S03.E09: Flint water crisis and lead poisoning

[Athena]

Segments: Vladimir Putin's annual call-in show, reactions to the Panama Papers in the United Kingdom, Böhmermann affair, Flint water crisis and lead poisoning.

[trow125]

Considering John's longstanding penchant for tangling with foreign officials, I would be very surprised if he didn't tackle this news story.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel paved the way Friday for the possible prosecution of a German satirist who recited on television a poem that lampooned Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president.

[Muffyn]

As too often happens, I feel like the only person without an emotional attachment to the Muppets. 

[TV-junkie]

I'd like to see the bad-ass muppets: Waldorf and Statler poking fun at Erdogan! And Kermit wanting to move with Miss Piggy to a pig sty because it's less poisoned than his home and more affordable - all f*cking hell breaks loose. ;-)

On a more serious note: the lead poisoning issue is one more example for the US being a third-world country when it comes to civil rights for poor people. And Congress still being the cheerleader for big companies' interests. Tell me something new ...

[Notwisconsin]

The president of Brazil has been impeached, that's new...

[Irlandesa]

I felt the lead story was one of the strongest stories he has done in a while. 

[KerleyQ]

The word "danger" was thrown around so many times on last night's show, it was disappointing we didn't get his Carlos Danger dance.  (Not that my 13 year old didn't do it at home as we watched anyway.) 

[attica]

I was happy to see the clip of Question Time, because that bit of UK's political apparatus never doesn't slay me.  I like to throw around the occasional Aw-dah! when hanging with my peeps. I love them because they all know what it is. 

[peeayebee]

The House of Commons Speaker looks like Terry Jones from Monty Python.

 

Although the lead story is terrible and sad, I also found it very interesting. Of course I knew about lead pipes and lead in paint, but it was good to get a concise history of lead in our country.

[fastiller]

The House of Commons Speaker looks like Terry Jones from Monty Python.

 

Although the lead story is terrible and sad, I also found it very interesting. Of course I knew about lead pipes and lead in paint, but it was good to get a concise history of lead in our country.

I miss Betty boothroyd.

[iMonrey]

Wow, I found the Muppets skit really lame and unwarranted. I preferred the parodies he's done in the past with the "fake" muppets but now that Sesame Street is on HBO I guess they can't mess with them anymore. It actually did feel like John Oliver paid a visit to Sesame Street for a Very Special Episode and that's not what I'm expecting from this show, or interested in.

[Victor the Crab]

Unmanageable hair, an ugly tie, and zero fucks to give. I really liked that British House of Commons speaker.

[Jamoche]

As too often happens, I feel like the only person without an emotional attachment to the Muppets. 

I like Oscar, but the emotion that Elmo inspires is very far from attachment.

[Jersey Guy 87]

Unmanageable hair, an ugly tie, and zero fucks to give. I really liked that British House of Commons speaker.

 

That tie was a real piece of work.  Unbelievably ugly.

[Danny Franks]

Good old Dennis Skinner, one of the last men of real character and integrity in British politics. He started his professional life as a coal miner, did that for twenty years, and has been an MP for over 40. And he never misses a session of Parliament. Anyone who's not familiar with him should read a bit about him. One of his finest moments:

 

Labour MP Dennis Skinner famously said “half the Tory members opposite are crooks”. When asked to apologise due to this being unparliamentary language, Skinner replied “OK, half the Tory members aren’t crooks.”

 

 

I was watching the main story thinking, 'how the hell is lead poisoning still an issue in what is supposed to be the most advanced country in the world?' Then John explained how, yet again, an industry put its own profits ahead of safety and health, and was allowed to get away with it. And no one ever bothered sorting it out because, hey, it's only the poor people who are affected, and who gives a shit about them, right?

 

'Sure, kids are being poisoned, and we could stop it but... I don't want to vote for the federal government to waste any more of the taxpayers' hard-earned money.' Sacks of shit.

[dcalley]

Lead poisoning is big problem in Baltimore. And the people who get settlements then frequently get victimized by people trying to buy those settlements from them for pennies on the dollar. The pipes in the schools need to be replaced, but it's cheaper to use bottled water.

[OneWhoLurks]

BERLIN — Few knew the German satirist and talk show host Jan Böhmermann until earlier this month, when he triggered a bilateral crisis between Germany and Turkey by reciting a vituperative poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Böhmermann started his show “Neo Magazin” in 2013 under the aegis of a secondary channel of the public TV giant ZDF. “Neo Magazin” targeted a young, Internet-savvy generation, far from the general audience of ZDF. Böhmermann paved his way to stardom by performing clever, mostly Internet-based gags that ended up as viral videos across all German social media. His latest hit before the Erdoğan uproar? A music video in which he called for a diverse Germany that warmly receives refugees.

 

[...]

 

How will Germans react to the government’s decision? We’re waiting to see. Merkel now relies on Erdoğan’s cooperation to deal with the refugee crisis. That’s the only explanation for why she distanced herself from Böhmermann in a telephone call with Turkey, arranged before Böhmermann’s performance of the poem. According to her spokesman, she called Böhmermann’s presentation “intentionally insulting.” But her remark did not suffice for Ankara. Erdoğan’s deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmus, described the poem as a “crime against humanity.” Such language can only be considered laughable in light of Turkey’s countless crimes against humanity (think of the Armenian genocide). It shows how Erdoğan and his entourage now perceive things like a sultan and his Ottoman court.

 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-gorlach/germany-boehmermann-turkey_b_9732118.html

[Hanahope]

I was watching the main story thinking, 'how the hell is lead poisoning still an issue in what is supposed to be the most advanced country in the world?' Then John explained how, yet again, an industry put its own profits ahead of safety and health, and was allowed to get away with it. And no one ever bothered sorting it out because, hey, it's only the poor people who are affected, and who gives a shit about them, right?

