The Non-Consensual Modification Of Human Genetics

tomrenz  |  This article is pretty science heavy so at this point I also want to acknowledge two additional points. First, I am not a Peter McCullough/Harvey Risch type scientist. I am a lawyer with some science background. That means that I am not the guy that will be creating science, but to do my job as an attorney litigating in this area I have to be able to read and understand the science. I do those things quite well. Second, the information in this article is based simply on reading and understanding the science. There is nothing here I’ve created - I just know how to read.

Disclaimers aside, I want to open this article with a confession. This article was titled using the acronym mRNA but that was intentionally misleading. For purposes of this article - mRNA actually stands for modRNA which is different from mRNA. mRNA is messenger RNA and is found all over in life. modRNA is laboratory modified RNA that has been synthetically created for a purpose. It can be more durable, and have substantially greater impact than a true mRNA and can do many other things. 

Why does this matter? Well let’s start with the COVID “vaccines”. Because mRNA is a weak particle and breaks down easily with a relatively lower risk of messing with your genetics than other gene therapy products (like modRNA) that is what is always talked about in the jabs. The problem is that it is a lie. Here is the FDA label for the Pfizer jab:

You can find the entire label here: https://labeling.pfizer.com/ShowLabeling.aspx?id=14471. Note that different vials are different (denoted by the cap color) but also, under number 3, that one of the ingredients is modRNA. No one is talking about this but it is crucial.

The human body is built on instructions carried in our genes. Here is a great summary of this info from NIH found here - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21134/:

Life as we know it is specified by the genomes of the myriad organisms with which we share the planet. Every organism possesses a genome that contains the biological information needed to construct and maintain a living example of that organism. Most genomes, including the human genome and those of all other cellular life forms, are made of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) but a few viruses have RNA (ribonucleic acid) genomes. DNA and RNA are polymeric molecules made up of chains of monomeric subunits called nucleotides.

To give you an idea of how complicated the genes that make up our body are this description from the same webpage follows:

The human genome, which is typical of the genomes of all multicellular animals, consists of two distinct parts (Figure 1.1):

*The nuclear genome comprises approximately 3 200 000 000 nucleotides of DNA, divided into 24 linear molecules, the shortest 50 000 000 nucleotides in length and the longest 260 000 000 nucleotides, each contained in a different chromosome. These 24 chromosomes consist of 22 autosomes and the two sex chromosomes, X and Y.

*The mitochondrial genome is a circular DNA molecule of 16 569 nucleotides, multiple copies of which are located in the energy-generating organelles called mitochondria.

*Each of the approximately 10¹³ cells in the adult human body has its own copy or copies of the genome, the only exceptions being those few cell types, such as red blood cells, that lack a nucleus in their fully differentiated state. The vast majority of cells are diploid and so have two copies of each autosome, plus two sex chromosomes, XX for females or XY for males - 46 chromosomes in all. These are called somatic cells, in contrast to sex cells or gametes, which are haploid and have just 23 chromosomes, comprising one of each autosome and one sex chromosome. Both types of cell have about 8000 copies of the mitochondrial genome, 10 or so in each mitochondrion.

So think about how complex that makes us. The nuclear genome contains 3.2 billion nucleotides & the mitochondrial genome contains 16.5k. Each of these were designed by God and have evolved over the millennia to work as a singular machine. Now imagine a watch. The watch tells perfect time because a bunch of tiny gears all work perfectly together to move the hands the appropriate amount to point to the proper minutes and seconds. If one of these gears becomes damaged or the wrong size gear is put into place the entire watch would go haywire and fail to work. A watch may have hundreds of parts - our bodies have billions.

With that in mind let’s talk about modRNA (or worse - saRNA). Rather than taking my word for what this is let me share this explanation from Pfizer you can find at https://www.pfizer.com/science/innovation/mrna-technology until they change it (which will likely happen shortly after I publish this):

So Pfizer’s modRNA and saRNA vaccines modify the nucleosides that make up the genes that make up our body.

