Done Road Tripping, Again

 I have either been working, buying groceries, or revising “Road Tripping”. More on all that later, I have about 30 minutes before I need to get ready for work. I go to the sheriff's after that, then back here for lamb stew. I have to start the lamb before I leave; which means turning on the crock pot.

Kevin McCarthy got booted as Speaker of the House. The weather has been beautiful.

I do have things to share – yes, I guess I belong to the modern age of over-haring!

Interesting for fans of Prince and Frank Zappa and the life of the artist: Frank Zappa on the lesson that the music industry failed to learn from Prince.

 

“Can you imagine what Prince’s image would be like today if it really had all been left up to those guys out there in the valley,” Zappa said in an interview following the resolution of the Prince’s dispute. “Nevertheless, how many record companies are willing to give up that kind of control, you know, hand over artistic control over their art?”

“Warner Brothers was smart enough to give it to Prince. It’s to their credit that they were smart enough to stay out of Prince’s way,” he added.

This stance enamoured Prince to Zappa. “You can, you look at him and know he is a creative guy,” he remarked. “Like his stuff or not, I think that compared to the rest of this stuff in the vicinity, Prince’s stuff stuff stands out because it’s a vision. You can agree with the vision, you can disagree with the vision, but it looks like Prince, not Warner Brothers, and that’s worth something, that’s something that’s worth protecting. It’s something that’s worth commending, and I hereby commend Prince and Warner Brothers for working out whatever they worked out.”

He concluded: “I would say that the whole music scene would be better off if there were more Prince-like relationships between creative artists and the record company, where they would, you know, just stay out of the guy’s way.”

Don't Meet Your Heroes, Especially the Dead Ones -  Esquire and Hemingway; a boat and fishing:

If you want to get to know somebody, then go fishing with them. Sometimes you wish you hadn’t. Many people eager to fish on Pilar were even more eager to get back to shore. The inherent pressure of fighting a marlin was increased when Hemingway yelled orders and blamed friends for missing fish. Then he got mad when friends caught fish bigger than his. Then he tried to shoot the sharks attacking a marlin of Mike Strater’s that looked like a record. Now there was more blood in the water. More sharks arrived, and they destroyed the entire back of the giant fish. Strater, an accomplished angler, never forgave Hemingway, who didn’t apologize anyway.

The Myth of Marijuana: Mexico’s radical, forgotten experiment with drug legalization by Alexander Aviña is a bit of history I never heard of before it was published in The Dial.

By early 1940, Salazar Viniegra had successfully introduced a set of new drug laws in Mexico, with the cooperation of the Cárdenas government. In March of that year, the health department established a single state-run morphine dispensary in southern Mexico City. At the dispensary, five doctors provided controlled doses of high-quality morphine twice a day at cheap prices. This allowed doctors to provide additional medical care and monitoring for people who were addicted to drugs — to get the morphine, they had to agree to receive medical advice. But as Smith notes, the real purpose of the dispensary was economic: the cheap state-provided morphine undercut Mexico City’s illicit drug economy and threatened to put street dealers out of business. They simply could not compete with the Mexican government. This approach threatened to break the illicit narcotics economy by targeting its profit structure — and to liberate drug users from, in the words of Salazar Viniegra, “the clutches of the trafficker.”

According to the health department, street dealers and big narcos lost thousands of pesos a day. Doctors, people with drug addiction and even some Mexico City newspapers celebrated the positive impact of the dispensary. Despite the “terrifying spectacle” — in the words of one journalist — of hundreds of people with drug addiction lined up outside the dispensary, some middle-class residents who lived nearby agreed with the approach. Even some of Salazar Viniegra’s old medical rivals backed the plan. Supportive editorials appeared in the Mexico City press, and journalists interviewed people who attended the dispensary. They said the cheap, safe morphine gave them at least the chance to consistently work again and provide for their families. Based on these initial results, according to Smith, the Cárdenas government made plans to open more dispensaries in Mexico City and Guadalajara in May 1940. 

Yet by the summer of 1940, the government had abruptly changed course. The health department shuttered the dispensary, and the Cárdenas government repealed the drug laws. Salazar Viniegra was removed from his position as drug czar. The official public explanation was that the beginning of World War II had caused a drastic shortage in the global supply of medical morphine. Mexico could no longer afford to import it from its main source, the U.S.

And now we have MAGA Republicans talking about invading Mexico to get at the drug cartels. As if this were 1914 and Pershing is after Pancho Villa. We really need to interrogate the motives and thinking of government in alternatives to its “war” on drugs. Drugs make money; both sides reek of greed.

The evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in mammals - so it is normal.

Same-sex sexual behaviour has attracted the attention of many scientists working in disparate areas, from sociology and psychology to behavioural and evolutionary biology. Since it does not contribute directly to reproduction, same-sex sexual behaviour is considered an evolutionary conundrum. Here, using phylogenetic analyses, we explore the evolution of same-sex sexual behaviour in mammals. According to currently available data, this behaviour is not randomly distributed across mammal lineages, but tends to be particularly prevalent in some clades, especially primates. Ancestral reconstruction suggests that same-sex sexual behaviour may have evolved multiple times, with its appearance being a recent phenomenon in most mammalian lineages. Our phylogenetically informed analyses testing for associations between same-sex sexual behaviour and other species characteristics suggest that it may play an adaptive role in maintaining social relationships and mitigating conflict.

NYPL Launches Nationwide Teen Banned Book Club - good for them!

Government & Politics Growth-focused task force reckons with development patterns, barriers:

Indiana’s communities face population declines, farm sales, child care shortages, hospital closures and more but lawmakers hope to turn the tide and enable growth.

In a wide-ranging, day-long meeting Monday, an interim Land Use Task Force examined problematic development patterns and barriers to growth, but found that suggested fixes come with their own consequences.

Legislation creating the task force gave it five issues to examine: growth trends, growth barriers, developer siting, local self-investment and food insecurity.

***

Indiana’s metropolitan areas grew more than 6% between 2010 and 2020, but the population outside those places shrank slightly — 0.09% over the same time period — according to Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.

Pandemic-induced migration led to declines in some urban counties, and growth of 0.1% in their rural counterparts, said Matthew Kinghorn, senior demographic analyst at IU’s Indiana Business Research Center. But those trends could be temporary.

Those areas are also losing farmland, testified the D.C.-based American Farmland Trust. Between 2001 and 2016, Indiana converted 265,500 acres of cropland, pastureland and woodland to other uses — mostly low-density residential housing.

With top quality farmland going for $13,500 acre, the trust’s Cris Coffin said, new farmers may struggle to break into the industry. Farms, she said, should exist in a variety of places and scales to ensure a resilient food supply.

What Did Robert Johnson Encounter at the Crossroads? (Part 1 of 2) 

Out of here.

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