“Strange New Infectious Diseases…Call Up A More Urgent Sort Of Attention”

September 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Curious that in the Information Age there’s still so much misinformation about potential pandemics. Epidemiology is vastly improved, but the public is often off-base in understanding medicine in our more quantified world, fearing life-saving vaccines while indulging in unhealthy behaviors. Schlocky journalism, a failure to develop critical thinking and our deep fear of horrible deaths conspire to make it so. From David Quammen in the New York Times:

“Humans die in large numbers every day, every hour, from heart failure and automobile crashes and the dreary effects of poverty; but strange new infectious diseases, even when the death tolls are low, call up a more urgent sort of attention. Why?

There’s a tangle of reasons, no doubt, but one is obvious: whenever an outbreak occurs, we all ask ourselves whether it might herald the Next Big One.

What I mean by the Next Big One is a pandemic of some newly emerging or re-emerging infectious disease, a global health catastrophe in which millions die. The influenza epidemic of 1918-19 was a big one, killing about 50 million people worldwide. The Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 was biggish, causing at least a million deaths. AIDS has killed some 30 million and counting. Scientists who study this subject — virologists, molecular geneticists, epidemiologists, disease ecologists — stress its complexity but tend to agree on a few points.

Yes, there probably will be a Next Big One, they say. It will most likely be caused by a virus, not by a bacterium or some other kind of bug. “

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“A Man Should Never Expect Another Man To Sacrifice For Him”

September 23, 2012 in Books, Politics, Videos | Permalink

James Day interviewing Ayn Rand in 1974. In addition to explaining her Objectivist claptrap, Rand names Victor Hugo as her greatest literary influence.

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A Brief Note From 1887 About Dr. Leach’s Eye

September 23, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 7, 1887 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Cairo, Ill.–While Dr. J.H. Leach, of Cairo, was walking the floor of his office Wednesday night a sudden and very severe pain darted into his right eye, which seemed to jump out of his head. A profuse hemorrhage began and continued all night. The pain was intense. An examination showed that the eye had burst and that its immediate removal was necessary. Dr. Leach was taken back to his own office where the operation was performed.”

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

September 23, 2012 in Misc. | Permalink


A few search-engine keyphrase searches bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

September 22, 2012 in Misc. | Permalink

Afflictor: Imagining what Mitt Romney envisions when he thinks of the so-called 47%.

  • Carl Hagenback’s odd childhood informed his insane zoos.

“Sun City Has A Fertility Rate Of Zero”

September 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “The Gray Tsunami,” Jeff Wheelwright’s new Discover article about the challenges attending the increasing longevity of world population, a section about Sun City retirement community in Arizona, an example of how some white Americans used to retire:

“Del Webb was no demographer, but in the late 1950s he saw an opportunity in America’s budding crop of elderly. Promoting the then-novel idea of ‘active retirement,’ Webb was a very active 60-year-old himself. Tall and lean, a vigorous golfer and baseball fan, he was a millionaire contractor with a common touch. The people who flocked to see his Sun City demonstration homes—100,000 showed up over New Year’s weekend in 1960—had had their fill of hard times. These were people who had lived through an economic depression and a world war. The advertisements for Sun City depicted a golden way of life in a place where they could retire and relax, where they would not be frail or sick.

Some of those ads now hang in the Sun City Historical Museum, which occupies one of the first homes to be built here, next to the first golf course. Two vintage golf carts, labeled Him and Her, stand side by side in the carport. Inside, the modest fixtures and furniture of a typical 1960s retired couple are on display. The original cinder-block structure consisted of five rooms totaling just 858 square feet; an addition was put on the back later. The small eat-in kitchen features a boxy electric range and fridge. The sink in the pink-tiled bathroom is very low and the toilet is minuscule, hardly suitable for today’s amplified Americans. The three academics smile as they look into the bathroom. ‘There are no handrails, nothing to grab onto,’ Glick says.

Sun City’s radical idea—to restrict home ownership to people 55 and older—effectively excluded families and children from the development. But recently the policy was updated. Now only one owner has to be over 55, this to accommodate residents with younger spouses. Getting back in the van and touring the quiet, curving streets, with their neat plantings and pink-tinted gravel, the ASU group sees no pregnant women or kids, no young people whatsoever. Sun City has a fertility rate of zero.

