Keith Urban - Street Called Main

But Who's Going to Foot the Bill?

A Wisconsin nurse is accused of amputating a patient’s foot without permission and wanting to display it in her family's taxidermy shop.

38-year-old nurse Mary K. Brown removed the frostbitten right foot of a 62-year-old patient at Spring Valley Health and Rehabilitation Center in Pierce County, according to a criminal complaint. She was charged last week with elder abuse.  Investigators were contacted about a death at the assisted living facility by the county medical examiner, who said the body was sent for an autopsy because of “the unusual circumstances of his death.”

The medical examiner said he noticed the victim’s foot was not attached to his body “but was rather lying beside him.”  Pete Koch, a Pierce County sheriff’s investigator, interviewed staff members at the rehabilitation center and found that the victim, who was not publicly identified, had been admitted several months before the death.

He was taken to the center because he had fallen in his residence when the heat went out, which caused him to have “severe frostbite” on both of his feet. His feet became necrotic, meaning his tissue had died.  Brown cut off the foot in what she said was an act of compassion because of the dire state of his feet.  According to the accounts of nurses Koch interviewed in the criminal complaint, the foot was no longer fully attached to the patient's leg, it smelled and it was “black like a mummy.”

Tracy Reitz, the center’s director of nursing, said that a few days before the amputation, the victim’s right foot “was dead, foul smelling."  The patient's foot was cut off by Brown as she and two other nurses, identified as Nurse 3 and Nurse 4, were in the victim's room.  The foot was then placed in a bag in a freezer, to be sent with him when he passed away.  Brown admitted to Koch that she had not received a doctor's order to cut off the foot.   She said that the victim didn't show any signs of pain and she covered up his stump with gauze.

However, Nurse 4 said she was holding the victim’s hand and his grip was “extremely tight and he was moaning a little bit.”  And another staffer, identified as Nurse 1, said she spoke with the victim two days after the amputation. According to the complaint, he told her "that when they cut his foot off he felt everything and it hurt very bad."

Brown said that she “was trying to make the quality of life better for him." She explained that the patient always complained about the smell and she thought he “would like it better.”  Nurse 3 told Koch that during the amputation, Brown talked about taking the victim’s foot home and “epoxying it," which the nurse found to be strange.  Another nurse, identified as Nurse 5, who was not in the room for the amputation, recalled that Brown said her family has a taxidermy shop. Brown told the nurse “she was going to preserve the foot and put it on display with a sign that said ‘Wear your boots kids.’”

Kevin Larson, administrator and CEO of the facility, told Koch that Brown did not do a report on the incident. Larson said nobody wrote anything in the victim’s chart on May 27 except for a notification about medications.  Larson said Brown had not asked him if she could remove the foot and there was no doctor’s order to do so.  Spring Valley Health and Rehab Center did not immediately respond to an NBC News request for comment.   Brown was charged on Nov. 3 with physical abuse of an elder person intentionally causing great bodily harm and mayhem, with increased penalties as the victim is an elderly person.

 

Stop Licking Toads!

The U.S. National Park Service is warning people to stop licking toads in the wild, due to their gland-secreted psychedelic substance that can create a hallucinogenic experience.  In a social media post, the NPS urged people to avoid any contact with the Sonoran desert toad, also known as the Colorado river toad.

The agency said the creature is far from harmless, as it contains a potent toxin that can make people sick if they touch it or get the poison in their mouth.   “These toads have prominent parotoid glands that secrete a potent toxin. It can make you sick if you handle the frog or get the poison in your mouth,” the National Park Service advised.   “As we say with most things you come across in a national park, whether it be a banana slug, unfamiliar mushroom, or a large toad with glowing eyes in the dead of night, please refrain from licking," they said. 

“Licking or swallowing can lead to numbness of the mouth and throat as well as severe and life-threatening effects on the heart as a result of the digoxin-like compounds and catecholamines described above,” the agency warns.

Despite the risks, some people have discovered that the toad's toxic secretions contain a powerful hallucinogenic known as 5-MeO-DMT.  The U.S Drug Enforcement Administration considers 5-MeO-DMT a Schedule 1 drug, meaning it is currently not accepted for medical use and has a high potential for abuse.  In recent years, smoking the amphibian's secretions has grown in popularity, and many celebrities, including boxer Mike Tyson and others, can’t get enough of tripping on toad venom.

