Monday, May 6, 2019
The Fish Leather Pioneers
"The first 200 times we just made smelly fish soups," she says.
Ms Gunnsteinsdóttir is the sales manager of Icelandic company Atlantic Leather, which owns the only fish tannery in Europe.
Overlooking a fjord on Iceland's remote north coast, since 1994 it has been processing the skins of salmon, perch, cod and wolffish.
The tanning process takes between three and four weeks, and 19 employees now produce 10,000 skins, or nearly a tonne, of fish leather a month.
"The fish smell disappears in the early stages, then it smells like any other leather," adds Ms Gunnsteinsdóttir, who is the daughter of the founders.
The company gets all its fish from sustainable stocks, via Icelandic, Norwegian and Faroe Island fishing fleets, and unlike the worst examples in the global cow leather industry its tanning process is as environmentally friendly as possible.
by Beth Timmins, BBC | Read more:
Image: Atlantic Leather
Ms Gunnsteinsdóttir is the sales manager of Icelandic company Atlantic Leather, which owns the only fish tannery in Europe.
Overlooking a fjord on Iceland's remote north coast, since 1994 it has been processing the skins of salmon, perch, cod and wolffish.
The tanning process takes between three and four weeks, and 19 employees now produce 10,000 skins, or nearly a tonne, of fish leather a month."The fish smell disappears in the early stages, then it smells like any other leather," adds Ms Gunnsteinsdóttir, who is the daughter of the founders.
The company gets all its fish from sustainable stocks, via Icelandic, Norwegian and Faroe Island fishing fleets, and unlike the worst examples in the global cow leather industry its tanning process is as environmentally friendly as possible.
The operation runs off geothermal energy, which is prevalent in Iceland, and the firm has equipment that enables it to re-use every drop of water between eight and nine times in the production process.
Atlantic Leather also uses natural, non-polluting dyes. The price of its leather varies depending on the fish, but the salmon skins sell for $12 (£9) a square foot.
Now supplying top European fashion houses Jimmy Choo, Dior and Ferragamo, Ms Gunnsteinsdóttir says it is a misconception that fish leather must be delicate and easy to tear.
"Fish leather's actually nine times stronger than lamb or cow leather of similar thickness," she says.
"This is because the fibres in fish skin criss-cross rather than just up and down... it makes it much more durable leather for products that have to be really strong like shoes, belts and bags."
Atlantic Leather also uses natural, non-polluting dyes. The price of its leather varies depending on the fish, but the salmon skins sell for $12 (£9) a square foot.
Now supplying top European fashion houses Jimmy Choo, Dior and Ferragamo, Ms Gunnsteinsdóttir says it is a misconception that fish leather must be delicate and easy to tear.
"Fish leather's actually nine times stronger than lamb or cow leather of similar thickness," she says.
"This is because the fibres in fish skin criss-cross rather than just up and down... it makes it much more durable leather for products that have to be really strong like shoes, belts and bags."
by Beth Timmins, BBC | Read more:
Image: Atlantic Leather
Netflix and Suicide
Netflix’s teen drama “13 Reasons Why” was born in controversy. The show, based on a novel by Jay Asher, from 2007, follows the suicide of a high-school girl named Hannah Baker, who recorded tapes that explain her decision to take her life. At the time of the show’s release, a host of commentators, from individual suicide survivors to the National Association of School Psychologists, pointed out that a wide array of studies has linked portrayals of suicide in the media to increases in the suicide rate. Before the show’s première, in 2017, Netflix contacted, among others, Dan Reidenberg, the executive director of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, whose advice was to not release the series. “But that wasn’t an option. That was made very clear to me,” he said at the time. Netflix responded to the controversy surrounding the release of the show with bromides: “Entertainment has always been the ultimate connector and we hope that ‘13 Reasons Why’ can serve as a catalyst for conversation.” On April 29th of this year, the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry published a report, by the National Institute of Mental Health, which provided evidence that the experts were right and Netflix was wrong.
The study stated that “13 Reasons Why” was “associated with a 28.9% increase in suicide rates among U.S. youth ages 10-17 in the month (April 2017) following the show’s release, after accounting for ongoing trends in suicide rates.” An association is not, of course, the same thing as causality. Suicide is a vastly complex phenomenon. A study from the University of Pennsylvania, published a week earlier, showed that suicide risk decreased for students who watched “13 Reasons Why” all the way to the end of Season 2. (Students who stopped in the middle were at a higher risk for suicide.) There were other events—such as the suicide of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, in May, 2017—that may have contributed to the spike. The study’s press release also notes that the researchers could not rule out that other, unmeasured events could have had an effect on the elevated rates, and that the increase in the suicide rate began the month before the series premièred.
Nonetheless, for anyone who studies the effects of mass media, a rise in the suicide rate following the release of “13 Reasons Why”—and during the marketing push that preceded it—would not be surprising. Our understanding of the interaction between pop culture and real-world consequences is fraught with lazy assumptions and fearmongering, and the best research is never utterly conclusive, but suicide is mostly an exception to this state of confusion. Suicide contagion has been observed for centuries. A notable example provides the basis for the famous Werther effect; in 1774, a rash of suicides followed the publication of Goethe’s novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” (The novel “13 Reasons Why” was the most banned book in American schools for the year 2017, according to the American Library Association, for exactly this reason.) More recently, other studies have suggested that news coverage of suicide plays a role in roughly ten per cent of suicides by people younger than twenty-five—“either by giving youths the idea to commit suicide or by providing youths already contemplating suicide with information about a specific method.” Among traditional media, this relationship is now mostly respected. That’s why you don’t often read specific details about suicides in the newspaper, even when there might be an obvious public interest in reporting them.
What are we to make, then, of Netflix’s decision to ignore this social phenomenon? It is obvious that the company did not want to cause these extra deaths. I do not doubt that its intentions were good. The show itself is hedged about on all sides with warnings and guidance for vulnerable viewers. Nic Sheff, a writer on the show and himself the survivor of a suicide attempt, defended the specifics of the show’s representation in a powerful open letter to Vanity Fair. There is an extended warning video that precedes the first episode: “By shedding a light on these difficult topics,” the lead actress, Katherine Langford, declares, “we hope our show can help viewers start a conversation.” Another actress in the video, Alisha Boe, goes so far as to say that, if you’re struggling with these issues, “this series may not be right for you.”
Netflix responded to the recent National Institute of Mental Health study with circumspection: “This is a critically important topic and we have worked hard to ensure that we handle this sensitive issue responsibly.” Except, of course, when it came to the option of not doing the show at all. Those who predicted the association between the show’s release and a rise in the suicide rate have met the fate of so much expert opinion in the twenty-first century: their predictions were ignored or cast into doubt by financially interested parties; the research, which came too late to matter, gave evidence that the predictions were true; and there were no consequences.
Netflix’s claim of good intentions is the kind of response that we have come to expect from tech companies in particular. Facebook is the leading master of the apology without consequence. These companies repeatedly claim, in the face of one scandal after another, that they really only wanted the best, that they’re working on it, that they’re sorry. No substantial change that might interfere with growth ever follows. We’ve become inured to this pattern—from Twitter, from Uber, and now from Netflix. Their expression of good intentions only makes the refusal to change more infuriating. If you cared, why didn’t you listen to the people who knew what they were talking about? If you listened, why didn’t you stop?
by Stephen Marche, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Getty
The study stated that “13 Reasons Why” was “associated with a 28.9% increase in suicide rates among U.S. youth ages 10-17 in the month (April 2017) following the show’s release, after accounting for ongoing trends in suicide rates.” An association is not, of course, the same thing as causality. Suicide is a vastly complex phenomenon. A study from the University of Pennsylvania, published a week earlier, showed that suicide risk decreased for students who watched “13 Reasons Why” all the way to the end of Season 2. (Students who stopped in the middle were at a higher risk for suicide.) There were other events—such as the suicide of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, in May, 2017—that may have contributed to the spike. The study’s press release also notes that the researchers could not rule out that other, unmeasured events could have had an effect on the elevated rates, and that the increase in the suicide rate began the month before the series premièred.Nonetheless, for anyone who studies the effects of mass media, a rise in the suicide rate following the release of “13 Reasons Why”—and during the marketing push that preceded it—would not be surprising. Our understanding of the interaction between pop culture and real-world consequences is fraught with lazy assumptions and fearmongering, and the best research is never utterly conclusive, but suicide is mostly an exception to this state of confusion. Suicide contagion has been observed for centuries. A notable example provides the basis for the famous Werther effect; in 1774, a rash of suicides followed the publication of Goethe’s novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” (The novel “13 Reasons Why” was the most banned book in American schools for the year 2017, according to the American Library Association, for exactly this reason.) More recently, other studies have suggested that news coverage of suicide plays a role in roughly ten per cent of suicides by people younger than twenty-five—“either by giving youths the idea to commit suicide or by providing youths already contemplating suicide with information about a specific method.” Among traditional media, this relationship is now mostly respected. That’s why you don’t often read specific details about suicides in the newspaper, even when there might be an obvious public interest in reporting them.
What are we to make, then, of Netflix’s decision to ignore this social phenomenon? It is obvious that the company did not want to cause these extra deaths. I do not doubt that its intentions were good. The show itself is hedged about on all sides with warnings and guidance for vulnerable viewers. Nic Sheff, a writer on the show and himself the survivor of a suicide attempt, defended the specifics of the show’s representation in a powerful open letter to Vanity Fair. There is an extended warning video that precedes the first episode: “By shedding a light on these difficult topics,” the lead actress, Katherine Langford, declares, “we hope our show can help viewers start a conversation.” Another actress in the video, Alisha Boe, goes so far as to say that, if you’re struggling with these issues, “this series may not be right for you.”
Netflix responded to the recent National Institute of Mental Health study with circumspection: “This is a critically important topic and we have worked hard to ensure that we handle this sensitive issue responsibly.” Except, of course, when it came to the option of not doing the show at all. Those who predicted the association between the show’s release and a rise in the suicide rate have met the fate of so much expert opinion in the twenty-first century: their predictions were ignored or cast into doubt by financially interested parties; the research, which came too late to matter, gave evidence that the predictions were true; and there were no consequences.
