Archive for June 11, 2022

Opioids are no joke

Posted: June 11, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , ,

The opioid addiction crisis in America has been in the news for quite a few years now. It tends to elicit the same politically-motivated responses from each side. The Left seems to ignore it mostly (since it hits a large portion of rural America that doesn’t vote for them), but occasionally someone uses it to argue for more lenient drug laws and better rehab options. The Right uses it to argue for more money for rural areas and occasionally rails about Big Pharma.

It’s hard to really understand what motivates someone addicted to opioids if you’re a regular person like me that doesn’t use illicit drugs. But I got a taste of it this past week. I had surgery last Friday on my shoulder to repair the over 18 years of damage the Navy has done to me, shoving me in submarines, airplanes and other small spaces that I was probably never meant to fit into. It all caught up, so I spent over two hours with a surgeon poking around my shoulder and repairing the various tears and installing a lot of anchors. When it was all finished, my brother-in-law drove me home with a large pack of medications, one of which was oxycodone.

Now, I’ve never had any narcotics, so I was careful to take the oxycodone on the prescribed schedule. By Sunday, I felt awesome. Sure, my arm was still in a sling and I was slowly working it back into a full range of motion, but I still felt great. I was walking around the house just fine, enjoyed being outside in my garden showing my kids what vegetable to pick, and I did plenty of “Netflix and chill.”

The chill dropped off on Tuesday. My prescription ran out, and that morning I had physical therapy. I would describe the crash of my mood like the drop as sudden, awful and gut wrenching. The last case was definitely true, since I threw up after the physical therapist had tortured me for 30 minutes. I spent most of Tuesday on the couch with some sort of ice pack on my shoulder, wondering what pain the next 10 minutes will bring.

Wednesday was better, and I learned to work through my pain, and by Thursday I was back to a much happier place. That brief glimpse of how effective oxycodone was, and how my whole world changed just after going off it from a weekend of use, gave me a far better understanding of just how powerful addiction is and the difficulty in breaking it. I have a lot more sympathy for someone that is in constant pain and just wants to feel normal, and if you can take a tiny pill (my oxycodone was the size of my thumbnail) to make it all go away, why wouldn’t you?

I can’t say I know what the answer to the opioid crisis is, but I can say some of our assumptions are flawed. I don’t think most people want to be addicted. I knew that while it was easy to take that tiny pill to feel better, long term it was a bad idea. Thankfully I have a family that can support me sitting on a couch for a while. What about senior citizens that don’t have family? What about the many single people who don’t have adult kids or even neighbors to check in on them? Thrusting these people into a bucket labeled “deplorable addicts” denies them humanity and makes it too easy and convenient to ignore their plight.

We need some actual solutions to opioid addiction that preserve our use of these drugs to manage pain while recognizing the power they have to destroy our lives if we aren’t careful.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you liked this article, why not donate to Da Tech Guy or purchase one of the author’s books on Amazon?

The Same Old Song and Dance, Yes Trying to Murder Kavanaugh was bad but GOP & GUNS!

Posted: June 11, 2022 by datechguy in culture, News/opinion, politics, the courts
Tags: , , , ,

Was part of an interested twitter exchange that will make a better post than what I was going to write:

It started with my reply to a Mollie Hemmingway tweet:

A fellow (or lady) by the name of Still following took umbridge at my suggestion that the left would consider the murder of a justice who opposed them a good thing:

I’ll give him/her/it full marks for suggesting that the protests (which are illegal under federal law) are wrong but his attempt to pivot to “republicans support the murder of citizens is so weak and such a standard response by the left that it’s almost not worth fisking, but I had the time…

I then started to note this piece at powerline rather than the tweets quoting the piece let’s just quote it directly:

What do the Democrats think about attempted assassinations of Supreme Court justices? To my knowledge, neither Schumer nor Joe Biden’s handlers have commented. I surmise that the Democrats are hoping for one or more assassinations to take place before Biden is hustled out of the White House, so that his handlers can appoint a successor.

The attempt on Kavanaugh’s life has only emboldened the Democrats’ efforts to intimidate conservative justices. Thus, the dark money group called “Ruth Sent Us,” which has been behind much of the publication of justices’ home addresses and threats against their families, is calling for action against Justice Amy Barrett:

why not double down if there is no push back:

Barrett attends church “DAILY”? The horror!

What I would like to know is, who funds “Ruth Sent Us”? I hazard a wild guess that it is not some fringe group, but rather mainstream Democratic Party donors like, say, George Soros. I think the campaign to expose conservative Supreme Court justices and their families to the risk of assassination is not “extremist,” but rather has been orchestrated by the leaders of the Democratic Party–Joe Biden’s handlers, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and so on. And I think they hope that one or more assassins will succeed so that Biden’s handlers will be able to nominate one or more justices.

Let me remind you that this is the opinion of John Hinderacker. A lawyer who has a long steady record and not someone who just shoots his mouth off: He continues:

Does this speculation seem beyond the pale? Once, I would have thought so. But, apart from open advocacy of assassination by Democrats as in the tweet above, Democratic leaders haven’t done anything to rebut it.

And I can’t think of an alternative explanation of why Merrick Garland and other Democratic Party authorities have failed to enforce laws against demonstrating outside judges’ homes. I can’t think of another explanation of why leaders of the Democratic Party can’t bestir themselves to condemn an assassination attempt. I can’t think of another explanation for why the Washington Post buried news of the attempted murder of Justice Kavanaugh deep in their “local news” section.

The “local news” bit is of course in line with DaTechGuy’s 3rd law of Media Outrage but the Merrick Garland business reminds me of how lucky we were not to have this evil asshole on the court. My apologies for the language but I can’t think of something worse description to use that is printable. He concludes:

Nor can I think of another explanation of why leaders of the Democratic Party haven’t called off “Ruth Sent Us” in the wake of the Kavanaugh assassination attempt. Could they do so? I am pretty sure they could. But let’s find out! Who, exactly, is financing “Ruth Sent Us”? How do those people (or maybe just one person) relate to assassination-inciter Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Party generally?

Inquiring minds want to know. The effort to intimidate or, better yet, assassinate Supreme Court justices didn’t begin with marginal characters like Nicholas Roske, just like the idea of assassinating the House Republican baseball team didn’t originate with James Hodgkinson. The leaders of the Democratic Party are in the dock. Can they defend themselves?

So far, they haven’t even tried.

In fairness even if they wanted to speak I believe that there are two factors here preventing them:

  1. The people who are funding these guys have things on the left to shut them up
  2. They are afraid of they murderous loonies on their side because unlike us on the right they know they’re willing to kill

But there is one more reason while the argument of Still Following fails and this is it:

Nobody is claiming that the Uvalde shooter murdered those kids in protest over gun control o the fellow who shot up his surgeon did so because he objected to limits on magazine sizes or that the gang bangers in Chicago, Baltimore or Philadelphia are basically having a “national day of gunning down people in support of Heller”. For his argument to have the slightest bit of rationality that would have to be true.

But that’s the left for you. it’s all about the narrative and the political goals.