Since when do grown-ups refuse to believe that it’s possible that there’s no good news?

When they have the boss or a supervisor pressuring them to present a positive spin.

Which is something that goes on in a LOT of American workplaces. How many workers have asked questions only to be found annoying by their peers? How many workers have offered dissenting opinions only to be told they were too negative?

Especially in an economy where you can get fired for any reason at all, we will say, do and put up with anything to keep earning a living.

Since when do grown-ups refuse to believe that it’s possible that there’s no good news?

Wait, there are grownups working in the mass media?!

The message to trust the invisible hand of the free market to create safe, clean, profitable solutions to all our problems isn’t something that the public is willing to buy right now.

Yet billions will be spent to shove it down our throats, and overfed pundits will be on the teevee telling it to us over and over again, and anyone who questions it will have their patriotism called into question, and a bunch of people will die from tainted food and nobody will ever be held accountable for it.

A couple of things here:

From a pedant’s point of view,  calling it “oil” or “dispersants” is very misleading. Crude oil contains dozens to hundreds of different kinds of hydrocarbons, all with different characteristics and different smells (and many with no smell at all), all with different biological effects. Same for the dispersant solutions (which, by the way, make it much more likely that seafood will be contaminated because they disperse the oil in tiny droplets throughout the whole water column). So the sniff tests are even less useful than Amanda is complaining about.

And from a regulatory-infrastructure point of view, it’s yet another sign of what the GOP and complaisant democrats have done to our nation’s safety over the past few decades when you suddenly have to train people to sniff for oil. The sensors to do this kind of stuff cheaply have been available for 10 years or more. They should have been in use the whole time.

“Yet billions will be spent to shove it down our throats, and overfed pundits will be on the teevee telling it to us over and over again, and anyone who questions it will have their patriotism called into question, and a bunch of people will die from tainted food and nobody will ever be held accountable for it.”

...in other words, just another day in our Libertarian/Objectivist Paradise!  Taste the Freedom™! 

Somewhere, dark and hot and subterranean, Ayn Rand — standing next to J.P. Morgan, J.D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and host of other infamous robber barons and other capitalist heroes — is smiling, or smirking, or laughing so hard she’s sobbing in delight…

Massive flow of Bullshit continues to gush from BP headquarters

“Yet billions will be spent to shove it down our throats, and overfed pundits will be on the teevee telling it to us over and over again, and anyone who questions it will have their patriotism called into question, and a bunch of people will die from tainted food and nobody will ever be held accountable for it.”

Yep. I figure you’re in the neighborhood of 100% correct there.

Fishermen say they can’t sell a tainted product anyway, whether it is inspected or not.

I guess we didn’t need all those stupid anti-adulteration laws after all then!

The sad truth is that once the spill blows over (or at least when the media stops covering it) there will be a return to the stupid ways of trusting the market.  This will happen unless liberals create a strong anti-business movement to say we’ve had enough of the business-is-always-right mentality.

We have become a society that specializes in denial. Being American means never having to say “I acknowledge reality.”

“Here, we don’t have inspectors on any level so we have to inspect our own seafood products to make sure they’re safe and oil-free and good to eat,” Jenkins said. “We’re not going to have inspectors everywhere. Everybody’s got to do their own job ... to make sure they don’t have a problem with oily shrimp whatsoever.”

Welp

*stops eating shrimp forever*

The free market humping that goes on in this article is also inexcusable.

To follow up on Dunc, This goes beyond free-market humping.  They’ve discounted the thousands (hundreds?) of over worked FDA inspectors.  After years of seeing more and more frequent lapses in food safety they continue to smile plastically at the camera and chirp vapidly about how everything the free market spews out is coming up roses.

The article itself makes it clear it’s not just “sniff for oil, come on, it’s easy, you’ve been to a gas station before.”

I think training noses to recognize the scent of oil is helpful, though obviously woefully inadequate.  The process can’t detect all the fractions, or the fucking dispersants, and they’re not testing every fish.  But if it stops some oil-tainted seafood from hitting the market, and helps identify additional locations where sea life is being affected, I am in favor.

But not mollified.

That said, how safe was the seafood before the oil spill?  It’s not like there wasn’t any oil seeping into the Gulf before now, or heavy metals and harmful chemicals entering the waterway via sludge.

The government downplaying risk is not new.  I seem to remember reading that the city of San Francisco downplayed personal risk to people during the 1918 flu epidemic, even though they knew the real danger.  They told people the risks of transmission were minimal.  Apparently after the epidemic ended, there was a huge backlash against the city government.  I could not find a link to this story.  i would like to think that people are less likely to believe the bullshit and protect themselves, but maybe not.

