Orchard Children. Companies Ignore Removing Toxic Chemicals in Water NY Times Charles Duhigg

December 16, 2009, Toxic Water Articles http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters

Dee, a friend from Canada, sent me a poem on Wine suggesting an alternative to drinking water. Unfortunately many bottled water are either from the tap or not purified to remove more recently determined levels of toxic chemicals now permitted in drinking water.

Eugene water is about the best tasting and pure in the USA because of the source and purification procedures. I now skip bottled water and drink from the tap, but some of Oregon's Water does have problems with deadly perchlorate.

Even though West Virginia's mountain top coal mining is increasing cancer from the drinking water to a large number of residents, they plan to continue the practice of contaminating the drinking well water supply.

The December issue of The Atlantic Magazine does explain why the radical Republican types now in Congress so ruthlessly ignore human needs and wants for profit. The article discusses Orchid Children who have the gene that prevents them from processing serotonin so they are much more susceptible to environment.

Serotonin is the happy chemical and when we do not get enough we get depressed. They also need to take elevated risk-taking to feel alive, express aggression more often which can be advantageous in challenging situations such as wars, social strife of many kinds, and migrations to new environments.

My comment: The Scot-Irish who migrated to our country tend to populate the South and the Republican Party tended to be part of the Lowland Scots who had to be aggressive and paranoid to survive the many wars and privation. Orchid Children remain in the gene pool in modern civilization because if they have a safe environment and parents who do not abuse them and give them lots of love such as spending lots of time with them, I feel that epigenetic effects of shutting down or activating genes makes these individuals very important to our society and are often our leaders and very accomplished individuals. The book on the Scot-Irish by Senator James Webb who is Scot-Irish is fun to read and very informative.

The authoritarian method of bringing raising children with punishment and tough love is not the way to develop good children. Allowing babies who cry are left unintended by Orchid families develop poorly. Perhaps the more recent increase in problem children resulted from this neglect when both father and mother were forced to work to survive thanks to the Reagan legacy which took away from the Middle Class to enrich the rich further.

Hillary Clinton and her two brothers were brought up in this manner where the father may not have resorted to physical violence, but continually criticized them. Only Hillary fought back at an early age which made her the favorite and he spent lots of time in the afternoon by coming home early from his business and taking her fishing and teaching her how to play baseball. Her mother also spent lots of time with her to train her about how life could be very tough based on her mother's experience and how to cope.

Her brothers were quite smart too, and one became a physician, but failed at that too. Even though the Clintons kicked the father out of the White House, Hillary spent 19 days and nights at the hospital attending to his father who finally died.

Obama's experience with his mother's nurturing and later with his grandmother and grandfather gave him the confidence to make use of his full potential. Obama spent a lot of time reading to his children including all of the Harry Potter books! Even though it does not look that way now, Obama will come through on healthcare and seems to be on his way to doing something about Global Warming.

If your friends are thinking about voting for Radical Republicans, I will be glad to give them the accurate history of the Republican Party, especially the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Gang and rampant incompetence and corruption.

Jim Kawakami, December 16, 2009, Posted http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Bush, Jr, Administration Threatened to Fire EPA Scientists who Talk about Contaminates in Water

... But when E.P.A. scientists produced assessments indicating those chemicals were more toxic — the first step in setting a standard for perchlorate and tougher standards for the other two substances — businesses fought back by lobbying lawmakers and regulators and making public attacks.

Military contractors, for example, said that regulations on perchlorate, which has been associated with stunted central nervous system development, would cost them billions of dollars in cleanup costs. In 2003, an Air Force colonel, Daniel Rogers, called an E.P.A. assessment of the chemical “biased, unrealistic and scientifically imbalanced.” Military officials told E.P.A. scientists they were unpatriotic for suggesting that bases were contaminated, according to people who participated in those discussions.

Property owners who had rented space to dry cleaners lobbied lawmakers and top E.P.A. officials to remove government scientists from research on perc, which has been associated with some kinds of tumors, according to interviews with lobbyists. (Trichloroethylene has been associated with liver and kidney damage and cancer.)

Soon, Dr. Preuss was told by some superiors that he might be dismissed if he continued pushing for extensive assessments of certain chemicals, he said. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/us/17water.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=all

Excerpt NY Times Article Deadly Drinking Water

... Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.

But not one chemical has been added to the list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000.

Other recent studies have found that even some chemicals regulated by that law pose risks at much smaller concentrations than previously known. However, many of the act’s standards for those chemicals have not been updated since the 1980s, and some remain essentially unchanged since the law was passed in 1974.

All told, more than 62 million Americans have been exposed since 2004 to drinking water that did not meet at least one commonly used government health guideline intended to help protect people from cancer or serious disease, according to an analysis by The Times of more than 19 million drinking-water test results from the District of Columbia and the 45 states that made data available. ...

In Millville, N.J., Pleasantville, N.J., and Edmond, Okla., drinking water has contained traces of uranium, which can cause kidney damage. Those concentrations also did not violate the law. (Contaminant records for each of the 47,500 water systems that provided data are at nytimes.com/contaminants.) ...

“If it doesn’t violate the law, I don’t really pay much attention to it,” said Stephen Sorrell, executive director of Emerald Coast Utilities Authority, which serves Pensacola, Fla. Data show that his system has delivered water containing multiple chemicals at concentrations that research indicates are associated with health risks. The system has not violated the Safe Drinking Water Act during the last half-decade. ...

Communities where the drinking water has contained chemicals that are associated with health risks include Scottsdale, Ariz.; El Paso, Tex., and Reno, Nev. Test results analyzed by The Times show their drinking water has contained arsenic at concentrations that have been associated with cancer. But that contamination did not violate the Safe Drinking Water Act. ...

Those two chemicals have been detected in drinking water in more than a dozen states, including California, Massachusetts, New York and Oregon. A study published last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found traces of perchlorate in every person examined by researchers.

A Department of Defense official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivities regarding perchlorate, said the military’s perspective on the chemical had changed since 2005, and it now deferred to the E.P.A.’s assessments. Colonel Rogers did not reply to e-mail messages and calls seeking comment.

“We need action,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees the Safe Drinking Water Act. “E.P.A. has the authority to set new standards, but it wasn’t used over the last eight years. There are people at risk.” ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/us/17water.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=all

A glass of wine ..........

To my friends who enjoy a glass of wine...

And those who don't and are always

seen with a bottle of water in their hand.

As Ben Franklin said:

In wine there is wisdom,

In beer there is freedom,

In water there is bacteria.

In a number of carefully controlled trials,

Scientists have demonstrated that if we drink

1 litre of water each day,

At the end of the year we would have absorbed

More than 1 kilo of Escherichia coli, (E. Coli) - bacteria

Found in feces.

In other words, we are consuming 1 kilo of poop..

However,

We do NOT run that risk when drinking wine & beer

(or tequila, rum, whiskey or other liquor)

Because alcohol has to go through a purification process

Of boiling, filtering and/or fermenting.

Remember:

Water = Poop,

Wine = Health.

Therefore, it's better to drink wine and talk stupid,

Than to drink water and be full of shit.

There is no need to thank me for this valuable information:

I'm doing it as a public service!