Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The other opioid crisis

Posted: September 17, 2019 by chrisharper in Uncategorized

After many years of back and knee pain, I got a prescription for hydrocodone from my doctor.

I rarely use the pills—about once or twice a month—but the government overreaction to the opioid crisis has left me and others feeling like crack addicts.

I used to get 30 pills every six months. But new government and insurance regulations force me to make an appointment every two months. That costs me $20 per session.

I have to provide a urine sample every time I see the doctor, who agrees that the restraints are extremely silly for people who don’t abuse their medication.

But my complaints about overreaction are far less serious than those who need pain relief.

The Washington Post wrote an excellent story—yes, that Washington Post—about how the opioid “crisis” has created massive problems for people who use pain drugs legally.

The news organization provided the story of Hank Skinner, 79, of Alexandria, Va., who has had seven shoulder surgeries, lung cancer, open-heart surgery, a blown-out knee, and lifelong complications from a clubfoot. He has a fentanyl patch on his belly to treat his chronic shoulder pain. He replaces the patch every three days, supplementing the slow-release fentanyl with pills containing hydrocodone.

“But to the Skinners’ dismay, Hank is now going through what is known as a forced taper. That’s when a chronic pain patient has to switch to a lower dosage of medication. His doctor, Hank says, has cut his fentanyl dosage by 50 percent — and Hank’s not happy about it. He already struggles to sleep through the night, as Carol can attest,” The Post reported.

Tami Mark, senior director of RTI International, a North Carolina think tank, said the changes in drug prescriptions might be a serious mistake. She has conducted one of the few formal studies of forced programs to cut back on legal prescriptions.

“This national effort at ‘de-prescribing’ is again being undertaken with limited research on how best to taper people off opioid medications,” Mark told The Post. “You can’t just cut off the spigot of a highly addictive medication that rewires your brain in complex ways and not anticipate negative public health consequences.”

The opioid “crisis” is a classic example of how government underreacts to a problem and then overreacts to it, leaving people angry and confused. These people—like me—aren’t drug addicts or criminals. They’re people with pain who were just following a doctor’s orders.

Report From Louisiana Extra! Governor’s Election Heats Up with Miraculous Budget Surplus

Posted: September 14, 2019 by Pat Austin in elections, politics, primaries, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , ,

Editor’s Note (DTG): While going through posts for the writers payday I found this post at the old blog in draft. For some reason it didn’t go up at the old blog, likely do to link issues. After reading it I’ve deemed it good enough to put up and pay for it, so slightly later than expected here via the last big of grief the old GoDaddy hosting site can give us is an election report from Pat Austin originally dated Sept 14th

The Washington Post has designated the Louisiana governor’s race as one of the top five governor’s races to watch in 2019-20.

John Bel Edwards has fairly high approval ratings (mid 50s) and is fairly adept at playing both sides of the line. He signed one of the strictest abortion bills in the country and he oversaw a massive Medicaid expansion. He probably feels fairly safe with the teacher vote because his paltry $1000-a-year raise allows him to say he gave the teachers their first raise in many years.

All in all, I think Edwards feels pretty safe.

His two Republican challengers, Eddie Rispone and Ralph Abraham, are splitting the Republican vote and it’s entirely possible that Edwards can stay comfy in his leather chair without having to worry about a runoff election. Should one of those two Republicans drop out, it might be a different story, but nobody is talking about that.

Adding more fuel to the gubernatorial debate stage will be the fact that now the governor’s office has miraculously discovered a budget surplus:

“Louisiana likely will have a $500 million budget surplus for the most recent fiscal year, significantly more than the $300 million initially thought, Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration said Friday, setting off a new round of debate in the governor’s race over the state’s financial situation.

“Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne told lawmakers in a joint budget hearing that the larger surplus will allow the state to pay for “dramatic needs” in infrastructure, including a $14 billion backlog in road and bridge projects, and the Edwards administration cast the news as proof the state has emerged from years of uncertainty with a stable budget.”

Louis Gurvitch at The Hayride would like to remind everyone of the facts: Here are the plain facts: “Taxes are way up, the state’s oil and gas industry is being destroyed by lawsuits and over-regulation, and Louisiana’s percentage increase in government spending is the highest in the nation! Don’t even bother to ask about the government reforms we were promised…”

Gurvitch speaks the truth. I love Louisiana, but we are not attracting new business with the excessive tax burden we have in this state, and we are indeed over-run by trial lawyers.

The primary is October 12. We will see then if Edwards stands alone or if he will go to a runoff.

Links:
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/06/top-governors-races/?noredirect=on

https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/elections/article_284b8438-d4b5-11e9-a813-375cc60d6770.html

Abortion is anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti pursuit of happiness

Posted: September 12, 2019 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

Abortion violates every component of the most often quoted sentence from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

Abortion is anti-life because abortion is murder.  It is a particularly heinous form of murder because the unborn child is the most innocent example of life you could possibly ever encounter.   Every individual is endowed by their creator with unalienable rights because all are endowed by God with a soul at conception.  Most genocides have occurred after a government has denied that certain individuals do possess a soul, abortion is another one of those genocides. 

