Oh, apparently DuPont knew that the C8 in Teflon was hella bad and didn’t care. My dad actually worked at a DuPont factory for a long time (people in my hometown either worked for DuPont or the prisons), but making nylon instead of pans, and does not have cancer as of press time:
Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story of DuPont’s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle — culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September — a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.
This story is based on many of those documents, which until they were entered into evidence for these trials had been hidden away in DuPont’s files. Among them are write-ups of experiments on rats, dogs, and rabbits showing that C8 was associated with a wide range of health problems that sometimes killed the lab animals. Many thousands of pages of expert testimony and depositions have been prepared by attorneys for the plaintiffs. And through the process of legal discovery they have uncovered hundreds of internal communications revealing that DuPont employees for many years suspected that C8 was harmful and yet continued to use it, putting the company’s workers and the people who lived near its plants at risk.
Listen up, nerds! You can pre-order Jaya and Matt’s DAD MAGAZINE book! A guide to “Pop” culture, as it were! dyinggggg
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I think it’s fantastic that the LA Times is looking back on how they could have done a better job covering the Watts riots:
Forty-five years later, I looked back on how they told Los Angeles’ most tumultuous story of that era, and my first reaction was, “How could this coverage have won a Pulitzer Prize?”
I’m not suggesting the work was unworthy. I read the stories with admiration for the reporters’ newswriting skill and for the courage of many white reporters who headed into the conflict zone.
But as the coverage continued day after day, it became apparent how unprepared these journalists were to probe the complex social currents that ignited and fueled the upheaval.
Over the 11 days of riot coverage and initial follow-up, The Times’ perspective evolved from objectivity to alarm to befuddlement as reporters struggled to comprehend a threat to their city from the sort of racial conflict that until then had largely been limited to America’s southern and northeastern states.
The state of black women and their families in the rural South:
Key findings include:
In the rural South, more than 1 in 4 children and nearly as many women live in poverty; the poverty rate is more than double for African-Americans and Latinos compared to their white counterparts.
In rural Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, white women were four times more likely to be employed and Black women earned nearly one-third less than white women.
In Clay County, Georgia, 36 percent of Black women had less than a high school diploma compared to 8 percent of white women.
Nearly 80 percent of the 4.8 million uninsured U.S. adults who fall into the coverage gap that would be alleviated by Medicaid expansion live in the South.
In Georgia, the teen pregnancy rate in rural counties was more than double the state rate, and the teen birth rate was at least 20 percent higher.
Of the 19 million Americans without broadband Internet access, 14.5 million live in rural counties.
In 2012, of the $4.8 billion philanthropic investments allocated to the South, just 5.4 percent went to programs focused on women and girls and less than 1 percent to programs focused on Black women and girls.
Here is a picture of my friend Carrie’s puppy yawning:
The Hairpin on the only X-Files conspiracy theory that truly matters:
Actually, the only pseudoscientific conspiracy theory I’m interested in propagating is my longtime conviction that Mulder and Scully started fucking in the very first episode of The X-Files. I have fought about this with so many fellow nerds that I’ve basically adopted a “Don’t @ Me” policy in real life about it, like just accept and respect my beliefs, and I’ll do the same with yours. But. Ok. You know in the pilot episode when Scully thinks she’s been bitten by whatever thing they’re in the middle of nowhere investigating? I could look this up but I’m kind of enjoying doing this by memory. ANYWAY, she thinks she’s been bitten, and she knocks on Mulder’s door, and she’s wearing JUST A TRENCH COAT OVER HER BRA AND UNDERWEAR, and she SHOWS HIM JUST HER SHOULDER, and he TOUCHES THE BITE and SMILES and says “IT’S JUST A MOSQUITO BITE”? Like. I’m wet just remembering this. Are you telling me that they DIDN’T immediately have “wow I’m not going to die and I’m so relieved” sex right then and there? And that they weren’t kind of casually fucking every so often, which accounts for Scully’s gentle exasperation in the face of Mulder’s endearing but annoying paranoia? She just constantly has this expression of, like, “Ugh you’re annoying the shit out of me right now but that D was so good last night that I’m just going to shake my head and let it go.” Which is an expression I know well.
All of today’s deleted comments are from one very determined gentleman by the name of “Jeff,” and some of them were too lengthy to be screencapped in full, so I apologize to him for occasionally excising a paragraph or two:
