This Stuff May Kill You

Some thoughts...

Did you know? After the millions and millions of dollars spent to remove asbestos, particularly from schools and hospitals, it is legal to install asbestos insulation. Why? any sane person would ask.

Because of the friendship of W R Grace and the Bush family.

Grace, who operated the vermiculite mine in Libby, Montana, that sickened nearly a third of the town with mesothelioma and asbestosis.

Vermiculite is a particularly insidious form of asbestos. The relatively tiny size of the fibers renders every standard filter useless.

Grace resisted issuing even the most rudimentary protection to workers. To do so would be to admit they knew there was a problem.

Mesothelioma has been rendered a joke by TV ambulance chasers. In fact, it is a long, slow, painful death.

Conditions in Libby were so bad that the wives who washed the miners' clothes contracted the diseases.

The dumbest president (until #40, #41, and, the clown dunce #43, lowered the bar to people who can't work a zipper) was Warren G Harding. His Teapot Dome held the 20th Century record for scandal until Nixon made Teapot Dome look like a joke. Seriously, does anyone even know what state Teapot Dome (an oilfield) is in?

Fact: not only are the Bushes idiots, they have the morals of badgers.

Chances are, unless you specced your home, it contains asbestos insulation.

Whatever happened to radon? It was the Hidden Killer, until the easy dollars for remediation went away and, apparently, so the threat. Except it is deemed responsible for 21,000 lung cancer deaths annually

Lead paint? The only way to easily recognize lead paint is, as it dries, and cracks, the cracks are square, not long strips.

There is an elemental reason for this. Minerals, salt, for instance, have the same shape regardless of size. Crystals. A salt crystal, whether molecular, Morton's table, sea salt, or rock salt, is always a cube, representing its most basic elemental structure.

Same as lead, which is also and always a cube.

Fishermen who use live bait have for years used lead "sinkers", weights to keep the bait from floating. And the preferred method of attaching the smaller weights, called split shot, is to bite the sinker split closed on the line.

Actually ingesting the lead, not just inhaling the undetectable paint "fumes", for lack of a better term.

Saw a couple of bluebirds and a bluejay, blue day. Some vultures in the road, feeding on animals that would still be breathing if people wouldn't drive so fucking fast.

It will not happen, but a 40 mph speed limit on 2-lane hiways, 50 mph on limited-access 4-lanes, and 60 mph on Interstates would save tens of millions of barrels of oil and generate millions in speeding revenues.

Take your time. Even on a tabletop like north central Indiana, there is lots to see.