 

Pinkertons Making A 21st Century Comeback With Impunity

 

counterpunch  |  During a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, my husband and I watched a private security guard help up an unhoused man from the sidewalk. Three white women looked on at the interaction that took place in the trendy Nob Hill neighborhood on August 7, 2023, right in front of a yoga studio.

But the guard was not responding with compassion. Seconds earlier, the tall and very muscular man sporting a flak jacket emblazoned with the word “security,” had walked right by me toward the unhoused man and savagely knocked him to the ground without provocation or warning. Blood streamed from the victim’s face and onto the sidewalk. He stood up as the guard hovered over him and stumbled toward the damaged glasses that had fallen off his face during the assault. The guard, who was twice the man’s size, picked up and offered him the hat that had also fallen off his head and ushered him away.

It’s increasingly common to see private security guards patrolling the streets of Portland—considered one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Not only are businesses banding together to pay for private armed patrols, but even Portland State University is using such a service on its campus. The city of Portland also recently increased its private security budget for City Hall by more than half a million dollars to hire three armed guards.

The trend is a knee-jerk response to sharply rising homelessness. There are tents belonging to unhoused people sprinkled throughout downtown Portland and Nob Hill. Like much of Portland, many of the unhoused are white, but, as Axios in a report about a homelessness survey pointed out, “the rate of homelessness among people in the Portland area who are Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander grew more rapidly than among people who are white.”

Three summers ago, Portland—one of the nation’s whitest cities—was also an epicenter of the nationwide racial justice uprising in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “There are more Black Lives Matter signs in Portland than Black people,” joked one Black resident to the New York Times. As Donald Trump’s administration sent armed federal agents to Portland to quash the uprising, the city’s residents and officials came to symbolize a heroic resistance to rising authoritarianism.

The brutal savagery of what we witnessed in Nob Hill was in jarring contrast to the signs, stickers, and posters that many Portland businesses continue to display on their windows, declaring that “Black Lives Matter,” or “All Genders are Welcome,” and that promise safety to everyone. Everyone but the unhoused, apparently.

Shocked by the violence of the security guard’s assault, my husband and I confronted the perpetrator. He responded that hours earlier the victim had allegedly assaulted a woman in the neighborhood. In the seconds before he was attacked, however, I had walked within a few feet of the unhoused man as he muttered to himself in what sounded like a mix of English and a foreign language. The man had been minding his own business.

In a detailed three-part investigation for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in December 2021, Rebecca Ellis examined how businesses have begun paying unknown sums of money to hire private security patrols. According to Ellis, “Private security firms in Oregon are notoriously underregulated, and their employees are required to receive a fraction of the training and oversight as public law enforcement.” She added, “They remain accountable primarily to their clients, not the public.”

Business owners and residents are claiming that rising homelessness is the result of increased drug addiction, forcing them to resort to private security. But researchers point to high rents and a lack of affordable housing—not drug use—as the cause of people living without homes.

We Don't Take Medically Needy People...,

wave3  |  This story began December 1 at 5 p.m. with a phone call to our newsroom from a horrified University Hospital employee. The employee claimed security had just wheeled an elderly woman all the way out to the corner of Hancock and Ali, just off hospital property, dumped the woman out of the wheelchair on the sidewalk and left.

Minutes later, we shot video of her still in a soiled hospital gown and slippers, breathing hard under a blanket placed over her in 36 degree weather. Her stuff was in a bag next to her.

The caller claimed she saw this a lot.

So I started watching, and on December 16 at 7 p.m., 35 degrees outside, I recorded three security guards surrounding an elderly woman with a walker and slowly escorting her out of the emergency room.

She couldn’t move fast.

It took several minutes to make it all the way to the same corner of Hancock and Ali.

After they had her across the street off the hospital property, the security guards turned around and went back.

When they cleared I caught up to her. She said she couldn’t breathe.

“They told me I would not stay on the premises,” she said.

“Were you there as a patient?” I asked.

