Several months ago I promised to take a picture of a local bumblebee. Sadly, the very next day our association’s gardeners pruned back the hedges around our lake where the bumblebees hung out. That was it for bumblebees.
But patience is a virtue, no? Irvine’s bumblebees may have flown off somewhere else, but Ireland still has plenty of them. When we got back from our trip to the Skellig Islands, Marian noticed this bush swarming with bumblebees, so I snapped off a few dozen shots. It may have taken a while, but thanks to the town of Portmagee you are finally getting your long-promised bumblebee.¹
¹This is assuming that some smart-aleck doesn’t come along to tell us that this isn’t really a bumblebee, just some kind of pseudo-orchid bee that looks like a bumblebee but is actually a member of the Fettucini family native to northern latitudes. I’ll wait.
As you all know, I’m smitten by all things lead related. A couple of days ago I came across an interesting little historical anecdote that I’m going to tell you now.
When I was writing my big lead-crime piece several years ago, one of the things I was curious about was why the EPA decided to phase out leaded gasoline starting in 1975. Unfortunately, there aren’t very many people around today who were personally involved in this stuff 40 years ago, and I ended up getting several conflicting answers that I couldn’t really reconcile. Since it wasn’t central to my story anyway, I gave up and skipped the whole thing.
Then, last week, reader David P. pointed me to a column by Barry Nussbaum, chief statistician at the EPA for over a decade and currently president of the American Statistical Association. As soon as I read it I called Nussbaum, who was a young EPA analyst in the late 70s when he—well, we’ll get to that. First, though, the answer to my question.
According to Nussbaum, EPA wanted places like California to reduce smog, and that meant cars would have to be fitted with catalytic converters. However, since gasoline lead ruins catalytic converters, refineries needed to produced unleaded gasoline. This was the initial impetus behind unleaded gasoline. The fact that it also reduced atmospheric lead was basically a happy accident.
Once that was done, however, EPA started looking more closely at the health effects of lead. It was no secret that high levels of lead poisoning were dangerous, but new research was showing that even moderate levels could be dangerous, especially in young children. So now EPA had two reasons to phase out leaded gasoline.
As it happens, they were doing this on two tracks. One track was unleaded gasoline. The other was a phasedown of the amount of lead in leaded gasoline: from 1.7 grams per gallon in 1975 to 1.2 in 1976, 0.9 in 1977, and 0.6 in 1978. But there was a problem with this: reducing the amount of lead also reduced the amount of gasoline you could refine from each barrel of crude oil. The difference wasn’t huge, but after the oil embargo of 1973 it was enough to raise policy questions. Thanks to all this, in 1979 Jimmy Carter was considering whether to halt the EPA phasedown of lead in gasoline.
By coincidence, at the same time HUD was trying to get more funding for its program to remove lead paint from old housing stock. As part of this effort, EPA looked at the incidence of high blood lead levels in children, and Nussbaum produced the following chart:
There are three things to notice about this chart:
It shows that blood lead levels spike every year in the summer.
It shows that lead levels in children appear to be correlated with gasoline lead emitted into the atmosphere.
It shows that black and Hispanic children had really high levels of lead poisoning.¹
The first item—unfortunately for HUD—suggested that lead poisoning was not correlated with lead paint in housing. After all, there’s no reason to think that kids are exposed to more lead paint in the summer. The second item suggests that lead poisoning is correlated with gasoline lead.² And the third item immediately convinced Carter to continue the lead phasedown. “He stated he did not want any policy that might have a particularly deleterious effect on these two groups,” Nussbaum says.
On a statistical note, Nussbaum adds this: “With the benefit of hindsight, Carter was concerned about the harmful effects on minority populations. Would he have even have known this if the graph just had one composite line for blood lead?” Maybe not. Sometimes flukes of data presentation are all it takes to influence public policy.
This chart is probably one of the earliest known visual correlations of gasoline lead with lead poisoning in children. As an historical artifact it deserves a little place in history.