Netflix’s claim of good intentions is the kind of response that we have come to expect from tech companies in particular. Facebook is the leading master of the apology without consequence. These companies repeatedly claim, in the face of one scandal after another, that they really only wanted the best, that they’re working on it, that they’re sorry. No substantial change that might interfere with growth ever follows. We’ve become inured to this pattern—from Twitter, from Uber, and now from Netflix. Their expression of good intentions only makes the refusal to change more infuriating. If you cared, why didn’t you listen to the people who knew what they were talking about? If you listened, why didn’t you stop?
by Stephen Marche, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Getty
Saturday, May 4, 2019
Killer Asteroid Flattens New York in Simulation Exercise
After devastating the French Riviera in 2013, destroying Dhaka in 2015 and saving Tokyo in 2017, an international asteroid impact simulation ended Friday with its latest disaster—New York in ruins.
Despite a simulated eight years of preparation, scientists and engineers tried but failed to deflect the killer asteroid.
The exercise has become a regular event among the international community of "planetary defense" experts.
The latest edition began Monday near Washington, with the following alert: an asteroid roughly 100 to 300 meters (330 to 1,000 feet) in diameter had been spotted and according to rough calculations had a one percent chance of hitting the Earth on April 29, 2027.
Each day during the conference, some 200 astronomers, engineers and emergency response specialists received new information, made decisions and awaited further updates from the organizers of the game, designed by a NASA aerospace engineer.
As fictional months ticked by in the simulation, the probability of the giant space rock crashing into Earth rose to 10 percent—and then to 100 percent.
NASA launched a probe in 2021 to examine the threat up close. In December that year, astronomers confirmed it was headed straight to the Denver area and that the western US city would be destroyed.
The major space powers of the United States, Europe, Russia, China and Japan decided to build six "kinetic impactors"—probes meant to hit the asteroid to change its trajectory.
It took time to build the impactors and wait for the right launch window. The impacts were set for August 2024.
Three impactors managed to hit the asteroid. The main body was deflected, but a smaller fragment broke off and continued on a deadly path, this time towards the eastern US.
Washington considered sending a nuclear bomb to deflect the 60-meter rock—repeating a successful strategy that saved Tokyo last year—but it was crippled by political disagreements.
All that remained was to prepare for impact.
With six months to go, experts could only predict that the asteroid was headed to the New York area. With two months to go, it is confirmed the city will be destroyed.
Evacuation!
The asteroid will enter the atmosphere at a blistering 69,000 kilometers per hour (43,000 miles per hour) and explode 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) above Central Park.
The energy of the blast will be 1,000 times that of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
It will destroy everything within a 15 kilometer "unsurvivable" radius, scientists said.
Manhattan will be completely razed. Windows as far as 45 kilometers away will shatter and damage will extend as far out as 68 kilometers from the epicenter.
The questions raised by the scenario were endless.
How do authorities evacuate ten million people? Moving people to safety from hurricanes has shown the task's difficulty.
"Two months may not be enough time to really evacuate, because you're evacuating people who are stuck, who have to rebuild their lives where they're going. You're going to have fleets of U-hauls," said Brandy Johnson, an "angry citizen" in the exercise, referring to the rental moving trucks.
Who will pay? Who will host those displaced? How will authorities protect everything from nuclear and chemical installations to works of art?
And how will citizens behave in the face of an end-of-the-world scenario?
"If you knew your home was going to be destroyed six months from now, and that you weren't going back again, would you keep paying your mortgage?" asked Victoria Andrews, NASA's deputy planetary defense officer.
by Ivan Couronne, Phys.org | Read more:
Image: Asteroid Bennu/NASA
Despite a simulated eight years of preparation, scientists and engineers tried but failed to deflect the killer asteroid.
The exercise has become a regular event among the international community of "planetary defense" experts.The latest edition began Monday near Washington, with the following alert: an asteroid roughly 100 to 300 meters (330 to 1,000 feet) in diameter had been spotted and according to rough calculations had a one percent chance of hitting the Earth on April 29, 2027.
Each day during the conference, some 200 astronomers, engineers and emergency response specialists received new information, made decisions and awaited further updates from the organizers of the game, designed by a NASA aerospace engineer.
As fictional months ticked by in the simulation, the probability of the giant space rock crashing into Earth rose to 10 percent—and then to 100 percent.
NASA launched a probe in 2021 to examine the threat up close. In December that year, astronomers confirmed it was headed straight to the Denver area and that the western US city would be destroyed.
The major space powers of the United States, Europe, Russia, China and Japan decided to build six "kinetic impactors"—probes meant to hit the asteroid to change its trajectory.
It took time to build the impactors and wait for the right launch window. The impacts were set for August 2024.
Three impactors managed to hit the asteroid. The main body was deflected, but a smaller fragment broke off and continued on a deadly path, this time towards the eastern US.
Washington considered sending a nuclear bomb to deflect the 60-meter rock—repeating a successful strategy that saved Tokyo last year—but it was crippled by political disagreements.
All that remained was to prepare for impact.
With six months to go, experts could only predict that the asteroid was headed to the New York area. With two months to go, it is confirmed the city will be destroyed.
Evacuation!
The asteroid will enter the atmosphere at a blistering 69,000 kilometers per hour (43,000 miles per hour) and explode 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) above Central Park.
The energy of the blast will be 1,000 times that of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
It will destroy everything within a 15 kilometer "unsurvivable" radius, scientists said.
Manhattan will be completely razed. Windows as far as 45 kilometers away will shatter and damage will extend as far out as 68 kilometers from the epicenter.
The questions raised by the scenario were endless.
How do authorities evacuate ten million people? Moving people to safety from hurricanes has shown the task's difficulty.
"Two months may not be enough time to really evacuate, because you're evacuating people who are stuck, who have to rebuild their lives where they're going. You're going to have fleets of U-hauls," said Brandy Johnson, an "angry citizen" in the exercise, referring to the rental moving trucks.
Who will pay? Who will host those displaced? How will authorities protect everything from nuclear and chemical installations to works of art?
And how will citizens behave in the face of an end-of-the-world scenario?
"If you knew your home was going to be destroyed six months from now, and that you weren't going back again, would you keep paying your mortgage?" asked Victoria Andrews, NASA's deputy planetary defense officer.
by Ivan Couronne, Phys.org | Read more:
Image: Asteroid Bennu/NASA
Friday, May 3, 2019
Stop Crushing on the Generals
The two-star army general strode across the stage in his rumpled combat fatigues, almost like George Patton—all that was missing was the cigar and riding crop. It was 2017 and I was in the audience, just another mid-level major attending yet another mandatory lecture in the auditorium of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The general then commanded one of the Army’s two true armored divisions and had plenty of his tanks forward deployed in Eastern Europe, all along the Russian frontier. Frankly, most CGSC students couldn’t stand these talks. Substance always seemed lacking, as each general reminded us to “take care of soldiers” and “put the mission first,” before throwing us a few nuggets of conventional wisdom on how to be good staff officers should we get assigned to his vaunted command.
This time, though, the general got to talking about Russia. So I perked up. He made it crystal clear that he saw Moscow as an adversary to be contained, checked, and possibly defeated. There was no nuance, no self-reflection, not even a basic understanding of the general complexity of geopolitics in the 21st century. Generals can be like that—utterly “in-the-box,” “can-do” thinkers. They take pride in how little they discuss policy and politics, even when they command tens of thousands of troops and control entire districts, provinces, or countries. There is some value in this—we’d hardly want active generals meddling in U.S. domestic affairs. But they nonetheless can take the whole “aw shucks” act a bit too far.
General It-Doesn’t-Matter-His-Name thundered that we need not worry, however, because his tanks and troops could “mop the floor” with the Russians, in a battle that “wouldn’t even be close.” It was oh-so-typical, another U.S. Army general—who clearly longs for the Cold War fumes that defined his early career—overestimating the Russian menace and underestimating Russian military capability. Of course, it was all cloaked in the macho bravado so common among generals who think that talking like sergeants will win them street cred with the troops. (That’s not their jobanymore, mind you.) He said nothing, of course, about the role of mid- and long-range nuclear weapons that could be the catastrophic consequence of an unnecessary war with the Russian Bear.
I got to thinking about that talk recently as I reflected in wonder at how the latest generation of mainstream “liberals” loves to fawn over generals, admirals—any flag officers, really—as alternatives to President Donald Trump. The irony of that alliance should not be lost on us. It’s built on the standard Democratic fear of looking “soft” on terrorism, communism, or whatever-ism, and their visceral, blinding hatred of Trump. Some of this is understandable. Conservative Republicans masterfully paint liberals as “weak sisters” on foreign policy, and Trump’s administration is, well, a wild card in world affairs.
The problem with the vast majority of generals, however, is that they don’t think strategically. What they call strategy is really large-scale operations—deploying massive formations and winning campaigns replete with battles. Many remain mired in the world of tactics, still operating like lieutenants or captains and proving the Peter Principle right, as they get promoted past their respective levels of competence.
If America’s generals, now and over the last 18 years, really were strategic thinkers, they’d have spoken out about—and if necessary resigned en masse over—mission sets that were unwinnable, illegal (in the case of Iraq), and counterproductive. Their oath is to the Constitution, after all, not Emperors Bush, Obama, and Trump. Yet few took that step. It’s all symptomatic of the disease of institutionalized intellectual mediocrity. More of the same is all they know: their careers were built on fighting “terror” anywhere it raised its evil head. Some, though no longer most, still subscribe to the faux intellectualism of General Petraeus and his legion of Coindinistas, who never saw a problem that a little regime change, followed by expert counterinsurgency, couldn’t solve. Forget that they’ve been proven wrong time and again and can count zero victories since 2002. Generals (remember this!) are never held accountable.
Flag officers also rarely seem to recognize that they owe civilian policymakers more than just tactical “how” advice. They ought to be giving “if” advice—if we invade Iraq, it will take 500,000 troops to occupy the place, and even then we’ll ultimately destabilize the country and region, justify al-Qaeda’s worldview, kick off a nationalist insurgency, and become immersed in an unwinnable war. Some, like Army Chief General Eric Shinseki and CENTCOM head John Abizaid, seemed to know this deep down. Still, Shinseki quietly retired after standing up to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Abizaid rode out his tour to retirement.