“I needed to be a patient because I’m sick,” she said.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“I’ve got COPD,” she said. “I got diabetes.”

“So they wouldn’t treat you?” I asked.

“The doctor talked to me for one minute,” she said.

“And told you what?” I said.

“That I had to leave,” she said.

“What reason did he give you?” I asked.

“He didn’t give me a reason,” she said.

She told me she was homeless.

“I’ve got to go because I’m hurting,” she said. “I’m in pain.”

Matthew Hauber and his mother claimed a similar story. They met us in front of Wayside Christian Mission in the spot where they said he was dumped in October.

“I was in a car crash,” Matthew said. “I completely shattered my hip and pelvis. I got like 30-some screws.”

“They said we can’t find a rehab right now,” Linda Hauber said.

She said when Norton Hospital told her they had a room lined up for Matthew at Wayside, she checked it out.

“I called Wayside just to confirm, and they said ‘No, we can’t do that, we can’t.’” Linda said. “‘We have beds and help find jobs, but we don’t take medically needy people, we don’t do that.’”

She said she then had a conference call with the hospital staff.

“The social worker said ‘We’re going to take him to a shelter’ and I said ‘Which one?’” Linda said. “And they said Wayside Christian Mission. And I said ‘Well I know that’s not true, because I called them and they don’t take them.’ Then the social worker said ‘That’s history, we’ll think of something else.’”
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Linda said the next day, her son was unloaded from a transport vehicle on the curb in the rain on Jackson Street in front of Wayside.

“I thought ‘They’ve dumped my son...’ my garbage I have to put out to the curb, that’s how they dumped my son,” Linda said. “Like garbage.”

Linda said she was in no shape to care for him at home. She died after the interview with us.

“They put all their stuff on the sidewalk over there, dump them off on the sidewalk, get back in their vehicle and get out of here just as fast as they can,” Wayside staffer Perry Layne said.
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Dirty Cop Gideon Cody Raids Newspaper Causing Death Of 98 Year Old Owner...,

boing boing  |  The Marion County Record was raided by local police, who took all of its equipment and even confiscated the personal cellphones of workers there, they claim. The newspaper's co-owner, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, died within hours of the smash-and-grab, and journalistic organizations are sounding the alarm about a shocking attack on the press.

The Marion County Record's co-owner and publisher, Eric Meyer, believes Friday's raid was prompted by a story published Wednesday about a local business owner. Authorities countered they are investigating what they called "identity theft" and "unlawful acts concerning computers," according to a search warrant.

"Based on public reporting, the search warrant that has been published online, and your public statements to the press, there appears to be no justification for the breadth and intrusiveness of the search —particularly when other investigative steps may have been available — and we are concerned that it may have violated federal law strictly limiting federal, state, and local law enforcement's ability to conduct newsroom searches," the letter said.

Turns out the police chief, Gideon Cody, thought that the paper was about to publish a story about him leaving his last job after allegations of sexual misconduct.

Meyer said that, before the raid, his newspaper had investigated Cody's background and his time at the Kansas City Police Department before he came to Marion. He declined to provide details of the newspaper's investigation of Cody. "I really don't think it would be advisable for me to say what it was we were investigating, other than to characterize the charges as serious….," Meyer said. He told The Star the newspaper didn't publish a story about the allegations. "We didn't publish it because we couldn't nail it down to the point that we thought it was ready for publication," he said. "He (Cody) didn't know who our sources were. He does now." Meyer said the newspaper told city leaders they had received information about Cody but could not confirm it.

Another factor in the raid appears to be the anger of a local politically-involved restauranteur:

He and his reporter Phyllis Zorn were kicked out of an August 2nd meeting at a local establishment with US Congressman Jake LaTurner (R-KS) by the City of Marion Police Chief after restaurant owner Kari Newell demanded they leave. Meyer and Zorn published a subsequent story about the hostile encounter, which infuriated Newell and prompted angry Facebook posts. 