The Colorado River toad, usually found in parts of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, is one of North America’s tallest at 7 inches. It’s also known to make a call described by the NPS as a "weak, low-pitched toot, lasting less than a second."

 

Doing the Mashed Potato

Claude Monet has become the latest artist to be the focus of food-related climate protests, after members of a German environmental group threw mashed potatoes over one of his paintings in a Potsdam museum.

Nine days after Just Stop Oil emptied tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, two activists from Letzte Generation (Last Generation) entered the Museum Barberini and doused Monet’s Les Meules (Haystacks) with mashed potatoes before gluing their hands to the wall.

The protesters said the stunt was designed as a wake-up call in the face of a climate catastrophe. “People are starving, people are freezing, people are dying,” one of the activists said in a video of the incident tweeted by Letzte Generation. “We are in a climate catastrophe and all you are afraid of is tomato soup or mashed potatoes on a painting. You know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid because science tells us that we won’t be able to feed our families in 2050,” the protester said. “Does it take mashed potatoes on a painting to make you listen? This painting is not going to be worth anything if we have to fight over food. When will you finally start to listen? When will you finally start to listen and stop business as usual?”

The group said it had decided to make “this Monet the stage and the public the audience” to try to get its message across. “If it takes pelting a painting with mashed potato or tomato soup to remind society that the fossil course is killing us all, then we give you mashed potato on a painting,” it added.

A spokesperson for the museum said the painting was protected by glass and the museum later said it did not appear to have been damaged.  The spokesperson said police had arrived quickly and that the protesters’ hands were detached from the wall “relatively easily”.

Last year, members of Letzte Generation staged a hunger strike outside the Reichstag building in Berlin to protest about the lack of political action over the climate emergency. Earlier this year, they glued themselves to some of Germany’s busiest motorways.

The group, which accuses the German government of ignoring all warnings and bringing the country to “the edge of the abyss”, says it is part of the last generation that can prevent society from collapsing.

Why Dogs Are Happier

Saudi-Backed LIV Shifts Strategy in its War With the PGA

The top professional golfers who have defected from the PGA Tour for the Saudi-backed LIV tour are making loads of money, but one thing they aren’t getting are world ranking points, which are crucial to making even more cash and playing in golf’s major championships. So far, the secretive body that grants ranking points, the Official World Golf Ranking, isn’t awarding them for LIV events.

The struggle between the PGA Tour and its Saudi-owned rival LIV Golf for control of the sport is playing out not just on golf courses, but across all three branches of the American government. It’s also being fought around a little-known entity based in Surrey, England, whose statisticians churn out a weekly pecking order for the best golfers on the planet.

The Official World Golf Ranking is no mere fan compendium. It’s a critical pathway for golfers to get into events such as the Masters. Players’ deals with sponsors also often escalate based on where they stand in the rankings. LIV players are tumbling in the rankings, and are only set to grow more anxious the steeper they fall. 

The fight brings together all of golf’s power players: The four majors, along with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour (also known as the European Tour) sit on OWGR’s board. And the length of time it takes for LIV to get into OWGR could determine whether the new circuit breaks through, or faces an existential threat, in the wider golf ecosystem. In effect, the fight for OWGR is about control of the game, and whether the golf establishment can continue to apply its traditional standards, or has to yield to a new, hungry challenger. 

It could fall to a U.S. court to decide. The OWGR claim looms large in the antitrust lawsuit in which LIV is arguing that the PGA Tour has acted improperly to squash a rival, including collaborating with the wider golf establishment. In a counterclaim, the PGA Tour says that LIV made promises it couldn’t keep in order to poach players.  If LIV doesn’t get its way, it could also trigger additional litigation on this specific issue in Europe, said people familiar with LIV’s position, or a push to get the majors to accept alternative rankings. 

No move is too minute, or too bold, for LIV to try to get its players back in fast. That’s why it recently formed its alliance with the MENA Tour (a developmental circuit in the Middle East and North Africa), in a new bid to prop up players’ rankings starting this weekend while it continues to fight for LIV events to make the OWGR cut. 

