IMHO the exaggeration of threats and wild stories tends to numb people to real and practical issues.

Imaging your eating a can of beans. Why you might be doing is anyone's guess. But there you are.

Case one: Someone comes in a voice both and breathless and panicked he tells you - DON"T EAT THE BEANS BECAUSE THERE ARE ALIEN LARVA INSIDE THE CAN. ALIENS WILL COME OUT OF YOU CHEST IN 24 HOURS.

You - Ummm ... sure. Get bent. And you finish off your beans.


Case two: Your eating your beans and someone comes over, introduces himself and tells you that 'Dude, I saw on the news this morning that that brand of beans is on a recall list because it is heavily infected with botulism. You might not want to eat it'

You - You stop eating and try to find out about any recall. If you start to feel sick you get yourself to a hospital.

Tsunamis traveling at 600 mph - <blink>

News that the vapors from the oil might make people with breathing difficulties sick ... You call your aunt with asthma because she lives right on the beach. You offer to put her up in your home. Which is 25 miles inland.

In my experience you don't get better response by exaggeration the situation. You might get a panicked, emotional response but it won't last, as soon as they slow down and thing most adults will start asking questions, and after that they don't listen to you.

The problem is that on the internet nobody knows your name and you can change your name like changing underwear. Many times I've seen the same people referencing the same e-mail alarmist drivel, going from site to site reposting it like it was a revelation from God. Ive also seen it go around the circle and the person that started the rumor use someone else reposting it as confirmation of their story.

This is basically how "intelligence" was confirmed going into Iraq. Set your standards low and use people retelling your rumor to confirm your story and you can 'confirm' anything.

Funny thing is that while it looks like there are always new stories if you keep track of them you start to find patterns. The whole 'toxic tsunami' coming ashore seems pretty much like the rumors in the 70s about the chance that USSR would sink a ship or ships full of uranium deep off our coast to take advantage of the dynamics of deep water 'linear stacked', 'open ended', nuclear detonations.

The physics was supposed to be that if you packed uranium around a nuclear weapon and sank it deep the high pressure would allow the small weapon to create a much larger explosion that would, at the end of the sequence, detonate the 'hydrogen in the seawater' to create a weapon of nearly unlimited power.

The story was that the Russians either had, or would sink a line of such bomb ships along the east coast and detonate them all at one. The mythology was this would send a huge radioactive wave twenty miles inland and destroy the entire east coast.

It was pretty gripping stuff if you were young, gullible, easily excited, and had a desire to have 'insider' 'intelligence information' from 'special' sources.

So what we have here is a non-nuclear version of the same story transposed onto the Gulf Coast with Jews, or somebody (insert favorite villain here) making/allowing it to happen.