Normally, I would be a little annoyed that my cheapie bags of frozen shrimp are marked as a Product of Thailand.

Anybody who knowlingly eats seafood from the Gulf is an idiot; you’d have to be to believe it’s not a huge risk.

That said, government and media are still complicit in pretending it’s safe to do so.

Some people are going to get very sick and die because they decided to trust those sources. What is also going to happen is that some Gulf seafood is going to get passed off as “non-Gulf” or otherwise safe.  I wouldn’t trust any fish that could possibly be from the Gulf, no matter how many seals, certifications or whatever it comes with.

With all of that, and with fish stocks being so low, I just don’t eat ocean fish anymore, at all. There’s far too much risk.  I think we’d all be better off doing the same.

Since when do grown-ups refuse to believe that it’s possible that there’s no good news?

No, see if they only report the truth, then they will be showing their liberal bias.  You can’t show a liberal bias!  That’s bad journalism.

You have to have a fair balance, i.e., show both sides, in order to prove that your are objective and therefore a serious journalist.

Investigating reality and reporting the truth?  Journalism has nothing to do with that crap. The only thing worse than being called a “racist” is being called “liberal”.

jackspratt, that rings a bell…[google google]...

I think you’re remembering incorrectly.  It wasn’t that the government played down the risk; it’s that they chose the wrong method of containing it—face masks.  I don’t know how stupid it was at the time, because, well, science marches on.

Here is an interview by Ira Flatow on Science Friday with Dr. Howard Markel, Professor, University of Michigan and Director, Center for the History of Medicine:

http://m.npr.org/news/Health/103710329?singlePage=true

jackspratt, this is from the NIH, and seems to suggest your recollection is accurate:

In San Francisco, which they found to have the most effective measures, they estimate that deaths would have been 25 percent higher had city officials not implemented their interventions when they did. But had San Francisco left its controls in place continuously from September 1918 through May 1919, the analysis suggests, the city might have reduced deaths by more than 90 percent.

What is true that the “City Fathers” did a lot of covering up after the ‘06 quake, as every California schoolboy should know:

San Francisco’s streets were still smoldering, its dead still buried in rubble. But for many in the city, the first priority wasn’t rescue. It was downplaying the disaster.

The city had to be rebuilt so instead of blaming the mass destruction on sometime as unpredictable and frightening as an earthquake—another culprit had to be found.

“There was a calculated effort to mask the horrors of the 1906 earthquake,” said author James D’Allesandro. “They were afraid that people might not rebuild in the city. They were afraid investors might shy away.”

Sam Singer, a Bay Area public relations specialist, said the ‘great cover-up’ began almost as soon as the earth stopped moving.

“The great earthquake really could be called the great cover-up,” he said. “The city tried to hide the number of dead. They tried to switch and spin the earthquake into a fire.”

There were buried bodies, burned bodies and a proclamation from the mayor that authorized Army troops to shoot to kill. And when looters were found, the Army did shoot to kill. Still the city’s official death toll was just 478.

Gladys Hansen, the city’s former archivist, has been researching the earthquake and fire for decades. Hansen and other researchers now believe the real death toll was at least 3,000 perhaps as high as 6,000.

“I knew there had to be more,” said Hansen of the official death toll. “The mayor of San Francisco’s number one priority was to get the city rebuilt. He was not concerned of inaccurate portrayal of the dead.”

D’ Allesandro is the author of the novel—“1906”. He believes the mayor and business leaders tried to hide the true scope of the doom and gloom to cover up for their own mistakes and to lure back business.

“An earthquake is an unpredictable dangerous thing,” he said. “If you say to someone, to a real estate company or a bank or a developer that the ground beneath you is unstable, that is a frightening thing.”

“If you say a big fire got out of control and we will build up the fire department and it will never happen again. That is something people can contend with.”

Photos were doctored to cover up quake damage and just show the fire.There was no earthquake insurance back then, but there was fire insurance. It was as if an entire city was committing insurance fraud.

“Everybody had a part in this,” Hansen said.

jackspratt, this is from the NIH, and seems to suggest your recollection is accurate:

  In San Francisco, which they found to have the most effective measures, they estimate that deaths would have been 25 percent higher had city officials not implemented their interventions when they did. But had San Francisco left its controls in place continuously from September 1918 through May 1919, the analysis suggests, the city might have reduced deaths by more than 90 percent.
Comment #19: Dark Avenger Guardian Chow Mein on 06/07 at 12:06 PM

But jackspratt wrote, “the city of San Francisco downplayed personal risk to people during the 1918 flu epidemic, even though they knew the real danger.”