Generals also love to tell the American people that victory is “just around the corner,” or that there’s a “light at the end of the tunnel.” General William Westmoreland used the very same language when predicting imminent victory in Vietnam. Two months later, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong unleashed the largest uprising of the war, the famed Tet Offensive.
Take Afghanistan as exhibit A: 17 or so generals have now commanded U.S. troops in this, America’s longest war. All have commanded within the system and framework of their predecessors. Sure, they made marginal operational and tactical changes—some preferred surges, others advising, others counterterror—but all failed to achieve anything close to victory, instead laundering failure into false optimism. None refused to play the same-old game or question the very possibility of victory in landlocked, historically xenophobic Afghanistan. That would have taken real courage, which is in short supply among senior officers.
Exhibit B involves Trump’s former cabinet generals—National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelley, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis—whom adoring and desperate liberals took as saviors and canonized as the supposed adults in the room. They were no such thing. The generals’ triumvirate consisted ultimately of hawkish conventional thinkers married to the dogma of American exceptionalism and empire. Period.
Let’s start with Mattis. “Mad Dog” Mattis was so anti-Iran and bellicose in the Persian Gulf that President Barack Obama removed him from command of CENTCOM. Furthermore, the supposedly morally untainted, “intellectual” “warrior monk” chose, when he finally resigned, to do so in response to Trump’s altogether reasonable call for a modest troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria. Helping Saudi Arabia terror bomb Yemen and starve 85,000 children to death? Mattis rebuked Congress and supported that. He never considered resigning in opposition to that war crime. No, he fell on his “courageous” sword over downgrading a losing 17-year-old war in Afghanistan. Not to mention he came to Trump’s cabinet straight from the board of contracting giant General Dynamics, where he collected hundreds of thousands of military-industrial complex dollars.
Then there was John Kelley, whom Press Secretary Sarah Sanders implied was above media questioning because he was once a four-star marine general. And there’s McMaster, another lauded intellectual who once wrote an interesting book and taught history at West Point. Yet he still drew all the wrong conclusions in his famous book on Vietnam—implying that more troops, more bombing, and a mass invasion of North Vietnam could have won the war. Furthermore, his work with Mattis on Trump’s unhinged, imperial National Defense Strategy proved that he was, after all, just another devotee of American hyper-interventionism.
So why reflect on these and other Washington generals? It’s simple: liberal veneration for these, and seemingly all, military flag officers is a losing proposition and a formula for more intervention, possible war with other great powers, and the creeping militarization of the entire U.S. government. We know what the generals expect—and potentially want—for America’s foreign policy future.
by Danny Sjursen, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image: Sgt. Mallory S. VanderSchans HQMC Combat Camera/Released
The general then commanded one of the Army’s two true armored divisions and had plenty of his tanks forward deployed in Eastern Europe, all along the Russian frontier. Frankly, most CGSC students couldn’t stand these talks. Substance always seemed lacking, as each general reminded us to “take care of soldiers” and “put the mission first,” before throwing us a few nuggets of conventional wisdom on how to be good staff officers should we get assigned to his vaunted command.
This time, though, the general got to talking about Russia. So I perked up. He made it crystal clear that he saw Moscow as an adversary to be contained, checked, and possibly defeated. There was no nuance, no self-reflection, not even a basic understanding of the general complexity of geopolitics in the 21st century. Generals can be like that—utterly “in-the-box,” “can-do” thinkers. They take pride in how little they discuss policy and politics, even when they command tens of thousands of troops and control entire districts, provinces, or countries. There is some value in this—we’d hardly want active generals meddling in U.S. domestic affairs. But they nonetheless can take the whole “aw shucks” act a bit too far.General It-Doesn’t-Matter-His-Name thundered that we need not worry, however, because his tanks and troops could “mop the floor” with the Russians, in a battle that “wouldn’t even be close.” It was oh-so-typical, another U.S. Army general—who clearly longs for the Cold War fumes that defined his early career—overestimating the Russian menace and underestimating Russian military capability. Of course, it was all cloaked in the macho bravado so common among generals who think that talking like sergeants will win them street cred with the troops. (That’s not their jobanymore, mind you.) He said nothing, of course, about the role of mid- and long-range nuclear weapons that could be the catastrophic consequence of an unnecessary war with the Russian Bear.
I got to thinking about that talk recently as I reflected in wonder at how the latest generation of mainstream “liberals” loves to fawn over generals, admirals—any flag officers, really—as alternatives to President Donald Trump. The irony of that alliance should not be lost on us. It’s built on the standard Democratic fear of looking “soft” on terrorism, communism, or whatever-ism, and their visceral, blinding hatred of Trump. Some of this is understandable. Conservative Republicans masterfully paint liberals as “weak sisters” on foreign policy, and Trump’s administration is, well, a wild card in world affairs.
The problem with the vast majority of generals, however, is that they don’t think strategically. What they call strategy is really large-scale operations—deploying massive formations and winning campaigns replete with battles. Many remain mired in the world of tactics, still operating like lieutenants or captains and proving the Peter Principle right, as they get promoted past their respective levels of competence.
If America’s generals, now and over the last 18 years, really were strategic thinkers, they’d have spoken out about—and if necessary resigned en masse over—mission sets that were unwinnable, illegal (in the case of Iraq), and counterproductive. Their oath is to the Constitution, after all, not Emperors Bush, Obama, and Trump. Yet few took that step. It’s all symptomatic of the disease of institutionalized intellectual mediocrity. More of the same is all they know: their careers were built on fighting “terror” anywhere it raised its evil head. Some, though no longer most, still subscribe to the faux intellectualism of General Petraeus and his legion of Coindinistas, who never saw a problem that a little regime change, followed by expert counterinsurgency, couldn’t solve. Forget that they’ve been proven wrong time and again and can count zero victories since 2002. Generals (remember this!) are never held accountable.
Flag officers also rarely seem to recognize that they owe civilian policymakers more than just tactical “how” advice. They ought to be giving “if” advice—if we invade Iraq, it will take 500,000 troops to occupy the place, and even then we’ll ultimately destabilize the country and region, justify al-Qaeda’s worldview, kick off a nationalist insurgency, and become immersed in an unwinnable war. Some, like Army Chief General Eric Shinseki and CENTCOM head John Abizaid, seemed to know this deep down. Still, Shinseki quietly retired after standing up to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Abizaid rode out his tour to retirement.
Generals also love to tell the American people that victory is “just around the corner,” or that there’s a “light at the end of the tunnel.” General William Westmoreland used the very same language when predicting imminent victory in Vietnam. Two months later, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong unleashed the largest uprising of the war, the famed Tet Offensive.
Take Afghanistan as exhibit A: 17 or so generals have now commanded U.S. troops in this, America’s longest war. All have commanded within the system and framework of their predecessors. Sure, they made marginal operational and tactical changes—some preferred surges, others advising, others counterterror—but all failed to achieve anything close to victory, instead laundering failure into false optimism. None refused to play the same-old game or question the very possibility of victory in landlocked, historically xenophobic Afghanistan. That would have taken real courage, which is in short supply among senior officers.
Exhibit B involves Trump’s former cabinet generals—National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelley, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis—whom adoring and desperate liberals took as saviors and canonized as the supposed adults in the room. They were no such thing. The generals’ triumvirate consisted ultimately of hawkish conventional thinkers married to the dogma of American exceptionalism and empire. Period.
Let’s start with Mattis. “Mad Dog” Mattis was so anti-Iran and bellicose in the Persian Gulf that President Barack Obama removed him from command of CENTCOM. Furthermore, the supposedly morally untainted, “intellectual” “warrior monk” chose, when he finally resigned, to do so in response to Trump’s altogether reasonable call for a modest troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria. Helping Saudi Arabia terror bomb Yemen and starve 85,000 children to death? Mattis rebuked Congress and supported that. He never considered resigning in opposition to that war crime. No, he fell on his “courageous” sword over downgrading a losing 17-year-old war in Afghanistan. Not to mention he came to Trump’s cabinet straight from the board of contracting giant General Dynamics, where he collected hundreds of thousands of military-industrial complex dollars.
Then there was John Kelley, whom Press Secretary Sarah Sanders implied was above media questioning because he was once a four-star marine general. And there’s McMaster, another lauded intellectual who once wrote an interesting book and taught history at West Point. Yet he still drew all the wrong conclusions in his famous book on Vietnam—implying that more troops, more bombing, and a mass invasion of North Vietnam could have won the war. Furthermore, his work with Mattis on Trump’s unhinged, imperial National Defense Strategy proved that he was, after all, just another devotee of American hyper-interventionism.
So why reflect on these and other Washington generals? It’s simple: liberal veneration for these, and seemingly all, military flag officers is a losing proposition and a formula for more intervention, possible war with other great powers, and the creeping militarization of the entire U.S. government. We know what the generals expect—and potentially want—for America’s foreign policy future.
by Danny Sjursen, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image: Sgt. Mallory S. VanderSchans HQMC Combat Camera/Released
[ed. Do read the comments. Not sure why the author blames the 'Left' for enabling what most Conservatives accept without reservation. See also: Smedley Butler and the Business Plot.]
Buspirone Shortage in Healthcaristan
There is a national shortage of buspirone.
Buspirone is a 5HT-1 agonist used to control anxiety [ed. trade name: Buspar]. Unlike most psychiatric drugs, it’s in a class of its own – there are no other sole 5HT-1 agonists on the market. It’s not a very strong medication, but it’s safe, it’s non-addictive, it’s off-patent, and it works well for a subset of patients. Some of them have been on it for years.
Now there’s a national shortage. My patients can’t get it, or have to go hunting from pharmacy to pharmacy until they find one that has it. I’ve told people find a source to stockpile a supply so they don’t run out. It feels like we’re living in the Soviet Union.
How did this happen? The New York Times writes:
Sure, generic drug manufacturing is pretty consolidated. Most individual generic drugs are now manufactured only by one or two companies. If one of those few companies gets greedy (like Martin Shkreli did with Daraprim), they can increase prices by orders of magnitude without a lot of competitors to push back. And if one of those few companies suffers a shock (like the FDA closing the buspirone factory), it makes sense that there might not be enough competitors to pick up the slack.
