Harper Kingsley blog

Natural bias

Saw an article title and photo that were about college students masked up, then approaching and drinking from a public water fountain on campus. The implication being "Look at these masked up morons; then they drink from the same water fountain?!? Those great fools. This is why masks are useless."

And it’s just so tiresome.

Yes, we know you learned how to be an asshole from the Internet. It clearly shows in your writing style as you concern troll about public health today while really sneering from inside your well of ineffable misery.

[The Ring: girl climbing walking out of the well]

Kids not breathing in diseased air = A+ to me. Masks are a win.

If the worry is that one of them is sucking on the fountain end, and thus they’re all potentially exposed to one of a hundred million deadly and debilitating diseases that can potentially harm human life… Why aren’t you coming up with solutions for the rampant water fountain disease problem? You’re a terrible person.

Buy all those kids water bottles with disease killing filters (and several replacements filters, because come on, those are expensive), or set up some kind of environmentally friendly sanitizing wipes they can use on the fountain before drinking.

Or, if your article was really a dig at people wearing masks, you can shut up. Because whatever your feelings on science and the happenings of the world, there is currently a global health crisis happening and you’re not helping the situation. You are actively making things worse.

Hanging out outside of hospitals to heckle patients and staff as they arrive and leave? Ripping the mask off a teacher’s face because you have "feelings" and that somehow supersedes assault charges? Switching out vaccine doses for saline solution? Purchasing, printing out, and using fake vaccination records and COVID test results?

The world is turning crazy, and you’re feeding into it with your biased reporting. The fact that your editor hasn’t called you up short?

Either you work for a publication that had all its editorial staff purged during the Highly Suspicious Happenings of 2015-2020, or the editor-in-charge is not doing their job correctly. Or at all.

I am a human being. I have a right to my own personal opinions and views. I can write or speak those views, and as long as I think the information I’m sharing is real and true, I’m pretty much free to say whatever about any topic I want.

Sure, some venues might not allow me to sell that content. And that’s understood… Because sex stuff is a touchy subject, attack ads are a no-no, and out-and-out imaginative fiction does not belong in the Non-Fiction category, no matter how much it gives me the feels.

I can "feel that my information is correct" about anything I want. And if I don’t do any research on a given subject before spouting off… Well, that’s just what it is. I’m showing my ignorance and blatant anti-scientism, and that’s on me. Especially if I leaned heavily on fake sources, or based my entire opinion off an article written by someone that does less research than none (because all their shit is fake).

You are a news publication staff member. You have a responsibility to gather all the information AS IT IS and present the news in a clear and concise manner. Your opinion does not belong on the front page; there’s a reason Opinion sections exist (and not just to be mocked).

Have some fucking standards.

Unnatural disasters

The Deepwater Horizon movie was playing the other day. And it made me think of unnatural disasters we’re dealing with (and not dealing with) even still today.

It’s a list of horrors. Sorry. (Detailed info from Wikipedia.)

