Tiny Beasts

Global warming was fucking up the squirrels. It was of course fucking everything up — the new and improved Boston Seaport would be underwater in twenty years, and the mosquitos were leaving particularly nasty welts. But special attention was on the squirrels. Higher-than-usual temperatures were fermenting the berries they ate off the trees and getting them so drunk they lost their sense of balance. They dented the roofs of cars on Rte. 9 as they plummeted from the branches, and the Boston Common was littered with their chubby, lethargic bodies. I am telling you this, A, because you would have loved them. You would have called them your messy bitch children and left them bottle caps of Gatorade for their tiny hangovers and sat down to draw them, sketching each individual tuft of fur: brown then silver then gold then chestnut until one could believe that these were actually the most majestic creatures that had ever lived. You hated Boston. But I like to think you would have come to visit this particular summer because I was there and because of the novelty of squirrels getting even drunker than we could on the contents of the dozens of stolen nips bulging from our overall pockets. I am going to tell you about the summer of the drunk squirrels because I wish you could have been there. I miss you and want you to explain what it means that I am now in my Saturn return.

As you might expect, I was not in a good place this summer. You had been gone for two years. I was in my second year as an editorial assistant at a small nonprofit publishing house. I thought it would be a dream job — editing books, or at least assisting in editing books about social justice issues I cared about was, on paper, exactly what I wanted to be doing with my life. But in practice I spent most of my time slouched in the recliner set up in the nursing room playing Candy Crush until each subsequent panic attack about cover mechs with unmarked typos or mis-stapled proposal packets subsided. I knew that eventually I would either quit or be fired and it was only a matter of how stubborn I was, or how long it took them to realize that any time I was asked to secure permissions for the images that were to accompany a Y.A. history book about indigenous genocide, I would simply lie and say the image could not be traced. The idea of sending another email to an artist begging them to let us use their labor for free ~bEcAuSe wE’rE jUsT a nOnPrOfiT~ made me want to die. I was allegedly making contingency plans to leave. I was applying to things at a manic rate: graduate school to be a high school teacher or administrator, a Fulbright in India to learn Urdu for the CIA, used bookstores, hemp farms in New Hampshire.

I started therapy because I hated my job as much as it hated me, but kept going with the hope that one day I would be brave enough to tell Susan, the nice, heavyset middle-aged woman who took notes on her Google Chromebook and drank an entire Dunkin’ XL iced coffee over the course of our lunch hour sessions, that the night after you were killed by a drunk driver while you crossed the highway that bisected campus to get more cigarettes, our friend Martin raped me at the memorial service held by our college. At times I got close. I spent the first 50 to 54 minutes of my appointment railing against the capitalist system where my survival depended on me continuing to destroy my mental health by working at a company that was enjoying what the board members called, with less awareness of the irony than they thought they had, a “Trump bump” in sales for books about the emoluments clause and why immigrants are actually good. In the last 45 seconds I would maybe say something like “and I’m probably so mad about this because of how grief and sex and loss and agency and death are now inextricably intertwined in my psyche. See you next week!” as I headed out the door and back to my desk for a long afternoon of forging invoices and making less than $15 an hour.

You know that I am terrible at picking out people to sleep with; I do not read red flags any better than I read the dimensions of things I buy online. That’s why I wind up with puny, ten-inch-tall cat scratching posts that looked bigger on Instagram and men who think that being described as “sensitive” by one fifth-grade teacher excused them from developing a single additional cell of emotional intelligence. I would have loved to tell you about how this particular man, a postdoc at MIT ten years my senior, tried to test my nurturing instincts by coming to my shitty shared attic apartment with a beta fish in the same bag as the three limes, condoms (ribbed for no one’s pleasure), and one-percent milk.

He did not provide water purification tablets or food or a bowl or the pretty marbles for the bottom of the bowl or any warning, but somehow the fish was now my problem. It seemed my ability to figure it out or develop an attachment to this twitchy aquatic handkerchief would decide for him whether I was worth the effort or the cost of a second towel for when I spent the night at his place. The next morning I accidentally dumped the fish down the garbage disposal when, while trying to pack a hurried lunch, I grabbed the first tupperware I saw. You would have shrieked, A, at how I looked this man dead in the face when I flipped the switch. (...)

But again I digress. The morning most important to this story was a Sunday morning and I was, as always, late to my second job working as a babysitter at an Episcopalian church in Beacon Hill. I had woken too early with too much energy after downing a bottle of rosé the night before. I suddenly had big ambitions. I dug the single pair of workout shorts I owned from the back of my pajama drawer. I drank water straight from the tap and ate a fistful of granola. I intended to get off the train three stops early and run the rest of the way to the church before breezing in, pressed green juice in hand, with a few minutes to spare for stretching before the first kids were dropped off for an enriching morning of the same three alphabet puzzles and two books about Noah’s ark and absolutely no lessons about Jesus. (...)

This particular morning I kept to the edges of the park. There were too many other runners, so many that it looked like everyone but me knew they were being chased. Maybe if I had taken my usual tear through the dead center of the garden, swinging my legs over the fenced-off rose plots like a giant to shave seconds off my tardiness, I would not have found myself in the landing zone for this squirrel at the moment he tumbled from one of the gnarled oaks that grew along the fence.

