Eideard

Fears of radiation from Japan have driven some customers at health food stores on the West Coast to stock up on kelp out of a belief its iodine content can protect against thyroid cancer…

Health officials have repeatedly said United States residents face no risk from radiation drifting across the Pacific Ocean from Japan’s stricken nuclear plants.

But that has not stopped some Americans from buying potassium iodide, considered a defense against radiation poisoning. Authorities have warned against taking potassium iodide unnecessarily because of a potential for side-effects.

Meanwhile, consumers are turning to more health-friendly sources of iodine, with kelp tablets high on the list and suppliers running out, health store owners and managers along the West Coast told Reuters.

Seaweed snacks and blue-green algae liquid are also popular items, and one Washington State homeopath is even recommending miso soup and brown rice, because of an anecdote that it helped a Japanese doctor protect against radiation decades ago…

Willow Follett said consumers are “just grasping at straws” in an effort to do anything they can to protect themselves, even though they face no risk…

That did not stop the phone from ringing off the hook at Justin Brotman’s Seattle supplements and health food store Heleo, from people worried about nuclear radiation.

Callers asked about potassium iodide, which Brotman said he would not sell them because of its potential side effects. Instead, he sold them the more healthy alternative of blue-green algae, which also has some iodine.

“I even stopped answering the phone to be honest with you”, said Brotman, 29.

A required reaction to natural disaster is watching out for criminal profiteering. In a case like this, Left-coasters stampeding like two-footed lemmings on the basis of unreasonable fear – I hope these people pay through the nose for their supply of homeopathic humbug.

A cell phone text message accidentally forwarded to a south-side Santa Fe elementary school caused officials to shut down the school and sent some parents into a panic for a couple hours Friday morning.

An employee at César Chávez Community School…at 8:06 a.m. found a phone message in Spanish that led authorities to believe somebody might be threatening to kill people inside.

Police were immediately contacted, and they put the school on lockdown — nobody goes in, nobody leaves — for a couple hours and beefed up patrols at surrounding schools as a precaution.

However, police later learned the message — a bogus warning about possible gang violence that has been widely circulated via telecommunications devices — wasn’t meant for the school and wasn’t directed at anyone there…

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A French poultry farmer is suing his country’s defence ministry, claiming that two low-flying fighter jets frightened almost 5,000 of his chickens to death.

Etienne Le Mahauté, a farmer in the village of Pléguien, Brittany, western France, claims that the military aircraft caused a chicken stampede in which 4,800 of the terrified fowl died of suffocation.

Mr Mahauté said he was having lunch on Tuesday when two military aircraft shot over his farm at very low altitude.

“We were in the house eating. When (the planes) passed overhead, we had vibrations in our backs it was so loud,” he said.

He ran straight to the giant coops where the chickens are kept only to find they had rushed into the same side and lay lifeless in their thousands.

“The chickens were terrified. They were stacked up on top of each in several layers on the same side of the three buildings,” he told the newspaper Ouest France. “If we hadn’t been there, it could have been worse. We separated those we could…”

The farmer, who is in charge of 68,000 fowl belonging to an agricultural co-operative, is demanding between 12,000 and 15,000 euros in compensation.

Frédéric Solano, a French air force official, confirmed that two jets had flown past the farm on Tuesday at midday as part of a “scheduled flight at an altitude respecting current rules”…

Last year, Britain’s Ministry of Defence paid out £42,000 to a Staffordshire farmer whose chickens laid fewer eggs because they were frightened by the Red Arrows display team.

I suppose we have to have compensation for animals in our care – although the premises of that care, including the level of stupidity bred into a pursuit of passivity, don’t especially convince me that all farmers deserve payment.

One of the farmers in my family raised “modern” domestic turkeys for a spell. Not to be confused with the crafty, intelligent critters roaming the wild. We always had to wave at them to halt any practice of looking skyward when it started to rain – because they would stand there with mouths open and drown.

Click on the image for a version NSFW

Fresh snowfall is forecast to hit parts of Britain today, with up to 5cm predicted in northern Scotland and in northern and western Wales, bringing warnings of icy roads.

5cm of snow. That’s about 2 fracking inches! That qualifies as snow flurries.

Lighter snow showers are expected in Merseyside, Shropshire and Derbyshire.

