Links are at the end; for pity’s sake, people, open some.
Yr. editor finds that writing without music is no longer a hyperlocal possibility.
Tomorrow is a Special K day, so you may or may not get a new edition.
“The ward office will borrow the metaverse created by the nonprofit Kazoku Hikikomori Japan joint association …”
A while back—everything is a while back now; everything …—yr. editor mentioned a program in the Edogawa ward of Tokyo aimed at identifying and easing the plights of social recluses, of whom the country has enough to have given them a name, “hikikomori.”1 Japan is not known for openly embracing discussion or treatment of mental health issues but is able to regard something like never going out of one’s room as a social issues rather than a mental health one, and hence openly addressable.
There’s some merit in categorizing mental health issues as social ones for purposes of treatment, at least in a society where social obligations are taken so seriously, which probably lets us out.
One of today’s stories has to do with a virtual reality/physical space program aimed at getting people out of the house and into contact with people in similar situations, while the other, also from Edogawa, is about a candy store the ward office opened to provide employment to hikikomori wanting to ease their way back into the flow.23
(The Japan News story on the Edogawa candy store will tell you to shut off your ad blocker even if you use the browser in which you’ve permanently disabled the ad blockers for just this sort of occasion, but you can still read it.)
One of the notable aspects of the story from a while back was that the Edogawa ward office explicitly went looking for hikikomori, distributing a survey to every household in the ward and then following up with households in which nobody responded to the survey. Having identified as many recluses as they could, the ward then set about developing programs for them. Other Japanese cities have inaugurated similar programs.
The effort was a coordinated, large-scale, fully adequate one aimed at helping a particular segment of the society. We don’t see a lot of that here.
Yr. editor wouldn’t turn down a job in a local hikikomori candy shop, frankly, although maybe I get out and about too much lately to qualify.
“News about Cruz’s death reached Priscilla Orta, an asylum attorney in Brownsville, the morning after the teenager died.”
That’s from a Texas Monthly story about Biden’s border immigration policy—specifically, about a new smartphone app asylum seekers are required to use for scheduling immigration hearings.4 The child in question was a Cuban asylum seeker who used the app to schedule an appointment three weeks down the road from their arrival at a Mexican border town, but he was murdered before he could get to his hearing in the U.S.
For weeks, Orta and her nonprofit, Lawyers for Good Government’s ‘Project Corazon’ initiative, which provides aid to immigrants, had worked with asylum seekers on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande Valley, helping them use the new app. At first, she’d been optimistic about the technology. CBP One had the chance to introduce some order to the immigration system and to finally give asylum seekers the basic information they all craved: how to do things the right way.
. . .
CBP One has massively narrowed the pool of asylum seekers allowed to seek these Title 42 (“health emergency” order shutting down the border) exemptions. Orta got a vivid window into how the new policy works in Reynosa, one of the most notoriously dangerous cities in Mexico, across the river from McAllen. Since the new regulations went into place, Orta and her team have seen multiple torture victims—some with clear evidence of physical injuries—turned away at the port. CBP officials told them they’d have to use app. “I do not think this happened because our local officers are heartless,” Orta said. “I do not—I think this is a conscious decision by the administration.”
. . .
Orta has found that in many ways CBP One has functioned more like a deterrence mechanism to reject travelers than like a mode of entry. It’s closer to razor wire than to an open gate. Where once the basic requirement for seeking asylum was “fleeing persecution,” now there’s a whole host of additional requirements, among them: having a working smartphone; internet connection to use the app; and the ability to read and write in English, Spanish, or, only recently, Haitian Creole, the only languages the app offers. Many of the most vulnerable do not meet these criteria.When asylum seekers began using CBP One in January, they also discovered a finicky app plagued with bugs that would often crash. It felt like the digital equivalent of visiting the DMV. Aid workers also quickly noticed a troubling pattern. The photo scan feature struggled to take photos of most users (when I used it at home in Austin, it crashed multiple times, and didn’t recognize my face at first). For users who were Black, especially, it repeatedly failed to work, unable to recognize differences in contrast on dark skin. Speaking on background, a CBP spokesperson acknowledged the bugs, but denied that the photo scan is not working for those with dark skin.
Ah well. C’est la guerre.
“Private Health Care Companies Are Eating the American Economy”
The numbers are astounding. Big Seven revenue increased 300 percent in the ten-year period studied, while profit increased 287 percent. Potter notes that, at three of these companies, over 90 percent of health plan revenues come from government programs.