The fertility rate is the number of children an average female will produce in her lifetime. The panelists note that the rate is currently plunging in almost all countries around the world. True, it has not occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, not yet. But for those who specialize in the long view, fertility collapse and accelerated aging have supplanted overpopulation as the most salient demographic trend.” (Thanks Browser.)

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Sun City promotional film from the 1960s:

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“What Are The Possible Sites Of A Human Colony In The Solar System?”

September 21, 2012 in Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Stephen Hawking’s 2008 NASA address encouraging space colonization.

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

September 21, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“Clean.”

I am looking for a clean and beautiful girl to have my babies (Jersey City, NJ)

I am a healthy person my sexual orientation is bisexual, and I would like to make arrangements with the right lady to have my baby. Only serious enquiries.

Requirements:

  • PLEASE SEND ONE FULL BODY PICTURE THANKS.
  • Age Btw 23-36
  • Hight 5/10-6/3
  • Weight SLIM preferable
  • Race: Any – Black a big Plus
  • Good health

“If Dallas Can Have A Zero-Waste Plan, Any City Can”

September 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Microbes supercharged to devour particular types of waste–even the non-organic kind–makes too much sense for it to not happen. Of course, it’s easy for me to say since I don’t have to come up with the science to enable that process. Until we perfect the method, we must employ workarounds. The city of Dallas, for instance, is trying to effect a zero-waste recycling plan by 2040. From Nick Swartsell in the New York Times:

“If J. R. Ewing can quit smoking and promote solar energy, anything is possible in Dallas, environmental advocates say, even an ambitious plan to have the city recycling nearly all of its garbage by 2040.

‘If Dallas can have a zero-waste plan, any city can,’ said Zac Trahan, the Dallas program manager at Texas Campaign for the Environment, a group challenging the city’s reputation for big oil, big cars and big sprawl. ‘It can really be a huge opportunity to move toward a more sustainable Texas.’

Before the last of the plastic bags, crumpled papers and other urban tumbleweeds head to the recycling plant, the city will have to determine when to put into place the various steps of its plan, which the Dallas City Council formally adopted on Aug. 22. It will also have to address the lingering concerns of advocacy groups and business interests, like unintended environmental consequences and unfinanced mandates.”

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A Brief Note From 1885 About A Nosebleed

September 21, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 1, 1885 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Laredo, Tex.–The 7 year old son of a well to do Mexican is dying a horrible death from a very unusual cause. A few days ago that little fellow had a slight attack of bleeding at the nose and lay down to sleep without removing the blood. While asleep a large green fly deposited its eggs in the bloody nostril. Physicians have extracted over fifty worms, about half an inch long, and have detected evidences of many others eating toward the brain. They say the child will die.”

“There Are People All Over The Country Who Believe The Future Is Now”

September 20, 2012 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A 1978 film about the early efforts to popularize solar energy in America, which encountered problems of economics and lack of political will. Hosted by Eddie Albert, who apparently was not Buddy Ebsen.

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“But Is Bada-Bing Really An Official Part Of The English Language?”

September 20, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Bada-bing.”

From “Cyber-Neologoliferation,” James Gleick’s fun 2006 New York Times Magazine article about his visit to the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary, an explanation of how the word “bada-bing” came to be listed in the OED:

“Still, a new word as of September is bada-bing: American slang ‘suggesting something happening suddenly, emphatically, or easily and predictably.’ The Sopranos gets no credit. The historical citations begin with a 1965 audio recording of a comedy routine by Pat Cooper and continue with newspaper clippings, a television news transcript and a line of dialogue from the first Godfather movie: ‘You’ve gotta get up close like this and bada-bing! you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.’ The lexicographers also provide an etymology, a characteristically exquisite piece of guesswork: ‘Origin uncertain. Perh. imitative of the sound of a drum roll and cymbal clash…. Perh. cf. Italian bada bene mark well.’ But is bada-bing really an official part of the English language? What makes it a word? I can’t help wondering, when it comes down to it, isn’t bada-bing (also badda-bing, badda badda bing, badabing, badaboom) just a noise? ‘I dare say the thought occurs to editors from time to time,’ Simpson says. ‘But from a lexicographical point of view, we’re interested in the conventionalized representation of strings that carry meaning. Why, for example, do we say Wow! rather than some other string of letters? Or Zap! Researching these takes us into interesting areas of comic-magazine and radio-TV-film history and other related historical fields. And it often turns out that they became institutionalized far earlier than people nowadays may think.'”