What I did not expect is that a squirrel would have such heft. Perhaps I should have assumed — aside from this newfound drinking problem, the squirrels of the Public Garden and the Common had been putting on weight. Despite signage from the Boston Parks Department pleading with us to not feed the wildlife, tourists could not seem to resist giving them the remnants of $27 Faneuil Hall lobster rolls. The squirrels ambled about with the butts of soft hotdog buns drenched in butter and hand sweat wedged into their cheeks.

This squirrel hit my shoulder like a well-meaning dad clapping me on the shoulder before realizing that despite my short hair and boyish figure, I was not, in fact, one of his nephews or sons or a player on one of their junior league soccer teams. It was solid and full and sent me off balance enough that I had to take a knee. On the ground next to me was the squirrel, who for purposes of clarity and what you would have called a garishly white impulse to give everything a name, I will call Bruce.

“I’ve been hit!” I sent not-boyfriend a photo of Bruce, sprawled into a belly flop. Because not-boyfriend is an earth sign and therefore a psychological terrorist, I saw the message go from delivered to read where it remained like an unreturned high five. I waited forty-five seconds, two minutes, without the immediate-gratification ellipses. There were no squirrel emojis to follow up with, so I sat on the ground with Bruce. I guessed he was young, although I am far from an expert on the aging patterns of North American city fauna. He seemed impossibly relaxed, and were it not for the breath twitching around his tiny black nostrils, I would have assumed he had died on impact. With the hand that was not clenching my phone as though to choke a response out of it, I stroked the fur between his ears. It was spongy, like new grass or duckling feathers. Squirrels did not typically present opportunities for us to notice their feral beauty. This squirrel, you would have said, went to private school — his overbite wasn’t even that noticeable. I think I was with you when I learned that something like 80 percent of the trees we enjoy today are the result of squirrels burying acorns and then forgetting where they’d left them. Despite or because of their chaotic natures, we now have parks and forests and 200-year-old oaks, and we get to live on an earth with oxygen and shade even though we kill off trees at twice the rate we plant them. But now, here Bruce was, relieved of this immense responsibility, at absolute ease.

I wanted what Bruce had, so I took Bruce. He was supple and loose and barely stirred when I picked him up; his head tipped backwards, arms thrown back as though opening himself up to the universe or to embrace the early morning sun or simply because he had torn his tiny rotator cuffs and there was no way for them to remain in their sockets. He was too girthy for the fanny pack where I kept my keys and wallet so like most other Sundays, I found myself snarfing down my idiot confection breakfast as I power walked toward the church, not only because I didn’t want to saunter in late holding evidence of my disregard for timeliness and how much I truly needed their $17/hr, but because the wax paper now served as Bruce’s sleeping bag.

by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, The Drift |  Read more:

Image: Brooke Bourgeois

The Other Opioid Crisis: False Narratives Are Hurting Patients

The number of accidental drug overdose fatalities crossed 100,000 in 2021, an increase of almost 15% over the previous year, which itself was an increase of 30% over the year before. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in its press release, called these deaths “opioid overdoses.” This framing of drug overdose fatalities as an “opioid crisis” is both misleading and counterproductive. The term “opioid” evokes prescription medications in popular imagination and ramps up fear of medications that have been used for centuries. The overdose death numbers, however, mostly reflect street drugs, ranging from heroin to illicit fentanyl analogs; 85% of 2019 deaths were from these drugs, and the increase in 2020 can be attributed almost entirely to them.

The conflation of all opioids has resulted in an unwarranted focus on prescription opioids and medical use as the root cause of the “problem” of accidental drug overdoses, even though overdose deaths from prescription opioids are a small and decreasing fraction of the total. The result is policies that fail to address the problem they were intended to solve—illicit drug use and accidental drug overdoses. Further, these policies have harmed medically fragile patients with chronic, high-impact, intractable pain who need prescription opioid medication to maintain quality of life and basic function levels.

Why did a narrative that is at odds with science become dominant, despite the harm it causes to people with substance use disorder and to medically fragile patients? The answer lies in the complex incentives that face policymakers, law enforcement and families of overdose victims, particularly as illicit drugs have edged into upper-income suburbs. The result of the “opioid crisis” narrative has been disastrous for the most vulnerable and powerless: Americans struggling with complex medical conditions and constant pain.

The Tidy but Inaccurate Narrative

The dominant narrative runs something like this: Doctors overprescribed opioids from the late 1990s through approximately 2012, resulting in addiction to prescription painkillers. When prescriptions ran out, these patients turned to street drugs. This overprescribing was responsible for an increase in substance use disorder rates and overdose fatalities. The appropriate policy response was, therefore, to tighten restrictions on opioid prescribing. Very plausible, very straightforward—and almost entirely contradicted by the facts. (...)

