Arsenic

The FDA monitors and regulates levels of arsenic (click here) in certain foods because it can cause serious and life-threatening health problems. The FDA also monitors arsenic levels in dietary supplements and cosmetics.

Arsenic is a naturally occurring element in the environment that can enter the food supply through soil, water or air. Arsenic levels in the environment are generally low but can vary depending on the natural geological makeup of local areas. For example, volcanic eruptions can bring arsenic from the earth’s interior to the surface. Contamination from mining, fracking, coal-fired power plants, arsenic-treated lumber, and arsenic-containing pesticides also contribute to increased levels of arsenic in certain locations....

Vinyl Choloride 

Vinyl chloride (click here) is a colorless gas that burns easily. It does not occur naturally and must be produced industrially for its commercial uses. Vinyl chloride is used primarily to make polyvinyl chloride (PVC); PVC is used to make a variety of plastic products, including pipes, wire and cable coatings, and packaging materials. Vinyl chloride is also produced as a combustion product in tobacco smoke.

How are people exposed to vinyl chloride?

Workers at facilities where vinyl chloride is produced or used may be exposed primarily through inhalation. The general population may be exposed by inhaling contaminated air or tobacco smoke. In the environment, the highest levels of vinyl chloride are found in air around factories that produce vinyl products. If a water supply is contaminated, vinyl chloride can enter household air when the water is used for showering, cooking, or laundry

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Which cancers are associated with exposure to vinyl chloride?

Vinyl chloride exposure is associated with an increased risk of a rare form of liver cancer (hepatic angiosarcoma), as well as brain and lung cancers, lymphoma, and leukemia.

How can exposures be reduced?

The U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration provides information about exposure limits to vinyl chloride....

Other Chemicals

Below is a picture of St. Joseph's and Benton Harbor (click here)

October 6, 2021

Benton Harbor — Michigan on Wednesday (click here) urged residents of Benton Harbor to use bottled water for cooking and drinking, a major shift in response to elevated levels of lead.

The state has been making free bottled water and filters available in the southwestern Michigan city. But the announcement is the first time that authorities recommended that residents in the predominantly Black and mostly low income city reduce their use of tap water.

More than 15,000 cases will be delivered in the days ahead, the state said.

"We’ve listened to the community’s concerns and out of an abundance of caution, we are recommending that residents use bottled water for cooking, drinking and brushing teeth," said Elizabeth Hertel, director of the state health department.

The state last month said it would go door-to-door to distribute filters and show people how to install them. But in its latest statement, the state said the federal government is studying how effective the filters are in reducing lead in drinking water.

Now isn't that strange, another mysogynist computer program.

October 10, 2021
By Jeffery Dastin

San Francisco - Amazon.com (click here) Inc's AMZN.O machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women

The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.

Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.

“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”

But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way....

"I'm 30 years old and I'm a widow: Mom of four shares grim warning after husband's COVID-19 death"

Real people with capacity to support a family as part of the USA economy are dying. The political right wing are a bunch of cowards. Roll up the sleeve and get the shot.

MUNHALL, Pa. — Mahogany Brown (click here) is sharing a tearful and urgent message as she grieves the death of her husband Alan Brown Sr., who died from COVID-19 complications on Sept. 29.

"I'm 30 years old and I'm a widow. You don't hear that," she said from her mother's porch.

Brown said she and her husband were not vaccinated when their 9-year-old son returned home from school infected with the virus on Sept. 11.

Two weeks later, Alan was gravely ill and lamented the fact that he was not vaccinated.

"He was leery at first, but then he changed his mind about it," Brown said.

Alan died one day after he was admitted into the hospital. Meanwhile, his grandfather, Alan Collins Sr., died two days prior, also from COVID-19 complications....

This is the calendar for the US Senate 2021

McConnell is not doing anything except postponing government shutdown until December. There aren't enough days in December (click here) to ensure there would be progress made on the debt ceiling approval. The only reason this is being done is because it is hacking away at President Biden's approval rating. McConnell is not interested in doing the business of the country, only preventing it to be done. The debt ceiling under Trump was permanently suspended.

The Republicans did this before in 2013 for 16 days that COST THE GOVERNMENT $2.1 billion. It was because President Obama was re-elected and they were having a fit. Then January of 2018 for three days and no one noted. But, this is a common way for the Republicans to bellyache because they don't have a president they like or spending they don't want to approve even though the debt limit covers the spending already slated. It has nothing to do with the current bills THAT HAVE NOT BEEN PASSED!

