Murder Insurance

The National Rifle Association emerged from its annual convention last week with a veneer of stability.

Its leader Wayne LaPierre managed to quash a takeover attempt by now-ousted President Oliver North, winning reelection as executive vice president in a unanimous vote of top board members.

But beneath the surface, the organization is in turmoil. New York Attorney General Letitia James is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into alleged financial mismanagement at the NRA, while the group is embroiled in a messy lawsuit with its longtime image-maker, Ackerman McQueen. The NRA sued the Oklahoma City-based ad firm last month to get documents as part of an apparent internal investigation into whether the firm has been siphoning money out of the gun lobby, allegations that Ackerman denies.

Then there’s Carry Guard. The program — which offers combat training and liability insurance for shootings carried out in “self-defense” — was founded in 2017 to keep money flowing into the NRA’s dwindling coffers after President Trump’s surprise election left gun owners assured that, for the time being, at least, no “jack-booted”government officials were coming for their firearms.

Instead, Carry Guard has become a financial liability of its own. Multiple states have banned the program and are investigating whether the NRA violated state law regarding the marketing and sale of insurance. In a lawsuit against Lockton, Carry Guard’s administrator, the NRA alleged it lost “tens of millions of dollars” from the program after relying on assurances that Lockton was complying with state law. Numerous NRA members took issue with the program’s “sloppy” rollout.

Gun control advocates even gave Carry Guard a nickname: “murder insurance.”

Rather than help the NRA shore up its finances, Carry Guard has become a symbol of the unprecedented public relations and legal woes plaguing the nation’s largest gun group. (...)

From the NRA’s perspective, Carry Guard had real potential to be lucrative. Like many affinity groups, the NRA had long offered various forms of insurance to members, former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman told TPM.

Feldman called insurance sales a tremendous source of revenue for the NRA over the years, but that, under LaPierre’s watch, the drive to earn a profit off them was taken “to the extreme.”

LaPierre had “turned the NRA into a business,” he added.

NRA members — and numerous stories from The Trace — refer to Carry Guard as the “brainchild” of NRA member Josh Powell. Brought on as NRA chief of staff in 2016 from the world of high-end outdoor garments, Powell reportedly “billed” the program “as an integral part of securing the NRA’s finances well into the future,” a source “close to the NRA” told The Trace.

Court filings indicate that Powell began serious preparation on Carry Guard in late 2016. The final version of the product offered four tiers of protection, from a bronze plan providing $250,000 in protection from civil lawsuits and another $50,000 in criminal defense to gold plus, with $1.5 million in civil protection and an extra $250,000 for criminal defense.

The Trace quoted a former Ackerman McQueen employee as saying that “Carry Guard was pushed to the front after the election because they needed money.”

But the project appears to have failed in that task. Between 2016 and December 2018, when Powell was shifted to a new role handling legal strategy for the various lawsuits entangling Carry Guard, the NRA lost some $55 million in income, according to The Trace.

That period saw internal dissent over the program, with some NRA members seeing it as a potential scam, according to interviews with NRA members and publicly available posts.

Carry Guard’s liability insurance component only kicks in for criminal cases after an acquittal. Individual Carry Guard customers would have to cover the hefty costs of criminal defense out of pocket until they were acquitted, leading to accusations within the firearms community that the NRA was luring people into paying for a service unlikely to help them during the most expensive and consequential phase of liability.

by Josh Kovensky, TPM | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Friends of the Pod

Every day we find news to be online. One man’s refrigerator texts him alerts about a coolant error. Another’s baby monitor sends photos of his child in night vision. People wielding phones chase apparitions in the park — Pokémon Go, a layer of childhood pixel monsters draped over physical reality — streaming trails of data behind them. There are tablets at the airport, browsers in rental cars. No screens yet on the subway, we think, and examine print ads for a chat-based pharmacy. But then, as if summoned, the screens appear! It’s our stop, crumbling and dirty as ever, newly outfitted with luminous displays shilling an expanding internet of things. Out on the street, a row of boxy storefronts displays the same pastel objects that have been following us around the social networks via tracker pixel. It’s as if the Instagram square has leapt from the screen. We look around, do a double take. Is this the internet, too?

We accept it, we guess. We like the internet. And really, we’d be online all the time if it weren’t for our eyes, those sensitive organs. Sidewalks fill with blue-light protection ads (on screens, of course) while we wait for our phones to learn to track eyestrain. In the meantime, we tear ourselves away to do the laundry and wash dishes, to drive to the grocery store or navigate on foot via . . . our screens. These activities demand the attention of our eyes and hands, for now. But we still have ears and mouths. Alexa! Play the Goldberg Variations. Actually, no — play the Song Exploder episode about Fleetwood Mac!