Most overdose fatalities are caused by illicit fentanyl analogs; they were responsible for more than 70,000 of 107,000 such deaths in 2021. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is available by prescription, but these “fentalogues” are not prescription opioids—they are never a part of the medical/pharmaceutical distribution system. They are street drugs, distributed through illicit channels. It makes no sense for the government to monitor physicians, patients, pharmacies and prescription records; it is akin to searching for keys lost in an alley under the streetlight, not because the keys are likely to be under the light but simply because it’s easier to search there.

by Nita Ghei, Discourse | Read more:

Image: Catherine McQueen/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Part 2: The Other Opioid Crisis: A Failure of Care; and, Part 3: How the Criminal Justice System Imperils Patients and Physicians (Discourse):]

The DEA continues this hunt for “drug-dealing doctors” even today, despite the fact that there is very little diversion of drugs from medical channels and almost none from patients. On the contrary, patients across the board are having their pain relief options limited, including patients with cancer where opioids are the first-line treatment.

The opioid problem today is a lack of access and even temporary shortages of some pain relievers. But in the 1990s, the DEA actually contributed to the rise of pill mills and the flow of prescription pain relievers to illicit markets. In what is probably a unique feature of the U.S., the DEA, a law enforcement agency, determines the quantities of the various Schedule II opioids—prescription medications—that manufacturers can produce in a year. The DEA increased the quota of oxycodone by about 3,900% between 1993 and 2015; the quota for fentanyl increased by 2,500%. While some increase was necessary as pain was significantly undertreated in the 1990s, opening the floodgates to this degree was a questionable call at best. The 1990s saw the rise of the pill mills and the first wave of the crisis, as a significant share of the new opioid production was diverted to nonmedical use.

The rates of substance use disorder have remained largely stable over the past several decades. The drug du jour has changed, though, with changes in the legal landscape. Sharp cutbacks in prescribing began in 2012, starting with the Veterans Administration, where prescriptions fell by two-thirds in eight years. The DEA started cutting opioid quotas in 2015. As the supply of prescription opioids in the illicit markets shrank, first heroin, then illicit fentanyl analogs filled the gap. The number of prescriptions fell rapidly between 2012 and 2022, but the number of fatal accidental overdoses rose almost as fast.

Today, opioid prescriptions are about 60% lower than their all-time peak in 2012. Fatal accidental overdoses, however, are at an all-time high, exceeding 100,000 last year. About 85% of these fatalities were caused by a combination of substances, including alcohol and illicit fentanyl analogs—substances that were never part of the medical materials supply chain. The DEA nonetheless continues to persist with its narrative of overprescribing doctors.

The Politicians Who Destroyed Our Democracy Want Us to Vote for Them To Save It

The bipartisan project of dismantling our democracy, which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich, has left only the outward shell of democracy. The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power. There is no institution left that can be considered authentically democratic. The corporate coup d’état is over. They won. We lost.

The wreckage of this neoliberal project is appalling: endless and futile wars to enrich a military-industrial-complex that bleeds the U.S. Treasury of half of all discretionary spending; deindustrialization that has turned U.S. cities into decayed ruins; the slashing and privatization of social programs, including education, utility services and health care – which saw over one million Americans account for one-fifth of global deaths from Covid, although we are 4 percent of the world’s population; draconian forms of social control embodied in militarized police, functioning as lethal armies of occupation in poor urban areas; the largest prison system in the world; a virtual tax boycott by the richest individuals and corporations; money-saturated elections that perpetuate our system of legalized bribery; and the most intrusive state surveillance of the citizenry in our history.

In “The United States of Amnesia,” to quote Gore Vidal, the corporate press and the ruling class create fictional feel-good personas for candidates, treat all political campaigns as if it is a day at the races and gloss over the fact that on every major issue, from trade deals to war, there is very little difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Democratic Party and Joe Biden are not the lesser evil, but rather, as Glen Ford pointed out, “the more effective evil.” (...)

[ed. Long list of Biden transgressions]

The decisions of politicians like Biden have a staggering human cost, not only for the poor, workers and the shrinking middle class but for millions of people in the Middle East, millions of families ripped apart by mass incarceration, millions more forced into bankruptcy by our mercenary for-profit medical system where corporations are legally permitted to hold sick children hostage while their frantic parents bankrupt themselves to save them, millions who became addicted to opioids and hundreds of thousands who died from them, millions denied welfare assistance, and all of us barreling toward extinction because of a refusal to curb the greed and destructive power of the fossil fuel industry, which has raked in $2.8 billion a day in profit over the last 50 years.

Biden, morally vacuous and of limited intelligence, is responsible for more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump. But the victims in our Punch-and-Judy media shows are rendered invisible. And that is why the victims despise the whole superstructure and want to tear it down.

These establishment politicians and their appointed judges promulgated laws that permitted the top 1 percent to loot $54 trillion from the bottom 90 percent, from 1975 to 2022, at a rate of $2.5 trillion a year, according to a study by the RAND corporation. The fertile ground of our political, economic, cultural and social wreckage spawned an array of neo-fascists, con artists, racists, criminals, charlatans, conspiracy theorists, right-wing militias and demagogues that will soon take power (...)