¹If you’re wondering why the chart doesn’t show white children, the answer is lost to history. Nussbaum thinks it might have something to do with the limits of plotting technology at the time. In any case, everyone knew what the line looked like: just like the other two, but lower.
²Ironically, they got the right answer for the wrong reason. EPA figured the summer spike was due to increased driving. In fact, we now know it’s due to lead that settles into the soil and then gets resuspended into the air every summer when the soil dries up.
Trump campaign advisor Carter Page during a trip to Moscow in December 2016.Korotayev Artyom/TASS via ZUMA
Carter Page, the idiot cousin of the Trump campaign, went on a trip to Russia last June. It was, he insists, a personal visit, not something done on behalf of the campaign. And he didn’t talk to any Russian officials anyway.
But guess what? Email exchanges suggest that, in fact, he did meet with Russian officials. And he reported back to the campaign about them. And he got permission from the campaign to take the trip. And he offered to step aside if Trump himself wanted to go in his place.
The Trump campaign, of course, says that Page—who was part of Trump’s five-person foreign policy team—was just some random volunteer guy that nobody ever even talked to. And Corey Lewandowski says that as Trump’s campaign manager at the time, he never gave Page permission for anything. No how, no way. Except, um, for those pesky emails:
During an interview on Fox News on Tuesday evening, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski claimed the distraction created by Father’s Day resulted in him being unable to remember an email sent to him by former campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. In the email, Page sought and ultimately received permission from Lewandowski to travel to Moscow.
“You have to remember, in the context of the campaign world––now, my memory has been refreshed, but to be clear, from what I understand and what I recall, that email was sent on June 19th of 2016, so about 18 months ago,” Lewandowski said. “It also happened to be Father’s Day on a Sunday, and it also happened to be the day prior to me being terminated from the campaign, so with all due respect, there were many other things on my mind that day other than trying to understand why a volunteer was telling me he may or may not be traveling outside the country.”
I really wonder what the story is with Trump and Russia. The full-blown collusion theory still seems pretty unlikely to me.¹ But obviously there was something. Just for starters, Trump wouldn’t be so obviously panicked by the whole thing if nothing untoward happened. And every day brings new evidence of something that some Trumpkin “forgot.” This whole thing is weird as hell.
¹Partly this is because I don’t think even Trump and his team could be so dumb. The evidence is clear that they’re pretty dumb, but are they that dumb? I dunno. Nixon was, and he was actually a pretty smart guy.
President Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping were calling each other friend by the end of their springtime retreat at Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago — a relationship that would have been unimaginable months earlier….On Monday in Japan, Trump expressed his new view: “I like him a lot. I consider him a friend. With that being said, he represents China; I represent the United States.”
Expect the good times to continue when Xi figuratively rolls out an ultra-wide red carpet to host Trump in Beijing — a “state visit-plus” in the words of the Chinese ambassador to the United States….The Chinese, much like the Japanese and South Koreans on the first two stops of Trump’s five-nation Asia tour, believe the gilded treatment is the best way to play to Trump’s ego and disarm him, and thereby blunt his demands that China open up its economy and take a harder tack against North Korea, according to experts and former government officials.
Flattery never hurts, of course, but what Abe and Xi are doing is so obvious that it’s hard to believe it would work even on Trump. But apparently it does. Trump is so titanically un-self-aware that he apparently has no idea that his hosts are all but openly mocking him with their displays of pomp and signed baseball hats and so forth. What a clown.
According to a quickie analysis from the folks at CIRCLE, youth turnout was pretty ho-hum in New Jersey but through the roof in Virginia: up from 26 percent in 2013 to 34 percent in 2017. And young people voted massively in favor of the Democrat:
If this is correct, it’s big news. I mean, even if you buy the idea that kids just didn’t like Hillary Clinton much, it’s pretty startling that they’d vote for Ralph Northam in such wildly bigger numbers. Northam isn’t exactly Bernie Sanders, after all.
The most obvious explanation is that (a) Trump’s victory galvanized them and (b) the racial crap at the end of the Virginia campaign really pissed them off. What’s more, Virginia was expected to be a close race. New Jersey wasn’t, so turnout stayed about the same as in the past.
