Friday Homestead Dispatch

Vigilant Voluntary Vacuum

1.
Most of you know I’m a Roadside Attraction kind-o-guy. So I was thrilled when CBS Sunday Morning featured a bit on the TOWERING LEGENDS OF THE "MUFFLER MEN!” The first of the figures, a Paul Bunyan holding an oversized axe to promote a restaurant, was created by Bob Prewitt in 1962 for the Lumberjack Café on Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona. Now, according to the CBS feature, a man named Joel Baker and friends have started a side business tracking down, collecting and restoring the characters, documenting their quest on their YouTube channel American Giants. Baker said, "It's really a shame to have giants and have them where nobody can see them. These were built to be out where the public can enjoy them and visit them, take their pictures."

One episode of American Giants features the story of Glenn Goode, the Texas fiberglass man who found a headless and handless 22ft advertising statue in 1970 and built a roadside empire. Great stuff!

The RV Muffler Man in Hatch, New Mexico is holding the rolling meth lab—the signature yellow and orange striped 1986 Fleetwood Bounder RV—from Breaking Bad. My wife Connie took the shot I used for the cover of my 2018 release Tallsome Tales.

And here’s a shot I took in 2010 of the Muffler Man at Glenn and Stone right here in the Ol’ Pueblo.

Enjoy the interactive map (https://www.roadsideamerica.com/map/theme/86) of the Muffler Men you can visit on your next road trip.

2.
Lab-grown meat, AKA cultivated meat, is getting a lot of attention lately. As it should. Although much pricier than conventional meat the upside of moving in this direction seems all positive; about a quarter of our climate change emissions come from food and agriculture. Meat and animal products are responsible for most of the environmental damage caused by the food system, though they provide only 18% of calories and 37% of protein. At the same time, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects demand for meat to increase 46% between 2012 and 2050.

At this time, cultivated meat is still in the infancy stage but according to the Good Food Institute, further scaling will require commercial production in significantly larger facilities than what currently exists. Scaling will also require solving an array of complex challenges that will influence the cost of production. These challenges span five key areas: cell lines, cell culture media, bioprocess design, scaffolding, and end product design and characterization.

In June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture granted its first-ever approval of cell-cultured meat produced by two companies, GOOD Meat and UPSIDE Foods. Both grow small amounts of chicken cells into slabs of meat—no slaughter required. It was the final regulatory thumbs-up that the California-based companies needed in order to sell and serve their products in the U.S. For now, both companies have been given the go-ahead to sell strictly chicken products at a select handful of restaurants. They’ll need additional approval to market cell-cultivated beef, pork or seafood.

UPSIDE Foods’ COO, Amy Chen said, “The biggest challenge right now is definitely building the manufacturing capacity. Industrial farming has had a head start.” But now that both companies have USDA and FDA approval, they can start to build up the infrastructure to cultivate enough meat to ship products across the U.S.

On the other hand, an article in Forbes details the financial constraints and provides a cautionary tale about the industry; Cultivated meat is not necessarily good for the environment. It’s true that the traditional methods of bringing meat to market drive irreversible climate change, but lab-grown meat presents a slightly different problem: it sucks up a massive amount of energy. There’s not a lot of research on that, especially the kind not funded by startups or their industry associations. That said, a few recent studies have shown that there’s cause for concern. The alt-protein industry’s Good Food Institute has most recently claimed that in a decade, lab-grown meat could have a smaller environmental impact compared with conventional cattle production, if renewable energy is used. Their study estimates roughly 80% fewer carbon emissions, in addition to less land gobbled up. But if cultivated meat uses traditional energy sources at scale, a 2015 study found that it would be worse for the planet than conventional meat production. In another paper, announced last month as it awaits peer-reviewed publication, researchers found that the environmental impact of lab-grown meat could be 4 to 25 times worse than the average beef sold at supermarkets.

Despite these arguments I’d rather we figure out the energy side of the equation and stop the stockyard-style animal slaughter. What’s your take?

3.
Drug prices in this country have been highway robbery for years. Thanks, Crooked Joe. Oh, wait, in 2022, Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act without a single Republican vote. That law permits the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices the government will pay. And according to a poll as far back as 2019, 86 percent of respondents say they support having Medicare negotiate directly with drug companies to get lower prices.

The Republican argument has been that high prices were necessary to create an incentive for drug companies to innovate, as their investment in research and development depends on the revenue they expect from new drugs. But according to that same NPR article in the link above, the pharmaceutical industry spent $79 billion on sales, marketing and administration last year — $22 billion more than it spent on research.

The ten drugs listed in Tuesday’s announcement are among those with the highest total spending in Medicare Part D, and Tuesday the Department of Health and Human Services released a report that 9 million seniors paid a total of $3.4 billion for these drugs in 2022. The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency that provides budget and economic information to Congress, estimates that government negotiation over these drugs will save taxpayers about $98.5 billion over ten years. If a drug maker refuses to negotiate, it either will face a significant tax or must withdraw from Medicare and Medicaid. OK, Joe, guess you’re not as crooked as the orange felon says.

