In article , wrote:

Doug Kanter wrote:

Write to the pig in the White House and tell him
you're aware of his crimes. Then, vote correctly and send him back to his
so-called "ranch".


Give it up, Kanater. The election is over, you guys didn't even have a
candidate this year.

You're only half right. It ain't over & even a dog's pecker wearing a
straw hat has a good chance of being rightly perceived as the superior
choice when Bush is the other opption. But you're right insofar as it is a
bloody shame there wasn't a candidate so qualified that it didn't need to
be this down-to-the-wire photo-finish before we know if Bush gets to be
Lord of Destruction four more years.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com

On Sun, 19 Sep 2004 10:59:36 -0700,
(paghat) posted:

In article , wrote:

Doug Kanter wrote:

Write to the pig in the White House and tell him
you're aware of his crimes. Then, vote correctly and send him back to his
so-called "ranch".


Give it up, Kanater. The election is over, you guys didn't even have a
candidate this year.

You're only half right. It ain't over & even a dog's pecker wearing a
straw hat has a good chance of being rightly perceived as the superior
choice when Bush is the other opption. But you're right insofar as it is a
bloody shame there wasn't a candidate so qualified that it didn't need to
be this down-to-the-wire photo-finish before we know if Bush gets to be
Lord of Destruction four more years.

-paghat the ratgirl

Yer funny. Smart, too. Probably cuter than a daisy in a cornfield.

But the French-looking one doesn't really stand a chance. Never
did. So solly.

But Spring blossoms will still burst forth next year, so who rilly,
rilly cares?

What I want to know is will my Rosemary die this winter like last
winter? Yeah, I know, it's hard to die twice, but --

Implanted

In article , "mulroys"
wrote:

Hey Doug,

Why didn't Clintler do anything about all that mercury?

Our pinhead Bushleaguer president squashed Bill Clinton's ten-year mercury
clean-up plan. The plan was not nearly strong enough, it is true, because
it already incorporated cave-ins to the Republican-dominated Congress that
would not permit clean-up to actually begin. But at least Clinton did get
mercury placed on the list of hazardous air pollutants. This
categorization, without the Republican interference, meant that power
plants & boiier-using, coal-burning, & waste-incinerating industries would
be forced to have scrubbers able to remove mercury that was then (and alas
still is) expelled directly into the atmosphere.

Almost as soon as the Bush administration came in, they removed it form
the list of Hazardous Air Pollutants, so that industry can continue to
release tons & tons & tons of the stuff into the atmosphere. In a
statement policy with no status as law, the Bush administration recommends
mercury-polluting industries do something about in fifteen years, which
year-count can begin in 2005.

Because the Republican Congress then Bush personally effectively kept the
half-reasonable Clinton plan from being put into effect, the Bush spin
today is that the Bush administration is the FIRST to ever have the EPA
enforce mercury air pollution restrictions. The reality of what the EPA
has been instructed to oversee is, unsurprisingly, quite the opposite of
Bush's claims:

Bush replaced Clinton's ten-year plan with an alternate "cap and trade"
policy that permitted various polluting industries to trade pollution
quotas: for example, an industry spewing arsenic can continue to do so if
it can trade its unused mercury quota to a mercury-spewing plant. Bush
claims this method will eventually reduce mercury pollution by half, or
even more than half, but as spin goes, that's a pretty pathetic lie. If
the Bush policy remains, the issue won't even be revisited for 15 years, &
in the meantime polluters will be trading in quotas to keep from reducing
any emissions at all. By comparison, 1991 EPA documents show that they
expected to reduce mercury air emmissions by 90% by 1908 if the Clinton
plan could have been put into effect. The Bush plan insures 0% lowering of
emissions by permitting pollutors to trade pollution quotas.

Republicans continuously declared the Clinton plan too expensive,
technnically difficult without new clean-up science, & harmful to the
profits of the affected industries, & the ten-year count-down never
started. Yet the issue remains important to many grass-roots &
environmental movements with some powerhouse legal angles still in play,
so Bush made fake concessions in the "cap and trade policy" which is a
complete scam that effectively cancelled out any need to reduce emissions
for another fifteen years.

Even Clinton's plan was far from sufficient, but it was a start. Bush's
fakery over the issue insures nothing will be done. Not until we have far
fewer Republicans controlling these issues, & a very different kind of
president.

