The Grateful Dead

Sticking the Landing, Shooting Blanks

I'm gonna live 'til I die. I'm gonna laugh 'stead of cry. I'm gonna take the town and turn it upside down. I'm gonna live, live until I die. Listening back to Frank Sinatra sing those lyrics, it would be fair for one to wonder if Ol' Blue Eyes was on shrooms. Many people facing the end are using psychedelics to help them stick the landing. "Though still in its infancy, the field of psychedelic-assisted palliative care has been exploding in recent years, its rise mirroring the overall growth in psychedelic medicine that has been offering new approaches to the treatment of some psychiatric conditions. Dr. Michael Fratkin, a palliative care specialist in California, said many of the patients he treated with ketamine experienced a marked relief from fear, anxiety and even physical pain." NYT (Gift Article): ‘Life-Changing’ Psychedelics, for When Life Is Ending. What a long, strange trip it's been...

2

The Pills that Kill

"In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. The company said it was “putting the brakes on the opioid epidemic” by making it harder to get potentially dangerous amounts of the drugs. The announcement, which came after pressure from federal health regulators, was followed by similar declarations from the other two companies that control access to prescription drugs for most Americans. The self-congratulatory statements, however, didn’t address an important question: Why hadn’t the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades?" If you've been following any story about American health care over the past couple centuries, you can probably guess the answer. NYT (Gift Article): Giant Companies Took Secret Payments to Allow Free Flow of Opioids. The opioid crisis is underrated as an explanation for Americans' dwindling faith in institutions. Health care failed them. Their doctors failed them. The federal government failed them. These often greed-driven failures led to a national tragedy that has only been compounded by the failure to properly address the scourge.

3

Shooting Blanks

"She wears a baggy blue jumpsuit, safety glasses, and a hairnet. Her job is to monitor the viscosity and temperature of the mix—an exacting task. The brown slurry must be just the right thickness before it oozes down metal tubes to the ground floor and into waiting rows of empty 155-millimeter howitzer shells, each fitted at the top with a funnel. The whole production line, of which she is a part, is labor-intensive, messy, and dangerous. At this step of the process, both the steel shells and the TNT must be kept warm. The temperature in the building induces a full-body sweat in a matter of minutes. This is essentially the way artillery rounds were made a century ago." And it's pretty much how they're made now. So it might not be surprising that America can't make them quickly enough to supply allies like Ukraine. Could we make enough for ourselves in the event of a war? Mark Bowden in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Crumbling Foundation of America’s Military. "This is not just a bump in the road, and it is not just about munitions. The U.S. military, the richest in the world, confronts a deep, institutional deficiency. If that truth is hard to accept, it’s partly because the reality is so profoundly at odds with our history."

4

Drone Psych

"Even some politicians have been caught up in the online fervor. Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) — who recently lost a campaign for U.S. Senate — posted a video on X last week showing what he said were drones flying over his house. They turned out to be stars in the constellation Orion." The imagined drone invasion of New Jersey is in some ways the perfect story of our times. No one trusts institutions or believes in science, and we have an incoming president who says things like, "Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!" (Look, up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's Stuporman!) WaPo (Gift Article): In online drone panic, conspiracy thinking has gone mainstream. The second half of that headline works quite well as a stand-alone. (FWIW, I heard that drones can be deterred by an aerosol version of ivermectin.)

5

Extra, Extra

It's Wooing or Suing: Following ABC's $15 million settlement with Trump, the prez-elect is "escalating his legal campaign against media outlets by suing renowned pollster J. Ann Selzer, her polling firm, The Des Moines Register newspaper and its parent company Gannett." Her crime: Posting her Iowa poll that showed Harris with an edge. Trump sues Des Moines Register and top pollster over final Iowa survey. As intended, even if Trump loses the suit, which he would if it went to trial, the cost of defending themselves will damage the Register, and make other organizations less likely to take risks. For smaller publishers, the suits could be existential. For big, corporate backed media players like ABC, parent companies won't want to take big risks in news because those divisions are such a small part of their bottom lines. Josh Marshall explains: The Great Fluffening of 2024. "The key here is that it is almost absurd to expect that these big diversified corporations are going to operate in the interests of or run major risks on behalf of their very small news divisions. These are in almost every case liabilities in the context of a Trump administration."

+ Place Setting: "While other Russian generals have died in occupied Ukraine or near the front line, he is the highest-ranking military official to have been killed inside Russia." Ukraine Says It Killed General Who Led Russia’s Nuclear Defense Force.

+ Dialysis Boom Bah: "She volunteered to become the first living person in the world to get a kidney from a new kind of genetically modified pig. Scientists hope this kind of pig will someday provide an unlimited supply of kidneys, livers, hearts and other organs that could alleviate the chronic shortage of organs for transplantation and save thousands of patients every year." A transplanted pig kidney offers a grandmother hope for life without dialysis.

+ Murder Rap: After a week of deliberations in a trial that riveted the Bay Area, a jury found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder in the killing of tech exec Bob Lee. The incident was used by many people with big followings to push their pre-existing narratives about San Franciso (even though they didn't know shit when they made these pronouncements).

+ You're On Candid Camera: "Walmart, the largest nongovernmental employer in the U.S., is testing the technology after smaller retailers started trying body cameras at their own stores as a way to deter theft. Body cameras and the footage they gather are commonly advertised as a way to prevent shoplifting, but Walmart intends to use the tech for worker safety — not as a loss prevention tool, according to a person familiar with the program." Walmart employees are now wearing body cameras in some U.S. stores.

+ Galling 911: "Police in the US state of Wisconsin say the emergency call they received over Monday's school shooting came from a child no older than seven or eight years old." In addition to that sad detail from another sad school shooting, it's also unusual that in this case the shooter was a 15-year-old girl.

+ Emissionary Position: For the first time, researchers have shown that feeding seaweed to grazing cattle can reduce their methane emissions by almost 40%. (Interesting. Avoiding cow's milk can reduce my menthane emissions by the exact same percentage.)

6

Bottom of the News

"All eyes are on Bend, Oregon, where a mysterious vandal (or group of vandals) has been sticking large, plastic googly eyes on public art sculptures around the city. Many residents say they love the unofficial adornments, but municipal authorities are not amused." (I'm definitely getting some of these for my beagles before our next walk.)