Biden and other establishment politicians are not actually calling for democracy. They are calling for civility. They have no intention of extracting the knife thrust into our backs. They hope to paper over the rot and the pain with the decorum of the polite, measured talk they used to sell us the con of neoliberalism. The political correctness and inclusivity imposed by college-educated elites, unfortunately, has now become associated with the corporate assault, as if a woman CEO or a Black police officer is going to mitigate the exploitation and abuse. Minorities are always welcome, as they were in other species of colonialism, if they serve the dictates of the masters. This is how Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street,” became President.

by Chris Hedges, SheerPost |  Read more:

Image: The Body Politic – by Mr. Fish
[ed. Happy election day. I was never a fan of Biden (or anyone, except Elizabeth Warren) but the alternatives (ie., Trump-supporting Republicans) inhabit a completely different universe of awfulness.]

Danger Mouse & Black Thought

[ed. Cheat Codes (Full Album).]

Hiromi Uehara

[ed. High energy. See also: Kaleidoscope]

Mastodon: Everything You Need to Know

Interest in the open source social media platform known as Mastodon has spiked again as users look for an alternative to Twitter, should Elon Musk’s takeover spell the end of that website as we know it.

If you’re fleeing the sinking ship of Twitter for the potential life raft of Mastodon – or wondering whether to – here’s what you need to know.

Welcome to the Fediverse

The first thing to get your head around is that Mastodon is what’s known as a “federated” network, a collection of thousands of social networks run on servers across the world that are linked by the common Mastodon technology, on a platform known as the “Fediverse”.

You sign up for a specific server, which is run by whoever set it up, usually volunteers doing it out of their own pocket or taking donations through Patreon. They’ll have their own rules and policies on, for example, who can join and how strictly the conversation will be moderated.

You can even start your own server if you want to set the rules yourself. Otherwise, there’s a list of servers which focus on specific locations or topics of interest. The servers on that list have all signed up to the “Mastodon covenant” which promises “active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia”.

Whichever Mastodon server(s) you sign up for, however, you can follow users on a different one with no problem.

Oh, and as this is a volunteer-run system, there are no paid-for ads in your feed. (...)

Posting is similar but different

For a start, you may have to get used to your posts being called “toots” rather than “tweets”.

On the plus side, you’ll have almost twice as many characters (500) to write a post, and additional features such as click spoiler warnings for text and images.

You will have more control over who can see your post, from being discoverable across the server, down to only those who you mention in the post – similar to a DM.

Hashtags work similar to Twitter for trending topics, and you can share someone else’s post with your followers by boosting it – which works the same as retweeting. But there’s no such thing as “quote tooting”.

by Josh Taylor, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

[ed. "Tweets" were bad enough, but "toots"? Haha. Probably an accurate reflection of most opinions though.]

Guy Bourdin

Image: Guy Bourdin Estate via

The Myth of Fed Independence

The Federal Reserve, far from the independent institution it often touts itself as, is under intense pressure at all times from massive commercial banks and other financial institutions advocating for favorable regulations, according to federal lobbying disclosures reviewed by The Intercept, as well as interviews with former Fed and other finance employees.

The Federal Reserve has come under scrutiny in recent months for its aggressive interest rate hikes designed to, as Chair Jerome Powell said, “get wages down and then get inflation down.” The Fed’s own research has warned that its aggressive policy mirrors a similar one that caused a “severe recession” under Paul Volcker in the 1980s, as The Intercept recently reported. Even the United Nations, which recently warned that the Fed’s rate hikes risk “inflicting worse damage than the financial crisis in 2008 and the COVID-19 shock in 2020.” Yet President Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, has declined to publicly criticize the Fed, saying after it began hiking rates earlier this year that he would “respect the Fed’s independence.”

Besides setting monetary policy, the Fed is also tasked with regulating commercial banks. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., opposed Powell’s nomination by both Trump in 2018 and Biden in 2021 due to what she considered his weak position on banking regulations. “Powell will roll back critical rules that help guard against another financial crisis — and that is simply a risk we cannot afford,” Warren said in a floor speech.

The intense lobbying the Fed is subjected to is targeted at these banking regulations. To take just one example, the Chamber of Commerce, the main business lobby in the U.S., reported lobbying on Powell’s nomination along with “Federal Reserve regulatory reform” — i.e., deregulation Powell was known to favor — as part of its $15.39 million lobbying activities in the first quarter of 2018. The Fed under Powell would go on to water down key elements of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Paid lobbyists make their case on behalf of massive financial corporations in the same fashion as K Street lobbyists hawking their wares to members of Congress. In 2022 alone, over 120 groups reported lobbying the Fed on issues ranging from credit card fees to cryptocurrency to sprawling monetary policy initiatives such as mortgage finance. Postings on the Federal Reserve website in the past year record meetings with Discover Financial, Student Loan Servicing Alliance, National Bankers Association, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. (U.S. banks saw their profits rise 7.8 percent in the second quarter of 2022 because of the rate hikes, though profits were still down year over year.)

“The Fed has a history of caving to corporate special interests, and I’ve loudly warned about the dangers of financial deregulation under Chair Powell that risk Americans’ economic security,” Warren told The Intercept.

Like their congressional counterparts, many of the lobbyists seeking to influence the Federal Reserve spent time in government before joining their respective firms. The agencies that served as training grounds for Fed lobbyists include the departments of Defense and Energy, but also financial regulatory agencies like the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve itself.

