Week in Our Dumb World
Poison
That’s lead.
That cloud in the picture? It’s lead dust. It’s a profoundly poisonous substance.
A worker took that picture in factory filled with inadequate safety protections and a horrifying safety record.
That picture is from a factory that OSHA hasn’t visited since 2014.
This is a nightmarish story of the complete collapse of regulatory infrastructure and greed. It’s the story of what it costs to recycle batteries when they’re all used up. It makes me shudder and think about the thousands of other plants and factories where things like this are happening and we don’t know about it because a reporter hasn’t found that story.
When I think about the things that feel most wrong in this country, I think about workers walking into a cloud of poison at a multi-million dollar business while knowing that regulators are too hamstrung to protect them and the company is giving them none of the necessary safety equipment. I think about them doing that for twenty dollars an hour.
When OSHA returned in December 2014 to investigate lead exposure after a complaint, the agency made more critical mistakes.
OSHA inspector Olja Correa toured the factory with the company’s safety officersand viewed a year’s worth of air-monitoring data, notes show.
At the time, tests indicated the company regularly had air-lead readings dozens and hundreds of times above the federal limit. In the furnace that year, more than a third of the readings were too high for the respirator assigned to most workers.
Just months earlier, in June 2014, the amount of lead in the air had reached life-threatening levels in the baghouse. Cadmium, a heavy metal linked to lung and prostate cancer, was recorded hundreds of times above the federal limit.
Correa’s report was so sparse, it’s unclear whether she toured the baghouse during her walk-through, and OSHA would not say whether she did. Her report only says that she “observed the battery recycling process.”
Correa gave Gopher one week before she returned to conduct her own air monitoring.
When Correa came back, she attached small monitoring devices to the uniforms of at least three employees. The workers were selected by company managers, according to an employee with direct knowledge of the visit. One handpicked worker who was supposed to represent the conditions inside Gopher’s battery-breaking process spent his days working outdoors, where conditions were safer.
OSHA’s inspection manual says inspectors are supposed to test workers who have the highest exposure. The amounts Correa measured weren’t close to what Gopher had logged in its own records.
Federal rules allow workers to be exposed to 50 micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air averaged over an eight-hour shift.
The highest air-lead level Correa recorded during the federal inspection was 738 micrograms per cubic meter in the furnace area. That was above the federal limit, but 10 days before, the plant’s internal data showed readings nearly 20 times higher.
Correa did not assess the plant’s ventilation system, according to records.
The inspector and her supervisors decided to issue no citations, noting in their report that Gopher was trying to control lead exposures.
Correa told the Times she could not remember details about her Gopher visit, saying she has done hundreds of inspections for the agency.
Hours before OSHA closed the case, on March 4, 2015, company data showed the amount of lead in the plant’s baghouse once more surpassed life-threatening levels. The concentration was measured at more than 200,000 micrograms per cubic meter.
Regulators haven’t measured lead at the factory again.
Always Always Always Get A Lawyer
I cannot stress this enough, if you are doing anything important please get a lawyer.
This is a profoundly upsetting story of surrogacy gone wrong leading to a court battle that must have been profoundly painful for all involved. Every step sounds horrifying and makes me feel terrible.
This story of a highly contentious custody dispute in Massachusets made me want to tear my hair out. First because Massachusets apparently doesn’t have a surrogacy law (?!?!) and second because these people could have prevented all of this with a conversation with a lawyer who JUST MIGHT have advised them that it was unwise to engage in a good faith arrangement for something as emotionally fraught as surrogacy.
This is also a good reminder of why we need better public access to civil legal aid. I suspect that part of the reason no one in this story sought out a lawyer was that the cost seemed prohibitive at the time. If there was a robust civil legal aid service where they could have had a free consultation with a family law specialist, I suspect that the specialist, after taking 20-30 minutes to calm down, would have told them to not do this under any circumstance.
Always get a lawyer. Please.
When a Massachusetts woman and her partner learned neither of them could carry a child, the women turned to their Facebook friends for help.
“[W]ho wants to pop out a baby for my [fiancee] and I?!” the Massachusetts woman posted in early 2017, according to court documents.
It wasn’t long before she received a private message.
“Hey, if you and [fiancee] were serious about a baby … then I would do it,” wrote a woman who said she was childhood friends with the fiancee.