This is why we love podcasts: they are the internet for our ears. Now we can be on the internet all the time.

Every corner of the internet has its corresponding podcast. We can’t read left Twitter when assembling Ikea furniture — at least, it’s not in the instructions — but we can listen to The Dig’s deep dive on The Eighteenth Brumaire. Reading the New York Times while attempting Times recipes isn’t recommended, but those who want the Gesamtkunstwerk experience can queue up The Daily. If all you watch on TV is basketball and Top Chef, you can listen to a podcast about Top Chef hosted by two basketball journalists. Or say, just hypothetically, you fell off your bike trying to take a selfie, concussing yourself, and the doctor said not to watch anything on a screen, not even Making a Murderer. Luckily for you, podcasters love murder. A woman we know just posted on Facebook, “FAVORITE MURDER PODCASTS??” and the recs go on for days. The gray ellipsis is still bouncing.

Listening to podcasts is a soothing kind of saturation, like ASMR, if you replaced the crinkly sounds and sensuous whispering with reedy-voiced dudes and cool girls with vocal fry. It’s hard to get riled up by a podcast, when the hosts are inarticulate and the episodes run over an hour. Done right, what the medium encourages is binge listening: each episode, a smooth little capsule, perfectly self-contained, can be popped one after another. The overall effect is pacification, a balm for burnout. As we fall asleep to podcasts and extend our time online into the first REM cycle, their murmuring voices drift into our dreams. There are words in our heads — thoughts, opinions — but for once, they’re not our own.

With your precious metal parasite humming happily in your hand, the only thing stopping you from listening to a podcast is you. Just plug in, pick the show, and play it: there’s no flipping through stations, no snatches of song or prayer, no scraps of news, and no chance you’ll settle on something without knowing what it is. There’s nothing intrusive, accidental, surprising — no static, no interference — and it’ll cut out all the other unwanted noise of life, too. An unbroken stream of sound, a stealth multitasking machine, the podcast has no natural predators. The only interruptions are the ads, but we don’t mind them. They’re for the same five free-delivery, life-in-a-box, order-from-your-phone services we stare at on the subway anyway.

Above all, podcasts make us feel less lonely. We tell ourselves offer codes in order to live. They simulate intimacy just enough to make us feel like we’re in a room with other people, or at least near the room . . . definitely in the same city as the room. But these people with podcasts are so much sharper than us, so at home in their corners of the world, with easy command of their respective bodies of pop-culture knowledge. The appropriate response is fandom. Coughing up $5 on Patreon feels like paying the cover at a dive for our local band, and we’re pleased to be part of something. Some podcasts even do live appearances, for which we might buy tickets. Listening to our heroes’ once intimate voices on a booming sound system, though, surrounded by a thousand fanboys, feels like a betrayal. We thought we had something special, with their voices so close to our ears. Podcasts were the first medium designed to be listened to primarily on headphones, by a single person. Hell is other listeners.

Actually, hell is other fans — specifically, fans of podcasts we don’t listen to. People give each other recommendations, barely better than the algorithm’s, and describe it as “discovery.” “You have to check out Pod Save America,” we hear a journalism student say to a barista. A rookie error, to admit to not listening; once you do, you’ve brought the proselytizing upon yourself. By now we have learned to lie, just like we learned to lie about watching Six Feet Under. Of course we love 99% Invisible! That episode about the artists squatting in a room accidentally built into the mall? So good. Back when we were honest, we suffered more.

Maybe we were better off with loneliness. In that meme “How It Feels to Listen to Podcasts,” three laughing friends eat sundaes in a brightly colored ad while our IRL stand-in laughs along beside it, a bowl of ice cream slowly melting in his hand. Is that us? Podcast hosts are the friends we think we love hanging out with but whom we suspect don’t love us back. You know the types. There are the explainers, at the start of the party, who corner us at the drink table to talk about blockchain-transferred solar power and the fine points of cosmetic dentistry. There are the recappers and decanters, who narrate TV episodes at length, spinning their theories and dispensing gossip. Over on the couch are the nihilist shitposters, politically incoherent but reliably mean about other people’s outfits, and the endearing deadbeats who record from their closets. Standing up straight, beers in hand, are the professionals: producers and reporters who either work for NPR or migrated from the once stable profession of print journalism. They’re talking to the big-name comedians, who invited — ugh — the storytellers. Holding forth by the door is the human-interest host, a descendant of congested Third Coast favorites like Ira Glass, and his rival, the stoner MMA fanatic whose favorite website is a tie between Pornhub and the Wikipedia page for the singularity. Then there are our favorites, the charismatic weirdos: people we like for no reason, people who are just good at talking. Maybe not even good. Maybe just talking.