But how come this is only happening in pharmaceuticals? How come (in capitalist countries) there are almost never meat shortages, bread shortages, laptop shortages, or chair shortages? Is there something unusual about the pharmaceutical landscape that predisposes it to this sort of thing?
I am not an expert in this area and may be getting some of it wrong. But from Berndt, Conti, and Murphy (2017) and a Berndt, Conti, and Murphy (2018), I gather that a big part of the story is the Generic Drug User Fee Amendments (GDUFA) of 2012 and 2017.
The story goes something like this. The FDA demanded that generic drug manufacturers pass FDA inspection before setting up shop. But the FDA didn’t have enough inspectors to review manufacturers in a timely manner. So companies kept asking the FDA for permission to enter the generics market, and the FDA kept telling them there was a several year waiting period. In 2012, Congress recognized the problem. Politicians, FDA officials, and industry leaders agreed on a new policy where generic drug manufacturing companies would pay the FDA lots of money (about $300 million last time anyone checked), and the FDA would use that money to hire inspectors so they could clear their backlog of applications.
The good news is, the FDA hired lots more inspectors and they are now pretty good at responding to generic drug applications in a timely way. The bad news is that the fees to the companies were designed in a way that subtly encouraged monopolies in generic drug markets. I don’t understand all the specifics, but there seem to be two main problems.
First, if you manufacture a drug, the FDA will charge you a fee, but the fee doesn’t scale linearly with how much of the drug you produce. So suppose Martin Shkreli owns a very big Daraprim factory. The FDA might charge him $1 million per year to fund their inspectors. Suppose you are a small businessman who is angry at Martin Shkreli’s fee hike, and you want to open a competing Daraprim factory in your small town, using your small amount of personal savings. Probably your factory will be much smaller than Martin Shkreli’s. But the FDA will still charge you the same $1 million per year. At worst this means you make no profit; even at best, Shkreli’s economy of scale gives him a big advantage over you. So you may decide not to enter the market at all. From the second paper:
Second, traditional economics suggests that if some company has a monopoly on a product that people really need (like a medication), they will charge very high prices. But many generic drugs are produced by only one company each – and Shkrelis aside, most of them charge affordable prices. Why? Berndt et al argue it is because of the possibility of competition: if Shkreli raises his prices too high, some other company can move in and undercut him. But FDA licensing procedures make this undercutting harder than it could be: it will take months to years, and thousands to millions of dollars, for the other company to move in (at which point Shkreli can just say “Haha, no” and lower his prices again, meaning the undercutter would lose all the money they put in).
Historically, the system has worked anyway – because lots of companies are sitting on pre-existing FDA approval to make certain drugs. If a company had ever made a drug in the past, they had FDA permission to make it again whenever they wanted. So if Shkreli raises prices on Daraprim, some other company that made Daraprim ten years ago can set up a new factory tomorrow and undercut him. This helped prevent would-be Shkrelis in most markets, and provided a safety valve for shocks like the one creating the buspirone shortage today.
But GDUFA weakened this system by mandating that any company with FDA approval to manufacture a drug pay yearly inspection fees to the FDA, whether or not they were actively manufacturing it. That turned FDA approval for drugs you weren’t actively manufacturing into a liability; you were paying fees, but not making a profit. Companies started voluntarily cancelling their FDA approvals for older drugs so they wouldn’t have to pay the fees. That meant monopolists lost a lot of their potential competition. And that cleared the way for people like Shkreli to hike prices.
You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. Unfortunately, the FDA is inadvertently taxing companies for being in the generic drug business. And it’s taxing them more if they’re not a monopolist with economies of scale. That means we get fewer companies in the generics industry, and more monopolists.
So my very tentative guess as to why buspirone is more plagued by shortages than bread or chairs is because number one, the need for FDA approval makes it hard for new companies to enter the buspirone industry, and number two, the FDA’s fee structure favors large-scale monopolies over small-scale competitors.
Buspirone is a 5HT-1 agonist used to control anxiety [ed. trade name: Buspar]. Unlike most psychiatric drugs, it’s in a class of its own – there are no other sole 5HT-1 agonists on the market. It’s not a very strong medication, but it’s safe, it’s non-addictive, it’s off-patent, and it works well for a subset of patients. Some of them have been on it for years.
Now there’s a national shortage. My patients can’t get it, or have to go hunting from pharmacy to pharmacy until they find one that has it. I’ve told people find a source to stockpile a supply so they don’t run out. It feels like we’re living in the Soviet Union.
How did this happen? The New York Times writes:
The main reason for the buspirone shortage appears to be interrupted production at a Mylan Pharmaceuticals plant in Morgantown, W.Va., which produced about a third of the country’s supply of the drug. The Food and Drug Administration had said the facility was dirty and that the company failed to follow quality control procedures.So the FDA shut down a major buspirone factory. But government agencies – ones that are a lot less nice than the FDA – shut down methamphetamine factories all the time without creating methamphetamine shortages. Why is the buspirone market so vulnerable? The Times again:
Rock bottom prices for some generic drugs are also contributing to the crisis. Consolidation among wholesalers has led to the creation of three buying consortium behemoths that purchase 90 percent of the generic pharmaceutical products in the United States, said Adam Fein, a consultant and chief executive of Drug Channels Institute. These “monster” buyers have squeezed manufacturers on prices, and “some of those generic manufacturers are deciding the profit is so low they can’t make money, and they’re exiting the category,” Dr. Fein said.Is this really how economics works? There’s a medicine that millions of people desperately need? But nobody will produce it because they can’t make a profit? Huh? Isn’t the usual solution to just raise the price? And people will buy it at the higher price, because they need it so badly? And then you will make more profit, and can keep on making the medication? Isn’t “nobody will supply this product, it’s too cheap” just the economics version of “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”?
Sure, generic drug manufacturing is pretty consolidated. Most individual generic drugs are now manufactured only by one or two companies. If one of those few companies gets greedy (like Martin Shkreli did with Daraprim), they can increase prices by orders of magnitude without a lot of competitors to push back. And if one of those few companies suffers a shock (like the FDA closing the buspirone factory), it makes sense that there might not be enough competitors to pick up the slack.But how come this is only happening in pharmaceuticals? How come (in capitalist countries) there are almost never meat shortages, bread shortages, laptop shortages, or chair shortages? Is there something unusual about the pharmaceutical landscape that predisposes it to this sort of thing?
I am not an expert in this area and may be getting some of it wrong. But from Berndt, Conti, and Murphy (2017) and a Berndt, Conti, and Murphy (2018), I gather that a big part of the story is the Generic Drug User Fee Amendments (GDUFA) of 2012 and 2017.
The story goes something like this. The FDA demanded that generic drug manufacturers pass FDA inspection before setting up shop. But the FDA didn’t have enough inspectors to review manufacturers in a timely manner. So companies kept asking the FDA for permission to enter the generics market, and the FDA kept telling them there was a several year waiting period. In 2012, Congress recognized the problem. Politicians, FDA officials, and industry leaders agreed on a new policy where generic drug manufacturing companies would pay the FDA lots of money (about $300 million last time anyone checked), and the FDA would use that money to hire inspectors so they could clear their backlog of applications.
The good news is, the FDA hired lots more inspectors and they are now pretty good at responding to generic drug applications in a timely way. The bad news is that the fees to the companies were designed in a way that subtly encouraged monopolies in generic drug markets. I don’t understand all the specifics, but there seem to be two main problems.
First, if you manufacture a drug, the FDA will charge you a fee, but the fee doesn’t scale linearly with how much of the drug you produce. So suppose Martin Shkreli owns a very big Daraprim factory. The FDA might charge him $1 million per year to fund their inspectors. Suppose you are a small businessman who is angry at Martin Shkreli’s fee hike, and you want to open a competing Daraprim factory in your small town, using your small amount of personal savings. Probably your factory will be much smaller than Martin Shkreli’s. But the FDA will still charge you the same $1 million per year. At worst this means you make no profit; even at best, Shkreli’s economy of scale gives him a big advantage over you. So you may decide not to enter the market at all. From the second paper:
President of the Pharma & Biopharma Outsourcing Association, Gil Roth, remarked, ‘We have a single generic client that we do a short run of production for. Why are we charged the same as a Teva facility that pumps out a billion tablets?’ Another commented, ‘At least a flat tax is based on a percentage, either of revenue or profit. This is a flat fee, which makes it a regressive tax on smaller businesses, both contract manufacturers and small generics companies’I think the fee might even be per factory, which encourages companies to concentrate all their manufacturing at a single site – like the Mylan one that just got shut down, thus affecting the whole country’s buspirone supply.
Second, traditional economics suggests that if some company has a monopoly on a product that people really need (like a medication), they will charge very high prices. But many generic drugs are produced by only one company each – and Shkrelis aside, most of them charge affordable prices. Why? Berndt et al argue it is because of the possibility of competition: if Shkreli raises his prices too high, some other company can move in and undercut him. But FDA licensing procedures make this undercutting harder than it could be: it will take months to years, and thousands to millions of dollars, for the other company to move in (at which point Shkreli can just say “Haha, no” and lower his prices again, meaning the undercutter would lose all the money they put in).
Historically, the system has worked anyway – because lots of companies are sitting on pre-existing FDA approval to make certain drugs. If a company had ever made a drug in the past, they had FDA permission to make it again whenever they wanted. So if Shkreli raises prices on Daraprim, some other company that made Daraprim ten years ago can set up a new factory tomorrow and undercut him. This helped prevent would-be Shkrelis in most markets, and provided a safety valve for shocks like the one creating the buspirone shortage today.
But GDUFA weakened this system by mandating that any company with FDA approval to manufacture a drug pay yearly inspection fees to the FDA, whether or not they were actively manufacturing it. That turned FDA approval for drugs you weren’t actively manufacturing into a liability; you were paying fees, but not making a profit. Companies started voluntarily cancelling their FDA approvals for older drugs so they wouldn’t have to pay the fees. That meant monopolists lost a lot of their potential competition. And that cleared the way for people like Shkreli to hike prices.
You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. Unfortunately, the FDA is inadvertently taxing companies for being in the generic drug business. And it’s taxing them more if they’re not a monopolist with economies of scale. That means we get fewer companies in the generics industry, and more monopolists.