The paper then received a tip about Newell having her license suspended in 2008 after a DUI, checked it out, decided not to publish it, and ultimately shared it with the local police because they believed it might've been shared with them as part of Newell's ongoing divorce battle. The police then told Newell what the newspaper shared, and she attended Monday's City Council meeting to make outrageous claims about the newspaper and one of the council members (who had also obtained the letter) violating her rights. She also called Meyer later that evening and erroneously accused him of identity theft. Not even four days later, police arrived at the newspaper office, Meyer's home and the council member's home with search warrants signed by a judge

 Lots of things about to be tried in this small town.

America's Credentialed Class Finds Joy In Making The Masses Obey And Comply

ET  |  Censorship is the cudgel that is out there. Censorship and cancellation are the two cudgels that are being used against us. It’s absolutely remarkable how easily we’ve gone from free speech to asking, “How can I make my way around the censorship that’s here?” We have skipped over the outrage phase, which might have led us to a more vigorous protection. Granted, a lot of boiling frog-type dynamics were built into the censorship regime.

But if you’ve been looking for the last 20 years at our press, September 11th brought a quantum leap in this need to marshal people into categories and to prohibit certain things and certain words and certain positions from entering into the public sphere. In 2001, Susan Sontag, one of the great American intellectuals, wrote about having some questions about the way the new war on terror was being pursued, and she was hooted down.

We’re beginning to see that a lot of this hooting down is not as spontaneous as many of us would like to believe. With the recent Twitter Files, and the case that the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana are trying now, we’re finding out that this was anything but spontaneous. There were a number of government actors working in concert with private actors to achieve a censorship that, frankly, for those of us of a certain age, is unimaginable.

You used to be able to say, “I have the First Amendment. Screw you. I’m going to say what I’m going to say.” We’ve gone from that to, “I have to be on guard because someone’s always watching me.” We went down this hole fairly quickly, and it’s very troubling.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is the treason of the experts, I suppose.

Mr. Harrington:
Yes. If you have been lucky enough to have a mentor in your life, what is a mentor? A mentor is someone who leads you along, who suggests, who looks at you and says, “What skills does this young person have that they are not aware of ?” They do an inquiry into that person and suggest and lead along, and then say implicitly, “How can I help this young person be the best version of themselves as I see it?” That is what an expert does. They do not impose a reality on anyone.

They are very aware of the power they have through their social title, but more often through their moral force. They realize that it’s a sacred thing that they have, and that it needs to be treated with the care that you treat treasures in your life, and that you don’t abuse it. They need to be very rigorous and be able to look at and check some of their ego impulses, and then ask, “Am I using this power to satisfy my ego gratification, more than I am to help the people that I say I am helping?”

It seems that that line has been crossed. There’s a lot of ego gratification that is interfering with what should be a real sober taking of responsibility for a gift of power. Power is a gift in a democratic society. It’s not something you own, and it’s not something there to make people obey you. It’s a gift you have that hopefully you can use in constructive ways that preserve the dignity of those who don’t have as much power as you do.

With the term treason of the experts, I’m playing with history a bit here with the title. It’s from a famous book that was written by Julien Benda after the First World War. He was an intellectual. As you know, the First World War was one of the great cataclysms in the history of the world, with violence that few people had ever seen.

When you go back and study it, you can look at what the violence was about, and the cynicism with which the violence was employed. Leaders marched their hundreds of thousands of troops so that they could get a tiny strip of land. It was an open auctioning of soldiers to be fed into the machine.

Benda wrote this book in 1927 called, “La Trahison des Clercs,” the Treason of the Clerisy. What he’s playing with is that in the world after the late 19th century, the church clerisy began to recede as an important element in society, to be superseded by the intellectual. The independent intellectual was made possible through newspapers and the publishing industry. The new clerisy, as he’s suggesting, are the free intellectuals.