Did we actually learn anything useful from these people, or just suffer through for a moment of company? Did we stay for that little high of accruing knowledge, however thin? At least now we’re armed with a collection of blithe anecdotes, prepped for retelling. At the next party we can all just talk about what we heard on this week’s podcasts. It doesn’t matter if we remember what they say, or if it’s all nonsense. This is friendship.

by The Editors, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Zimoun, 25 woodworms, wood, microphone, sound system. 2009

via:
[ed. Pretty clever.]

How Chinese Spies Got the N.S.A.’s Hacking Tools, and Used Them for Attacks

Chinese intelligence agents acquired National Security Agency hacking tools and repurposed them in 2016 to attack American allies and private companies in Europe and Asia, a leading cybersecurity firm has discovered. The episode is the latest evidence that the United States has lost control of key parts of its cybersecurity arsenal.

Based on the timing of the attacks and clues in the computer code, researchers with the firm Symantec believe the Chinese did not steal the code but captured it from an N.S.A. attack on their own computers — like a gunslinger who grabs an enemy’s rifle and starts blasting away.

The Chinese action shows how proliferating cyberconflict is creating a digital wild West with few rules or certainties, and how difficult it is for the United States to keep track of the malware it uses to break into foreign networks and attack adversaries’ infrastructure.

The losses have touched off a debate within the intelligence community over whether the United States should continue to develop some of the world’s most high-tech, stealthy cyberweapons if it is unable to keep them under lock and key.

The Chinese hacking group that co-opted the N.S.A.’s tools is considered by the agency’s analysts to be among the most dangerous Chinese contractors it tracks, according to a classified agency memo reviewed by The New York Times. The group is responsible for numerous attacks on some of the most sensitive defense targets inside the United States, including space, satellite and nuclear propulsion technology makers.

Now, Symantec’s discovery, unveiled on Monday, suggests that the same Chinese hackers the agency has trailed for more than a decade have turned the tables on the agency.

Some of the same N.S.A. hacking tools acquired by the Chinese were later dumped on the internet by a still-unidentified group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers and used by Russia and North Korea in devastating global attacks, although there appears to be no connection between China’s acquisition of the American cyberweapons and the Shadow Brokers’ later revelations.

But Symantec’s discovery provides the first evidence that Chinese state-sponsored hackers acquired some of the tools months before the Shadow Brokers first appeared on the internet in August 2016.

Repeatedly over the past decade, American intelligence agencies have had their hacking tools and details about highly classified cybersecurity programs resurface in the hands of other nations or criminal groups.

The N.S.A. used sophisticated malware to destroy Iran’s nuclear centrifuges — and then saw the same code proliferate around the world, doing damage to random targets, including American business giants like Chevron. Details of secret American cybersecurity programs were disclosed to journalists by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor now living in exile in Moscow. A collection of C.I.A. cyberweapons, allegedly leaked by an insider, was posted on WikiLeaks.

“We’ve learned that you cannot guarantee your tools will not get leaked and used against you and your allies,” said Eric Chien, a security director at Symantec.

Now that nation-state cyberweapons have been leaked, hacked and repurposed by American adversaries, Mr. Chien added, it is high time that nation states “bake that into” their analysis of the risk of using cyberweapons — and the very real possibility they will be reassembled and shot back at the United States or its allies. (...)

For American intelligence agencies, Symantec’s discovery presents a kind of worst-case scenario that United States officials have said they try to avoid using a White House program known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process.

Under that process, started in the Obama administration, a White House cybersecurity coordinator and representatives from various government agencies weigh the trade-offs of keeping the American stockpile of undisclosed vulnerabilities secret. Representatives debate the stockpiling of those vulnerabilities for intelligence gathering or military use against the very real risk that they could be discovered by an adversary like the Chinese and used to hack Americans.

The Shadow Brokers’ release of the N.S.A.’s most highly coveted hacking tools in 2016 and 2017 forced the agency to turn over its arsenal of software vulnerabilities to Microsoft for patching and to shut down some of the N.S.A.’s most sensitive counterterrorism operations, two former N.S.A. employees said.

The N.S.A.’s tools were picked up by North Korean and Russian hackers and used for attacks that crippled the British health care system, shut down operations at the shipping corporation Maersk and cut short critical supplies of a vaccine manufactured by Merck. In Ukraine, the Russian attacks paralyzed critical Ukrainian services, including the airport, Postal Service, gas stations and A.T.M.s.