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“They Call It The Obesity Paradox”

September 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

That Bloomberg took away our barrels of soda for (perhaps) no reason. A growing number of studies show that overweight, even obese, people fare better when becoming ill than their thinner counterparts with the same diseases. From Harriet Brown in the New York Times:

“A few years ago, Mercedes Carnethon, a diabetes researcher at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, found herself pondering a conundrum. Obesity is the primary risk factor for Type 2 diabetes, yet sizable numbers of normal-weight people also develop the disease. Why?

In research conducted to answer that question, Dr. Carnethon discovered something even more puzzling: Diabetes patients of normal weight are twice as likely to die as those who are overweight or obese. That finding makes diabetes the latest example of a medical phenomenon that mystifies scientists. They call it the obesity paradox.

In study after study, overweight and moderately obese patients with certain chronic diseases often live longer and fare better than normal-weight patients with the same ailments. The accumulation of evidence is inspiring some experts to re-examine long-held assumptions about the association between body fat and disease.”

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“Parents Will Stop Letting Their Kids Play, Starving The League Of Talent”

September 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

When I first became conscious of sports as a child, I was obsessed with boxing. But I was still a kid when Muhammad Ali lost his amazing speaking ability, and I never could watch it again. Ali was very important to me not only as an athlete but for his politics. It isn’t giving him enough credit in and of himself to say that he was for me a gateway drug to Malcolm X, but there’s a lot of truth to that statement. In fact, studying boxing matches that took place long before my birth taught me so much about history and race and politics and sociology. The sport had the same effect on millions of others. Boxing was king until it wasn’t. The shadiness of the promoters had something to do with its decline, but mostly it was watching these beloved figures grow shaky in their hands and voices.

Rich Cohen has an article in the New Republic about football’s future being threatened by the growing awareness of the sport’s unavoidable head injuries. It seems inconceivable that football could severely decline because of the cash cow that the NFL is, but, then again, no one is building insta-stadiums to handle overflowing boxing crowds anymore. An excerpt:

“The worry is not just that people will stop watching the game—it’s that parents will stop letting their kids play, starving the league of talent. Speaking on The Tonight Show, Terry Bradshaw, the great Steelers quarterback, predicted the demise of football, saying if he had a son, he would not let him sign up. ‘The fear of them getting these head injuries,’ he explained, ‘it’s just too great for me.’ Something similar happened to boxing, which was once the biggest sport in the United States. But the country evolved away from the ring, until boxing became a mirror of its own saddest character, the nobody, the palooka, the bum.”

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“Our History, As Recorded By Social Media, Is Slowly Leaking Away”

September 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t know that our history is disappearing more quickly because so much of it is now reported and recorded online, but maybe we had unrealistic expectations about new technologies defeating the wasting away of information. I would assume, on average, we collect and retain more info now than ever before. But the fraying of facts can only be kept at bay for so long–in our minds and in our machines. No matter how advanced the system, the system will eventually fail. From a post about the Arab Spring vanishing into the Twitterplex at MIT’s Technology Review:

“On 25 January 2011, a popular uprising began in Egypt that  led to the overthrow of the country’s brutal president and to the first truly free elections. One of the defining features of this uprising and of others in the Arab Spring was the way people used social media to organise protests and to spread news.

Several websites have since begun the task of curating this content, which is an important record of events and how they unfolded. That led Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, to take a deeper look at the material to see how much the shared  were still live. 

What they found has serious implications. SalahEldeen and Nelson say a significant proportion of the websites that this social media points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death and the Syrian uprising. 

In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.”