The MENA Tour is already accredited but hadn’t competed since the pandemic’s onset. Suddenly this month, it was back, appearing as LIV’s partner for LIV’s long-scheduled event this weekend in Bangkok (which isn’t actually in the Middle East or North Africa).

Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and others aren’t just the hottest names playing for LIV. They play for MENA, now, too, redubbed “MENA Tour members” by its commissioner. OWGR didn’t buy it. 

LIV argues that after snapping up some of the best players in the world—as measured by OWGR—that the rankings need to include them to continue to be considered valid. Without LIV players properly rated, they believe, the rankings would simply be inaccurate. British Open champion Cameron Smith, for instance, was No. 2 in the world when he joined the rebel tour. 

LIV also says that OWGR has made clear it reserves the right to incorporate tours that don’t meet all the criteria, and reject tours that do, and that it’s being treated unfairly at the behest of the dominant golf tours that control the OWGR board in another instance of monopolistic behavior.

OWGR’s broad position is that its validity comes from making sure that the events meet its rigorous standards for inclusion—and that the best players in the world may currently be playing in LIV competitions that fall short.  People familiar with OWGR’s opaque process—its full requirements for accreditation aren’t publicly available—say there is a lengthy review process and they aren’t going to give LIV special treatment. 

For a new tour to be considered by OWGR, its organizers need to express interest, then submit an application with supporting documents to show how they meet the OWGR’s criteria, people familiar with OWGR’s process said. It also needs to be proposed by an existing circuit, with the Asian Tour, which received a $300 million investment from LIV, taking care of that. 

Tours that apply can negotiate over how to meet all the requirements and make changes with feedback from OWGR, they said. Applications are reviewed by OWGR’s technical committee, not its governance board, and are on average accepted, from the time of the expression of interest, in a year and a half. LIV submitted its application in July, though it though it met with OWGR in March. 

Some of the criteria are straightforward and no problem for LIV, such as a requirement that play be governed by the rules of golf as established by its governing bodies. There’s also no disagreement that LIV has knocked one requirement out of the park: having a minimum of 10 tournaments, with an average purse of $30,000 or more. 

But some of the key criteria where LIV may face resistance from OWGR are fundamental to LIV’s structure. Its small fields of 48 players, inside tournaments that last just 54 holes, fall short of OWGR’s standards, the people familiar with the process said. They added that they expect tournaments to average at least 75 players and that non-developmental circuits should play the standard 72 holes. The LIV events also do not have a cut, which is required. 

LIV believes it has made an effort to meet those standards, according to LIV executives. It has added an additional 72-hole LIV Golf International Series, which will have a cut and 128 players apiece, pulling the average above 75. The OWGR may be skeptical of counting that, the people familiar with the body said, as those events are co-sanctioned by Asian Tour.  LIV executives note that there are accredited events, including ones on the PGA Tour such as its Tour Championship, that do not have a cut and feature smaller fields. Those tournaments, though, are the exception not the rule. 

The upstart circuit does not dispute that it falls short on one of the key criteria: that a tour must demonstrate compliance with the guidelines for at least a year. LIV’s first full season isn’t until next year, when it’s introducing other elements that it hopes will bring it up to code. That means, according to the typical process, LIV would need to wait until 2024—at least. 

Here, LIV is hoping for an exception.  “In light of the implications for OWGR and its credibility of not affording LIV Golf players appropriate points, and in view of LIV Golf’s unprecedented strength of field for a tour in its infancy, we have urged that OWGR gain comfort with LIV Golf’s status, because it is plainly in the best interests of the OWGR, players, and the game to do so,” LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman wrote in an August letter to players and their agents. 

For now, LIV’s players project to continue falling in the rankings as the battle plays out. Those golfers who are eager enough to boost their ranking could turn to playing on some Asian Tour events, as former Masters champion Patrick Reed did earlier this year.  Rory McIlroy has emerged as one of the PGA Tour’s staunchest defenders, and even he said he would have no problem if LIV were eventually accredited. “I certainly would want the best players in the world ranked accordingly,” McIlroy said.  He also added a stiff caveat.  “You can’t make up your own rules,” he said. “There’s criteria there and everyone knows what they are. If they want to pivot to meet the criteria, they can.” 