“None of the decisions that go into the process are risk free. That’s just not the nature of how these things work,” said Michael Daniel, the president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, who previously was cybersecurity coordinator for the Obama administration. “But this clearly reinforces the need to have a thoughtful process that involves lots of different equities and is updated frequently.”

by Nicole Perlroth, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michal Czerwonka for The New York Times

Zillow Wants to Buy Your House

In today’s on-demand digital world, buying and selling a home remains stubbornly, painfully analog. Most sales still begin with a real estate agent (and a 6 percent commission). Most still end in an office, with the two sides signing page after page of legalese.

Silicon Valley wants to change that. Tech companies have begun to nibble away at the edges of the residential real estate industry, offering virtual open houses, digital closings and other services. Now they are coming straight for the real estate transaction itself through “instant buying,” in which companies buy homes, perform some light maintenance and put them back on the market.

Established companies like Zillow and venture-backed upstarts like Opendoor and Offerpad have raised billions of dollars on the promise that they can use sophisticated algorithms to predict the value of individual homes. They contend that those predictions, combined with old-fashioned economies of scale, will allow them to be far more efficient than traditional home flippers.

The companies and their backers say they are doing what tech is best at: bringing efficiency and convenience to a process not known for either. Silicon Valley has already upended the way we hail a cab and order takeout, they argue. Why not improve a transaction that even well-educated professionals find intimidating?

“You should be able to sell a home within a handful of clicks,” said Eric Wu, Opendoor’s chief executive.

But houses are not taxicabs. A bad Uber ride might set a user back $20 and make her late for a meeting. A house is the largest asset for most Americans and the most expensive purchase they will ever make.

At best, skeptics see instant buying, also known as “iBuying,” as an overhyped, capital-intensive business whose explosive growth will fizzle once investors tire of profit margins that Zillow itself calls “razor thin.” At worst, they worry that it could bring volatility and risk to an industry that has already brought down the American economy once this century. (...)

Instant buying is a small part of the market, but it is growing at breakneck speed. Zillow bought fewer than 700 homes in 2018; it expects to be buying 5,000 homes per month in three to five years. Opendoor, the first big iBuyer, bought more than 11,000 homes last year and in the past year has raised more than $1 billion to step up its pace.

The companies typically aim to hold homes for 90 days or less before selling them, typically to an individual buyer. For the eventual owner, little changes about the process.

by Ben Casselman and Conor Dougherty, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

How 'I Got a Plan' Became a Thing

Warren Nerds Out and the Crowds Go Crazy

The Twitter exchange played out over several hours on April 11: “Many profitable companies pay nothing in corporate income tax. Elizabeth Warren has a plan to stop that,” Vox wrote, linking to one of its wonky explainers. “You bet I do,” Warren tweeted back.

Then a woman named Keely Murphy — a self-described bookworm, space enthusiast and feminist — replied back to the Massachusetts senator: “I would certainly buy a shirt that said ‘Elizabeth Warren: She’s Got a Plan for That.’”

Within days, the tweet — along with many others the campaign had been noticing expressing unbridled enthusiasm for Warren’s policy-heavy approach to her presidential candidacy — prompted the campaign to embrace the nerd-tastic meme. “I got a plan” has become a staple of her stump speech, often drawing loud applause. And Warren fans like Murphy can now purchase “Warren has a plan for that” T-shirts and tote bags from her website.

The bottom-up evolution of the slogan is a source of encouragement for the Warren campaign, perhaps a sign that the former Harvard professor’s policy-heavy bid is breaking through. Since January, she’s rolled out plans to break up tech companies, forgive over $600 billion in student loan debt, enact a 2 percent wealth tax, provide universal child care and more — lapping the Democratic field on both the volume and scope of policy proposals.

She regularly goes into the weeds when taking questions at town halls and sometimes cautions voters that she’s going to “nerd out” for a bit. Some of her supporters see the approach as a way to distinguish her as a heavyweight in a crowded 2020 field. And Warren’s embrace of “I got a plan” has coincided with a rise in her poll numbers over the past two weeks.

Some Democrats say it’s unclear whether voters will ultimately care about the policy rollouts. They point out that Hillary Clinton also had a well-staffed policy shop and that the flood of white papers didn’t always resonate with voters.

But for now, at least, Warren and her campaign think they might be on to something.

by Alex Thompson, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
[ed. Imagine... running a campaign based on detailed policies (instead of slogans, generalities, vague 'ideas' and aspirations) then being criticized for being too "nerdy". See also: A Guide to Elizabeth Warren’s (Many) 2020 Policy Proposals (The Cut).]

via:

via:

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.

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."

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

via:

Jamie Hewlett, Tank Girl 1994
via:

Jose Feliciano & Daryl Hall

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

Les Paul & Mary Ford

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

[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:

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.]

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. (...)

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?]