“Understanding The Brain…Is Much Like A Being A Medieval Blacksmith Trying To Reverse Engineer A Jet Plane”

September 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t think any of us will live to see a real understanding of human consciousness. The brain is too confusing, too confounding. We’ll get there eventually, but it’s going to be a long slog. Paul Allen is currently trying to reverse engineer the brain, fully aware of the mammoth challenge. From Matthew Herper in Forbes:

“Understanding the brain, Allen argues, is much like a being a medieval blacksmith trying to reverse engineer a jet plane. It’s not just that you don’t understand how the wing attaches to the fuselage or what makes the engine go. You don’t even know the basic theory of how air going over a wing creates lift. ‘Moore’s Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience,’ Allen says. ‘The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does. The computer is a very regular structure. It’s very uniform. It’s got a bunch of memory, and it’s got a little element that computes bits of memory and combines them with each other and puts them back somewhere. It’s a very simple thing.

‘So for someone to learn how to program a computer, in most cases, a human being can do it. You can start programming. I did it in high school. Me and Bill Gates and our friends did that. Probably in a few months we were programming and probably understood what there was to understand about computing within a few years of diving into it.’

In the human brain, designed by evolution, every tiny part is very different from every other tiny part. ‘It’s hideously complex,’ Allen says. And it’s going to take ‘decades and decades’ of more research to understand.”

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If I Had A Twitter Account…

September 20, 2012 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

There is an entire country named Chad. I don’t even like individual people named Chad.

Chad.

Chad: Hey, bro.

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Old Print Article: “A Man Who Would Not Drink Made To Drink,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1896)

September 20, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

“They attempted to force liquor down his throat, and slapped and kicked him.”

As I understand it from this 19th-century article from the Big Timber Express (which was republished in the March 11, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle), a bunch of nice fellas in a Montana town bought a round of drinks for a local newspaperman and no one appreciated the kindly gesture. An excerpt:

“Occasionally an Eastern newspaper voices the general impressions of the people of the country where it circulates concerning social conditions in far Western states. Lynching, murders, highway robbery, untamed cowboys and heroes of the Deadwood Dick type are represented as the striking elements in the average Western town, and one would think to read the stuff, that every other Western citizen is a ruffian and a cutthroat, and that the only semblance of law and order is maintained by the constant intimidation of the sheriff’s pistol and a few scattered churches. Of course such articles only betray the ignorance of their authors to those who have been West, but it must be admitted that a measure of justification is found for them in such experiences as George H. Scott, of the Rocky Mountain Husbandman had at Perry (formerly Joliet), Montana, a week or two ago.

Mr. Scott is a gentleman who is opposed on  principle to the use of intoxicating liquors, and when the prominent ruffians of Perry invited him to drink with them, he very properly but civilly declined, whereupon they attempted to force liquor down his throat, and afterward slapped and kicked him. When it is remembered that Mr. Scott is an invalid, the brutality of the drunken scoundrels is horrible, and if it be a fact as stated, that some of the most prominent business men of the place participated in the outrage, the town should be at once quarantined, and missionaries backed by a military force, sent in to effect the civilization of the Perry barbarians. Perry is as much a disgrace to Montana as it would be to as Eastern state, and decent people will do well to avoid the town as they would a plague district, until it proves itself possessed of some of the elements of civilization and self respect.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

September 20, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“Urine or piss.”

Healthy Male Urine/Piss Sample Specimen – $30 (Nassau)

Do you need a urine or piss sample for your own personal testing? I’m a healthy male guranteed. If you come to me it is the price listed and if I have to come to you it is more depending on the distance. Do what you will with the sample. Just email me your number and I will get back to you very shortly I check my email every hour just in case you need one ASAP.

“No One Is In Control, And Yet An Invisible Hand Governs”

September 19, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Kevin Kelly’s 1994 book, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, which examined, among other things, how hive behavior in insects might be replicated in humans connected by technology:

“Ants, too, have hive mind. A colony of ants on the move from one nest site to another exhibits the Kafkaesque underside of emergent control. As hordes of ants break camp and head west, hauling eggs, larva, pupae — the crown jewels — in their beaks, other ants of the same colony, patriotic workers, are hauling the trove east again just as fast, while still other workers, perhaps acknowledging conflicting messages, are running one direction and back again completely empty-handed. A typical day at the office. Yet, the ant colony moves. Without any visible decision making at a higher level, it chooses a new nest site, signals workers to begin building, and governs itself.

