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Toxic Snow for Sale

by Radio Free Peaks
Reporting on the use of the dispersant Corexit in the Deepwater Horizon disaster found in the weekly Shortwave Report can serve as a touchstone to determine the quality of the foreign state broadcasters mirrored. Most of what makes the Shortwave Report valuable is that due to their being in line with commercial and regime interests the quality of reporting in American media is so low. But this is to a certain extent the same in the foreign countries where those contributions are being produced, so what does appear in favorable contrast sometimes leaves in fact much to be desired as well.
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This reaches its most significant form when it comes to environmental issues, where all states are dishonest and ill-intended and do not allow Nature to develop a voice among them, while conflicts among states are sometimes reported with more detail and accuracy than in Anarchist media. And often these broadcasts are for foreign use only, and no equal coverage can be found in the local media, because some regimes tend to micromanage their broadcasters and some state broadcasters employ wrynecks from others. Due to its fork on multiple sources, the Shortwave Report still has a relatively low susceptibility for specific disinformation, although this also means that spontaneous increases of the established quality level are unlikely too. In addition to that, the current composition has a few remarkable but easily ignored blind spots such as the lack of an African source which might however just be a depiction of shortcomings of the shortwave spectrum.

The carpet bombing of the spilled oil with large amounts of a toxin cocktail called Corexit is propagandistically flanked with household metaphors, which appears kind of weird because it leaves something that is in fact a sort of Agent Orange or Depleted Uranium of the seas appear as a home cleaning agent. Exhibit 1 suggests that the oil spill was more of an oil spray, because it occurred from a reservoir which before peak oil would have been discarded as uneconomic to exploit, creating foreseeable aggravated conditions for tested cleanup techniques, but although that also made the effort to hide the released crude oil from view less urgent, it was done with increased urgency causing increased damage. It mentions the toxicity, but none of its medical details, apparently there was no doctor around to ask beyond fluffy descriptions, and no politician to comment on its different legal handling by different states. Exhibit 2 mentions the deepwater effects, but without details as well, avoiding any connection between the willingness to exploit precarious reservoirs and the willingness to produce collateral damage when that does not work as imagined. Neither one is drilling into the mindset of the perpetrators which enables them to speculate they could somehow be right to make things worse as if this was a suitable means to making them better in a next step, although it appears consistent that carelessness towards the value of leaving these reservoirs untouched would also entail carelessness towards the handling of crises with them.

Exhibit 1: Shortwave Report Mar 1, 2013 about Corexit (05:30)

Exhibit 2: Shortwave Report Nov 8, 2013 about Corexit (05:22)
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by Radio Free Peaks
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by Stupid Buyer
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"I bought it and all I got is this ominous graph"
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