This is all guesswork at the moment, and might change when we get more solid numbers. But along with reports that minority turnout was also up in Virginia—which powered a huge Democratic shift in the state legislature that nobody predicted—it provides some hope for 2018 and 2020. If Donald Trump has finally provided the magic formula for motivating Democratic constituencies to vote in midterm elections, the Trumpublican era may turn out to be a blessedly short one.
Waymo, the autonomous car company from Google’s parent company Alphabet, has started testing a fleet of self-driving vehicles without any backup drivers on public roads, its chief executive said Tuesday. The tests, which will include passengers within the next few months, mark an important milestone that brings autonomous vehicle technology closer to operating without any human intervention.
….The tests are a show of engineering prowess by Waymo at a time when traditional automakers and other tech companies like Uber race to develop similar vehicles….Waymo said its driverless cars hit the public roads last month. The company did not say whether it was testing the driverless cars in environments considered challenging for autonomous vehicles, like bridges or tunnels, or more difficult conditions, like driving at night or in rain and snow — usually not a big concern in the dry Phoenix climate.
Waymo’s CEO says, “Fully self-driving cars are here,” which may be a bit of puffery but probably isn’t too far from the truth. But here’s something I don’t get:
Waymo is limiting the trials to a region around Phoenix, where it has been conducting a ride-testing program this year, and plans to expand the testing area over time. The company said it planned to use the driverless vehicles to launch a commercial ride-hailing service for the general public, but did not offer any detail on when, where or how.
I Am Not An Engineer, but it strikes me that a commercial taxi is one of the hardest things for a self-driving car to do. The car has to be prepared to go absolutely anywhere. The passengers are different every time. And the technology has to be able to negotiate things like airports, which strikes me as a challenge.
Wouldn’t it be easier to start off with something that drives a semi-fixed route? Or perhaps a limited number of fixed routes? Or even a leasing program, where the cars are used by people who could receive a little bit of training about what to expect and how to interact with the car?
Why is everyone so obsessed with ride hailing services?
Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA. Pinocchio nose by Kevin Drum.
Oh man, I almost forgot about this. Remember the other day I mentioned that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is a multi-billionaire? Funny story about that.
It turns out that in his financial disclosure to Congress, his net worth only amounted to about $700 million. Forbes asked him about this, and Ross said it was because he had put about $2 billion into family trusts that he didn’t have to disclose:
So began the mystery of Wilbur Ross’ missing $2 billion. And after one month of digging, Forbes is confident it has found the answer: That money never existed. It seems clear that Ross lied to us, the latest in an apparent sequence of fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers that have been going on with Forbes since 2004. In addition to just padding his ego, Ross’ machinations helped bolster his standing in a way that translated into business opportunities. And based on our interviews with ten former employees at Ross’ private equity firm, WL Ross & Co., who all confirmed parts of the same story line, his penchant for misleading extended to colleagues and investors, resulting in millions of dollars in fines, tens of millions refunded to backers and numerous lawsuits. Additionally, according to six U.S. senators, Ross failed to initially mention 19 suits in response to a questionnaire during his confirmation process.
….Ross’ questionable assertions to Forbes, combined with a recent controversy about a multimillion-dollar stake in a shipping company that does big business with close associates of Vladimir Putin, paint a clearer picture of the commerce secretary’s tactics….“Wilbur doesn’t have an issue with bending the truth,” says David Wax, who worked alongside Ross for 25 years and served as the No. 3 person in his firm. Another former colleague, who requested anonymity, was less circumspect: “He’s lied to a lot of people.”
Wilbur Ross sounds like a man who really fits into Donald Trump’s cabinet, doesn’t he? He lies a lot. He pretends he has more money than he does. He has oddly unexplained ties to Russian tycoons. He loves trade barriers. He apparently has a titanic but fragile ego. I wonder who recommended this guy to Trump?
Oh, and the whole Forbes piece is well worth a read. Ross is really quite the guy.