The marvel of ‘hive mind’ is that no one is in control, and yet an invisible hand governs, a hand that emerges from very dumb members. The marvel is that more is different. To generate a colony organism from a bug organism requires only that the bugs be multiplied so that there are many, many more of them, and that they communicate with each other. At some stage the level of complexity reaches a point where new categories like ‘colony’ can emerge from simple categories of ‘bug.’ Colony is inherent in bugness, implies this marvel. Thus, there is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive.”

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“We’ll Notice The Products Around Us Begin To Change”

September 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The early promise of PCs in the 1970s, in the heyday of the Homebrew Computer Club, was that the individual would be master of the technology, not that we would queue up for “improved” iPhones handed down to us by a gigantic corporation every six months. Chris Anderson thinks the spirit of the Homebrew is regaining prominence and will be the future of American manufacturing. From Farhad Manjoo in Slate:

“As Anderson describes it, the new movement is built on three technological and social advances. First, there’s ‘rapid prototyping.’ Today you can design your world-changing widget on a computer, instantly make it real on a 3-D printer, and then go back to the drawing board to refine it. Second, because your designs are all standard CAD files, you can share them with others and borrow other people’s designs, allowing for everyone to improve their widgets through remixing. Finally, when you’ve perfected your widget, you can take advantage of firms like Kickstarter to raise money, then send your designs to commercial manufacturers that will produce your widget in bulk—even if bulk, for you, means you’re making only a few thousand of them.

When I chatted with Anderson recently, I asked him about the timeline of his vision. He thinks the maker movement is around where the PC industry was in the mid-1980s—somewhere between the release of the Apple II and the Mac, between a computer that was popular with hobbyists and one that was meant for everyone. Soon, we’ll have 3-D printers that cost about the same as paper printers, we’ll have 3-D design software that’s as easy to use as iMovie, and making physical things will take on the kind of cultural significance that making digital things did in the first dot-com boom. At that point, we’ll notice the products around us begin to change, Anderson says. A lot of what you’ll buy will still come from large companies that make mass-manufactured goods, but an increasing number of your products will be produced by ‘industrial artisans.’ These artisans will produce goods aimed for niche audiences—perhaps you’re a gardener who needs a specific kind of sprinkler head, or maybe you want computer speakers shaped like Mount Rushmore. Because they’ll be able to sell anywhere, and because their goods will command higher prices that mass-manufactured stuff, artisans will be able to build thriving small businesses from their inventions.”

•••••••••••

Homebrew at the Byte Shop in 1978:

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“You Take Our Stories And Put Them In A Magazine That Rich People Read?”

September 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a recent Guernica interview conducted by Emily Brennan, Katherine Boo, that excellent New Yorker writer, addressed the moral complexity of reporting about poverty for a magazine aimed at those with considerable disposable income. An excerpt:

“Guernica: 

At a lecture at American Academy, you recounted that during your reporting on that evacuation shelter for The New Yorker a woman told you, ‘Wait, so you take our stories and put them in a magazine that rich people read, and you get paid and we don’t? That’s some backward-ass bluffiness, if you ask me.’ She seemed to sum up the moral dilemma that reporting on poverty raises. Can you speak to some of these ethical questions?

Katherine Boo: 

She said it better than I did. We take stories and purvey them to people with money. And in the conventions of my profession, which I try to adhere to, we can’t pay people for stories. Anyone with a conscience who does this work grapples with that reality, and if they don’t, I’d worry. I lie awake at night, and I think, ‘Am I exploiting them? Am I a vulture?’ All of the terrible names anyone could call me, I’ve called myself worse.

But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world. Because if you take a kid like Sunil, who’s been denied the possibility of an education that allows him to write his own story, and all of the people who lack the means and access to do so, they go down the memory hole. They’re lost. What it comes down to is, the only thing worse than being a poverty reporter is if no one ever wrote about it at all. My work, I hope, helps people understand how much gets lost between the intellection of how to get people out of poverty and how it’s actually experienced.

