five minutes with leo kearse on the small boats that appear off shore;
Thursday, August 20, 2026
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
any time someone tells you, insisting, that something is settled science, consider these examples;
If you had trusted the settled science of the day, here is how it would have gone.
1890s: you dose the baby with Bayer’s new cough syrup, the non-addictive alternative to morphine, marketed for children. It was heroin. They named it after the German for heroic.
1900s: you rub calomel teething powder on your infant’s gums. It is a mercury compound, and it leaves a generation with pink disease. Swollen, peeling hands and feet, screaming for months, and some of them died.
1910s: you cook in Crisco, launched by a soap and candle company, because cottonseed oil is modern and lard is what your mother used. The process that made it solid produced trans fat, banned outright a century later.
1920s: you drink Radithor, certified radioactive water, on prescription. Eben Byers took fourteen hundred bottles for his vitality. His jaw was removed in pieces and he was buried in a lead coffin.
1930s: a chemist dissolves a new sulfa drug in diethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. It kills 107 people, mostly children, and only then does America give the FDA power to demand safety testing...........more............
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