Temperatures dropped well below freezing overnight with a low of -7C recorded in Benson, Oxfordshire…

There were five separate crashes on Bonemill Lane in Sunderland yesterday morning and police were forced to close the road for an hour and a half. And an icy road surface led to a three-vehicle collision at a roundabout near Crowther Road in the city. Nobody was injured in any of the incidents, police said.

Is this the weather forecast from the UK – or Mexico?

“Temperatures will return towards the seasonal average of 4C to 6C, but it will remain quite chilly in Scotland with the potential for snow over the hills.”

It’s always chilly in Scotland except when it’s fracking freezing. But, my kin in the Outer Isles don’t panic over a snowstorm unless it produces serious accumulation.

C’mon, folks. Whatever happened to those brave barechested bruisers I see on the telly cheering on Newcastle? Did the whole nation get relegated?

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying…

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation’s latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply published today – used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

In particular they question the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its current level of 83m barrels a day to 105m barrels. External critics have frequently argued that this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and say the world has already passed its peak in oil production…

“Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources,” he added.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was “imperative not to anger the Americans” but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. “We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad,” he added.

The annual outlook was released today and the IEA repeated its prediction that oil supplies would rise to 105 million barrels by 2030. The oil’s gonna run out someday; but, not while they’re in charge.

A truly thoughtful attitude.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Few subjects polarise opinion like vaccination. Since Edward Jenner pioneered the concept more than 200 years ago, it has transformed public health across the globe and vies with antibiotics and anaesthesia as the most significant advance in modern medicine. But, as the recent furore over the cervical cancer vaccine has proven, it is also one of the most controversial.

A 14-year-old schoolgirl, Natalie Morton, collapsed and died within hours of receiving the Cervarix vaccine, fuelling the embers of parental concern and encouraging the conspiracy theorists who populate so many internet forums. That she now appears to have died from an underlying cancer, rather than from a reaction to the vaccine, seems to have been largely ignored. The damage has been done…

There are many sensible voices out there, but they are drowned in a sea of prejudice. On one forum, an independent virologist was trying to explain the link between the human papilloma virus (HPV — the infection that the vaccine protects against) and cervical cancer when one of her fellow posters launched into a tirade about vaccination being part of a plan to reduce the world’s population by 80 per cent. How on earth do you have a sensible discussion with such a crackpot?…

I also discovered a widely held belief that Cervarix is a cheap, second-rate vaccine that has already caused a number of deaths in the United States, where the authorities are supposedly considering withdrawing it. Actually Cervarix isn’t even available in the US. The national programme there uses Gardasil — a similar vaccine that offers additional protection against genital warts. Most doctors would have liked to have seen Gardasil used in the UK, too, but for that additional protective effect against warts rather than any improved safety…

I am all for healthy scepticism, but I have had enough of the scaremongering. If people choose not to be vaccinated then that is their right and it should be respected. But that has to be an informed choice based on facts, and vaccines should be considered in the same light as other medical interventions — it is the balance of benefits and risks that is critical…

The frustrating part of the equation is that the loudest skeptics are the self-defined libertarians fueled by their distrust of any organization larger than a garage band. What their fear and hatred of republican government has to do with medical care is beyond comprehension.

I know we went through this for everything from Jenner’s original discovery – on up to the installation of traffic lights and mandatory driving insurance. But, I grew up in the time of regular deaths or lifetime incapacity from measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough and polio. Only an ignoramus or a fool would want those days to return.

Vice Admiral John Currier

Someone this morning was scanner-snooping the DC area. They locked onto channel 81, a discrete Coast Guard channel – not encrypted except during actual emergencies – so they hear someone say, “Bang – bang – I’ve fired 10 rounds!”

If they had been listening earlier they could have heard the start of the 10-minute exercise, “This is a test – this is a drill” – because 4 river patrol boats of the U.S. Coast Guard were practicing halting an intruder in a secure zone on the river. This is a routine exercise that happens 4 times a week. And has been forever.

Probably because it’s 9/11, everyone at CNN went batshit crazy. First, they have the jump on everyone else. Second, maybe Washington, DC is being invaded by, uh, one pleasure boat.

I watched it right from the beginning and it was clear enough the Coast Guard patrol boats were parked, back in a stand easy position, within a few minutes of their exercise. CNN kept on yipping in fear for another half-hour.

It’s now a couple hours later and CNN and 72 other radio and TV media outlets are trying to weasel an apology out of the Coast Guard for the panic that CNN and their media buddies created among themselves.

Vice Admiral John Currier handled the press conference for the Coast Guard and the man has the patience of Job.

The blathering herd came up with the same few questions – 20 different ways – all premised upon demanding to know why they weren’t informed in advance of the exercise. If it was important enough, they could have checked with the regional command center in Baltimore and they would have known about these four small patrol boats dashing around in pretend circles in between 2 bridges on the Potomac.

I have no idea how this military dude maintained his calm in the face of a pack of ignorant hyenas trying to justify their existence by demanding to know “who’s responsible?” They’re the people responsible for the whole fracking incident.

Again, I have to say I’m impressed with Admiral Currier. Halfway through the absurdity of these questions [and excuses] I would have told our Fourth Estate where to stick it and work it.

After a recent spate of burglaries, residents of Broughton, a village in Buckinghamshire, UK, formed a human chain around, and hurling insults at, a Google Street View car, refusing to allow it inside the hamlet.

A spate of burglaries in the Buckinghamshire village of Broughton caused residents to spring into action when the Google Street View car puttered towards Broughton with a 360-degree camera on its roof. The villagers formed a human chain to stop it, haranguing the driver about “invasion of privacy” fears, claiming a belief that the images Google planned to put online could be used by burglars.

Meanwhile, in Lala-land…

Joel Anderson, a Republican California state assemblyman from San Diego County, wants to make sure that the terrorists can’t win. Because obviously, the only thing that’s allowing them to commit heinous acts is having access to the Internet. Specifically, to services like Google Earth.

About a month ago, Anderson introduced Assembly Bill 255, which would fine Web sites and other online services up to $250,000 per day for not blurring out schools, places of worship, medical facilities, or government sites on satellite or aerial imagery. The same restriction would apply to street-level shots like Google Maps’s Street View feature. Knowingly violating this law could also result in jail time of up to 3 years for the operator.

In an interview with CNET, Anderson said: “Well, I looked at where we’ve had security issues in the past and potentially, might have issues in the future. Churches and synagogues have been bombed. So have federal buildings and then, of course, 9/11. So, the threats are out there and as a state legislator, public safety is my No. 1 job. To ignore that fact would be irresponsible.”Anderson said:

Knowing WTF you’re talking about might also be too much a stretch for this dumbass politician.

It’s just that this sort of absurdity has been hollering in my ears all my life. It trails its stink back into recorded history to the edicts of Nero – and probably will afflict thoughtful humans ten centuries from now. Time doesn’t make it any more bearable.

A 25-year-old transsexual man in Barcelona has announced that he is pregnant with twins, prompting debate in Spain about the ethical use of reproductive technology. Rubén Noé Coronado Jiménez, who is reportedly nine weeks pregnant, interrupted hormone treatments and postponed plans to have a full sex-change operation in order to get pregnant because his 43-year-old girlfriend could no longer have children.

I can just hear the furor among True Believers. “The Anti-Christ has come. Runaway! Runaway!”

After emailing the 158 fertility clinics in Spain, he found one in Barcelona willing to help him prepare his atrophied uterus for insemination by donated sperm. “I have a right to have a baby,” he told reporters. “We are going to be a father, a mother and two children. I don’t see the problem.”

Coronado is not the first transsexual to become pregnant, but is reportedly the first to have twins.

Mar Combrolle, president of the Association of Transsexuals of Andalusia, denied Coronado’s pregnancy was “a contradiction”. She said: “The desire to have a child knows no sex. I think any biological man who wanted a child would give birth if he could.” She added that she recognised that not every transsexual would postpone a sex change in order to become pregnant.

Cripes. Does everyone have to turn an essentially private, family matter into a public soap opera?

If you took the religious moral panic out of the equation, this wouldn’t even make to to the newspapers.

Click on photo for raw riot video
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Pandemonium erupted outside of an “America’s Next Top Model” casting call in midtown Saturday when an overheating car triggered a stampede of catwalk-craving cuties.

Screaming as they ran for their lives, hundreds of hotties in heels toppled over barricades along W. 55th St. after several people in the crowd started yelling, “There’s a bomb!”

By the time the model madness ended, two women were hospitalized and two others and one man were busted for inciting a riot, authorities said.

Seems to be about as well-managed as a bull in a china shop.