Bill Nelson — executive vice president and chief economist of one of the largest bank lobby groups, the Bank Policy Institute, or BPI — served as deputy director of the Division of Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve where he attended Federal Open Markets Committee meetings and briefed the Board of Governors. He now lobbies the Federal Reserve on behalf of the same banks that the Fed is charged with regulating.

According to three former BPI employees, the organization regularly hosts unreported meetings where Fed officials are provided ample time to discuss policy with members of the lobbying organization.

“When you have Fed officials sitting next to JPMorgans and Wells Fargos at these BPI events, do you really think the interests of communities are being represented? They are a very lethal force. Look at mortgage rates today, do you really think those rates are a result of the pending recession? This is a machine working hand in hand to generate profit on their own balance sheets. Everyone is serving their own interests,” Marshall Bornemann, a former employee of the Financial Services Roundtable, which later merged with The Clearing House Association to become BPI, told The Intercept. Three former BPI employees who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal confirmed that unreported conversations through informal channels abound between BPI members and Federal Reserve officials.

“These types of meetings between Fed members and BPI are totally in violation of the Fed’s own communication policy,” former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm told The Intercept.

BPI acknowledged its lobbying activity. “Like other industries, the banking industry regularly engages with its regulators,” Sean Oblack, head of communications for BPI, told The Intercept in an email. “For its part, BPI employs subject matter experts on topics from sanctions enforcement to cybersecurity to money markets, and our economists, analysts and attorneys maintain an open dialogue with policymakers who care about developments in those areas.”

The conventional wisdom is that the Federal Reserve is an independent institution dispassionately pursuing its mandate to maximize employment and stabilize prices for the betterment of the country. But since its inception, big banks have tried to influence the Fed to their liking.

In the aftermath of Dodd-Frank — legislation passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crash to create greater oversight on banks — federal regulatory agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission began publicly listing their meetings with stakeholders in an effort to increase transparency and public trust in their oversight efforts. But even now, so little is publicly known about the kinds of outside pressure the Federal Reserve is subjected to that multiple experts contacted for this story were unaware that lobbying was even permitted.

Scandals involving insider trading and unreported meetings between Fed officials and major financial services groups are baked into the foundation of the Federal Reserve as a system created by and for bankers.

by Daniel Boguslaw, Ken Klippenstein, The Intercept |  Read more:
Image: Graeme Sloan/Sipa via AP Images

Eelus, Alice

via:

Yes Sir, May I Have Another?*

The Transportation Security Administration is lowering fees for enrolling into its PreCheck program from $85 to $78. It's good news as airports brace for crowds traveling for the holidays.

Ahead of the holidays, the cost for TSA PreCheck is dropping (NPR)

Image: Scott Olson/Getty Images
[ed. Articles I've never finished reading. (*Animal House)]

Homeland Security Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists

Section 1. Purpose. The first duty of government is to ensure domestic tranquility and defend the life, property, and rights of its citizens. Over the last 5 weeks, there has been a sustained assault on the life and property of civilians, law enforcement officers, government property, and revered American monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial. Many of the rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies—such as Marxism—that call for the destruction of the United States system of government. Anarchists and left-wing extremists have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation. They have led riots in the streets, burned police vehicles, killed and assaulted government officers as well as business owners defending their property, and even seized an area within one city where law and order gave way to anarchy. During the unrest, innocent citizens also have been harmed and killed.  (...)

... Christian figures are now in the crosshairs, too. Recently, an influential activist for one movement that has been prominent in setting the agenda for demonstrations in recent weeks declared that many existing religious depictions of Jesus and the Holy Family should be purged from our places of worship.

Individuals and organizations have the right to peacefully advocate for either the removal or the construction of any monument. But no individual or group has the right to damage, deface, or remove any monument by use of force.

In the midst of these attacks, many State and local governments appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between the lawful exercise of rights to free speech and assembly and unvarnished vandalism. They have surrendered to mob rule, imperiling community safety, allowing for the wholesale violation of our laws, and privileging the violent impulses of the mob over the rights of law-abiding citizens. Worse, they apparently have lost the will or the desire to stand up to the radical fringe and defend the fundamental truth that America is good, her people are virtuous, and that justice prevails in this country to a far greater extent than anywhere else in the world. Some particularly misguided public officials even appear to have accepted the idea that violence can be virtuous and have prevented their police from enforcing the law and protecting public monuments, memorials, and statues from the mob's ropes and graffiti. Executive Order 13933

Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump

Image: AP

[ed. Executive Orders matter (especially for the people caught up in them). Also, what has 'Homeland Security' done for you or me lately, or ever actually?]

Kazuo Ishiguro: On Being Human

[ed. The conversation at 31:50 - 39:50 seems especially interesting (to me, anyway) when good novels, songs and songwriting are compared to viruses in their ability to lodge somewhere in our brains, forming a soundtrack to our lives and providing insights at different times when we need them.] 

George Booth
via:

CDC Issues New Opioid Prescribing Guidance

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued new guidance for clinicians on how and when to prescribe opioids for pain. Released Thursday, this revamps the agency's 2016 recommendations which some doctors and patients have criticized for promoting a culture of austerity around opioids.