Nothing you quoted here supports the idea that they knew they shouldn’t lift the controls but they did so anyway.  You’re implying evil where simple ignorance might well apply.

The real story is that if you were eating seafood, or any food for that matter, you’re already likely to have been subtly poisoned with some chemical runoff or other. The only reason why these people are right that the spill doesn’t change much is not the your food is safe, is that it was unsafe before and that now we just happened to have one of those spills be front page news for weeks so we’re aware of it.

We’re deeply screwed.

Left Wing Fox—That’s interesting, considering the crotch-thrusting objectivist machismo of The Incredibles, I’m sure the culpability of the business owners will be downplayed so that more shame can be directed toward the government.

I liked shrimp.  MmmmMmmmm seafood, you were so yummy.

They are having people sniff for oil b/c using mechanical/chemical tests that prove the toxic content would be mean to companies.  The Free Market will save us all, you know.  After a few thousand people die, well, they won’t be buying from that fishmonger anymore, will they?

Why are we even still allowing people to fish in the Gulf of Mexico? The ecosystem isn’t fucked up enough from the oil spill, so let’s continue to fish it so we can be absolutely certain that it is devoid of all life.

You’re implying evil where simple ignorance might well apply.

“It is a sin to believe evil of others.  It is seldom a mistake.”

H. L. Mencken

The only possible good that could come from this is if it makes people more serious about alternative sources of energy. But I’m not holding my breath on that one.

You’re implying evil where simple ignorance might well apply.

“It is a sin to believe evil of others.  It is seldom a mistake.”

H. L. Mencken
Comment #27: Dark Avenger Guardian Chow Mein on 06/07 at 01:44 PM

Mencken is referring to the evil of people, not actions. 

Even if the SF city fathers were super monstrously evil doesn’t mean everything they did was evil, because (a) there’s not enough time and (b) they wouldn’t always know if they were doing horrible things or not. 

You’d be assuming they’re not only evil but smart, that they knew that the social preventive measures (which they actually were at the forefront of using, according to your own quote) shouldn’t have been abandoned when they were.  And also had some kind of evil master plan by which they would escape the ravages of the flu and the consequences thereof.

Thanks oldfeminist, I will listen to the Science Friday program.  I remember the implication of evil, but I could have that wrong.

Dark Avenger, thanks for the info on the earthquake.  It is fascinating, and not unlike the spinning now in the gulf.  I will read that book.

There’s something deeply unsettling about the pressure on the news media to find upbeat angles when covering the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

I have recently been reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s critique of positive thinking (Bright Sided).  She traces the history of the positive thinking movement back to a backlash against Calvanism; Thinking negatively has become the Calvanistic sin of the positive thinking movement, and therefore is to be scorned and banished. 

Like Barbara I often think the people who emphasize Eternal Positivity (TM) are a <strike>bit</strike> lot insane.  Without saying and doing things we perceive as negative there is no such thing as critique, and therefore no such thing as a real solution.

But not to fear.  If we believe the oil spill will go away hard enough, it will, because of the power of the human mind and shit.

Caelan, I listened to an interview with Ehrenreich about Bright Sided and she’s spot-on.

Does she discuss the corporatism of Eternal Positivity? Positivism requires action to prove positivism and is often expressed through consumerism. IE: It’s not just important to have a positive mental outlook to defeat breast cancer, you have to BUY all that fluffy pink crap to reinforce the positivism.

You’d be assuming they’re not only evil but smart, that they knew that the social preventive measures (which they actually were at the forefront of using, according to your own quote) shouldn’t have been abandoned when they were.  And also had some kind of evil master plan by which they would escape the ravages of the flu and the consequences thereof.

oldfeminist, have you ever heard of the guy  who was the mayor in San Francisco when the flu epidemic started?:

Rolph received considerable criticism for publicly praising the citizens of San Jose following the November 1933 lynching of the confessed murderers of Brooke Hart, while promising to pardon anyone involved, thereby earning the nickname, “Governor Lynch”.

Now, please note that nowhere I have stated that the corrupt bastards running city politics in 1918 were responsible for the observation in the NIH paper.