I’ve been told by many self-identified libertarians that true libertarians must support the right of everyone to choose an abortion.  This is the position maintained by more than a few libertarian websites and organizations.  Many individuals have told me that I am not a libertarian because I believe abortion is murder, therefore, no one has a right to an abortion.  This happens even though I agree with those libertarians on every other key philosophical point.  If all libertarians had a proper understanding of the terms libertarian and liberty they would see that there is one correct philosophical side to the abortion debate, and that is the side I occupy.

A libertarian is someone who believes that the ideal of liberty should be their guiding principle, and the guiding principle at all levels of government in the United States.  That was precisely the guiding principle of the founding fathers of this nation. 

A great many believe that liberty is the freedom to do as you please.  They are mistaken.  Liberty is the freedom to do as you want as long as you do not hurt others or interfere with the rights of others.   Liberty is freedom with the responsibility to do no harm to others.  The responsibility portion of liberty was stressed by the founding fathers of the United States.  Because the fetus is murdered it is greatly harmed during the abortion. 

The fact the fetus is harmed during the abortion is a violation of the entire concept of liberty.   As a result of the abortion the rights of the fetus are destroyed which is also a violation of liberty.  Because all of the concepts of liberty are violated, abortion violates the entirety of the libertarian philosophy.

When it comes to libertarians who are strongly pro-life I’m in good company.  Here are two quotes from Dr. Ron Paul:

Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the “right” of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the “property rights” of slave masters in their slaves. Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other, so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State. Unlike Nazi Germany, which forcibly sent millions to the gas chambers (as well as forcing abortion and sterilization upon many more), the new regime has enlisted the assistance of millions of people to act as its agents in carrying out a program of mass murder.

As an O.B. doctor of thirty years, and having delivered 4,000 babies, I can assure you life begins at conception. I am legally responsible for the unborn, no matter what I do, so there’s a legal life there. The unborn has inheritance rights, and if there’s an injury or a killing, there is a legal entity. There is no doubt about it.

Abortion being anti pursuit of happiness is obvious, an aborted unborn child will never be able to pursue any form of happiness.

There Will Be Math

Posted: September 10, 2019 by julietteochieng in Uncategorized
Tags:

by baldilocks

Dennis Prager:

Our age loves scientific equations. Here’s one you weren’t taught at college but which affects you as much as the law of gravity:

GI – W = E

Good Intentions (GI) minus Wisdom (W) leads to Evil (E)

Prager uses an example that’s obvious — at least to the sane.

Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)

The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity. They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity — eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens “free” education and “free” health care. They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.

That’s why leftists have such moral contempt for those who differ with them. Because those on the left are so good, only bad human beings could possibly oppose them.  (…)

The problem with communists and with leftists who don’t consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It’s that they lack wisdom.

As Thomas Sowell would put it, such people fail to ask this question: “And then what happens?” Should someone ask question, the wisdom-less doer of good will give a rainbow and unicorns answer, and that answer will be a revelation.

Take Robert “Beto” O’Rourke and his promise to institute mandatory “buyback” of AR-15s and other firearms should he become president.

“No. I don’t see the law enforcement going door to door. I see Americans complying with the law. I see us working with gun owners, non-gun owners, local, county, state, federal law enforcement to come up with the best possible solution. I have yet to meet an owner of an AR-15 who thinks it’s OK that we have these kind of mass killings in this country,” O’Rourke said when asked by the Washington Examiner about specifics of his plan.

When pressed further about how he plans to enforce his proposal for those who would not comply, he responded, “How do you — how do we enforce any law? There’s a significant reliance on people complying with the law. You know that a law is not created in a vacuum.”

Got that? He won’t use the enforcers to enforce such a law, but the law will be enforced.

Magically.

Beta Male is an easy target — if you’ll pardon the expression — but it’s clear that his “plan” is a perfect example of Prager’s equation. Does O’Rourke want to do good? I doubt it and think that he and other politicians who would forcibly disarm law-abiding Americans have tyranny as their ultimate goal.

O’Rourke knows that his proposal would lead to lots of dead bodies but he’s too big of  a coward to admit it, much less admit that the body bags would be a feature rather than a bug, from his point of view.

President O’Rourke presiding over a disarmed America would have enormous power.

It’s certain, however, there are some voters who do want to do good and who would vote for him or for one of the other Democrat candidates who promise — as president — to confiscate private firearm property. Such voters want there to be no more mass shooters ever and believe that if the government just takes the tools away, mass shootings will simply stop happening.

Magically.

And it is here where the dearth of wisdom is most glaring among all good-faith advocates of gun confiscation: they think that government can fix humans. This notion has remained pervasive over centuries.

On the contrary, we human beings cannot change our flawed and sinful nature. Politicians can’t. Laws can’t. We can only be mindful of our individual natures and attempt to protect ourselves against those who abandon themselves to their sinful natures, mass shooters being among this number.

Those who are without wisdom believe that humankind is innately good — in spite of the evidence to the contrary that each one of us observes every day.

The perfect sinless, gun-less world that the doers of good say they want is promised by God, but He has conditions which a lot of them aren’t willing to meet. They’d rather let politicians like O’Rourke do the dirty work for them.

And that road will end in the same place it has all the other times.

O’Rourke has no chance of becoming president in 2020, but the front-running Democrats want to take the guns, too.

P minus G equals D. I’ll let you figure out what the variables indicate.

(Thanks to Bearing Arms)

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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