He suggests that the role of the free intellectual is to always be rigorous and to always place themselves above their passions to the best extent they can and say, “What’s really going on here?” He wrote a devastating critique in the mid-1920s in which he takes on both the French intellectuals and the German intellectuals. He said, “They betrayed our trust. They acted as cheerleaders. They sent young men off to war to get destroyed, and became cheerleaders of gross propaganda.” He said, “Come on. We’ve got to reassume the responsibility that goes with having been granted a credential or a moment in power.” The first thing I thought about when this began three years ago was World War I.

Mr. Jekielek:
This being Covid?

Mr. Harrington:
Covid. The Covid triennial that we’re in now. In March of 2020, and you’ll see it in the first essay in the book where I say, “What’s going on here?” My mind immediately went to World War I. There were big forces that were pushing us in ways that didn’t add up. There were hidden hands in places making us do things that simply were not justified at the level of pure rational analysis. I was very grateful that I had studied a bit of World War I.

There’s another wonderful book where you can see some of the madness. It’s by Stefan Zweig, who was a wonderful intellectual back in that time. He talks about what happened in 1914 in Vienna. He thought, “We’ve reached the highest civilization that the world has ever seen.” He was a Viennese Jew. His friends had been integrated into Viennese life, and they were leading Viennese life in many ways.

All of a sudden, they were saying, “Don’t you want to go off to the trenches? Shouldn’t you be going off to the trenches? Shouldn’t you be excited? I’m going to go. Isn’t it wonderful?” He began to say, “What’s going on in this world that I thought was civilized?” I had the very same reaction in March of 2020.

Mr. Jekielek:
Some people think that this is being done for their own good. It’s not that there are nefarious forces with their own agendas. A lot of these folks genuinely believe in this incredibly dystopian vision of the world, that this is really the right thing to do, and that it will be good for me and good for you. There is a line that I flagged in the book, “Ever more open disdain for the intelligence of the citizenry.” There’s hubris here. That’s particularly infuriating, isn’t it?

Mr. Harrington:
Absolutely. It’s condescension, and I’ve always had a very thin skin for people being condescending to me. One of the nice things that my parents did in general was they talked to us as sentient beings almost from the beginning. It’s one of the things I’ve sought to do with both my children and with my students.

The condescending idea is that you need to dole it out and say, “If I told you, you might not understand. I’m coming from a place of complexity that you can’t understand. You’ll just have to trust me.” This is very insulting to people, and it’s antidemocratic. That’s just a fact.

The premise of democracy, as we understand it, and as it was formed in this country in the late 18th century, was that the farmer, the worker, and the lawyer were all citizens in the same measure. Granted, there would be a natural pecking order in terms of certain skill sets that would emerge. But in the public space, no one was inherently better or in a place to tell someone else what they need to know and how they need to live. It’s one of the great things about this country.

 

Norfolk Southern Has Track Safety Detection Systems That Are Not Maintained/Not In Use

freightwaves  |   One union of rail workers has questioned declining maintenance standards following the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which forced the evacuation of the 5,000-person town earlier this month. 

A device that can play a role in preventing derailments is the wayside hot-box detector. It uses infrared sensors to detect bearings, axles or other components of a rail car that are overheating, then uses radio signals to flag rail crews of any overheated components. 

The rail car that initiated the derailment had an overheated wheel bearing, according to a Tuesday report from the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB is still investigating the cause of the derailment and will publish a preliminary report in two weeks. 

Wayside hot-box detectors are typically placed every 25 miles along a railroad, according to a Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) report. Their use has contributed to a 59% decrease in train accidents caused by axle- and bearing-related factors since 1990, according to a 2017 Association of American Railroads study.

Declining head counts have led to these mechanisms receiving less preventative maintenance, according to an official from the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen union. 

The FRA has no regulations requiring the use or maintenance of hot-box detectors.

A hot-box detector in East Palestine notified the crew moments before the train derailed, according to the NTSB’s report. 

It’s unclear if any hot-box detector prior to East Palestine notified crews. A surveillance video shared on Facebook from an industrial facility in Salem, Ohio, about 20 miles from East Palestine, suggests the train’s axle was already on fire. 

