Inside meth

The widespread use of meth, goes a long way toward making our countryside a unified whole, with our hollowed out suburbs, and half-abandoned urban cores.  Think of it as a successful sort of multiculturalism - granted of a hellish sort.

 

A professor, foolish or brave, embedded himself into the modern meth culture of Jefferson County, Missouri.

 

He had many interesting items to note, but I thought one unusual, but on target comment was:

I Embedded with a Community of Meth Users
Alice Robb, New Republic, 6 January 2014 (hat tip: MR)

It’s like you or me taking ADHD meds—a sort of legitimated form of speed. Adderall is middle-class meth. It motivates people to produce themselves as the kinds of avid, goal-pursuing, risk-taking and at-the-ready subjects of late capitalism. The stressed, anxious and overworked individuals that animate many segments of the US ‘mainstream’ economy are perhaps the more presentable kin of the emaciated, toothless, pockmarked, wide-eyed and busy meth users I encountered.

It's interesting to see that the original headline appears to have been something like "Meth: Adderall for Construction Workers".  We are indeed a self-medicating society.

Apocalyptic fishing

As Yves noted at the tail end of the link (see hat tip) “These stories will pop up with ever more frequency in the future. Considering that over 1 billion people strictly depend on fisheries for most of their protein intake, this could turn very ugly in the not-so-long run.”

 

Daunting Calculus for Maine Shrimpers as Entire Season Is Lost

Jess Bridgood, New York Times, 31 December 2013 (hat tip: NC)

Shrimping in the Gulf of Maine was so bad last season that Randy Cushman, a longtime fisherman, wondered if there was any point in going out at all.

“I can honestly say it was the worst catch that I’ve ever seen in my career,” said Mr. Cushman, 51, who has captained a boat for more than 30 years. “I was calling people and saying, ‘Let’s shut this fishery down, this is stupid.’ ”

Regulators recently did just that, closing the 2014 Gulf of Maine shrimping season — which, in a normal year, might have run from December through the spring — to give the supply time to recover.

Catastrophic fishing events are no longer big news.  Ouch!

Terminal lunar cataclysm

The stability of our solar system is an illusion of our short time span looking at it, and Newtonian Clockwork physics.  There has been a lot of movement.

At one point Jupiter comes in close enough to the Sun to seriously mess up Mars.  Earth would have been toast, but it did not exist yet.

There is the potential for further movement.

The Madness of the Planets
Corey S. Powell, Nautilus, 12 December 2013 (hat tip: NC)

So are we home free? No again. “The terrestrial planets, they are not totally stable,” Morbidelli says. That instantly captures my attention: Earth is one of the four terrestrial planets. “Mercury is on the edge of the instability, and it could go nuts, start to encounter Venus, then the orbits of Venus and the Earth could become unstable themselves.” From there, Venus could collide with Earth, or Earth could go careening off on a totally new orbit, sterilizing the planet. The odds are not great, but they’re not all that small either—about 1 percent over the next few billion years.

I have been re-reading Lucifer's Hammer, so this is all of interest to me.

Pot shots at power

I am not sure what to think of this one. It occurred around the time of the Boston Marathon attack, but does not appear to be linked.  It took a little while for the news to percolate to a national level.

 

Sounds sort of Uni-Bomber-like to me, but within a group setting.

 

Military-Style Raid on California Power Station Spooks U.S.

Shane Harris, Foreign Policy, 27 December 2013 (hat tip: NC)

Around 1:00 AM on April 16, at least one individual (possibly two) entered two different manholes at the PG&E Metcalf power substation, southeast of San Jose, and cut fiber cables in the area around the substation. That knocked out some local 911 services, landline service to the substation, and cell phone service in the area, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Foreign Policy. The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility. Ten transformers were damaged in one area of the facility, and three transformer banks -- or groups of transformers -- were hit in another, according to a PG&E spokesman...

"These were not amateurs taking potshots," Mark Johnson, a former vice president for transmission operations at PG&E, said last month at a conference on grid security held in Philadelphia. "My personal view is that this was a dress rehearsal" for future attacks.

Having done a little work around utility systems, I can second the articles comments that this is not the work of neophytes to the power grid.