Heavy metals sure hate all that heat.
1 Like
Sure, just ask the folks in Flint!
14 Likes
Dilbert sequence starting here:
3 Likes
I suppose if you distill it. But I’m not a chemist, so I don’t know if and which chemicals also evaporate and come along for the ride.
2 Likes
Then you get them as vapor so you will breathe them instead, unless you have very good ventilation, in which case they just contribute to the background pollution level. Stuff don’t just disappear, unfortunately.
4 Likes
21 Likes
“Big Chemical says higher pollution levels are safe in West Virginia because all those people are going to die soon anyway.”
FTFY
7 Likes
Since it is incontrovertible that Big Chemical executives are thick in the head, laws protecting them from being punched face need to be relaxed.
6 Likes
I was just thinking this same thing the other day. Big Tech, too. The “explanations” are seriously thin these days.
1 Like
Ok. I know this violates all sorts of internet rules, but bear with me here. I read the article. It references the Charleston Gazette’s daily column on current boil orders: Boil-water advisories: March 14, 2019
Both boil orders listed when I read it were from water main breaks. These are appropriate to boil from, and aren’t (directly) related to chemical pollution of the water supply.
Basically, it sounds like in addition to a polluted water supply, they’ve got such aging infrastructure that they can’t always deliver the water either.
The way to remove chemical or heavy metal contaminates in drinking water is reverse osmosis. It’s apparently a high maintenance and low throughput system. I’m in another region with a lot of heavy metal contamination from mining. I filter the water down to 1 micron, but draw drinking water from another (local government controlled and monitored) source
7 Likes
The big problem is that neither side actually does anything to help West Virginia. The Republicans have just been a lot more vocal about lying that they are going to do something to help.
Also, I think one of the big red-line issues with Democrats is their stance on Gun Control. West Virginians need their guns to put food on the table (no, seriously), and there is this in the collective memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
If the Democrats dropped gun control and picked labor rights back up, they might start winning in WV again, given a while so that people trust them… West Virginians generally believe in equal rights for everyone, they just don’t like being told that they are privileged and how wonderful they have it and that their concerns are nothing while they are literally being poisoned, worked, and starved to death…
5 Likes
They need bolt-action rifles for that, not the AR-15s or pistols the GOP is promising to protect so West Virginians can protect themselves from the gubmint.
As for Blair Mountain (where they were fighting private corporations backed by the government), the solution there is not firearms but protections for union organisers. The Dem establishment has dropped the ball there since the 1990s, but “right to work” is a GOP lie that only sets the stage for future Blair Mountains.
13 Likes
I got lots of things to knock this down but I want to focus on the obesity thing because the one problem these clowns don’t seem to understand is that the more fat you have the more tissue that you have to absorb chemicals leading to toxic levels. Fat is good at this which is why their logic just makes no sense.
11 Likes
They aren’t even trying to make sense. They’re presenting a bad-faith argument in the hopes that the EPA will use it to make a bad-faith decision in their favor. Both parties understand the game.
14 Likes
You think they are looking for logic? This is just word salad to justify their a priori assumptions. WVians have always been treated as interchangeable cogs of no intrinsic value themselves. I am afraid that somewhere along the line they started to think of themselves the same way. And yes, I am one. The whole state has become a large scale example of Stockholm syndrome.
14 Likes
Some of them don’t actually. Many of them don’t vote. Many of them vote for the party that at least talks to them, rather than ignoring them, which the democratic party has been doing for a while. So, when you get a candidate who only pays lip service to supporting unions (which previously being part of an administration that contributed to various forms of off-shoring, which helped to undermine union jobs), talks about climate change and environmental degradation, but doesn’t acknowledge that it means no more decent paying jobs, and seemingly has no plan to help with job replacement other than low wage service work, which is seen as a more feminine occupation… then you get an opponent who at least seems to acknowledge you and your struggle (even if he’s not doing something in reality), it’s kind of obvious, especially when he helps to give them an easy alternative target to the real people who are screwing them over to help them get out some of the pent up rage (immigrants).
But this class analysis of this is never popular here, because it upsets the easier, coasts vs heartlands, blue vs. red, northerns vs. southerners, city vs. rural, progressive vs. regressive narratives that make things easier to understand.
But @gracchus said it better than me…
20 Likes
Calling them “big chemical” is part of the problem. Don’t do that. It’s how we get anti-Vaxxers and anti-GMO nuts. And food Babe.
Everything in the universe is made of chemicals. Demonizing the word is Trump-level ignorance. Demonize the business practice instead.
6 Likes
It used to be…
10 Likes
I think you both said it well. @gracchus just used less words. 
Very true points by both of you. I am just hoping that the demographic of WV and other states begin to open their eyes as to who is actually on their side.
Fingers crossed
5 Likes
Not until they realize that the Democrats aren’t really any or all of the following: atheists, socialists, communists, abortionists, abolitionists, ‘race traitors’…
West Virginians’ problem stems more from deep-seated social conditioning, to wit: no matter how badly the Republicans abuse the non-wealthy, tbe Democrats will be vastly worse.
1 Like
