That was so long I gave up even scrolling to the end on my phone. It might not have an end, as far as I know.
If you weren't brain damaged as a child, you'd have a longer attention span.
I don't remember what set me off down this track, but remember 'crack babies' who were going to be irreparably damaged and ineducable and probably superpredators, and that all turned out to be mostly a myth but boy did people believe that poor minority women's bad behavior was going to turn their children into animals? And in contrast, the real hazard that produces damaged children is an industrial problem, not something that can be traced to maternal misbehavior.
It's not nearly as good a story that way, is it?
And in contrast, the real hazard that produces damaged children is an industrial problem, not something that can be traced to maternal misbehavior.
Those industrialists wouldn't have poisoned the environment with lead if their mother had brought them up right.
Long, but it's a good article and the guy was really dedicated to getting rid of lead. The amazing thing is that people knew it was toxic since antiquity, and they just kept right on using it, though earlier uses weren't as damaging as the petroleum thing.
I wonder if his dedication to the cause came from a "Boy Named Sue" syndrome. Clair Patterson? Really?
One of my favourite parts of the lead exposure hypothesis is that it predicts that the Middle East (where lead was added to petrol for a lot longer than elsewhere) will finally begin to calm the hell down in another ten years or so. Which will be something of a relief.
I think the concept of subclinical poisoning took a long time to develop. People knew poison could kill you, but the idea of something that caused subtle damage over a long period was hard to process.
I thought Clair was a male name back in the day? Isn't the other pedophile in Lolita named Clair?
8: yes, exactly. "The poison is the dose" and all that; Mithridates he died old, unlike Cousin Norman Urquhart. People had an understandable belief that there might be an amount of something that would kill you, and a smaller amount that would make you sick, but anything below that would be just fine, even if you kept taking it again and again.
Based on motor traffic density in Afghanistan I'm thinking 7 is maybe not the whole explanation.
...but the idea of something that caused subtle damage over a long period was hard to process.
Except for masturbation.
Which suggests the global warming people should say increases in atmospheric CO2 cause young people to touch themselves, instead of using science to show it will endanger human existence.
Drum has pushed the decreased lead will decrease terrorism line, but terrorism doesn't seem to me to be the same kind of impulsiveness. But what do I know? I guess I know what it feels like to have a lead-addled brain, since I was in Iran until 1978. It's also interesting to think that all these older dudes running the country also have lead-addled brains. Trump growing up in NY? No wonder he's demented.
15: well, I think we're all Generation Lead, wherever we grew up. That's why the kids keep looking at us funny. They didn't start taking lead out of petrol until the 1980s, by which time it was too late for us.
More seriously, there might be a connection between impulsive crimes of violence and terrorism; the prison radicalisation pipeline definitely exists, and if there are fewer young violent criminals now, there'll be fewer terrorists later. And less lead-heavy people on both sides are also more chilled and less impulsive, and therefore less likely to commit the kind of acts of impulsive violence that, in politically suitable situations, lead to increased terrorism - shooting protesters, say, or chucking stones at soldiers.
Tragically, the decline in lead-related terrorism will be near-impossible to extricate from the confounding decline in oil revenue-related terrorism.
Just need to hop on over to the control universe.
Very few wars before cars used gas, it's true.
This may be pure pollyannaism, and I think I've said it before, but I would believe that being less lead-poisoned is sort of grossly noticeable among current teenagers. That is, my kids' friends and classmates seem distinctly better adjusted and behaved than kids I remember when I was a lead-addled teen myself.
Or I could just be imagining it, which is also likely.
We had shitheads, but not in a way today's kids can understand.
Anyway, I also think today's kids are nicer than we were, which may be confounded by the fact that I'm not living near where I grew up. And they appear to be behaving patiently without smoking.
7: From Wikipedia: "As of June 2016 only Algeria, Yemen, and Iraq continue widespread use of leaded gasoline." :-/
11: Also Clair and Claire, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Lee_Chennault
That was so long I stayed in bed longer than intended yesterday morning reading it. Sometimes I lie in bed sort of mindlessly hunting something of interest, other times it's a fairly discrete and intentional bop through the online world, and when there are no more interesting things, I start my day. Yesterday took the form of the former because that article swallowed what was actually the latter.
26: It was long, but well written and interesting throughout.
I had issues with the writing style but the content was worth it: Patterson really is an excellent biographical subject. Two thoughts:
1) material/experimental purity complex leads to massive positive social change (see also hand-washing), whereas ideological purity complex, as in the academic-math editorial several posts below, leads to impasse. It's weirdly cheering to see Patterson's obsessiveness triumph; I feel I've mostly seen it doom worthy causes.
2) Kehoe, the industry shill, is also a great portrait: déformation professionelle as banality of evil. I am thoroughly unnerved by how much more likely I am to be this guy than to be Patterson, and, even if I beat those odds, how much more likely I am to be a failed Patterson than a successful one.
I was going to try to read it, but ogged discouraged me.
28.2 -- Sure, there's the banality of evil, but Thomas Midgley, Jr.
may have been working for an ancient seaborne intelligence that hates other life. That's the exoticism of evil.
30: That's what they said about teenagers fucking vampires.
31: You beat me to my favorite Midgley fact! He also was rendered extremely ill after demonstrating the safety of tetraethyl lead by washing his hands in it. Generations of journalists since have tried to play gotcha with less success. "Would you drink this cup of fracking water?" Oh hell, no.
30: It's about a chapter in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.
My substantive comment is that stories of this type are so common, with a mustache-twirling industry-funded scientist and an academic who risks (and often nearly loses) his or her career to spread the truth. It's hard to distinguish crackpot from iconoclastic hero in real time, unfortunately.
33.2: That was a good book to keep in the bathroom back when computers were too big to take in with you and phones too small to read much on.
29
That's OK, with your lead-addled brain you probably didn't have the concentration to get through it anyways.
SPOILERS for Supergirl:
The season finale involved defeating an alien invasion by filling the world's atmosphere with lead, which was toxic to aliens but harmless to humans. Midgely is apparently still at it from beyond the grave.
Agree entirely with 35. What a terrible business.
37: Christ, you weren't kidding even a little. They didn't even have the decency to make it a new fictional metal (there was another one in the same episode, only important for about three minutes).
I liked the movie Evolution where, by looking at a periodic table, they were table to figure out that the aliens were poised by Selson Blue.
Cousin Norman Urquhart
I'm by definition about to ruin what I say, but I love that there's a passing, unexplained Dorothy Sayers reference. (Would it be more obvious to an average book-reading Brit?)
Well, yes. Completely. (Also just factually wrong. No, prime ministers are not immune from terrorism. Both Thatcher and Major came very close to being murdered by the IRA.)
And now speaking for those near the royal family, Lord Mountbatten.
Also, Airey Neave was in opposition when he was assassinated by the INLA, but if they'd waited another 6 months he would certainly have been in the cabinet. And the IRA injured Norman Tebbit (though not as badly as his wife) while he was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.