Norfolk Southern did not respond to a request for comment, and the FRA declined to comment on the record. 

From 5 ‘electronic leaders’ to zero in derailment region

Specialized signalmen called “electronic leaders” specialize in maintaining devices like hot-box detectors.

As recently as three years ago, Norfolk Southern employed five electronic leaders in the area of its rail network that includes East Palestine. Today, it employs zero, according to Christopher Hand, director of research at the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen.

The area in question is Eastern Region North – Division B, shown in red on the map. It runs east to west from Mansfield, Ohio, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and north to south from Morgantown, West Virginia, to Astabula, Ohio. It also includes rail track in Pittsburgh, as well as Youngstown, Ohio.

Biden DOJ Backing Norfolk Southern’s Bid To Block Lawsuits

levernews  |  A looming Supreme Court decision could end up making it easier for the railroad giant whose train derailed in Ohio this month to block lawsuits, including from victims of the disaster.

In the case against Norfolk Southern, the Biden administration is siding with the railroad in its conflict with a cancer-stricken former rail worker. A high court ruling for Norfolk Southern could create a national precedent limiting where workers and consumers can bring cases against corporations.

The lawsuit in question, filed initially in a Pennsylvania county court in 2017, deals with a state law that permits plaintiffs to file suit against any corporation registered to do business there, even if the actions that gave rise to the case occurred elsewhere.

In its fight against the lawsuit, Norfolk Southern is asking the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling, overturn Pennsylvania’s law, and restrict where corporations can be sued, upending centuries of precedent.

Oral arguments in the case were held last fall, and a ruling is expected from the Supreme Court in the coming months.

If the court rules in favor of Norfolk Southern, it could overturn plaintiff-friendly laws on the books in states including Pennsylvania, New York, and Georgia that give workers and consumers more leeway to choose where they take corporations to court — an advantage national corporations already enjoy, as they often require customers and employees to agree to file litigation in specific locales whose laws make it harder to hold companies accountable.

Limiting lawsuits is exactly what the American Association of Railroads (AAR), the industry’s primary lobbying group, wants. The organization filed a brief on the side of Norfolk Southern in the case, arguing that a ruling in favor of the plaintiff would open up railroads to more litigation.

It is also apparently what the Biden administration wants — the Justice Department filed its own brief in favor of Norfolk Southern.

Should Norfolk Southern prevail, the company could use the ruling to challenge other lawsuits on the grounds that they’re filed in the wrong venue, said Scott Nelson, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which filed a brief backing the plaintiff in the Pennsylvania case.

Such a decision could affect lawsuits filed by residents exposed to hazardous chemicals as the result of accidents in other states — such as the East Palestine, Ohio, derailment disaster, which occurred five miles west of the Pennsylvania state line.

 

You'll Know Things Are Serious If Obama Goes To East Palestine And "Drinks" Some Water...,

doomberg  |  For the rest of the country, let’s take a step back and dig into what has transpired. For this exercise, we will rely heavily on the extraordinarily detailed resource page put up by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shortly after the event began. The site represents the agency’s best efforts to be as transparent and timely as possible in releasing information to the public.

Before proceeding, we need to address the fact that there are many on social media who are convinced the government is somehow covering up the severity of this event – hence the hyperbolic and totally irresponsible references to Chernobyl. In our experience, the EPA would not look to minimize the severity of an industrial accident of this type. Quite the opposite. For the rest of this piece, we will take their reports, measurements, and commentary at face value. To do otherwise is to assume the EPA would fabricate complex technical data on the fly to deceive the public and protect the very corporate interests they otherwise infuriate with their harsh oversight on a daily basis.

The most important document on the EPA’s website is the full accounting of each of the 52 derailed cars. The two-page PDF file details what was in each car and what happened to them during the accident. Twenty-seven cars suffered no major damage or significant leaks, and one is listed as having an unknown status. Let’s systematically walk through the other 24:

• Two hoppers of solid polyethylene were consumed in the initial fire shortly after the derailment. Polyethylene is the major component of trash bags and plastic buckets. Nobody would recommend getting too close to such a fire, but the environmental damage here is minimal.