• 1943 Hanford Site: The Hanford Site is a decommissioned nuclear production complex operated by the United States federal government on the Columbia River in Benton County in the U.S. state of Washington. The site has been known by many names, including Hanford Project, Hanford Works, Hanford Engineer Works and Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, the site was home to the B Reactor, the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world. During the Cold War, the project expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes. Many early safety procedures and waste disposal practices were inadequate, and government documents have confirmed that Hanford’s operations released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the Columbia River.
• 1976 The Seveso disaster: The Seveso disaster was an industrial accident in a small chemical manufacturing plant approximately 12 miles north of Milan in the Lombardy region of Italy. When the reactor relief valve eventually opened, it caused the aerial release of 6 tons of chemicals, which settled over 6.9 square miles of the surrounding area. It resulted in the highest known exposure to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) in residential populations , which gave rise to numerous scientific studies and standardized industrial safety regulations. The EU industrial safety regulations are known as the Seveso II Directive. This accident was ranked eighth in a list of the worst man-made environmental disasters by Time magazine in 2010.
• 1978 Amoco Cadiz oil spill: On March 16, 1978 the oil tanker Amoco Cadiz ran aground on Portsall Rocks, 1.2 miles from the coast of Brittany, France. It split in three parts and sank, resulting in the largest oil spill of its kind in history to that date: 58 million gallons by NOAA estimates.
• 1970s Love Canal disaster: In the 1920s, the canal became a dump site for municipal refuse for the city of Niagara Falls. During the 1940s, the canal was purchased by Hooker Chemical Company, which used the site to dump 43,700 pounds of chemical byproducts from the manufacturing of dyes, perfumes, and solvents for rubber and synthetic resins. In 1953, Love Canal was sold to the local school district after the threat of eminent domain. Over the next three decades, it attracted national attention for the public health problems originating from the former dumping of toxic waste on the grounds. This event displaced numerous families, leaving them with longstanding health issues and symptoms of high white blood cell counts and leukemia. Subsequently, the federal government passed the Superfund law. The resulting Superfund cleanup operation demolished the neighborhood, ending in 2004.
• 1984 Bhopal disaster: The Bhopal disaster, also referred to as the Bhopal gas tragedy, was a gas leak incident on the night of December 2, 1984 at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. It is considered among the world’s worst industrial disasters. Over 500,000 people were exposed to methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas. The highly toxic substance made its way into and around the small towns located near the plant. ALSO In 1976, two local trade unions complained of pollution within the plant, and In 1981 a worker was accidentally splashed with phosgene as he was carrying out a maintenance job of the plant’s pipes. In a panic, he removed his gas mask and inhaled a large amount of toxic phosgene gas, leading to his death 72 hours later. Following these events, journalist Rajkumar Keswani began investigating and published his findings in Bhopal’s local paper Rapat, in which he urged "Wake up, people of Bhopal, you are on the edge of a volcano."
• 1984 Ok Tedi environmental disaster: The Ok Tedi environmental disaster caused severe harm to the environment along 620 miles of the Ok Tedi River and the Fly River in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea between around 1984 and 2013. One of the worst environmental disasters caused by humans, it is a consequence of the discharge of about two billion tons of untreated mining waste into the Ok Tedi from the Ok Tedi Mine, an open pit mine situated in the province. This mining pollution, caused by the collapse of the Ok Tedi tailings dam system in 1984 and the consequent switch to riverine disposal (disposal of tailings directly into the river) for several decades, was the subject of class action litigation brought by local landowners naming Ok Tedi Mining Limited and BHP Billiton.
• 1986 Chernobyl disaster: The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on Saturday April 26, 1986, at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union. It is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history both in terms of cost and casualties, and is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven—the maximum severity—on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan. In the most affected areas of Ukraine, levels of radioactivity (particularly from radionuclides 131I, 137Cs and 90Sr) in drinking water caused concern during the weeks and months after the accident. Guidelines for levels of radioiodine in drinking water were temporarily raised to 3,700 Bq/L, allowing most water to be reported as safe.
• 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill: The oil spill occurred in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989, when Exxon Valdez struck Prince William Sound’s Bligh Reef at 12:04 a.m. and spilled 10.8 million US gallons of crude oil over the next few days. It is considered the worst oil spill worldwide in terms of damage to the environment. Prince William Sound’s remote location, accessible only by helicopter, plane, or boat, made government and industry response efforts difficult and made existing response plans especially hard to implement. The region is a habitat for salmon, sea otters, seals, and seabirds. The oil, originally extracted at the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, eventually affected 1,300 miles of coastline, of which 200 miles were heavily or moderately oiled.