So my very tentative guess as to why buspirone is more plagued by shortages than bread or chairs is because number one, the need for FDA approval makes it hard for new companies to enter the buspirone industry, and number two, the FDA’s fee structure favors large-scale monopolies over small-scale competitors.
by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex | Read more:
Image: WebMD
[ed. On a drug/pharma/FDA rant this week.]
Thursday, May 2, 2019
Make America Trip Again
Nearly every human society has figured out how to get high. This behavior isn’t limited to Homo Sapiens—a number of animals also do recreational drugs. So why do we and some of our finned and hoofed brethren seek to escape normal consciousness? Well, as an active participant in normal consciousness, I don’t find the mystery too great: normal consciousness often sucks. Our brains are powerful problem-solving machines that evolved to protect and pass along our genes. In many situations, achieving that goal is unrelated to being happy.
“The mental healthcare system is so badly broken, it doesn’t even qualify as a system.” This indictment, coming from Tom Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is not due to lack of effort. The U.S. spends over $200 billion on mental healthcare treatment each year, double what we spent in 2005. American suicides are at a fifty year high and increasing at an increasing rate. Over 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2017, twice as many as did in 2007.
Our best responses to depression, addiction, and PTSD haven’t changed much. SSRI’s, introduced in the 1980s, work only with some forms of depression, have not improved, and carry side-effects that their users hate. Only 8 to 12 percent of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) members get sober after the first year, and the organization has resisted the introduction of more effective drug-based treatments. Talk-based therapy is expensive, time-consuming, and often ineffective.
Rather than throw up their hands in the face of maladies that are affecting tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions more worldwide, researchers are turning back to a class of compounds that have were exiled from the medical establishment over 40 years ago.
Classical psychedelics were administered to over 10,000 people in research settings in the 1950s and ’60s. Acting primarily on the 5HT2A subtype of serotonin receptors and sharing a similar chemical structure, classical psychedelics are generally thought of as psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD, mescaline, and DMT. MDMA (i.e. Molly or Ecstasy) shares some features, but is neurotoxic at high doses and can lead to dependencies not seen in the classical psychedelics. Classical psychedelics share more than just structure and method of action, they are anti-addictive (they help users break addictions and don’t create dependencies themselves), non-toxic, and generally affect the mind far more than they affect the body. (Someone tripping on a high dose of LSD will exhibit normal vital signs, and the only external evidence of the experience is pupil dilation). (...)
Recent psychedelic research has demonstrated the ability of psychedelics to beat our current best treatments for depression, addiction, PTSD, smoking, alcoholism, and existential anxiety. A lot of these studies are conducted by highly-motivated researchers on small samples and may not generalize. But the promise of psychedelics across such a wide range of ailments may indicate that mental illnesses aren’t as varied as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders would have us believe. The ability of psychedelics to help people with treatment-resistant mental illness (those that persist after two or more forms of treatment have been attempted) may foreshadow even better results in populations with less severe conditions. David Nutt, Britain’s former director of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, told me over email that these results are “almost certain” to generalize. (...)
After showing so much promise as a therapeutic tool and revealing deep truths about the mind (the discovery of LSD’s similarity to serotonin arguably kicked off modern neuroscience), LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline are Schedule I drugs: they have high potential for abuse and no accepted medical uses. Research significantly dropped off in 1966 and froze in 1976.
What happened?
Nixon declared the start of the “War on Drugs” in 1971, but the first shots were fired far earlier. The United States has a long history of criminalizing drugs associated with social undesirables, detailed in Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream. Premonitions of the war to come can be found in late 19th century. Fears of Chinese immigrants using opium to seduce white women contributed to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. A 1914 New York Times headline informed their readers that “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace.” This climate led to the passage of the Harrison Act the same year, which effectively criminalized cocaine and heroin.
Harry Anslinger, the fanatical and viciously racist founder of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, is the founding father of the drug war. In the 1920s, Anslinger prosecuted 35,000 doctors for prescribing controlled drugs to addicts, overriding a Supreme Court decision (this would not be the first time drug enforcers ignored judicial opinion) and ceding control of addictive drugs to the black market. After successfully pushing for marijuana criminalization in 1937, Anslinger took his show on the road. Invoking fears of Chinese “Communist heroin”, he threatened to cut other countries off from American foreign aid and markets if they didn’t adopt drug laws similar to America’s. In the words of a retired DEA agent, “He was truly the founder of international drug enforcement.”
There is a tendency to see the backlash to psychedelics as an avoidable tragedy brought on by the “antics” of Timothy Leary and other evangelizers. While psychedelics may have seemed poised to become a part of the mainstream, the infrastructure to criminalize substances in the face of all evidence was built long before Leary emerged on the scene.
The history of the psychedelic 1960s is well-documented in Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: the Complete Social History of LSD. The media narrative went something like this: an extremely promising drug (LSD) was being used responsibly and to great effect by pioneering therapists and intellectuals. Along come reckless scientists like Timothy Leary and counter-culture populists like Ken Kesey, who heave psychedelics over the wall separating the educated classes from the great unwashed. In response to the social and public health crisis that resulted from millions of people turning on, tuning in, and dropping out the government steps in, first when the FDA regulated acid as an experimental drug in 1962, then when California banned it in 1966, with the final nail coming with the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which inaugurated the modern war on drugs. (...)
James Fadiman told me that he thinks Compass is attempting to control part of the psilocybin market, but they’re also trying to move things forward as fast as possible and get governments and insurance companies to cover the cost, which compares favorably with decades of SSRI treatment.
Rick and others in the psychedelic establishment (yes, there is such a thing) claim not to be worried about Compass. One reason Rick isn’t particularly concerned is that Compass has a competitor from Usona, a nonprofit that is also trying to do psilocybin therapy. The idea is, if Compass charges too much, Usona can compete. But Usona has struggled to get its own source of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) psilocybin, a requirement for FDA approval. Compass is trying to patent its method of manufacturing psilocybin, which could ensure that it has a significant cost advantage over competitors, who would need to develop their own means of making GMP psilocybin. The reality is that nonprofits don’t have many of the advantages of a venture-funded for-profit. To go through the FDA, an enormous amount of startup capital is required, erecting a large barrier to entry that nonprofits will struggle to surmount. MAPS needed to raise $27 million to take MDMA through FDA approval. (...)
The pushback to Compass Pathways is sometimes framed as the overreaction to the mainstreaming of a previously fringe movement: Compass is just doing business as usual in a space where business is unusual. Rick sees the entrance of for-profit players like Compass as a healthy sign for psychedelics: people think they’re a good investment. The allure of tax revenues and big returns helped legalize marijuana. But legal marijuana became quickly became commercialized marijuana, leading to some of the problems we face with alcohol and tobacco: powerful industry lobbies resisting regulation and misleading labeling and advertising. As one marijuana entrepreneur said at an alcohol industry conference, “I fundamentally believe that it is Big Alcohol and Big Tobacco that will be my future employer.”
Given the way for-profit companies have handled drugs, skepticism is warranted. Researchers, advocates and practitioners who have spent decades working to make psychedelics safely available to more people are understandably terrified of a company focused on the bottom line moving too fast and setting the movement back. Compass is running studies with 400 people in eight countries based off of research done with a very small group of people. Psilocybin poses psychological risks that MDMA doesn’t, and MAPS therapists undergo substantially more training.
At the same time, 300 million people around world experience depression, and Compass has moved faster than Usona. It may be the case that MAPS training and protocols are overkill, and that the Compass approach is safe and far more scalable and cost-effective. As Compass embarks on larger scale research, Katherine MacLean sincerely hopes for their success. For the sake of all the people who could be helped by psilocybin treatment, I do too.
The final approach may be the best we can hope for in the near term. An excellent series from Psymposia lays out the future of MDMA. MAPS has established a public benefit corporation that has the exclusive rights to conduct MDMA therapy for five years, should the treatment get approved by the FDA. The public benefit corporation is separate from MAPS, but MAPS is the sole shareholder. Any profits from the corporation go back into MAPS research, which is publicly available. From what I can tell, Rick is genuinely committed to making psychedelic therapy available to as many people as possible (MAPS has hired a patent lawyer to develop anti-patent strategies to ensure that nobody can patent the use of MDMA). The way to get there seems to be by jumping through expensive and onerous hoops to prove the safety and efficacy of psychedelics to the FDA.
There are still risks and drawbacks to the MAPS approach. If the FDA Phase III trials are successful, only MAPS’ GMP MDMA will be re-scheduled by the DEA. And legal risks for recreational users could persist as re-scheduling won’t necessarily change criminal penalties associated with the drug. For the five years that MAPS has a monopoly on MDMA therapy, only therapists trained by MAPS will be able to conduct therapy or trainings of their own, creating a potential bottleneck in the number of people who can legally provide MDMA-assisted therapy. The associated costs are considerable. Training for this therapy can cost more than $9,000. The current protocols for MDMA treatment involve many therapy sessions with a two-person co-therapy team that can cost up to $15,000 altogether. There are strict requirements on prospective MDMA-assisted therapy clinic: two MAPS-trained therapists, a prescribing physician who can obtain a DEA Schedule I license, access to a lab for bloodwork, and a cardiologist. Clinics must be established businesses with the facilities to meet therapeutic and security standards.
[ed. Looks like it's heading the same way of ketamine treatments. Expensive regimens only the rich can afford. But... baby steps. See also: Women Who Microdose Mushrooms, and It Happened to Her (because I just finished Cat Marnell's How to Murder Your Life.)]
“The mental healthcare system is so badly broken, it doesn’t even qualify as a system.” This indictment, coming from Tom Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is not due to lack of effort. The U.S. spends over $200 billion on mental healthcare treatment each year, double what we spent in 2005. American suicides are at a fifty year high and increasing at an increasing rate. Over 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2017, twice as many as did in 2007.
Our best responses to depression, addiction, and PTSD haven’t changed much. SSRI’s, introduced in the 1980s, work only with some forms of depression, have not improved, and carry side-effects that their users hate. Only 8 to 12 percent of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) members get sober after the first year, and the organization has resisted the introduction of more effective drug-based treatments. Talk-based therapy is expensive, time-consuming, and often ineffective.Rather than throw up their hands in the face of maladies that are affecting tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions more worldwide, researchers are turning back to a class of compounds that have were exiled from the medical establishment over 40 years ago.
