I love the way the Neocon spin machine works. They piss in the soup, then tell everyone to stop whining until it can be proven conclusively, scientifically and legally, that it's really bad for us.

TB's posts on this topic, particularly, from the very start, have been designed to deflect concern and minimize the effects of this spill, and to distract us from its potential and demonstrated consequences. They've seized on every factoid that can be used to interpret the spill as benign, and rigorously attacked and ridiculed every speculation and concern that suggests otherwise, ridiculing them and dismissing them as machinations of the great Liberal Conspiracy. They have used outrageous bogus calculations concerning dilutions, concentrations, etc, somehow ignoring that most folks here are technically capable of seeing right through the smoke and mirrors, which makes one wonder if perhaps they are targeted at a specific audience. The insistence on misleadingly comparing the amount of oil to the volume of water is so obviously contrived that one wonders how anyone with any technical training could have the audacity to bring it up on a science-related board.

The propaganda campaign was initiated from the very start of the crisis, to cushion and mitigate the effects of the PR disaster, and has been constant and insistent ever since. And of course, when rebuttals have been offered, they have been immediately attacked and pooh-poohed as hysteria, if not downright conspiracy. This has all the characteristics of an orchestrated and deliberate propaganda campaign, designed specifically to blunt legitimate concern for the environment and protect corporate interests from potential damage and even criticism. And this is not the first time, or for the first issue, these little campaigns have been rehearsed on these boards.

This is why I am convinced the Zone should never become fully public. Like similar forums throughout the net, they are systematically being infiltrated by agents of a specific partisan agenda in order to give that agenda an illusion of legitimacy.

Tell the truth. Who's been fooling who?