4.
I don’t really want to talk about Elon Musk, the manchild with all the money. ALL the money. But recent attention has been given to the fact that this one man exerts considerable control over the satellite internet industry that operates in “low Earth orbit” — generally about 300 miles above Earth — even as that industry is crucial to the war effort in Ukraine. There are just shy of 8,000 satellites in the skies today; more than 4,500 of those are Starlink satellites, launched by SpaceX. The company hopes to multiply this number almost tenfold in the coming years.

Oracle, Arizona resident and sage Michael Moore said it best on Facebook this week:

Musk is a product of the 80’s - a time when Dungeons and Dragons were forming the adolescent brains of young people. Regardless of the strong possibility that much of Elon Musk never fully grew up, he is today the richest guy on earth at something like 220 billion dollars. His influence is not just something in the newspapers regarding the rich and famous. He also owns the satellite device on my roof from which my computer receives information from the world around me. He has moved into the broadband vacuum formerly occupied by internet providers who were not up to the task, hardly to mention a government (our collective) that did not consider the task was any of its business. Musk, a capricious Trump enthusiast, now personally owns a large part of America’s news media and a growing part of our access to it - demonstrable power that must be the envy of the Biden administration.

But it gets scarier still. Thousands of satellite devices identical to the one on my roof are deployed across Ukraine. They are also owned by Elon Musk together with the service they provide. Of course they are weaponized - a critical communication tool of the Ukrainian military in it’s war with Russia. Musk has not only threatened to pull the plug on this vital service. He has done so briefly in Eastern Ukraine, halting troop operations until he, Elon Musk, could decide what to do with his suddenly awesome geopolitical power.

Trump’s mental age has been estimated to be about twelve. American has already demonstrated its willingness to place its well being in the hands of a churlish child. Musk is undoubtably more intelligent than Trump, though he shares with Trump the belief that the world is a sort of proprietary video game. He is also vastly richer than Trump, more resourceful, more powerful and more dangerous. My disgust with Trump - embodied in the text you are reading at this minute - comes to you via Musk’s rooftop antenna and Musk’s orbiting satellite system. Musk permits me to speak to you in exchange for a tithe of $120 monthly, though he is legally entitled to change his mind about that.

Fundamental to everything we do is our collective story, our consensual narrative. We are not a well educated country. We don’t read or think critically. It has been clearly demonstrated that we are herd animals. Our opinions are derived from our tribal mythologies. Andrew Breitbart correctly said that politics is downstream from culture. The fact that our culture and the technologies on which it depends are today largely the plaything of Elon Musk’s questionable judgement and sense of entitlement is disturbing. While we are worrying about Trump coming through the front door, we have hardly noticed that Musk has already come through the back.

Tiny Tidbits of Goddamn!

1. Vivek Ramaswamy is insane. At the BIG DEBATE the other night he said, "The climate change agenda is a hoax...the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.” He wants to raise the voting age to 25. He’s just to the right of the orangeman, which should be enough to make one cringe. On the subject of systemic racism being responsible for disparities affecting Black people he put more of the blame on Black people themselves — as well as on Democrats, citing the decline of marriage and two-parent households and arguing that benefits programs like welfare incentivized bad behavior. He also vows to fire anyone who has targeted the orangeman along with laying off 75 percent of the federal workforce and end U.S. aid to Ukraine. GODDAMN!

2. In July, amid a lethal and record-setting heatwave, The Intercept captured photos of roughly 50 migrants caged in an outdoor pen at the Border Patrol’s Ajo Station, deep in the Sonoran Desert two hours west of Tucson. The high temperature that day was 114 degrees. GODDAMN!

3. In Tennessee, another state where WOKE goes to die, Erin Reed reports that Tennessee District Attorney, Ryan Desmond, threatened Pride organizers in Blount County with arrest under the now-unconstitutional provisions, arguing the ruling "does not apply" to his office and district. The ruling referred to is from U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker who blocked April 2023’s anti-drag law. No dancing in Tennessee! GODDAMN!

Wholesome Ryan K. Desmond

4. Damn, Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., gets some kudos from me for authorizing an amendment to the 2024 defense spending bill to collect information on trainees who overthrow their governments. It would require the Pentagon for the first time to inform Congress about U.S.-mentored mutineers. As reported by the Intercept, the State Department, which tracks data on U.S. trainees, is either unwilling or unable to provide information on the total number of U.S.-trained mutineers across Africa since 9/11. The Intercept identified more than 70 other African military personnel involved in coups since 2001 who might have received U.S. training or assistance, but when provided with names, State Department spokespeople either failed to respond or replied, “We do not have the ability to provide records for these historical cases at this time.” GODDAM

You must need some cute kittens about now…

And now this…