One of the reasons I pore over official documents and reportage is because I’m fascinated by the chasm between the lives that people have and the way they’re officially recorded. In Annawadi, when people were killed, they were categorized as sickness deaths because the officials were corrupt, were extorting money from other people, didn’t care to investigate the deaths of no-account people, and so on. The tragedy is that the other children in Annawadi knew that these people were murdered, that their lives had no meaning, that they’d be classified and filed away. The corrosive effect of that knowledge is staggering. When you know that anything can happen to you, that there is no possibility of redress because of who you are, because you’re an embarrassment in this prosperous city, that’s tragic. Sunil knows people who’ve been killed and filed away, and he can’t bring that to life. But he can tell me and I can get the documents and do the work and bring it to life. And that’s a trade-off to make.”

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“Within The Decade, Solar Could Be Cheaper Than Coal”

September 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Noah Smith’s hopeful new Atlantic article about solar erasing our carbon footprint:

“You may not believe me, but I have news about global warming: Good news, and better news.

Here is the good news. US carbon emissions are decreasing rapidly. We’re down over 10% from our emissions peak in 2007. Furthermore, the drop isn’t just a function of the Great Recession. Since 2010 our economy has been growing, but emissions have kept on falling. The reason? Natural gas. With the advent of ‘fracking’ technology, the price of gas has plummeted far below that of coal, and as a result, essentially no new coal plants are being built. Although gas does release carbon, it only releases about half as much as coal for the same amount of electricity. This is why — despite our failure to join the Kyoto Protocol or impose legal restrictions on CO2 — the United States is now outpacing the rest of the developed world in reducing our contribution to global warming.

Now for the better news. A technology is in the pipeline that has the potential to eliminate CO2 emissions entirely. Solar power, long believed to be unworkably expensive, has actually been falling in cost at a steady exponential rate of 7 percent per year for the last three decades straight. Because of this ‘Moore’s Law for solar,’ electricity from solar panels now costs less than twice as much as electricity from coal, and only about three times as much as electricity from gas. Furthermore, technologies now in the pipeline seem to ensure that the cost drop will continue. 

Within the decade, solar could be cheaper than coal. Within two decades, cheaper than gas. When that happens, assuming we also have electric cars, it is game over for carbon emissions.”

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“He’s Credited With Being The First Computer Researcher To Find His Way Into The Virtual World”

September 19, 2012 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

A 1989 demo of work by pioneering computer artist Myron Krueger.

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“I Looked At The Label On The Bottle—These Were Literally Animal Pills”

September 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I never had time to read this article before. It’s a 2003 Outside piece of participatory journalism about performance-enhancing drugs written by Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s very embattled senior strategist. It’s actually quite good. An excerpt:

“He handed me a bottle of pills. It was Stanozolol, an anabolic steroid that lifters use to add muscle mass. This is one of the drugs that sprinter Ben Johnson was caught using at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, where he was subsequently stripped of his 100-meter gold medal.

‘Where do you get this?’ I said.

‘A vet I know,’ he answered casually. It took me a second to realize he meant veterinarian, not military veteran. ‘Vets and Mexican farmacias, that’s where you get the best stuff.’ I looked at the label on the bottle—these were literally animal pills. They’re used to bulk up livestock, and they’re banned from greyhound racing, where they’re given to dogs to make them stronger.

‘Start with this,’ he went on, spilling out several doses. ‘Good base, can’t go wrong.’ I must have looked shocked, because he gave me a friendly punch in the arm and said, ‘You want to get big, don’t you?’

That night at home I sat staring at the pills. Veterinarians? Mexican pharmacies? I shuddered and threw them out. I knew the only way I could play this game was under a doctor’s supervision.

THAT’S WHAT LED ME, a few weeks later, to Dr. Jones. He was an internist by training and a specialist in the hot new field of anti-aging medicine, which involves helping people—who are always affluent, since these treatments are expensive—try to stave off the effects of growing old with a combination of nutrition and drugs, including HGH, steroids, and testosterone. A doctor I knew had tipped me off, with a wink, that Dr. Jones also used these drugs to ‘work with a lot of athletes.’

Inside his waiting room, I’d squeezed in next to the World’s Largest Man and a woman who I thought might be an actress—though I couldn’t be certain, since she was wearing a hat and sunglasses indoors. The jumbo guy was somebody I was pretty sure spent Sunday afternoons chasing quarterbacks on television. Such people were, I would come to realize, the core of Dr. Jones’s business: athletes and attractive women of all ages. Plus rich guys over 50. And the odd Playmate or two. Oh, and me.”

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