• Four hoppers of solid polyvinyl were consumed in the initial fire. Polyvinyl is the major component in PVC plumbing pipes available for purchase at your local hardware store. While its combustion fumes are certainly more toxic than those observed with polyethylene, essentially every major home fire in the US results in significant burning of PVC pipes. Unfortunate for sure, but not a catastrophe.

• One hopper of semolina, a coarsely milled durum wheat, was consumed by the initial fire. This is the functional equivalent of burning wood.

• One box car of medical-grade cotton balls was consumed by the initial fire.

• One box car of sheet steel is listed as being consumed by the initial fire, although it is unclear to us how sheet steel burns. We suspect this material was damaged by the surrounding fire to the point where it could not be commercially salvaged. 

• One box car of frozen vegetables was consumed by the initial fire.

• One hopper of something called “powder flakes” was partially burned, and the fire is noted as having been extinguished. 

• One tank car of propylene glycol was breached, and most of the load was spilled into the local environment. Propylene glycol is the dominant ingredient in aircraft deicing fluids, a substance routinely and openly sprayed onto aircraft packed with passengers at major airports across the country. It is also a common ingredient in many processed foods.

• One tank car spilled an unknown amount of ethylhexyl acrylate. This highly reactive monomer is used in the production of many household adhesives. The material is considered moderately hazardous and is readily biodegradable.

• Two tank cars of petroleum lube oil were spilled. As the name suggests, this product is derived from the refining of oil. As far as oil spills go in the US, two tank cars worth is relatively inconsequential.

• One tank car of diethylene glycol was fully breached and a second lost at least part of its load to the local environment. Although the compound has historically been used in criminal poisoning, according to this study: “Diethylene glycol is readily biodegradable and unlikely to bioaccumulate. Diethylene glycol has low potential to adsorb to soil and sediment. Diethylene glycol is of low toxicity concern to aquatic organisms.”

• One tank car of butyl acrylate was either lost to the local environment or consumed in the initial fire. This compound has low acute toxicity.

• One tank car of polypropylene glycol was breached and spilled into the local environment. This material is considered to be relatively benign.

If you are keeping track, we have accounted for all rail cars involved in this derailment except for the five that contained vinyl chloride. Given their prominent role in the media narrative observed in the past few days, these five deserve special treatment. Although none of the five rail cars containing the now infamous substance were damaged by the initial derailment and fire, in the days after the accident, local officials became increasingly concerned that the material could explode in an uncontrolled fashion. Given the circumstances, the decision was made to isolate the cars and implement a controlled burn. Here’s a quote from Ohio Governor Mike DeWine’s office announcing the decision ahead of time:

“Following new modeling information conducted this morning by the Ohio National Guard and U.S. Department of Defense, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro are ordering an immediate evacuation in a one-mile by two-mile area surrounding East Palestine which includes parts of both Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The vinyl chloride contents of fiveon.

Even though this, and all information quoted in this piece, is readily available to any reporter with access to Google, countless references to the dangers presented by phosgene are giving the public anxiety over the decision to execute the controlled burn. To pick one example from many dozens, a Newsweek story, titled Did Control Burn of Toxic Chemicals Make Ohio Train Derailment Worse?, includes the following sentence: “Phosgene is a deadly gas that was used in chemical warfare during World War I.” The report goes on to quote – and we kid you not – a TikTok video from an “entrepreneur” for more insight.

Sigh.

Where do things stand now? For the answer, we return to the EPA’s incident response website and quote from a statement that was widely available the same day Newsweek published its report:

“On the evening of Feb. 13, U.S. EPA discontinued air monitoring for phosgene and hydrogen chloride community air monitoring. After the fire was extinguished on Feb. 8, the threat of vinyl chloride fire producing phosgene and hydrogen chloride no longer exists. U.S. EPA will continue 24-hour community air monitoring for other chemicals of concern. 