CDC officials say that doctors, insurers, pharmacies and regulators sometimes misapplied the older guidelines, causing some patients significant harm, including "untreated and undertreated pain, serious withdrawal symptoms, worsening pain outcomes, psychological distress, overdose, and [suicide]," according to the updated guidance.

The 100-page document and its topline recommendation serve as a roadmap for prescribers who are navigating the thorny issue of treating pain, including advice on handling pain relief after surgery and managing chronic pain conditions, which are estimated to affect as many as one in every five people in the U.S.

The 2016 guidelines proved immensely influential in shaping policy — fueling a push by insurers, state medical boards, politicians and federal law enforcement to curb prescribing of opioids.

The fallout, doctors and researchers say, is hard to overstate: a crisis of untreated pain. Many patients with severe chronic pain saw their longstanding prescriptions rapidly reduced or cut off altogether, sometimes with dire consequences, like suicide or overdose as they turned to the tainted supply of illicit drugs.

Federal agencies had tried to course correct, making it clear that the older voluntary guidelines were not intended to become strict policies or laws. But doctors and patient advocates also held out hope that the CDC's updated guidelines would undo some of the unintended consequences of the earlier guidance.

This was clearly on the mind of CDC health officials when they announced the new clinical guidelines on Thursday. (...)

The change in outlook is evident all over the new guidelines, says Dr. Samer Narouze, the president of the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine.

"You can tell the culture around the 2016 guidelines was just to cut down opioids, that opioids are bad," he says. "It's the opposite here, you can sense they are more caring more about patients living in pain. It's directed more towards relieving their pain and their suffering."

A new focus on individualized care

Opioid prescribing started to decline in 2012 and that trend continued after the 2016 guidelines were released. There's widespread agreement that opioids should be used cautiously because of the risks associated with addiction and overdose. But today, the majority of overdose deaths are not due to prescription opioids, but rather fentanyl and other illicit drugs. (...)

While the voluntary guidelines are a welcome step, their impact depends largely on how state and federal agencies and other authorities respond to them, says Leo Beletsky, professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University and director of the Health in Justice Action Lab there.

"CDC needs to be a lot more proactive than just putting out this update and trying to walk back some of the misinterpretation of the previous version," he says. The agency needs to work with other federal agencies, he says, including Health and Human Services and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as law enforcement to implement these guidelines. (...)

"Most people that I know – and I know a lot of people living with chronic pain – have already been taken off their medication. Doctors are incredibly fearful of prescribing at all." From Steinberg's perspective, the new CDC guidelines remain overly restrictive and won't make much difference to the patients who have already been harmed.

Specific dose and duration limits are out

The most consequential changes in the new guidance come in the form of 12 bullet points that lay out general principles related to prescribing.

Unlike the 2016 version, those takeaways no longer include specific limits on the dose and duration of an opioid prescription that a patient can take, although deeper in the document it does warn against prescribing above a certain threshold. The new recommendations also explicitly caution physicians against rapidly tapering or discontinuing the prescriptions of patients who are already taking opioids — unless there are indications of a life-threatening issue.

Unravelling rigid opioid prescribing policies

It's uncertain if the new guidance will translate into substantive changes for patients who are struggling to have their pain treated.

Many patients currently can't find treatment, in the aftermath of the 2016 guidelines, says Barreveld, because doctors are wary of prescribing at all. (...)

The previous guidelines led to restrictions on prescribing being codified as policy or law. It's not clear those rules will be re-written in light of the new guidelines even though they state they're "not intended to be implemented as absolute limits for policy or practice."

"That is a good idea, and it will have absolutely no effect unless three major agencies take action immediately," says Kertesz. "The DEA, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, all three agencies use the dose thresholds from the 2016 guideline as the basis for payment quality metrics and legal investigation."

by Will Stone and Pien Huang, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Jose M. Osorio/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

[ed. About time, but too little too late. As a former opioid patient, the hysterics and political grandstanding to do something about the "opioid crisis" have been frustrating to watch and heartbreaking for the thousands if not millions of patients who've been indiscriminately thrown to the curb. Everybody - politicians, hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, federal agencies, media, everybody - should be ashamed of their complicity in inflicting more pain and suffering on chronic pain patients and making the situation worse.]

George Booth, New Yorker Cartoonist of Sublime Zaniness, Dies at 96

George Booth: George Booth, New Yorker Cartoonist of Sublime Zaniness, Dies at 96

George Booth, the New Yorker cartoonist who created a world of oddballs sharing life’s chaos with a pointy-eared bull terrier that once barked a flower to death, and sometimes with a herd of cats that shredded couches and window shades between sweet naps, died on Tuesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 96.

His daughter and only immediate survivor, Sarah Booth, said the cause was complications of dementia.

In a typical Booth cartoon, a lot happens at once. A stunned dog leaps three feet in the air. A shocked cat bounds for an open window, knocking a newspaper from the hands of a shaken man — all as his frumpy wife stands in a kitchen doorway with blackened eyes, announcing: “Eyeliner is back!”