In the meantime, a small amount of mercury clean-up is occuring because of
reigional municipality regulations; but federal cut-backs & diminishing
tax base has not permitted even these small regionally limited hopes of
improvement to be enforced. Also on the good side, the Bush administration
has no big-business interests in altering the Clean Water Act (mercury
clean-up portion in the 1972 Federal Water Pollution Control Act
Amendments), so Bush has not reversed that part of the protection, though
industry interests in dumping arsenic directly into water did convince him
to reverse that water pollution protection. The relative effectiveness of
the Clean Water Act is also why Clinton focused his attention on mercury
as a hazardous air pollutant, one of the largest remaining areas that has
been allowed to keep polluting. The Clinton proposals would also have
hugely reduced nitrous oxide emissions (which form smog); the Bush fake
regulations put the kabosh on that too, so it's up to local municipalities
to pass their own laws if any are to exist; federally, it's open season on
polluting the atmosphere.

As for changing this with the upcoming election, Kerry's record is
wishywashy in most categories, but on health & environment he scores
fairly well. In most issues Kerry's mediocre to lousy & Bush's charge of
flipflops is alas accurate, except where the environment is concerned,
Kerry has an excellent legislative record on that, contrasting to Bush
whose policies have been downright monstrous & destructive. So in this one
area, Kerry is a strongly viable candidate for public & environmental
health. It will doubtless still be an uphill struggle with Republicans
dominating a congress & not budging until abortion is a capital crime
punishable as murder, queers are constitutionally denied equal rights, all
Jews & Moslems in the public school system are forced to pray to Jesus &
taught that evolution is a theory but God is a fact, industries on whose
boards they'll again serve when they leave office have a freehand to lay
waste to the planet while paying no taxes, & everyone's library card
registers in the Homefront office what you're checking out to read.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com

In article ,
(paghat) wrote:

In article , "mulroys"
wrote:

Hey Doug,

Why didn't Clintler do anything about all that mercury?

Our pinhead Bushleaguer president squashed Bill Clinton's ten-year mercury
clean-up plan. The plan was not nearly strong enough, it is true, because
it already incorporated cave-ins to the Republican-dominated Congress that
would not permit clean-up to actually begin. But at least Clinton did get
mercury placed on the list of hazardous air pollutants. This
categorization, without the Republican interference, meant that power
plants & boiier-using, coal-burning, & waste-incinerating industries would
be forced to have scrubbers able to remove mercury that was then (and alas
still is) expelled directly into the atmosphere.

Almost as soon as the Bush administration came in, they removed it form
the list of Hazardous Air Pollutants, so that industry can continue to
release tons & tons & tons of the stuff into the atmosphere. In a
statement policy with no status as law, the Bush administration recommends
mercury-polluting industries do something about in fifteen years, which
year-count can begin in 2005.

Because the Republican Congress then Bush personally effectively kept the
half-reasonable Clinton plan from being put into effect, the Bush spin
today is that the Bush administration is the FIRST to ever have the EPA
enforce mercury air pollution restrictions. The reality of what the EPA
has been instructed to oversee is, unsurprisingly, quite the opposite of
Bush's claims:

Bush replaced Clinton's ten-year plan with an alternate "cap and trade"
policy that permitted various polluting industries to trade pollution
quotas: for example, an industry spewing arsenic can continue to do so if
it can trade its unused mercury quota to a mercury-spewing plant. Bush
claims this method will eventually reduce mercury pollution by half, or
even more than half, but as spin goes, that's a pretty pathetic lie. If
the Bush policy remains, the issue won't even be revisited for 15 years, &
in the meantime polluters will be trading in quotas to keep from reducing
any emissions at all. By comparison, 1991 EPA documents show that they
expected to reduce mercury air emmissions by 90% by 1908

heh heh, by 2008.

if the Clinton
plan could have been put into effect. The Bush plan insures 0% lowering of
emissions by permitting pollutors to trade pollution quotas.

Republicans continuously declared the Clinton plan too expensive,
technnically difficult without new clean-up science, & harmful to the
profits of the affected industries, & the ten-year count-down never
started. Yet the issue remains important to many grass-roots &
environmental movements with some powerhouse legal angles still in play,
so Bush made fake concessions in the "cap and trade policy" which is a
complete scam that effectively cancelled out any need to reduce emissions
for another fifteen years.

Even Clinton's plan was far from sufficient, but it was a start. Bush's
fakery over the issue insures nothing will be done. Not until we have far
fewer Republicans controlling these issues, & a very different kind of
president.