'Sure, kids are being poisoned, and we could stop it but... I don't want to vote for the federal government to waste any more of the taxpayers' hard-earned money.' Sacks of shit.

 

 

IMO, its the same problem with our country's obesity problem.  Everyone keeps wondering why our country is so fat, especially poorer people.  Its because our food production and manufacturing companies are allowed to add high fructose corn syrup to everything, and huge corn subsidies are granted to corporate farmers.  Non-corn syrup food is then demonized, like when we were all told how bad "fat" is in butter, milk, and other foods, which then provided "low fat" options that are then sweetened up with the high fructose corn syrup in order to make the food palatable with all the fat taken out, or we're told to eat more carbs instead of meat, carbs that are loaded with high fructose corn syrup.    The manufactured food is then cheap so the poor buy it because they can't afford healthier options.  Of course, now we find out that fat isn't really all that bad for most people (and meat as well, provided the animals aren't fed a bunch of chemically laced food).

 

 

The pipes in the schools need to be replaced, but it's cheaper to use bottled water.

 

I was watching The Big Short this weekend.  I noticed at the end, the movie reported that Michael Blurry, the hedge fund manager who saw the mortgage crises before everyone else, is now only investing in water.  I thought that was interesting.  The movie didn't say whether it was bottled water, or water filtration, maybe its more than one thing to do with the fact that humans kindof need clean water to survive and it seems to have the potential to become a rarer commodity.

[sum]

I wasn't aware of UK's anti-satire law and it seems odd that of all countries UK have that.

Anyway, http://www.adambowie.com/blog/2016/04/satire-parliament-and-dennis-skinner/

What’s interesting is how the news was later reported beyond the day’s news reports.

 

On Friday, Have I Got News For You covered it, pointing out that Parliamentary rules prevented them from showing clips on a satirical TV programme. They instead used an “artist’s impression” as shown above [screen capture].

 

Now I’ve written about this issue before – here in 2009, and again in 2011.

As the licences to use material from Parliamentary coverage make clear: no extracts of Parliamentary proceedings may be used in any light entertainment programme or in a programme of political satire;

 

This is despite some changes in copyright legislation which, to my non lawyer’s eyes, would seem to be at odds with them.

So it was slightly surprising to sit down and watch Monday night’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Sky Atlantic, originally transmitted by HBO on Sunday evening, and see footage of Commons, lifted from the BBC’s website, and used by Oliver for, well, satirical purposes!

I don't know if the law is stricter for FTA channels or not but it was news back in 2011 that Channel 4 had to cut out The Daily Show's Parliament coverage.

And another one 'absolutely no footage of the royal wedding could be used for any satirical purposes' in any country.

[Danny Franks]

I was watching The Big Short this weekend.  I noticed at the end, the movie reported that Michael Blurry, the hedge fund manager who saw the mortgage crises before everyone else, is now only investing in water.  I thought that was interesting.  The movie didn't say whether it was bottled water, or water filtration, maybe its more than one thing to do with the fact that humans kindof need clean water to survive and it seems to have the potential to become a rarer commodity.

 

Well water's one of the things we can't make any more of. At least, not without huge capital outlay and cost and labour intensive processes. We can't make any more, and there's not enough to go around. I've seen a fair number of speculative theories about future wars and strife being directly connected to water access, and I find them scarily plausible.

 

People investing in water now are banking on those theories coming to pass, in one form or another. And I reckon the biggest opportunities are probably in water conservation. If you control the supplies of water, you control everything. It's a Malthusian argument, but one I find far more convincing that the same arguments about food resources. There are ways to concentrate foods, to stimulate growth and make more, to store it more effectively (like Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat). You can't really do that with water.

 

With all that, it's even sadder that some people are being so casual with this crucial resource. Letting it be poisoned and rendered unsafe should be a serious criminal offence.

Edited April 22, 2016 by Danny Franks

[OneWhoLurks]

Quote

 

It’s been 777 days since Michigan switched Flint’s water supply from Detroit to Flint River and residents began complaining that it looked, tasted, and smelled wrong; 478 days since a Flint resident informed the Environmental Protection Agency that her water contained high levels of lead; and 157 days since Republican Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency.

The U.S. Congress still hasn’t passed any aid to help Flint, or for any of the other communities that could use it.

Senate Republicans on Thursday abandoned an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would allocate $1.9 billion for lead-free clean water infrastructure across the country and in Flint. Before this bill, the Senate didn’t add aid onto a comprehensive energy package because Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) blocked the amendment.

 

777 days later, Congress hasn’t lifted a finger for Flint

[OneWhoLurks]

Quote

 

In one city after another, the tests showed startling numbers of children with unsafe blood lead levels: Poughkeepsie and Syracuse and Buffalo. Erie and Reading. Cleveland and Cincinnati.

In those cities and others around the country, 14 percent of kids — and in some cases more — have troubling amounts of the toxic metal in their blood, according to new research published Wednesday. The findings underscore how despite long-running public health efforts to reduce lead exposure, many U.S. children still live in environments where they're likely to encounter a substance that can lead to lasting behavioral, mental and physical problems.

[...]

A recent Reuters investigation found that in much of the country, lead testing isn't required for young children and infants. And even when it is, those blood tests often aren't done. In addition, Trasande said many pediatricians "have taken their eye off the ball" when it comes to testing, because elevated lead in blood isn't as widespread as it once was.

 

In some Zip codes, 1 in 7 children suffer from dangerously high blood lead levels