The Debt Ceiling should be abolished. (click here)

• Measures no coherent economic value. The measure of debt it targets is not inflation-adjusted, would perversely make the debt situation look worse if there was a reform to Social Security that closed that program’s long-run actuarial imbalance, and ignores trillions of dollars in assets held by the federal government.
• Has no relationship to any economic stressor facing the country. Over the past 25 years, as the nominal federal debt rose from $5 trillion to $22.7 trillion, debt service payments (required interest payments on debt) shrank almost in half, from 3.0% of GDP to 1.8%.
• Can cause real damage if it’s not lifted in the next couple of weeks. It would only take a couple of months of missing federal payments due to the debt ceiling to mechanically send the economy into recession—and that’s without assessing damage it would cause from financial market fallouts.
• Has been used time and time again to enforce misguided austerity policies. The 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) grew directly out of a GOP Congress threatening to not raise the debt ceiling absent spending cuts. The BCA provided an anti-stimulus about twice as large as the stimulus provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA—commonly known as “The Recovery Act”) and is largely responsible for the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession....

Facebook plus AI is a societal disaster with carnage of bodies along the way.

Where is the accountability? There is less and less accountability in our system of justice than anyone wants to say.

October 6, 2021
By Therese Poletti

What will happen to Facebook Inc. (click here) after a former employee testified in the U.S. Senate about the social-media company repeatedly putting profit ahead of its users?

Well, probably not much. Executives and directors at publicly traded companies are expected to place the creation of shareholder value, or profit, at the top of their list as part of their fiduciary duty to investors. As is often seen in these types of controversies, it would not be the actions by executives that produce recriminations, but the lies they tell to cover up those actions.

Former Facebook FB, +0.13% product manager Frances Haugen told a Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security on Tuesday that the social-media giant has lied to investors and the public about its practices, and that would be actionable.

“The documents I have provided prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled us about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, its role in spreading hateful and polarizing messages, and so much more,” Haugen said in her testimony on Capitol Hill.

Haugen was the main source of documents in The Wall Street Journal‘s recent investigation, The Facebook Files, and her identity was unveiled when she spoke with “60 Minutes” for a piece that aired Sunday night before testifying to senators Tuesday. The coordinated rollout coincided with an unprecedented six-hour outage of Facebook’s services on Monday, as well as the biggest drop in its stock in nearly a year....

Facebook is a myogynist tool. The sentimental feelings about Zukerberg and Facebook should never outweigh the reality of the nightmare it has created.

Febraury 4, 2019

By Alexis C. Madrigal

On the 15th anniversary of Facebook’s launch at Harvard, (click here) a dozen students and faculty members reflect on seeing and being the first users of the world’s largest social network.

There was a time when Facebook was small. After all, it only existed in one place on Earth: Harvard University, where Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore. He lived in Kirkland House, a square of brick buildings arranged around a courtyard, one side hemmed in by JFK Street. For all the tendrils that Facebook now has snaked across the globe, it feels strange that one can pinpoint the moment it all began: 6 p.m. on February 4, 2004, as the temperature dipped below freezing on another day in Cambridge....

...Sarah Goodin was there in Kirkland House too. She was a sophomore like Zuckerberg, and friends with Chris Hughes, another one of the site’s co-founders. So, shortly after it launched, Zuckerberg emailed her and asked her to try his new thing. As far as anyone can tell, she was the 15th total user. “Supposedly, I am the first woman on Facebook,” Goodin, now an exhibit developer and interactive designer at the California Academy of Sciences, told me....

...By far the most cited common use was to check on someone’s relationship status, which now suddenly posed a new problem for couples. Defining or ending a relationship meant choosing a new answer in a dropdown; one of life’s enduring human messes now required an answer that a computer could understand....

...Heather Horn, now an editor at The New Republic, was an incoming freshman in the fall of 2004. Many of her classmates had signed up over the summer, so they never experienced a day on campus without Facebook. “Pretty continually through the next four years, I had people berate me that my three-year, rock-solid relationship wasn’t listed on Facebook,” Horn told me. “I remember my roommate’s boyfriend thought I must not be serious about my boyfriend, if he wasn’t listed on Facebook. I remember thinking that was just bananas.”...

...“Being asked out by someone you’d never met nor ever seen in person was completely new to us ... In February 2004, it was hard for us to believe that a photo and a few things you wrote about yourself would prompt a guy to ask you out and, at first, seemed sort of weird.” (In the end, the roommate and messenger had a single, awkward date.)...

...But if the downsides of this new thing were obvious to the critical eye, what made people keep coming back and back and back? Lester had a theory there, too. “There are plenty of other primal instincts evident at work here: an element of wanting to belong, a dash of vanity and more than a little voyeurism probably go a long way in explaining most addictions (mine included),” she wrote. “But most of all it’s about performing—striking a pose, as Madonna might put it, and letting the world know why we’re important individuals. In short, it’s what Harvard students do best. And that’s why, wildly misleading photos aside, it would be difficult if not near-impossible to go cold turkey in the face of thefacebook.com.”...

...“I often think about, you know, obviously Mark didn’t know it was gonna go this way. I still have his business card, from when his title was ‘I’m CEO, Bitch,’” said Goodin, the first woman on Facebook. “What’s weird is that it seemed like this kind of fun thing, and all of a sudden it’s a utility and it’s warped into something else that is not that great because of the way it has transformed social interaction.”