Classical psychedelics were administered to over 10,000 people in research settings in the 1950s and ’60s. Acting primarily on the 5HT2A subtype of serotonin receptors and sharing a similar chemical structure, classical psychedelics are generally thought of as psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD, mescaline, and DMT. MDMA (i.e. Molly or Ecstasy) shares some features, but is neurotoxic at high doses and can lead to dependencies not seen in the classical psychedelics. Classical psychedelics share more than just structure and method of action, they are anti-addictive (they help users break addictions and don’t create dependencies themselves), non-toxic, and generally affect the mind far more than they affect the body. (Someone tripping on a high dose of LSD will exhibit normal vital signs, and the only external evidence of the experience is pupil dilation). (...)
Recent psychedelic research has demonstrated the ability of psychedelics to beat our current best treatments for depression, addiction, PTSD, smoking, alcoholism, and existential anxiety. A lot of these studies are conducted by highly-motivated researchers on small samples and may not generalize. But the promise of psychedelics across such a wide range of ailments may indicate that mental illnesses aren’t as varied as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders would have us believe. The ability of psychedelics to help people with treatment-resistant mental illness (those that persist after two or more forms of treatment have been attempted) may foreshadow even better results in populations with less severe conditions. David Nutt, Britain’s former director of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, told me over email that these results are “almost certain” to generalize. (...)
After showing so much promise as a therapeutic tool and revealing deep truths about the mind (the discovery of LSD’s similarity to serotonin arguably kicked off modern neuroscience), LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline are Schedule I drugs: they have high potential for abuse and no accepted medical uses. Research significantly dropped off in 1966 and froze in 1976.
What happened?
Nixon declared the start of the “War on Drugs” in 1971, but the first shots were fired far earlier. The United States has a long history of criminalizing drugs associated with social undesirables, detailed in Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream. Premonitions of the war to come can be found in late 19th century. Fears of Chinese immigrants using opium to seduce white women contributed to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. A 1914 New York Times headline informed their readers that “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace.” This climate led to the passage of the Harrison Act the same year, which effectively criminalized cocaine and heroin.
Harry Anslinger, the fanatical and viciously racist founder of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, is the founding father of the drug war. In the 1920s, Anslinger prosecuted 35,000 doctors for prescribing controlled drugs to addicts, overriding a Supreme Court decision (this would not be the first time drug enforcers ignored judicial opinion) and ceding control of addictive drugs to the black market. After successfully pushing for marijuana criminalization in 1937, Anslinger took his show on the road. Invoking fears of Chinese “Communist heroin”, he threatened to cut other countries off from American foreign aid and markets if they didn’t adopt drug laws similar to America’s. In the words of a retired DEA agent, “He was truly the founder of international drug enforcement.”
There is a tendency to see the backlash to psychedelics as an avoidable tragedy brought on by the “antics” of Timothy Leary and other evangelizers. While psychedelics may have seemed poised to become a part of the mainstream, the infrastructure to criminalize substances in the face of all evidence was built long before Leary emerged on the scene.
The history of the psychedelic 1960s is well-documented in Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: the Complete Social History of LSD. The media narrative went something like this: an extremely promising drug (LSD) was being used responsibly and to great effect by pioneering therapists and intellectuals. Along come reckless scientists like Timothy Leary and counter-culture populists like Ken Kesey, who heave psychedelics over the wall separating the educated classes from the great unwashed. In response to the social and public health crisis that resulted from millions of people turning on, tuning in, and dropping out the government steps in, first when the FDA regulated acid as an experimental drug in 1962, then when California banned it in 1966, with the final nail coming with the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which inaugurated the modern war on drugs. (...)
Compass Pathways is the controversial startup that recently secured FDA approval for psilocybin as a breakthrough treatment. Originally a nonprofit, Compass has been criticized for capitalizing on the work of academic and nonprofit researchers to develop their business. A Quartz investigation describes how Compass courted researchers as a nonprofit, then iced them out and transferred its intellectual property to the company’s founders before transitioning to for-profit status. When a charity is dissolved, it is required to distribute its assets to other charities, a requirement Compass appears to have violated. The conditions Compass puts on research it sponsors are “restrictive contracts even by pharmaceutical industry standards, according to John Abramson, lecturer in health care policy at Harvard Medical School, and have the potential to distort the publicly available body of scientific knowledge.” David Nutt told me via email that this practice is “necessary under current commercial funding routes to [a] successful clinical trial outcome.” (The idea is that competitors could piggy-back off of Compass’s research and undercut the resulting products). The company only requires a weekend of training for its therapists and does not require them to have personal experience with psilocybin. (...)
James Fadiman told me that he thinks Compass is attempting to control part of the psilocybin market, but they’re also trying to move things forward as fast as possible and get governments and insurance companies to cover the cost, which compares favorably with decades of SSRI treatment.
Rick and others in the psychedelic establishment (yes, there is such a thing) claim not to be worried about Compass. One reason Rick isn’t particularly concerned is that Compass has a competitor from Usona, a nonprofit that is also trying to do psilocybin therapy. The idea is, if Compass charges too much, Usona can compete. But Usona has struggled to get its own source of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) psilocybin, a requirement for FDA approval. Compass is trying to patent its method of manufacturing psilocybin, which could ensure that it has a significant cost advantage over competitors, who would need to develop their own means of making GMP psilocybin. The reality is that nonprofits don’t have many of the advantages of a venture-funded for-profit. To go through the FDA, an enormous amount of startup capital is required, erecting a large barrier to entry that nonprofits will struggle to surmount. MAPS needed to raise $27 million to take MDMA through FDA approval. (...)
The pushback to Compass Pathways is sometimes framed as the overreaction to the mainstreaming of a previously fringe movement: Compass is just doing business as usual in a space where business is unusual. Rick sees the entrance of for-profit players like Compass as a healthy sign for psychedelics: people think they’re a good investment. The allure of tax revenues and big returns helped legalize marijuana. But legal marijuana became quickly became commercialized marijuana, leading to some of the problems we face with alcohol and tobacco: powerful industry lobbies resisting regulation and misleading labeling and advertising. As one marijuana entrepreneur said at an alcohol industry conference, “I fundamentally believe that it is Big Alcohol and Big Tobacco that will be my future employer.”
Given the way for-profit companies have handled drugs, skepticism is warranted. Researchers, advocates and practitioners who have spent decades working to make psychedelics safely available to more people are understandably terrified of a company focused on the bottom line moving too fast and setting the movement back. Compass is running studies with 400 people in eight countries based off of research done with a very small group of people. Psilocybin poses psychological risks that MDMA doesn’t, and MAPS therapists undergo substantially more training.
At the same time, 300 million people around world experience depression, and Compass has moved faster than Usona. It may be the case that MAPS training and protocols are overkill, and that the Compass approach is safe and far more scalable and cost-effective. As Compass embarks on larger scale research, Katherine MacLean sincerely hopes for their success. For the sake of all the people who could be helped by psilocybin treatment, I do too.
The final approach may be the best we can hope for in the near term. An excellent series from Psymposia lays out the future of MDMA. MAPS has established a public benefit corporation that has the exclusive rights to conduct MDMA therapy for five years, should the treatment get approved by the FDA. The public benefit corporation is separate from MAPS, but MAPS is the sole shareholder. Any profits from the corporation go back into MAPS research, which is publicly available. From what I can tell, Rick is genuinely committed to making psychedelic therapy available to as many people as possible (MAPS has hired a patent lawyer to develop anti-patent strategies to ensure that nobody can patent the use of MDMA). The way to get there seems to be by jumping through expensive and onerous hoops to prove the safety and efficacy of psychedelics to the FDA.
There are still risks and drawbacks to the MAPS approach. If the FDA Phase III trials are successful, only MAPS’ GMP MDMA will be re-scheduled by the DEA. And legal risks for recreational users could persist as re-scheduling won’t necessarily change criminal penalties associated with the drug. For the five years that MAPS has a monopoly on MDMA therapy, only therapists trained by MAPS will be able to conduct therapy or trainings of their own, creating a potential bottleneck in the number of people who can legally provide MDMA-assisted therapy. The associated costs are considerable. Training for this therapy can cost more than $9,000. The current protocols for MDMA treatment involve many therapy sessions with a two-person co-therapy team that can cost up to $15,000 altogether. There are strict requirements on prospective MDMA-assisted therapy clinic: two MAPS-trained therapists, a prescribing physician who can obtain a DEA Schedule I license, access to a lab for bloodwork, and a cardiologist. Clinics must be established businesses with the facilities to meet therapeutic and security standards.
by Garrison Lovely, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Nick Sirotich[ed. Looks like it's heading the same way of ketamine treatments. Expensive regimens only the rich can afford. But... baby steps. See also: Women Who Microdose Mushrooms, and It Happened to Her (because I just finished Cat Marnell's How to Murder Your Life.)]
Screenplay Software Adds Tool to Assess a Script’s Inclusiveness
One of the most widely used screenplay programs in Hollywood has a new tool to help with gender equality and inclusion.
In an update announced Thursday, Final Draft — software that writers use to format scripts — said it will now include a proprietary “Inclusivity Analysis” feature, allowing filmmakers “to quickly assign and measure the ethnicity, gender, age, disability or any other definable trait of the characters,” including race, the company said in a statement.
It also will enable users to determine if a project passes the Bechdel Test, measuring whether two female characters speak to each other about anything other than a man. The Final Draft tool, a free add-on, was developed in collaboration with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University, which has been at the forefront of studying the underrepresentation of women on screen.
In a statement, Geena Davis said the update “will make it easier for readers, writers and creative execs to more easily use a gender and intersectionality lens when evaluating scripts prior to greenlight, casting and production.”
The Final Draft feature comes almost a year after similar programs were instituted in other screenplay apps, starting with Highland software. The idea then came from Christina Hodson, a screenwriter (“Bumblebee,” the forthcoming “Batgirl,”), who reasoned that if scripts were the blueprint for blockbusters and indies alike, “it made sense to me that we can do a lot ourselves, before they even leave our desk.” She approached software makers, who developed and released tools in a matter of weeks.