 

 

Are We Ready for the Crazy GOP Overlords?

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times has a few provocative thoughts leading up to Tuesday's elections:

“How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?” Boebert asked a crowd at a Christian campaign event in June. I’m going with none, honestly, but her answer was, “Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.”

The Denver Post pleaded: “We beg voters in western and southern Colorado not to give Rep. Lauren Boebert their vote.”   The freshman representative has recently been predicting happily that we’re in the end times, “the last of the last days.” If Lauren Boebert is in charge, we may want to be in the end times. I’m feeling not so Rapturous about the prospect.

And then there’s the future first female president, Kari Lake, who lulls you into believing, with her mellifluous voice, statements that seem to emanate from Lucifer. She’s dangerous because, like Donald Trump, she has real skills from her years in TV. And she really believes this stuff, unlike Trump and Kevin McCarthy, who are faking it.  As Cecily Strong said on “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, embodying Lake, “If the people of Arizona elect me, I’ll make sure they never have to vote ever again.”

Speaking of “Paradise Lost,” how about Ron DeSantis? The governor of Florida, who’s running for a second term, is airing an ad that suggests that he was literally anointed by God to fight Democrats. God almighty, that’s some high-level endorsement.

Much to our national shame, it looks like these over-the-top and way, way, way out-of-the mainstream Republicans — and the formerly normie and now creepy Republicans who have bent the knee to the wackos out of political expediency — are going to be running the House, maybe the Senate and certainly some states, perhaps even some that Joe Biden won two years ago.

And it looks as if Kevin McCarthy will finally realize his goal of becoming speaker, but when he speaks, it will be Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert doing the spewing. It will be like the devil growling through Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” — except it will be our heads spinning.

Welcome to a rogue’s gallery of crazy: Clay Higgins, who’s spouting conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, wants to run the House Homeland Security Committee; Paul Gosar, whose own family has begged Arizonans to eject him from Congress, will be persona grata in the new majority.

In North Carolina, Bo Hines, a Republican candidate for the House, wants community panels to decide whether rape victims are able to get abortions or not. He’s building on Dr. Oz’s dictum that local politicians should help make that call. Even Oprah turned on her creation, Dr. Odd.

J.D. Vance, the Yale-educated, former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” who called Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2016, before saluting him to gain public office, could join the Senate in January. Talk about American Elegy.   Even though he wrote in his best seller that Yale Law School was his “dream school,” he now trashes the very system that birthed him. Last year, he gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy”: His mother-in-law is a provost at the University of California San Diego.

It’s disturbing to think of Vance side by side with Herschel Walker. Walker was backed by Mitch McConnell, who countenanced an obviously troubled and flawed individual even if it meant degrading the once illustrious Senate chamber.

Overall, there are nearly 300 election deniers on the ballot, but they will be all too happy to accept the results if they win.  People voting for these crazies think they’re punishing Biden, Barack Obama and the Democrats. They’re really punishing themselves.  These extreme Republicans don’t have a plan. Their only idea is to get in, make trouble for President Biden, drag Hunter into the dock, start a bunch of stupid investigations, shut down the government, abandon Ukraine and hold the debt limit hostage.

Democrats are partly to blame. They haven’t explained how they plan to get a grip on the things people are worried about: crime and inflation. Voters weren’t hearing what they needed to hear from Biden, who felt morally obligated to talk about the threat to democracy, even though that’s not what people are voting on.  As it turns out, a woman’s right to control her body has been overshadowed by uneasiness over safety and economic security.

To top it off, Trump is promising a return. We’ll see if DeSantis really is the chosen one. In Iowa on Thursday night, Trump urged the crowd to “crush the communists” at the ballot box and said that he was “very, very, very” close to deciding to “do it again.”  Trump, the modern Pandora, released the evil spirits swirling around us — racism, antisemitism, violence, hatred, conspiracy theories, and Trump mini-mes who should be nowhere near the levers of power.  Heaven help us.