In the meantime, a small amount of mercury clean-up is occuring because of
reigional municipality regulations; but federal cut-backs & diminishing
tax base has not permitted even these small regionally limited hopes of
improvement to be enforced. Also on the good side, the Bush administration
has no big-business interests in altering the Clean Water Act (mercury
clean-up portion in the 1972 Federal Water Pollution Control Act
Amendments), so Bush has not reversed that part of the protection, though
industry interests in dumping arsenic directly into water did convince him
to reverse that water pollution protection. The relative effectiveness of
the Clean Water Act is also why Clinton focused his attention on mercury
as a hazardous air pollutant, one of the largest remaining areas that has
been allowed to keep polluting. The Clinton proposals would also have
hugely reduced nitrous oxide emissions (which form smog); the Bush fake
regulations put the kabosh on that too, so it's up to local municipalities
to pass their own laws if any are to exist; federally, it's open season on
polluting the atmosphere.

As for changing this with the upcoming election, Kerry's record is
wishywashy in most categories, but on health & environment he scores
fairly well. In most issues Kerry's mediocre to lousy & Bush's charge of
flipflops is alas accurate, except where the environment is concerned,
Kerry has an excellent legislative record on that, contrasting to Bush
whose policies have been downright monstrous & destructive. So in this one
area, Kerry is a strongly viable candidate for public & environmental
health. It will doubtless still be an uphill struggle with Republicans
dominating a congress & not budging until abortion is a capital crime
punishable as murder, queers are constitutionally denied equal rights, all
Jews & Moslems in the public school system are forced to pray to Jesus &
taught that evolution is a theory but God is a fact, industries on whose
boards they'll again serve when they leave office have a freehand to lay
waste to the planet while paying no taxes, & everyone's library card
registers in the Homefront office what you're checking out to read.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com

Dang girl!
Now I know more about mercury poisoning than I would have ever imagined
Thanks for the info... seriously. That was quite intersting!