Final Draft, the industry leader, took a more measured approach, Scott McMenamin, the company’s president, said in an email. “We just wanted to make sure we got this right,” he wrote, “which is why we didn’t release it right out of the gate” with the most recent update, Final Draft 11, in September 2018.
by Melena Ryzik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Final Draft
[ed. For all aspiring screenwriters. Who knew industry standard screenwriting software existed?]
In an update announced Thursday, Final Draft — software that writers use to format scripts — said it will now include a proprietary “Inclusivity Analysis” feature, allowing filmmakers “to quickly assign and measure the ethnicity, gender, age, disability or any other definable trait of the characters,” including race, the company said in a statement.
It also will enable users to determine if a project passes the Bechdel Test, measuring whether two female characters speak to each other about anything other than a man. The Final Draft tool, a free add-on, was developed in collaboration with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University, which has been at the forefront of studying the underrepresentation of women on screen.In a statement, Geena Davis said the update “will make it easier for readers, writers and creative execs to more easily use a gender and intersectionality lens when evaluating scripts prior to greenlight, casting and production.”
The Final Draft feature comes almost a year after similar programs were instituted in other screenplay apps, starting with Highland software. The idea then came from Christina Hodson, a screenwriter (“Bumblebee,” the forthcoming “Batgirl,”), who reasoned that if scripts were the blueprint for blockbusters and indies alike, “it made sense to me that we can do a lot ourselves, before they even leave our desk.” She approached software makers, who developed and released tools in a matter of weeks.
Final Draft, the industry leader, took a more measured approach, Scott McMenamin, the company’s president, said in an email. “We just wanted to make sure we got this right,” he wrote, “which is why we didn’t release it right out of the gate” with the most recent update, Final Draft 11, in September 2018.
by Melena Ryzik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Final Draft
[ed. For all aspiring screenwriters. Who knew industry standard screenwriting software existed?]
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
The Biggest Bias In Tech That No One Talks About
I was recently chatting with two young men who were telling me of their struggle to hire older employees.
“The rest of our office is young. They just don’t fit with our culture,” the first one admitted.
“Our industry is brand new,” said the second. “Older candidates don’t bring any relevant experience, but come with a higher paycheck.”
And then: “I’m not sure if an older employee would be able to adapt and learn quickly in our fast-paced work culture.”
I nodded in agreement. All these things made sense. Then one of them interjected: “I don’t want to feel like we have an office mom!”
Suddenly I felt a pit at the bottom of my stomach. I am a real-life mom. Oblivious to my reaction, the two men went on talking, genuinely trying to find a solution. One said: “We actually did hire an older employee recently. I was nervous about whether he would fit in, but so far, it’s going okay. He’s 40.”
The sinking feeling in my gut turned to all-out panic. Throughout this conversation I had been picturing a gray haired 60 year old. But no, “old” in tech is someone in their 40s. Until this point, I’d never thought of myself as too old for tech, but as a woman in her late 30s who is also a mother to three young children, I suddenly realized what others might be thinking when I walk in the room.
The data says ageism starts young in tech
There’s no getting past the fact that tech is a young industry. Studies show that age bias is rampant in tech not just once one hits their 40s, but by age 36. When VC firm First Round Capital polled a wide range of US startup founders in The 2018 State of Startups report, age was cited as the strongest investor bias against founders, with 89% of founders saying older people face discrimination in tech, followed by gender. And older women have double the odds. In a 2017 Indeed survey, 43 percent of tech workers said that fear of losing their jobs due to age is a real fear. (...)
Pregnancy and ageism create a double penalty for women
Ageism impacts everyone, but women bear the unfair brunt of this trend. In this same survey of early stage founders, the amount of capital raised by male founders peaked between ages 30 and 45. But for female founders, the amount raised doesn’t spike until the late 30s and it peaks soon after, by age 45. Founders of both sexes experience a drop off in funding after they hit their 45th birthday. For women, this means a very narrow window in which to maximize their fundraising. (...)
Why is youth so coveted in tech?
Unlike other industries, tech’s hallmark is change and innovation. For this reason, professional experience is not valued as much as the ability to think outside the proverbial box. Fresh young talent has a leg up in an industry where bold new ideas are valued above all else. Tech is an industry of and in disruption, not beholden to status quo ways of doing things.
In the war for talent, tech culture targets young recruits, particularly those that don’t have family obligations at home. Tech campuses are built like all-inclusive resorts, enabling — no, encouraging — recruits to stay on campus as much as possible, a la The Circle, Dave Eggers dystopian novel circa 2013. Apple Park, Apple’s multibillion-dollar new campus in Cupertino, is colloquially known as “the Spaceship Campus” because of its design — but also because it’s a self-contained destination one could conceivably stay airlocked inside forever.
These tech cultures offer “work-life balance” only in the sense that you can theoretically manage your entire life from campus, with no need to go elsewhere to exercise, do errands, eat out or meet up with friends (why be friends with people outside of work, after all?). The caveat here is these perks tend to fall short if your life responsibilities happen to include small people who are dependent on you. (...)
But what are we collectively missing out on because of all this?
But the even bigger issue is that tech’s myopic view causes it to miss out on many billion dollar opportunities.
The stats on this opportunity are things we’ve all heard before: baby boomers control more than ⅔ of the disposable income in the US and will inherit $15 Trillion over the next two decades.
What is surprising is that the tech industry hasn’t taken more notice of this rapidly growing market underserved by tech. Instead, VCs are distracted by apps for millennials like private chefs, valet parking and skipping the line while clubbing (yes, there is a new app for this).
What about instead building technology focused on working parents, second careers, menopause, retirement and senior care?
by Maren Thomas Bannon, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Getty
“The rest of our office is young. They just don’t fit with our culture,” the first one admitted.
“Our industry is brand new,” said the second. “Older candidates don’t bring any relevant experience, but come with a higher paycheck.”
And then: “I’m not sure if an older employee would be able to adapt and learn quickly in our fast-paced work culture.”I nodded in agreement. All these things made sense. Then one of them interjected: “I don’t want to feel like we have an office mom!”
Suddenly I felt a pit at the bottom of my stomach. I am a real-life mom. Oblivious to my reaction, the two men went on talking, genuinely trying to find a solution. One said: “We actually did hire an older employee recently. I was nervous about whether he would fit in, but so far, it’s going okay. He’s 40.”
The sinking feeling in my gut turned to all-out panic. Throughout this conversation I had been picturing a gray haired 60 year old. But no, “old” in tech is someone in their 40s. Until this point, I’d never thought of myself as too old for tech, but as a woman in her late 30s who is also a mother to three young children, I suddenly realized what others might be thinking when I walk in the room.
The data says ageism starts young in tech
There’s no getting past the fact that tech is a young industry. Studies show that age bias is rampant in tech not just once one hits their 40s, but by age 36. When VC firm First Round Capital polled a wide range of US startup founders in The 2018 State of Startups report, age was cited as the strongest investor bias against founders, with 89% of founders saying older people face discrimination in tech, followed by gender. And older women have double the odds. In a 2017 Indeed survey, 43 percent of tech workers said that fear of losing their jobs due to age is a real fear. (...)
Pregnancy and ageism create a double penalty for women
Ageism impacts everyone, but women bear the unfair brunt of this trend. In this same survey of early stage founders, the amount of capital raised by male founders peaked between ages 30 and 45. But for female founders, the amount raised doesn’t spike until the late 30s and it peaks soon after, by age 45. Founders of both sexes experience a drop off in funding after they hit their 45th birthday. For women, this means a very narrow window in which to maximize their fundraising. (...)
Why is youth so coveted in tech?
Unlike other industries, tech’s hallmark is change and innovation. For this reason, professional experience is not valued as much as the ability to think outside the proverbial box. Fresh young talent has a leg up in an industry where bold new ideas are valued above all else. Tech is an industry of and in disruption, not beholden to status quo ways of doing things.
In the war for talent, tech culture targets young recruits, particularly those that don’t have family obligations at home. Tech campuses are built like all-inclusive resorts, enabling — no, encouraging — recruits to stay on campus as much as possible, a la The Circle, Dave Eggers dystopian novel circa 2013. Apple Park, Apple’s multibillion-dollar new campus in Cupertino, is colloquially known as “the Spaceship Campus” because of its design — but also because it’s a self-contained destination one could conceivably stay airlocked inside forever.
These tech cultures offer “work-life balance” only in the sense that you can theoretically manage your entire life from campus, with no need to go elsewhere to exercise, do errands, eat out or meet up with friends (why be friends with people outside of work, after all?). The caveat here is these perks tend to fall short if your life responsibilities happen to include small people who are dependent on you. (...)
But what are we collectively missing out on because of all this?
But the even bigger issue is that tech’s myopic view causes it to miss out on many billion dollar opportunities.
The stats on this opportunity are things we’ve all heard before: baby boomers control more than ⅔ of the disposable income in the US and will inherit $15 Trillion over the next two decades.
What is surprising is that the tech industry hasn’t taken more notice of this rapidly growing market underserved by tech. Instead, VCs are distracted by apps for millennials like private chefs, valet parking and skipping the line while clubbing (yes, there is a new app for this).
What about instead building technology focused on working parents, second careers, menopause, retirement and senior care?
Image: Getty
How to Fly a Plane in an Emergency Situation
As a professional pilot, I spend four or five days a year in multimillion-dollar flight simulators being examined by specialized training pilots. Since professional pilots already know how to fly, much of the testing focuses on what are called “non-normal situations.” Let’s imagine you find yourself on an airplane, in the sky, without a pilot. You are in a non-normal situation.
A useful guide to your initial actions if you’re in such a pickle is a simple mnemonic called ANC: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. (Aviation is as acronym-laden a field as any I’ve come across.)
So, aviate. You need to keep the plane in the safe, stable flight you found it in.
Use the control wheel and the horizon displayed on the attitude indicator to level the wings. If it’s gin-clear outside and the real horizon is obvious to you, feel free to use it.
Next, take a look at the altimeter and the vertical speed indicator. Pick an altitude as your target—a simple number near your current altitude, like 10,000 or 15,000 feet. If you’re climbing away from your target, then very gently push the control column forward—that is, away from you—until you’ve stopped climbing. If you’re descending, then pull the control column back, toward you, until you’re not descending anymore. Be gentle, as it’s easy to overcorrect. Porpoising, or repeatedly ascending above and then descending below your target altitude, is a common problem for new pilots.