This ruthless profiteering poses a threat to the stability of Medicare’s financing. It (along with Medicaid) is funded through a payroll tax that is split between an employer and an employee, the surplus of which goes into the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. That fund is expected to run out in 2028, according to The New York Times.5
That’s The American Prospect (TAP) writing on a new report from former health insurance executive turned whistleblower Wendell Potter, himself writing on his substack newsletter, Health Care un-covered.6 Potter also runs the Center for Health and Democracy, a non-profit reporting on for-profit health care grotesqueries and lobbying against them.7
As you would expect, Potter and the issues he addresses have been individually and in tandem—and sometimes both at once; don't try that at home—touched upon by yr. editor on several occasions.8 Much of the writing on health care and related issues here focuses on the creeping-to-galloping-privatization of Medicare and Medicaid, which along with outsourced VA programs and the Defense Health Agency's Tricare program, account for that more-than-90% of government-fed revenues at the companies identified by Potter.
Ah well. C’est la guerre.
Luxury yacht finally freed from Maui near-shore reef only to sink in 800 feet of water
Once the boat stated leaking fuel, the U.S. Coast Guard federalized the vessel, meaning it has jurisdiction over the yacht which cannot be moved until all hazardous material was removed.
When that process was done the state Department of Land and Natural Resources took over because [owner Jim] Jones said he did not have the money to pay for the salvage operation. The state organized and is paying for the operation, but will be sending Jones a bill, which initially was for $460,000 plus. But that will be sure to go up due to all the problems encountered during the salvage.9
This is, or was, a 94-foot motor yacht, similar used examples of which seem to be selling for $1.5 million - $2 million, stupidity tax excluded. Other stories refer to Jones as the charterer of the boat rather than the owner, but either way he’s racking up a bill that will approach the value of the yacht (when it was afloat) by the time damage to the reef and environs is factored in.
Jim Jones. First Guyana and now this.
Ah well. C’est la guerre.
“The GDF11 protein thus indirectly increases cell turnover in the hippocampus and restores neuronal activity”
That’s from Neuroscience News, regarding a study in which regular doses of a blood protein were administered to older mice, resulting in lower levels of depressive behavior and memory loss. The same researchers tested young, depressed humans and found lower-than-normal levels of the protein in their subjects, with the levels fluctuating in tandem with changes in mood.10
“This work provides clinical evidence linking low blood levels of GDF11 to mood disorders in patients with depression,” said Lida Katsimpardi, a researcher in the Institut Pasteur’s Perception and Memory Unit, affiliated with Inserm at the Institut Necker-Enfants Malades, and co-last author of the study.
“In the future, this molecule could be used as a biomarker to diagnose depressive episodes. It could also serve as a therapeutic molecule for the treatment of cognitive and affective disorders,” she concludes.
So that’s good. It could turn out that administering the protein in aged humans works well enough to ease the labor shortage, to whatever extent that’s real. Or it could turn out that administering the protein creates a breed of aged, enraged, and newly functional humans who suddenly remember every slight and abuse they’ve suffered in their lives, and use their rejuvenated capacities to hunt down the perpetrators.
One must consider all the possibilities. Yr. editor is definitely down with a human trial, though.
Also in Neuroscience News is a study about how the generally quite modest variations in our heartbeats affect our experience of time.11
“Time is a dimension of the universe and a core basis for our experience of self,” Anderson said. “Our research shows that the moment-to-moment experience of time is synchronized with and changes with the length of a heartbeat.”
Atomic clocks are liars because they lack a certain something.
Ah, c’est le coeur.
C’est la musique
These were all new to me, and of them the first and last are probably the ones likely to be best liked by the usual suspects, although the last one doesn’t finish as strongly as it starts. I didn’t care much for Tilly and the Wall, but they were up on the stage doing their thing, which is a thing I couldn’t do under the best of circumstances.
Agent Ribbons, “Chateau Crone;”12 The Mynabirds, "Generals;"13 Tilly and the Wall, "Tilly and the Wall 2002-2013;"14 Hotel Eden, "Rewind."15
That’s it, Comrades
Be well, take care, share the newsletter if you like it, consider subscribing if you’ve not already—and if you’ve gotten this far, why not?—it’s free unless you want to pay.
I imagine being shell-shocked after a gruesomely fiery barrage, wandering the city aghast at the carnage, and eventually being found by some French-speaking allied troops who coped with all the wreckage with a kind of fatalistic acceptance of it all.
So it goes.
So thanks for that. I have wondered what inspired the phrase; now I suspect I know.