She offered to conceive a baby with her boyfriend and give the women custody so they could raise the child as their own. The women would not have to pay her or cover medical expenses, she said.
“I get some people say they couldn’t do it or it would be heartless to just give up a baby,” she continued, “but it’s not because it would be helping out.”
Without meeting in person or involving lawyers, the women — who are not named in court documents — agreed to what they viewed as an informal surrogacy. But the relationship between the parties soured after the child’s birth in December 2017, when the biological parents decided they wanted the baby back.
Isaac Newton: Sorcerer Supreme
I love the way this emphasizes the process aspects of science. It doesn’t matter that alchemy is nonsense, what matters is that alchemists sought evidence and conducted experiments to prove (or disprove their nonsense).
It’s a good reminder that the best science embraces the mystery and magic in the world and tries to engage with it instead of dismissing it out of hand.
This confirms the accuracy of every depiction for Isaac Newton as an evil Wizard because he was an evil Wizard.
Newton’s chymistry followed this tradition in many ways, Newman says, especially his view of nature as a riddle that only a gnostic brotherhood of alchemists could unravel. At the same time, Newton was unique among alchemists for uniting his chymistry with other, seemingly disconnected scientific obsessions of his, such as optics. Newman even argues that Newton’s famous demonstration that white light was merely a combination of colored light rays owes a significant debt to the alchemy of Boyle.
In the 1660s, Boyle got tangled up in a dispute with scholastic philosophers over the essence of matter. These adherents of Aristotle believed that once a substance dissolved into something else, it lost its identity forever. Boyle devised an experiment to dissolve camphor, an aromatic chemical, in acid, at which point the camphor lost its scent. This agreed with scholastic thought. But Boyle then added water to the solution—at which point the camphor reappeared, regaining its odor and all other properties. Boyle could pull similar tricks with dissolved metals like gold. This classic alchemy proved scholastics wrong, Boyle said: Dissolved substances don’t lose their identity.
The scholastics retorted that there was no proof it was really the same camphor. When the water was added, the solution might have created the camphor anew. But Boyle rejected this reasoning. Why, he argued, should the camphor’s essence be any different because it came from an experiment and not from nature? If it talked like camphor and walked like camphor, it was camphor, period.
Adult Swim
There is no such thing as the “best” adult swim show. Part of the beauty of nonsense drive humor is that it’s such a personal experience and that makes it unpredictable and impossible to compare. Its hard to explain why it’s funny to someone who doesn’t get it, because it takes a vast ocean of cultural references to truly untangle why some of these things are as funny as they are. And sometimes it’s just an asshole shaped like a milkshake.
This is a small article that lightly details the genesis of Adult Swim. I wish it was longer. I’m mainly using it to post these clips of my three favorite adult swim shows.
Lucy, Daughter of the Devil. This is a mostly forgotten show and I absolutely cannot get enough of it. Especially middle eastern DJ Jesus. He absolutely kills me.
Squidbillies. I cannot explain how much I love this show or why. It’s mean spirited nonsense and yet I can spend hours watching Early Cuyler.
The Venture Brothers. Every character in this show perfectly straddles the line between tragedy and comedy at all times. I lied. This is objectively the best adult swim show.
WILLIS The idea for “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” started with a [expletive] fast food restaurant that tried to use all the scraps of meat they weren’t allowed by the F.D.A. to put into a hamburger, wadded together. We saw Meatwad as this poor, neglected creature — I think his line in his first script was like [in Meatwad voice], “Please, God, kill me.” I did the voice, and I can’t tell you how many times people said, “I don’t understand what he’s saying; you need to recast him.” But we stuck to our guns. I always thought of it like Willie Nelson, who sings real quietly, and so everyone is on the edge of their seat trying to listen to what he’s saying. As a result, you’re more into it. At least, that was my excuse! [Laughs.]
WILLIS We were beating all the networks in the most prized demographic: men with money to spend. I distinctly remember bumping into the guy running ad sales in the bathroom. He said something to the effect of, “Wow, you really pulled that [expletive] out of the fire!” I was like, “What do you mean?” And he said, “I saw that thing [“Aqua Teen Hunger Force”] and I can’t believe I have to promote it as one of our new shows, but you guys really turned that around.” It was good to know we were thought of so highly. [Laughs.]
Missing White Woman Syndrome
No Reason.