Kate

"paghat" wrote in message
news | In article et,
| "SVTKate" wrote:
|
| My grandfather was a gold miner.
| "Back in the day" before anyone knew any better, he used quicksilver to
| separate the gold out from the quartz.
| In his later years, he went crazy. I think it was due to Mercury
Poisoning.
| I don't even think that they put mercury in thermometers anymore do
they?
|
| Kate
|
| Right, it's not in thermometers anymore. But I can remember breaking a
| thermometer as a kid, rollikng the mercury around in the palm of my hand,
| & putting it in a small pill bottle to keep in a little rock collection --
| then being sad that it evaporated. Its dangers were not unknown yet at the
| time every household had several easily broken glass thermometers laying
| about, for checking fevers or weather thermometers. That's a danger now of
| the past.
|
| It was once widely used as a medicine for treatment of minor & severe
| illnesses from acne to syphyllus. Its side-effects included kidney
| failure, dissolving the spine & other bone loss, gum loss, tooth loss,
| nail discoloration, hair loss, Crohn's disease & other severe
| gastrointestinal illness, cardiovascular disease, severe fatigue, mental
| deterioration, memory loss, moodiness, & madness, palsy, seizure
| disorders, blindness, deafness, damage to central nervous system,
| neurological disorders, language difficulty, diminished motor skills,
| Cushing's syndrome, endocrine disturbances.
|
| When a large toxic exposure occurs the health issues that result are
| severe & unmistakable. At lower but persistent exposures, mercury may pass
| undetected as the cause of Guillian-Barre syndrome, long-term memory loss,
| dementia, & senility, colitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, & many other
| problems for which a causal link to mercury is difficult to prove but
| which many researchers suspect. Dental amalgam, normal amounts of mercury
| in even wild-caught fish, & evaporative levels accumulating in basements,
| may well be contributing factors.
|
| "Causal link" is the key word here. Many health problems have been shown
| beyond any statistical dought to have an increased incidence in people
| with mercury in their teeth. They study that started the debat was a 1993
| compilation of 1,569 patients from four countries with an array of minor
| symptoms potentially associated with mercury poisoning, chiefly memory
| difficulties & chronic fatigue (another area difficult to quantify beyond
| each patient's own subjectivity). All 1,569 patients had their dental
| amalgams removed, with an 80% recovery rate for the sufferers. This is a
| highly indicative study, but it analyzed existing case studies that were
| not set up to prove any causal link. But a second study of 2,000
| additional cases undertaken in Germany had the same high rates of recovery
| after removal of mercury amalgams.
|
| The American Dental Association has remained stubborn about acting on such
| findings on the basis of there being no "causal link" firmly established.
| And by now they don't dare take a belated stand or dentists will risk
| being sued out of existance by everyone with so much as a headache or
| recurring fatigue because all mercury fillings done since the early 1990s
| can certainly be regarded as legally & medically a known risk that
| dentists consciously decided to ignore. Such lawsuits are already being
| brought, which puts the ADA in the sorry position of having to support
| growing numbers of dentists who've done the wrong thing, & their best
| method of support right now is to deny it is the wrong thing to do. The
| ADA actively threatens anti-amalgam dentists who speak openly about the
| current science, because the ADA rightly believes such concerned dentists
| who refuse to stick to the party line are a threat to dentists
| collectively. And dentists have left the ADA in droves over this issue;
| half of all dentists under the age of thirty-five with more modern
| awareness of their trade never join the ADA at all.
|
| Yet the studies keep coming. A University of Kentucky study established
| conclusively that people who die of Alzheimer syndrome have twice as much
| mercury in their systems as is normal. Low-level but ongoing exposure from
| such sources as fillings have been implicated "a possible factor" in
| multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, & Parkinson's disease. The near
| impossibility of turning statistical likelihood into definitive causal
| link is what made it possible for the tobacco industry to pretend for
| decades that cigarettes were harmless, & permitted clean up of asbestos to
| be put off for more than fifty years after it was nominally known to be
| extremely hazardous. If the government declared dental amalgams
| definitively harmful, the lawsuits would increase by factors of thousands.
| The hope is that the dental industry will voluntarily correct its behavior
| before that is necessary, but it will probably take government action
| before what does need to be done is done.
|
| But for the greater whop-a-doodle levels of sickness that are not so
| frought with subjectivity, & for which causal links are firmly
| established, exposures must generally be greater than from amalgams,
| needing the extra kick of industrial activity, waste disposal, spills,
| contaminated products such as Chinese medicines or imported facial creams,
| or such grotesque cases as the Illinois boy who stole mercury from a
| school lab, covered his body with it to play Tin Man of Oz, permanently
| damaging himself neurologically & making the family home uninhabitable for
| ten months with expensive clean-up by the EPA. Other severe cases include
| eating contaminated pork & farm-fish that had been given
| mercury-contaminated feeds, contaminated water, living near or working in
| mines or along rivers into which mining contaminants are dumped, or near
| coal-burning plants or plants that use boilers, or near medical &
| hazardous waste incinerators.
|
| After a couple centuries western physicians finally caught on & stopped
| recommending it for illnesses it was more apt to cause than cure. But in
| Chinese & Tibetan herbal medicines or dietary supplements, the most active
| ingredients are frequently mercury & arsenic. Herbal hypochondriacs who
| have Romantic superstitions about Chinese Traditional Medicine are at
| particular risk. One study of Chinese herbal compounds, undertaken by the
| California Department of Health Services, ran analyses on 251 Asian herbal
| medicines & found that 14% contained toxic levels of mercury, 14% toxic
| levels of arsenic, besides such deadly herbs as birthwart, monkshood, &
| foxglove that are banned for such use in the US & never listed as
| confessed ingredients. A UK study found that some Chinese medicines as
| much or more than 11% mercury, which was either not mentioned on the
| labels or was mentioned only in Chinese; other Chinese medicines
| purporting to be herbal turned out to contain as their active ingredients
| cortico steroids or glibenclamide (a drug for diabetics). So when
| "believers" in this crap feel it really has an effect on them, they're
| quite right! But do they know that what they're responding to is not
| Natural Herbal Medicines, but steroids, diabetic drugs, mercury, &
| arsenic?
|
| The "wise" Chinese Traditional take on mercury is it causes longevity &
| good health, basing its use on astrological charts rather than on effects
| on human subjects. The majority of the products are of the
| sucker-born-every-minute type.
|
| -paghat the ratgirl
|
| --
| "Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
| "Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
| -from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
| Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com

One other thing to note...

The toxicity of Mercury is more evident when body
weight is lower. This is pretty much a general truth about
all toxic materials. The real meaning is that kids are more
susceptible to poisons than are adults, so what may not
affect you, holds much greater opportunities to affect a
child.

This is true for cigarette smoking as well. I firmly stand behind
the fact that cigarette smoking and second-hand cigarette
smoke represents the leading cause of asthma in children.
And once the lungs are damaged at a young age, they
remain damaged for life. People do not just get asthma
all of a sudden for some unfathomed reason. I will leave
these statements open to debate. :-)

--
Jim Carlock
Post replies to the newsgroup.