Or, as a score of cats lounge in a parlor and a man in pajamas scowls into a newspaper in his easy chair, his wife in the kitchen says: “Edgar, please run down to the shopping center right away, and get some milk and cat food. Don’t get canned tuna, or chicken, or liver, or any of those awful combinations. Shop around and get a surprise. The pussies like surprises.”

Or, as a neighbor with a big nose peers over a backyard fence, 10 cats bound out of a back door to freedom and scatter in all directions as a woman at the open screen door shouts after them: “Everyone be home by two o’clock!”

In a half century at The New Yorker, Mr. Booth drew roughly a score of covers and hundreds of zany cartoons for the inside pages. (...)

“His work is about hope in the mdst of what looks like calamity,” Bonnell Robinson, the curator of the 1993 Boston cartoon exhibition “Lines of the Times: 50 Years of Great American Cartoons,” told The Times. “Booth cartoons express the will to continue in the face of disaster.” One cartoon in the show depicted a parlor crammed with junk, pets and sundry relatives. “Attention everyone,” a woman chirps. “Here comes Poppa, and we’re going to drive dull care away!”

Mr. Booth’s pen-and-ink cartoons were collected in a dozen books, reproduced as artworks and sold in galleries. He lectured widely and joined discussion groups at schools, museums and cartoon-art exhibitions until he slowed down in his 90s. (...)

Mr. Booth’s zoological record for one cartoon was 86 cats and 74 dogs, not counting the little clouds of flies he drew buzzing around some characters. “From a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense to draw 86 cats and 74 dogs,” he noted, because as a contract freelancer he was paid flat rates. “But,” he said, “I enjoy it.”

by Robert D. McFadden, NY Times | Read more:
Images: (George Booth; Zephy, markk/Video: New Yorker)

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[ed. Wonder what's happened to these beautiful cameras now that film is nearly extinct.]

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House of Staud

Is She the New Queen of Los Angeles?

Earlier this year, Sarah Staudinger began taking a Polaroid of nearly every person to visit her freshly renovated home.

“There’s a few people that I’ve missed, but I try to get everybody,” she said. “Even people I don’t really know.”

The book of Polaroids she has amassed included, in August, her mother, her pickleball instructor, the blockbuster producer Joel Silver and the acclaimed painter Mark Bradford. As she turned each page, pointing to the faces, her voice was low, relaxed, unbothered.

“This is one of my best friends.” Flip. “That’s Alice, who helped with the wedding.” Flip. “He’s an agent at WME.” Flip.

“Here, we had just moved in, and it was the most random crew,” she said, arriving at some poolside photos. “P. Diddy just hands everybody a blunt.”

Schooled by a lifetime of being surrounded by celebrities, Ms. Staudinger, 33, didn’t change her tone no matter who it was. Her godmother is Cher, whom she called Shere Khan as a child, like the “Jungle Book” villain. She attended a private all-girls school in Brentwood. Almost everyone in her life calls her Staud rather than Sarah, and that is also the name of her modestly sized fashion line, which has become closely associated with celebrities who wear the brand in their everyday lives: Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid, Sophie Turner.

Her world was already very L.A., but it became even more so in May, when she married Ari Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel’s career as an agent famously inspired Ari Gold’s character on “Entourage,” but his influence today, as chief executive of Endeavor, reaches beyond Hollywood. His company’s holdings include the talent agencies IMG and WME — representing athletes, authors, musicians, models and many of the behind-the-scenes people who make those professions possible — along with the art fair Frieze and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

In a short time, Ms. Staudinger went from fireworks-close-out-her-New-York-Fashion-Week-show famous to paparazzi-stake-out-her-Greek-vacation famous.

For the most part, she has just found that funny.

One recent afternoon, while driving to her store on Melrose Place in her electric pickup truck, Ms. Staudinger nodded to the house where she lived as a teenager. It was big and white with six tall pillars out front, the kind of house you’d envision if your knowledge of the Westside was built on the pop culture of Ms. Staudinger’s youth, like “Clueless” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”

After graduating from high school, Ms. Staudinger attended the New School in New York, focusing on media studies, though taking some fashion courses at Parsons, too. “The clothing business was in our blood,” said her mother, Joanna, whose father was the president of Mode O’Day, a large chain of clothing stores founded in Los Angeles in the 1930s. In the 1970s, Joanna designed popular rhinestone T-shirts and ballet shoe wedges; she was a “bohemian child,” she said, wearing silk skirts, stacked bracelets and “hippie hair.” But she had an innate sense for “what everybody wanted to wear.” So did her best friend, Cher. (...)

(Cher, by the way, doesn’t mind her closet playing muse: “Look, there are only so many inspirations,” she said, and Ms. Staudinger has “made them her own.”)

The aesthetic package can be hard to articulate, even for the people closest to her. It’s based primarily on Ms. Staudinger’s “feminine instinct and intuition,” Mr. Augusto said.

But it can be traced to Ms. Staudinger’s childhood, spent largely in observation mode, her mother said.