In fact, the paper doesn’t assign blame:

We examined the impact of maintaining controls at the maximum level of effectiveness estimated for each city throughout the modeled period. Table 1 (last column) indicates that, if this had been feasible, it might have reduced mortality by an average of ≥40%. For the four top-ranked cities for intervention effectiveness listed above, mortality could have been reduced by at least 50% for all model variants, whereas for San Francisco, we estimate that transmission might have been stopped (R < 1), and thus mortality might have been reduced by >95%. These figures, however, do not allow for the mortality that may then have resulted when controls were finally lifted.

And, actually, San Francisco did better than a lot of American cities fighting the same epidemic, so I’ll credit the city fathers at the time for that achievement, whether or not they were corrupt bastards as well.

Yah, Positive Thinking has been around for a while:

The application of his mantra-like conscious autosuggestion, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” (French: Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux) is called Couéism or the Coué method.[1]  The Coué method centers on a routine repetition of this particular expression according to a specified ritual, in a given physical state, and in the absence of any sort of allied mental imagery, at the beginning and at the end of each day.[citation needed] Unlike a common held belief that a strong conscious will constitutes the best path to success, Coué maintained that curing some of our troubles requires a change in our unconscious thought, which can only be achieved by using our imagination. Although stressing that he was not primarily a healer but one who taught others to heal themselves, Coué claimed to have effected organic changes through autosuggestion.[1]

OTOH, it has been know to produce results in the purely psychological realm:

But the disastrous premiere of his 1st Symphony, poorly conducted by A. Glazunov, coupled with his distress over the Russian Orthodox Church’s pressure against his marriage, caused him to suffer from depression, which interrupted his career for three years until he sought medical help in 1900. He had a three-month treatment by a hypnotherapist, aimed at overcoming his writer’s block. Upon his recovery, Rachmaninov composed his brilliant 2nd Piano Concerto, and made a comeback with successful concert performances. From 1904-1906 he was a conductor at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

From the Wiki on Rachmaninoff:

In 1900, Rachmaninoff began a course of autosuggestive therapy with psychologist Nikolai Dahl, himself an amateur musician. Rachmaninoff quickly recovered confidence and overcame his writer’s block. A result of these sessions was the composition of Piano Concerto No. 2 (Op. 18, 1900–01), dedicated to Dr. Dahl. The piece was very well received at its premiere, at which Rachmaninoff was soloist.

if they have to say something positive maybe they could talk about Deep water horizon doing for offshore drilling what three mile island did for nuclear power.

“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”

It sure worked well for Chief Inspector Dreyfus.

Dark Avenger Guardian Chow Mein, you sure have a funny way of saying “you’re right.”

Except I didn’t say that your assertion that the city fathers acted out of sheer ignorance was correct, nor have I exculpated them from being corrupt.

I’m going to quit this subject because it’s apparently a bee in your bonnet that I have neither the time or patience to resolve it in a way that you would find acceptable.

Have a good evening.

Being American means never having to say “I acknowledge reality.”

In Capitalist America, reality acknowledge YOU!

Thousands of people won’t die.  They’ll die later, when we don’t know what killed them.  Fishermen will have shorter lifespans.  They already had pretty short ones.

The gulf is pretty big, and saying that they shouldn’t fish basically puts tens of millions out of work, out of food, and I’m not entirely sure it’ll help.

Once the fishermen are gone, so to is any effort to keep the ocean clean.

PS, you wouldn’t eat pretty much any meat or fish if you knew what was in it.  ‘tests’ are both destructive to the product and useless at telling you if they’re toxic or not. 

The sniff test is actually useful - if it’s toxic to the fish, then they’ll smell sick, and if you can smell oil, you know it’ll be ultimately toxic to us.  Fish are really the canaries in the mine in this instance.

hp @20:
People can’t tell the difference between flounder and tilipia?  Other than being white fish that are fairly mild, they aren’t much alike.  Not in typical size, form or texture.

emjaybee:
You are probably okay with most salmon, cod and other cold water fish.  Probably is not very comforting, I know, not when we are talking food.
Freshwater and controlled farm raised (from a known source, any way) are your better bet for now.

That said, Crissa is right on.

When in the frozen bags of fillets, you are absolutely right.  Tilipia is usually narrower, thinner fillets, not really obvious through the thick plastic of the bag and then individual wrappers.  I’d be pissed even though I like tilipia. 
I try to check out what’s in the regional grocery (Market Basket) fish counter and then see if they have any still frozen if it’s marked previously frozen; but I have some of the bagged stuff, too.  Either way, I am always disappointed by their flounder, especially as usually it’s much more expensive.