• 2002 Prestige oil spill: The oil spill occurred off the coast of Galicia, Spain, caused by the sinking of the 26 year old structurally deficient oil tanker MV Prestige in November 2002, carrying 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. During a storm, it burst a tank on November 13, and French, Spanish, and Portuguese governments refused to allow the ship to dock. The vessel subsequently sank on November 19, 2002, about 130 miles from the coast of Galicia. It is estimated that it spilled 60,000 tons or a volume of 17.8 million US gallons of heavy fuel oil. The spill polluted thousands of miles of coastline and more than one thousand beaches on the Spanish, French and Portuguese coast, as well as causing great harm to the local fishing industry. The spill is the largest environmental disaster in the history of both Spain and Portugal. The amount of oil spilled was more than the Exxon Valdez incident and the toxicity considered higher, because of the higher water temperatures.
• 2006 Prudhoe Bay oil spill: The Prudhoe Bay oil spill (2006 Alaskan oil spill) was an oil spill discovered on March 2, 2006 at a pipeline owned by BP Exploration, Alaska (BPXA) in western Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Initial estimates of the five-day leak said that up to 267,000 US gallons were spilled over 1.9 acres , making it the largest oil spill on Alaska’s north slope to date. Alaska’s unified command ratified the volume of crude oil spilled as 212,252 US gallons in March 2008. The spill originated from a 0.25-inch (0.64 cm) hole in a 34-inch (86 cm) diameter pipeline. The pipeline was decommissioned and later replaced with a 20-inch (51 cm) diameter pipeline with its own pipeline inspection gauge (pig) launch and recovery sites for easier inspection. In November 2007, BPXA pleaded guilty to negligent discharge of oil, which prosecutors said was the result of BP’s knowing neglect of corroding pipelines, a misdemeanor under the federal Clean Water Act, and was fined US$20 million.
• 2008 Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill: The Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill was an environmental and industrial disaster that occurred on Monday December 22, 2008, when a dike ruptured at a coal ash pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, releasing 1.1 billion US gallons of coal fly ash slurry. The spill released a slurry of fly ash and water, which traveled across the Emory River and its Swan Pond embayment, onto the opposite shore, covering up to 300 acres of the surrounding land. It was the largest industrial spill in United States history. The initial spill resulted in no injuries or deaths, but several of the employees of an engineering firm hired by TVA to clean up the spill developed illnesses, including brain cancer, lung cancer, and leukemia, as a result of exposure to the toxic coal ash, and by the ten year anniversary of the spill, more than 30 had died. In November 2018, a federal jury ruled that the contractor did not properly inform the workers about the dangers of exposure to coal ash and had failed to provide them with necessary personal protective equipment.
• 2010 BP oil spill/Deepwater Horizon disaster: The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was an industrial disaster that began on 20 April 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, considered to be the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry and estimated to be 8 to 31 percent larger in volume than the previous largest
• 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster: The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was a 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. It was classified as Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
• 2020 Beirut Explosion: On 4 August 2020, a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut in the capital city of Lebanon exploded, causing at least 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, and US$15 billion in property damage, and leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless. A cargo of 2,750 tones of the substance (equivalent to around 1.1 kilotons of TNT) had been stored in a warehouse without proper safety measures for the previous six years, after having been confiscated by the Lebanese authorities from the abandoned ship MV Rhosus.

Humans have had a grievous impact on our environment. And while people have placed a low price point on the damages owed, the devastation is a bill that has long gone unpaid.

My brother told me a story of his coworker sharing what seemed like a pleasant anecdote to the coworker but that was a horror story to anyone with commonsense: The coworker shared how when he was a kid, every spring he would watch his grandpa stand at the shore of the family lake property and pour an entire bottle of motor oil out onto the water. To create a protective film to keep the mosquitos from reproducing.

Every single year.

Big environmental disasters, little environmental disasters, the key words are "disaster" and "environment."

Stop screwing up the planet, people. If things get bad enough, NOBODY is going to save themselves by moving to Mars.

Be serious: If the world got so bad people are looking to flee, and the poors realized that all the riches are leaving with only a moderate slave population to handle all the dirty parts… Sorry riches, your shuttles are not getting off the ground.

It takes workers to build all your stuff. To mine all the circuitry parts and mix all the carbon fibers. To grow, cook, and serve your food.

Every part of your life is connected to other people. And when those people realize you’ve caused a ton of the environmental mess that’s killing everyone and now YOU’RE LEAVING?!?

Fix the planet. Then you can leave. Otherwise, you’re a parasite killing its host.

And that’s bad, m’kay.