“I wanted her to be aware of what she looked like, what she acted like,” Joanna said. “We’d drive by a group of older girls, and I’d say, ‘OK, Sarah, which girl do you think has class?’ She would say, ‘The girl in the red dress’ or something. I’d say: ‘You’re going to be standing in that circle one day. Which girl do you want to be?’” (...)

Five years later, the first night of their three-day St.-Tropez wedding was held at Senequier. The ceremony was later officiated by Larry David. The wedding was, naturally, a paparazzi target. Leaked guest names included Brad Pitt, who didn’t end up attending, disappointing the single women who’d wanted Ms. Staudinger to seat them nearby, and Elon Musk, who spent much of the wedding in conversation with Mr. David, or with Ms. Staudinger’s 11-year-old half brother. (...)

The couple discouraged wedding gifts, though Ms. Staudinger noted that several well-wishers sent “Hermès blankets, which is, I guess, a standard wealthy person thing to send as a congratulations.” The most thoughtful gift she received, she said, was from friends who commissioned a ceramic sculpture of Ms. Staudinger’s favorite type of chips. (She is deeply obsessed with chips and, in particular, a vegan take on pork rinds called Snacklins.) The bag now hangs in a guest bathroom of their estate, which was bought in 2020, reportedly for $27.5 million.

by Jessica Testa, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Dafydd Jones

[ed. Thanks NYT, we needed this. “I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby). If you're blocked by the NYT paywall, check out these (86!) photos in Vogue: Inside Ari Emanuel and Sarah Staudinger’s St. Tropez Wedding.]

Alex Williamson 

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Unfrozen Flu

At the moment that the ferret bit him, the researcher was smack in the middle of Manhattan, in a lab one block from Central Park’s East Meadow. It was the Friday afternoon before Labor Day in 2011, and people were rushing out of the city for a long weekend. Three days earlier, the ferret had been inoculated with a recombinant strain of 1918 influenza, which killed between 20 and 50 million people when it swept through the world at the end of World War I. To prevent it from sparking another pandemic, 1918 influenza is studied under biosafety level 3 conditions, the second-tightest of biosafety controls available. The researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (now Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) was wearing protective equipment, including two pairs of gloves. But the ferret bit hard enough to pierce through both pairs, breaking the skin of his left thumb.

The flu is typically transmitted through respiratory droplets, and an animal bite is unlikely to infect a scientist. But with a virus as devastating as 1918 flu, scientists are not supposed to take any chances. The researcher squeezed blood out of the wound, washed it with an ethanol solution, showered, and left the lab. A doctor gave him a flu shot and prescribed him Tamiflu. Then, after checking that he lived alone, a Mount Sinai administrator sent him home to quarantine for a week, unsupervised, in the most densely populated city in the United States. As documents obtained by The Intercept show, staff told him to take his temperature two times a day and to wear an N95 respirator if he got sick and needed to leave for medical care.

NIH guidelines say that only people exposed through their respiratory tract or mucous membranes need to be isolated in a dedicated facility, rather than at home. But some experts contend that the protocols governing research with the most dangerous pathogens should be stronger. “That is a pretty significant biosafety breach,” said Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, agreed: “Say the risk was 0.1 percent. But if he just happened to be unlucky, then the consequences would be absolutely gigantic.” A researcher stuck in a small apartment in New York City might be tempted to venture outside to get food or fresh air, he added.

Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, said that Mount Sinai’s response seemed appropriate. But, he said, the episode shows that “accidents sometimes happen even where there isn’t negligence.” In his view, the solution was simpler: 1918 influenza is so dangerous that experiments with it shouldn’t be done at all.

Adolfo García-Sastre, the lab’s principal investigator, knew firsthand how work with the 1918 flu virus could spark controversy. In 2005, he was part of a team that reconstructed the virus in order to study how it had become so devastating. The effort was the culmination of an outlandish journey, which started when a Swedish microbiologist trekked to Alaska to take a sample of the virus from the corpse of a 1918 flu victim; she had been buried in a mass grave after the virus wiped out most of her village, and her body was preserved in the permafrost. Using that and other samples, scientists spent years sequencing parts of the virus, eventually sequencing the whole genome. García-Sastre and collaborators then used a technique called reverse genetics to make a copy of the virus’s DNA, laying the groundwork for recreating the virus. (The actual reconstruction of the virus was done at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Atlanta.) When the team studied the virus in mice, they found that it was incredibly lethal. Some mice died within three days of infection.

Furor ensued. Biosafety proponents argued that the risk of accidental release was not worth taking. No one really knew how potent the virus would be in modern times. Did we want to find out?

The ferret bite happened six years later but has not been publicized until now. For some, it is a stark example of the risks that accompa ny research on dangerous pathogens.

The mishap and hundreds of others are recorded in more than 5,500 pages of National Institutes of Health documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, detailing accidents between 2004 and 2021. The Intercept requested some of the reports directly, while Edward Hammond, former director of the transparency group the Sunshine Project, and Lynn Klotz, senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, separately requested and provided others.

The documents show that accidents happen with risky research even at highly secure labs. NIH recently convened an advisory panel to consider how it regulates such experiments.

by Mara Hvistendahl, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Alex Williamson for The Intercept
[ed. See also: Experimenting With Disaster Bent Over With Pain (The Intercept)]