Now look at the airspeed indicator. Pick a target speed toward the higher end of the safe range. It’s impossible to give numbers for every airplane, but try 100 knots in a small plane, 250 knots in a small airliner, and 280 knots in something like a 747. If your speed is higher than your target, pull the throttles or thrust levers back slightly to reduce power. If it’s lower, then add power.
The goal is to reach an equilibrium in which your speed and altitude are safe and stable. Note the pitch attitude and power setting at which this occurs. The problem, as you’ll soon realize, is that the inputs required to correct one aspect of your flight path will almost certainly upset another one. For example, if you’ve just changed your power setting, then your pitch may have changed, and perhaps you’ve started to inadvertently climb or descend. Or, if you’ve accidentally lowered your pitch attitude, you’ll soon see your speed increasing and your altitude dropping.
The best way to catch such unintended changes early is to move your eyes between the primary instruments in a consistent pattern. This pattern is called the scan and the scan is, unfortunately, much easier said than done, in part because it can seem repetitive at first, and in part because you must keep scanning at the same time as you’re doing everything else you need to do. In fact, getting the scan right is one of the hardest parts of pilot training. It’s hardly overstating it to ask you to imagine that every remaining word in this article is followed by the command “Scan!” (...)
Now it’s time to navigate a safe flight path (in relation to mountains, storms, air traffic zones, and other aircraft) and communicate with the folks who need to know what you’re doing, or who can help you to achieve a safe outcome. For a trained pilot, navigation is a more immediate priority than communication (hence the order of the mnemonic, first A, then N, and last of all C). But for you the opposite is true, because unless you can see an airport right in front of you, you’re going to need outside help to remain clear of terrain and to find a runway.
For that reason, we’ll talk about communication first, and return to navigation afterward. For now, if you can see mountains or other obstacles in your path, turn away from them, climb (by adding power and lifting the nose of the plane), or both.
by Mark Vanhoenacker, Wired | Read more:
Image: markk
A useful guide to your initial actions if you’re in such a pickle is a simple mnemonic called ANC: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. (Aviation is as acronym-laden a field as any I’ve come across.)
So, aviate. You need to keep the plane in the safe, stable flight you found it in.
Use the control wheel and the horizon displayed on the attitude indicator to level the wings. If it’s gin-clear outside and the real horizon is obvious to you, feel free to use it.
Next, take a look at the altimeter and the vertical speed indicator. Pick an altitude as your target—a simple number near your current altitude, like 10,000 or 15,000 feet. If you’re climbing away from your target, then very gently push the control column forward—that is, away from you—until you’ve stopped climbing. If you’re descending, then pull the control column back, toward you, until you’re not descending anymore. Be gentle, as it’s easy to overcorrect. Porpoising, or repeatedly ascending above and then descending below your target altitude, is a common problem for new pilots.Now look at the airspeed indicator. Pick a target speed toward the higher end of the safe range. It’s impossible to give numbers for every airplane, but try 100 knots in a small plane, 250 knots in a small airliner, and 280 knots in something like a 747. If your speed is higher than your target, pull the throttles or thrust levers back slightly to reduce power. If it’s lower, then add power.
The goal is to reach an equilibrium in which your speed and altitude are safe and stable. Note the pitch attitude and power setting at which this occurs. The problem, as you’ll soon realize, is that the inputs required to correct one aspect of your flight path will almost certainly upset another one. For example, if you’ve just changed your power setting, then your pitch may have changed, and perhaps you’ve started to inadvertently climb or descend. Or, if you’ve accidentally lowered your pitch attitude, you’ll soon see your speed increasing and your altitude dropping.
The best way to catch such unintended changes early is to move your eyes between the primary instruments in a consistent pattern. This pattern is called the scan and the scan is, unfortunately, much easier said than done, in part because it can seem repetitive at first, and in part because you must keep scanning at the same time as you’re doing everything else you need to do. In fact, getting the scan right is one of the hardest parts of pilot training. It’s hardly overstating it to ask you to imagine that every remaining word in this article is followed by the command “Scan!” (...)
Now it’s time to navigate a safe flight path (in relation to mountains, storms, air traffic zones, and other aircraft) and communicate with the folks who need to know what you’re doing, or who can help you to achieve a safe outcome. For a trained pilot, navigation is a more immediate priority than communication (hence the order of the mnemonic, first A, then N, and last of all C). But for you the opposite is true, because unless you can see an airport right in front of you, you’re going to need outside help to remain clear of terrain and to find a runway.
For that reason, we’ll talk about communication first, and return to navigation afterward. For now, if you can see mountains or other obstacles in your path, turn away from them, climb (by adding power and lifting the nose of the plane), or both.
by Mark Vanhoenacker, Wired | Read more:
Image: markk
[ed. I learned to fly because of a couple "non-normal" situations. One time my pilot kept falling asleep, dropping several hundred feet at a clip. It was early evening and he'd been flying all day. He kept making lame jokes, like... "just wanted to check out that muskrat den" and "that's why they call us bush pilots, because we fly from bush to bush, haha." Funny. I had to keep nudging him and feeding him cigarettes to stay awake, and even on final approach he was still nodding off. Another time, another pilot, caught above the clouds, solidly socked in. We had to descend into a mountain range and weren't exactly sure where we were (above this valley or that one?). A small hole opened up and we dove into it like a screaming Japanese zero. It closed immediately and then we were flying blind into... somewhere. I wondered briefly if we'd feel anything, slamming into the side of a mountain. Finally broke through a few hundred feet above ground. In the wrong valley. After that I told myself I'd never get in those situations again without having some type of knowledge or control. But of course, never say never.]
Why Is Iced Coffee So Gay?
In late January, during the Polar Vortex that held America by the throat with an icy grasp, a picture of a man wearing a massive coat with his hood up while battling his way through a snowstorm went viral. It sounds unremarkable, except that, in 2°F weather, he was death-gripping an iced coffee.
The picture, fairly innocuous aside from the man’s choice of caffeinated beverage, was shared by the City of New York’s Twitter feed and paired with an incredulous caption. How could an individual in this freezing weather, the tweet suggested, be drinking an iced coffee? It’s obvious, people responded: He’s gay.
Obviously there’s no way commenters could’ve known this man’s sexuality. Honestly, I’m not sure anyone even knows who he is. But none of that matters, after all; what was clear to the corner of the Internet known as Gay Twitter, and to the site Gay Star News,was that this man was just exercising his rights—nay, his duty—as a gay man to drink iced coffee. Iced coffee, you see, is gay culture [ed. note: can confirm].
In a piece published last October on the LGBTQ website New Now Next, it was noted that for the past two years on social media there’s been a steady flow of jokes and memes about the gay community’s affinity for iced coffee. According to NNN, iced coffee is gay because: portability (cute cups), easy consumption (it’s cold) and customization (you can pump it full of sugar, or sugar-free syrup that is definitely not giving you diabetes). The site compared it to the stereotype of suburban moms and their consumption of pinot grigio; iced coffee is a gay crutch. (...)
“I think the joke sort of originated as gays drinking iced coffee in the winter,” Stryker explains. “Like, gays will do ridiculous things and there’s something so counterculture about drinking an iced coffee during the winter.” It’s also, he says, a sign of resisting homogenization. “Hot coffee is so normcore. Like, it’s for dads and old people commuting on the train.”
For Sam, iced versus hot coffee is the perfect symbolism between queer and straight culture. Essentially, iced coffee has become a queer avatar, and a way for gay people to signpost themselves against the uniformity of heterosexuality. (...)
While there are some codes that were very specific, such as the hanky code which signaled specific sexual proclivities, Dr. Bengry says that mostly the signposting was subtle, such wearing a red tie or a pinky ring. Usually, though, they had something to do with subverting gender norms. For example, wearing color was a subversion of the dark suits men were accustomed to wearing, while anything ostentatious or extravagant, such as using a scent or perfume, was associated with women. “The codes associated with a gendered difference,” he adds, “could then signal a sexual difference.”
The picture, fairly innocuous aside from the man’s choice of caffeinated beverage, was shared by the City of New York’s Twitter feed and paired with an incredulous caption. How could an individual in this freezing weather, the tweet suggested, be drinking an iced coffee? It’s obvious, people responded: He’s gay.
Obviously there’s no way commenters could’ve known this man’s sexuality. Honestly, I’m not sure anyone even knows who he is. But none of that matters, after all; what was clear to the corner of the Internet known as Gay Twitter, and to the site Gay Star News,was that this man was just exercising his rights—nay, his duty—as a gay man to drink iced coffee. Iced coffee, you see, is gay culture [ed. note: can confirm].In a piece published last October on the LGBTQ website New Now Next, it was noted that for the past two years on social media there’s been a steady flow of jokes and memes about the gay community’s affinity for iced coffee. According to NNN, iced coffee is gay because: portability (cute cups), easy consumption (it’s cold) and customization (you can pump it full of sugar, or sugar-free syrup that is definitely not giving you diabetes). The site compared it to the stereotype of suburban moms and their consumption of pinot grigio; iced coffee is a gay crutch. (...)
“I think the joke sort of originated as gays drinking iced coffee in the winter,” Stryker explains. “Like, gays will do ridiculous things and there’s something so counterculture about drinking an iced coffee during the winter.” It’s also, he says, a sign of resisting homogenization. “Hot coffee is so normcore. Like, it’s for dads and old people commuting on the train.”
For Sam, iced versus hot coffee is the perfect symbolism between queer and straight culture. Essentially, iced coffee has become a queer avatar, and a way for gay people to signpost themselves against the uniformity of heterosexuality. (...)
While there are some codes that were very specific, such as the hanky code which signaled specific sexual proclivities, Dr. Bengry says that mostly the signposting was subtle, such wearing a red tie or a pinky ring. Usually, though, they had something to do with subverting gender norms. For example, wearing color was a subversion of the dark suits men were accustomed to wearing, while anything ostentatious or extravagant, such as using a scent or perfume, was associated with women. “The codes associated with a gendered difference,” he adds, “could then signal a sexual difference.”
by Alim Kheraj, GQ | Read more:
Image: City of NY
[ed. News you can use.]
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