As of end of the day February 13th, U.S. EPA has screened indoor air at 396 homes, with 100 homes remaining, and 65 homes on the schedule for today.”

There are many well-documented reasons to question communications issued from government agencies these days – and the widespread alarm over the incident lays bare the chronic stress such distrust lets simmer under the surface for much of the population. If we have earned any credibility with our readership over these last two years of publication, please take this to heart: residents of Mississippi need not stock up on bottled water, at least not because of this.

That is not to say there isn’t a cause for nationwide upset here. As we will detail in a future piece, this incident demands a much-needed light be shined on the scandalous state of the US rail industry. That we even allow vinyl chloride to be shipped in this fashion is unnecessary and unacceptable. As few are aware, there are other, even more, dangerous materials on trains passing by residential neighborhoods every single day. It would take but a few simple rule changes to chemical industry regulation to alleviate much of this risk.

Stay tuned for more.

Railroad Workers Tried To Tell Us Last Year Until Biden And Congress SHUT THEM DOWN!!!

thenation  |  As public outrage has grown over the toxic fallout from last week’s fiery derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, Ohio, the urgent questions behind this disaster echo the past year’s confrontations over working conditions in the lightly regulated rail industry. Indeed, the catastrophe in Ohio—together with another hazardous derailment in Houston, Tex., just a week later—drives home the steep costs in health and well-being that we all incur when we fail to heed rail workers’ calls for more regulation and adequate staffing mandates.

As rail workers sought to win basic guarantees of staffing support and sick leave from rail carriers long accustomed to selling labor short and winning major regulatory concessions from federal agencies, they stressed how the unsustainable demands placed on their working lives would result in disasters just like the one in East Palestine. The northeast Ohio village of about 5,000 people is 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh and 20 miles south of Youngstown; already those metropolitan areas are under alert for the air and water contamination originating from the Palestine derailment. And in Palestine proper, many residents are already reporting troubling health symptoms and dying area wildlife as they weigh the risks of remaining exposed to the toxic fumes and chemical leaks from the derailed tanker cars carrying hazardous materials.

In the immediate aftermath of the derailment, rail officials ordered that the vinyl chloride hauled by five of the Norfolk Southern cars in the 150-car train be burned off to prevent a still greater explosion—but that action sent hydrogen chloride and phosgene, two dangerous gasses, spuming into the air. EPA investigators have since identified other hazardous chemicals the train had been hauling, including ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, isobutylene, and butyl acrylate. And the EPA has released a report saying that chemicals from the derailment have leached into the soil and water in the aftermath of the accident.

“We’ve been trying to share our concerns around this for a while now,” Ross Grooters, current rail employee and cochair of Railroad Workers United said. “It wasn’t a matter of if this was going to happen. It was a ‘when and where,’ and unfortunately, there’s a high likelihood that this will happen again, somewhere, if the root causes of the issues aren’t addressed.”

Rank-and-file workers organizing with Railroad Workers United (RWU) have waged high-profile pressure campaigns to improve rail safety and retain staffing. Jason Doering, an RWU organizer and a legislative representative of SMART Nevada, says that focusing industry and regulatory attention on the threat of derailments has been a continual challenge. Rail workers with Fight for Two Person Crews have been waging an allied campaign to lobby state and federal lawmakers to create and enforce standards for safer train staffing: a mandatory minimum of two person crews on freight trains. Last year, the Federal Railroad Administration proposed to reinstate a two-person crew rule and opened a public hearing in December 2022. During the public comment period for the rule change, more than 13,000 comments were logged in favor of it.

With the country’s attention now fixed on the disaster in East Palestine, reformers say that the time to act is now. “This is an opportunity for us to really identify safety risks in the industry,” said Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO (TTD). He noted that the TTD has been working on improving rail safety for workers and the communities in the path of freight traffic. “I think it’s something that you’ll hear from a lot of rail workers and people who’ve been seeing sort of the changes in the industry, the deterioration of the drastic reductions in workforce and the focus on speed over safety.”