Category: Culture - Jack Hostrawser's Beginner's Guide To Gibberish

"...it shouldn't be against the law to be sick."

8/7/2019

"In the 1980s and 1990s, heroin gripped [Portugal], resulting in the highest HIV infection rate in the European Union. One out of every 100 people in Portugal used the drug.

Faced with an unprecedented health crisis, the government tried something unheard of, and decriminalized drug possession and consumption in 2001. The country flipped how it spent money on addiction, moving the majority of funds formerly spent on criminal punishment into treatment, and gave its health ministry responsibility for drug-related issues rather than law enforcement.

This led to a shift in how people thought about one another. “Those who had been referred to sneeringly as 'drogados' (junkies)—became known more broadly, more sympathetically, and more accurately, as ‘people who use drugs’ or ‘people with addiction disorders,’” a 2017 Guardian article about Portugal’s policy noted.

Portugal opened an overdose-prevention center only recently, but not because of ideological opposition—because it has already come so far in reducing overdose deaths that the spaces were less urgently required. The results of Portugal’s drug policy when compared to the results of the United States’ drug policy are staggering. In Portugal, 27 people died of drug overdoses in 2016. The country is on track to whittle its overdose deaths to a single digit.

In the United States, more than 60,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2016. The next year, the last with comprehensive data, was no better. “We lost 70,000 of our loved ones in 2017,” Beyer said.

The underlying idea motivating Portugal’s policymakers and the people fighting for overdose-prevention spaces is the same: People who are addicted to drugs should be treated as people in need of medical care, and it shouldn’t be against the law to be sick."

https://www.theringer.com/2019/8/6/20756144/overdose-prevention-site-us-2019

The wide, cold skies of the San Luis Valley

7/20/2019

Ted Conover buys a trailer on some of the cheapest land in America, and sets to getting to know his reclusive new neighbours.

"The amazing thing was that a person, even a person of very limited means, could actually buy a piece of these vast acres of land—some of it farmland with pumped irrigation but most of it just undisturbed, primeval—for not too much money. Not that this would be a smart investment in terms of return: Paul had told me he’d paid about $2,300 for his five acres twenty-five years ago, which was probably close to what it was worth today. “But you know what they say about land,” he said. “They’re not making any more of it!” The lots are now mainly sold online, on the sites that pop up when you search for “cheap land Colorado,” as Matt and many others had done. It is even sold on eBay, where one serial seller maintains that the location of a particular lot doesn’t make much difference: “There are no rare finds here, it is all the same views, sage brush, same rattlesnakes.”

"But to me these lots are not all the same. A few of them had neighbors visible, and you wanted to size up neighbors. A few have been occupied before and have junk left on them. A few of them are situated near enough a cell tower that you’d get more than a single bar of signal. A few are near a road that might see several cars a day (with the associated dust). I thought about these things and about where I might like to buy. I couldn’t entirely explain why: I wasn’t going to move out here, and it wasn’t my wife’s idea of a nice vacation property. And yet, and yet . . ."

Radio... from Around the World... on the Internet.

5/31/2017

This is a really neat site. It lets you scroll around a 3D globe and tune into live radio from just about anywhere using the dark, mystical magic of the internet.

A New Yorker Profile of James Mattis

5/30/2017

A quote:

"For Trump, the choice of Mattis seemed more emotional than deliberative. Their initial meeting lasted just forty minutes, and Trump seemed drawn to him less for his world view than for his fearsome reputation. Announcing his nomination for Secretary of Defense, Trump revelled in using the general’s nickname—Mad Dog—and compared him to General George S. Patton, who was famous for his tactical brilliance, his profane language, and his merciless style. Anecdotes about Mattis’s audacity in the field are legion. Early in the Iraq War, he met with local leaders and told them, 'I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I will kill you all.'"

Mainstream Conspiracy

5/30/2017

Guardian writer Carey Dunne spent a month on an organic farm with a couple who believe in chemtrails. She writes an eye-opening piece on what she learned from the experience.

An excerpt:
"If Rob were to start reading the news, he’d discover that most mainstream reporting about conspiracists ranges from subtly to explicitly condescending in tone. Maybe this seemed all in good fun back when conspiracy theories appeared to hold no sway in national politics. But with our new conspiracy-theorist-in-chief, President Trump, it’s become counterproductive to laugh off the fact-averse as paranoid kooks, or to passively ignore their perspectives in hopes that science will inevitably prevail.

Research suggests that condescension and passive dismissal won’t help change minds – especially given that conspiracy theorists are more likely to meet the criteria for all types of psychological disorder, including anxiety, depression and being socially disadvantaged."

Life After the Gatlinburg Fire of 2016

5/30/2017

Justin Heckert's vivid and powerful article introduces us to the citizens of Gatlinburg who are doing the tremendous work of rebuilding their lives and their community.

John Hersey's "Hiroshima" at 70

8/31/2016

Seventy years ago today, the entire new issue of The New Yorker was, without prior warning, taken up by a single article. Hiroshima was a sensation, with issues selling out almost immediately. Later, it sold over three million copies in book form.

The New Yorker is making this masterpiece of journalism available for free on its website for some amount of time (I don't know how long). If you don't mind reading on a screen, this is perhaps the best piece of nonfiction journalism ever, and is certainly a founding text of the "New Journalism" movement.

Calm, unflinching, and attuned solely to the human experience--not political posturing or retrospective debate--this is a harrowing and immensely moving story that makes us hesitate to consider the million small choices we make each day that, for several "lucky" survivors became the difference between life and death.

A.S. Neill on the founding of his Summerhill School

5/1/2016

“At Summerhill we have proved, I believe, that self-government works. In fact, the school that has no self-government should not be called a progressive school- it is a compromise school. You cannot have freedom unless children feel completely free to govern their own social life. When there is a boss, there is no real freedom. This applies even more to the benevolent boss than to the disciplinarian. The child of spirit can rebel against the hard boss, but the soft boss merely makes the child impotently soft and unsure of his real feelings.”
--A.S. Neill, in "Summerhill School: A New View Of Childhood."

Success, by association

5/1/2016

This Youtube channel makes semi-serious reviews of all manner of weird, old, or simply forgotten cars that the makers manage to get their hands on. But what makes any of that actually interesting is that, between the silly voices and surrealist tangents, the makers find a path through each artifact of the automotive industry to an insightful and sometimes revelatory discussion of how cars both define and are defined by our motion-obsessed culture.

This video explores the deliriously chintzy Chevrolet Chevette, an "economy car" slapped together by a beleaguered General Motors running on sheer panic.
"GM hoped that the name Chevette would call to mind the Corvette, and that it would be a success... by association."

Two Articles on the Ethics of How We Die

5/1/2016

First, from "Traditional Burial Is Polluting The Planet. So Where Will We All Go When We Die?"

"Americans are funny about feeling like they own a 4-by-8 plot for eternity," Kate Kalanick, executive director of Green Burial Council, said in a phone interview Wednesday. "In an environmental sense, traditional burial is selfish for the impact it has. I don't think people really think about how their death affects the land or our world."

Below, From "Dissolving The Dead:"

"Dale Hilton can show you fear in a bagful of dust: 160 pounds of once-living human, pressure-cooked, baked, and pulverized into soft white powder fine enough to sprinkle over French toast. The ground bones sit in clear plastic on a counter, next to a pacemaker,
a false hip, and a pair of breast implants extracted from some of the eighty bodies Hilton has disintegrated at his bio-cremation facility in Smiths Falls, Ontario, an hour’s drive southwest of Ottawa. 'It’s a lovely product,' he says, looking proudly at his handiwork."