Icepick Headaches And Beer-based Antibiotics, Plus

SNAP and congressional cowardice update, plus music

Anthurium and wooden steps, shot with black and white film on my Pentax MX camera (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

Icepick Headaches And Beer-based Antibiotics

Icepick headaches feel like what they sound like: getting stabbed in the head with an icepick. I had a series of them three years ago in my left eye; although they’re usually quite brief and don’t consistently recur, my episode lasted about five days, was intensely painful when it peaked and made the eye throbbingly sensitive to light the whole time. I began to think the eye was a goner after a couple of days but the doctor assured me otherwise and ran me through the is-something-wrong-with-your-brain machines to make sure.

I got an eye patch to deal with the light sensitivity because keeping one eye closed all the time is hard to do, and otherwise I couldn’t get anything done. Unfortunately the patch became a cat toy afterward so when the current iteration of the headache hit this past Friday, I had to venture one-eyed into the universe and fetch a new one.

I shouldn’t have waited two days to see if it would go away, but it’s not as bad as last time so I figured maybe it wouldn’t be as long-lasting either. I awakened this morning feeling better and able to keep the afflicted eye open for relatively long stretches, so far.

Also I dreamed that a high school friend of mine with whom I’ve not corresponded in years wandered into a hospital room, where I was sitting with another friend waiting to hear some news about a fourth, unidentified friend, to tell us that both her parents had cancer and her mood was bad because of it. Her parents were a shade younger than mine but they’d still be in their mid-nineties at the youngest. Not very many people on good terms with their parents want them to die, sometimes even if the parents are miserable.

She looked good!

Beer-based antibiotics

We’re not quite there yet but a team of scientists have taken brewery waste and turned it into nanoparticles which successfully attacked some common bacteria in the lab. They’ve patented their process; sadly it’s not yet ready to go out into the world, but it does sound simple enough that home brewers might one day be able to crank out some new antibiotics to which the bugs haven’t developed any resistance.

Also sadly, it could kill you because you’re making metal-laden nanoparticles in your garage.

My team and I developed nanoparticles coated with some of the compounds found in brewery waste – an invention which we have since patented but are not actively commercializing. We created the particles by adding waste from any stage of brewing to a metal source.

When we added a chemical containing silver – for example, silver nitrate – to the waste, a combination of processes converted silver compound into nanoparticles. One process is called reduction: Here, compounds found in the brewery waste undergo a chemical reaction that converts the silver ions from the silver nitrate to a metallic nanoparticle.
. . .
My colleague Neha Rangam found that the coating formed by the brewery waste compounds makes these nanoparticles nontoxic to human cells in the lab. However, the silver from these nanoparticles killed Escherichia coli, a common bacterium responsible for intestinal illness around the world.

We found that a special type of nanoparticle containing high amounts of silver phosphate worked against E. coli.
. . .
Because they’re so tiny, these particles are difficult to remove from the body unless they are attached to drug carriers designed to transport the nanoparticles safely. Before doctors can use these nanoparticles as antibacterial drugs, scientists will need to study the fate of these materials once they enter the body.

Some engineered nanoparticles can be toxic to living organisms, so research will need to address whether these brewery waste-derived nanoparticles are safe for the human body before they’re used as a new antibacterial drug component.

If you’re a beer drinker, you may have been told at some point that beer is bad for you. Now you can say that it may save humanity at least long enough for the species to die off from global warming-fueled floods and fires.

SNAP and congressional cowardice update

My SNAP benefits arrived on Saturday after a federal judge ordered the regime to pay out benefits in full by Friday, rather than the partial payment they’d begrudgingly agreed to provide. They immediately appealed the order and on Saturday, Roberts court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a temporary stay on it, expiring today, pending the outcome of the appeal, which could also come today.

The regime seized on the stay as an opportunity to claw back the money they’d already sent out to the states in order to reduce the benefits to the level they’d originally agreed to. Multiple states have sued to prevent the USDA from doing that.

Despite recent attempts from the Trump administration to take back the money used for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in Oregon last week, state leaders say beneficiaries will continue to have their full benefits this month.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield filed a motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) late Sunday night alongside a coalition of 22 attorneys general and three governors to ensure that the money used to pay these benefits would not be forcibly returned.

This motion comes after the U.S. Department of Agriculture instructed states on Saturday to “immediately undo” actions they had taken to send out full SNAP benefits or lose out on federal cost-sharing.

I’ve not had a chance to hit the grocer’s yet because I can barely fucking see, but as of a minute or two ago the full benefit is still showing on my account. I can’t see our first-term governor acceding to the regime’s demands.

Despite the regime’s widely-panned attempts to pull the rug out from under a bunch of needy people who’ve already been scrambling to keep their families fed for more than a week, in some cases, a coterie of senate Democrats chose this moment to stop trying to force Republicans to restore the Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid spending without which many people will lose their access to health care. Some of those people will die.

With the support of eight members of the Democratic caucus—Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Dick Durbin of Illinois, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Angus King of Maine, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire—Republicans in the upper chamber secured the necessary 60 votes needed to pass a cloture vote that paves the way for a deal critics warn does nothing to save Americans from soaring healthcare premiums unleashed due to the GOP spending bill passed earlier this year and signed into law by President Donald Trump.

“It is thoroughly disappointing that, while most Americans overwhelmingly oppose Republicans’ horrific budget, support the fight to curtail Trump’s authoritarianism, and want to protect healthcare, some Democrats failed to hold the line, and squandered an opportunity to score a popular and decisive win for the American people,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-director of the progressive watchdog group Public Citizen.

The deal will combine three separate funding measures into a single stopgap bill that will reopen the government and keep it funded through the end of January of 2026, but contains no restoration of Medicaid funding, fails to curb Trump rescissions that have devastated government agencies and programs, and does nothing to address Affordable Care Act subsidies other than a “meaningless” promised vote to extend them within 40 days—a vote nearly sure to fail in the Senate and likely not even taken up in the US House, controlled by Republicans.

Fetterman was a lost cause, and King too, but somehow Schumer has so little control over his caucus that enough of the rest of them felt free to bolt. What the fuck is Dick Durbin thinking, beyond that he’s retiring and won’t face a reelection campaign? In fact none of these people will be running again until 2028 at the earliest, at which point Americans will have been marinating for three years in the misery the holdout was meant to at least partially forestall.

That’s if we have meaningful elections. And maybe the misery is the point; they’re hoping that Republicans will take all the blame for the suffering and preventable deaths that are sure to follow, and no one will remember how their senators caved.

Lots of people have been asking what lessons Democrats should be taking from their solid wins in last week’s elections. Evidently one of those lessons, for these cowards, was “roll over.” The 2028 primaries beckon.

Music

Panic Shack, “Jiu Jits You”

The Meteors, “Chainsaw Boogie”

Billy Nomates, “Blue Bones”

Stiff Richards, “Bad Disease”

Christone Kingfish Ingram, “Hey Joe”

Gurriers, “Approachable”

Prima Queen, “The Prize”

Hayley Williams, “Parachute”

Tedeschi Trucks Band, “Franklin’s Tower”

And that, Comrades in Witness, is all I got. Please share and let me know if you like what I do, and consider subscribing if you’ve not already. Free ones are free, paid ones start at $50/year; the big difference is that free ones are free and paid ones add to my GTFO fund. They’re all good.