Pushback against Donald Trump helped lift Democrats to governorships in the two highest-profile U.S. elections since the 2016 presidential contest. In Virginia, voters by a 2-1 margin said they were casting their ballot to show opposition to Trump rather than support for him. In New Jersey the margin was nearly 3-1. And Trump’s weak approval rating among voters in Virginia, 40 percent, was weaker still in New Jersey, a dismal 34 percent.
Relatedly, a surge in turnout by politically liberal voters boosted Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, as did a broad advantage on health care, which voters by a wide margin identified as the top issue in the vote.
That’s good news. It provides some hope that Republicans will start to realize how bad Trump is for their brand. If Virginia voters opposed Trump by 2-1, it’s quite possible that Republicans would have won if someone else had been in the White House.
I wish Republicans were willing to turn against Trump just on principle, but I’ll take what I can get. America will be a much better place if we can demonstrate once and for all that Trump-style politics has no home here anymore.
Democrat Ralph Northam, winner of today's election for governor of Virginia.Brian Cahn via ZUMA
It appears the Democrat Ralph Northam has won the Virginia governor’s race by a healthy margin. I guess I’m surprised. I know he was leading in most of the polls, but I don’t trust Southern states. Somehow they always seem to end up electing Republicans when everything is said and done. Plus there’s the fact that my Twitter feed has been practically on fire for the past week, packed full of jittery liberals who were convinced that Northam was blowing it. But he didn’t.
Normally, I wouldn’t really care all that much about a race like this. Northam is hardly a progressive firebrand, and Ed Gillespie isn’t a tea party nutball. If he had won it wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. Except for one thing: In the final two weeks of the campaign, Gillespie shamelessly decided to follow the Trump playbook, appealing all but openly to the worst kind of racist sentiment in Virginia. What’s worse, nobody on the conservative side of the aisle even blinked about it.
If you haven’t been following this, the best short summary comes from Ramesh Ponnuru, whose Monday column at Bloomberg was dedicated to outlining everything Gillespie did—but solely in order to explain that race had nothing to do with any of it. No sir. It was just a bunch of boring policy differences that all coincidentally happened to have racial underpinnings and just happened to be the ones that blanketed the airwaves in grainy, panic-inducing ads over the final two weeks of the campaign. Like this one, which lays out one of those boring policy differences in a calm, technocratic way that isn’t designed at all to trigger any racial anxiety among white folks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0UiqMDbpAw
Ponnuru’s column is titled, “Why Democrats’ Race-Baiting Often Backfires.” Ponnuru should be ashamed of writing stuff like this, and I suppose someday he will be. In the meantime, though, thank God he was wrong. The last thing we need is for a bland white Republican who’s behind in the polls to discover that racial triggers are still the royal road to victory. As it turns out, they aren’t.
In fact, it now looks as though they backfired bigly—but on Republicans, not Democrats. Republicans are getting shellacked up and down the ballot in Virginia and are close to losing their majority in the legislature. Medicaid won in Maine. Democrats gained control of the governor’s mansion in New Jersey. And although polls haven’t closed yet in Washington, there’s a pretty good chance that Democrats will run the table there too. This has been a very bad day for the Trumpified Republican Party and a very good day for a desperately needed resurgence of decency and resistance in America.
The Penn Wharton Business Model has analyzed the Republican Tax plan and reports back that it will have the following effect on GDP:
What’s that? The chart is too small and you can’t see the difference? No worries: your eyes are fine. The problem is that there virtually is no difference. PWBM figures that by 2027 GDP would be .58 percent higher than it would be under current law. That’s a difference of .05 percent per year. And that’s with dynamic pixie dust included.
In other words, GDP growth over the past couple of decades has averaged about 2.3 percent per year. The Republican tax plan would increase that to…2.35 percent. This is not exactly the supercharged 3 percent economy Donald Trump promised us.
And it gets worse after 2027. Thanks to the $5 trillion in extra debt the tax cut generates, the economy would lose even this tiny amount of extra growth and maybe even grow slower than it would under current law. Between 2017 and 2040, the total net effect of the Republican plan is basically zero.
But a bunch of rich people would be a lot richer. Mission Accomplished!
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