Another day, another shooting

Putting it in quick perspective

Greetings,

Another day, another shooter.

Or whatever we’re not supposed to believe but do anyway. I don’t think even the rabid hangers on and True Believers of this president have the patience for these episodes anymore. Either this “assassination attempt” happened the way the administration says it did or he has surrounded himself with bungling commando chimps who ate the security detail log rather than implement it.

Last night, after something about “another shooting scam” appeared on social media, I figured that could only mean a mock assassination, and so I followed the thread to the man’s national address to assure us all he was okay, or whatever. Hearing the first words out of his mouth, “That was unexpected,” I immediately suspected it. Then, after about 30 more seconds of him free associating about unity, I had to turn him off or I would become too agitated to sleep.

This fucker and his legion of losers managed to get under my skin this week.

The headline that grabbed me was this one from The Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica in a joint reporting effort: “Punch in the Gut”: After years of waiting, many opioid victims will be shut out of Purdue settlement”

In brief, Purdue Pharma negotiated with the federal courts in secret to help them make the settlement process so byzantine, in the end, only 63,000 survivors of the more than 300,000 persons killed by opioids, will be compensated. From the article:

The changes between the initial and revised settlement agreements were negotiated out of the public eye for months, with key details later scattered across thousands of pages of court filings, hearing transcripts and sworn declarations. To date, they have not received any media attention or public scrutiny. The winnowing of victims has been the result of byzantine legal procedures, strict vetting and tightened eligibility rules, which victims told ProPublica and the Inquirer took them by surprise.

You might already have recognized this, but the only drug so lethal it has killed more than a quarter million Americans and counting, was not a street drug cooked up and pushed on our streets by Chinese or Mexican drug lords. It was the one approved by the FDA. Based on shitty, essentially made up data, no less. Makes you wonder. Maybe even become conspiratorial.

Why was it this article and not news about Gaza, or Lebanon, or ICE victims, or name anything you can think of that is unjust? Because I cannot do a damned thing about any of that, much less believe with certainty that any of it is as it is being reported to be, but I can speak directly about the opioid crisis because I do know something about it. When I was in Washington, I had reported on it, had attended the big National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Formerly the Institute of Medicine for that lats bit) meeting about it. I saw the casual apathy of our government first hand.

I remember my disgust watching the FDA representatives sitting before a room of outraged academics who also saw patients who’d been destroyed by the drug. Those FDA snobs kept going on about the pain people need to take seriously, and how it wasn’t their fault, they had revised the evidence. But by then, everyone knew the “pain crowd” as one of the academics put it, were phony, a made up nonprofit founded by Purdue.

This is not theoretical for me, in other words. The FDA failed us. For many, it was the first real understanding that our government is crumbling, if it was ever solid to begin with. Meanwhile, the settlement was to have lifted some of the burdens created by these selfish and inhumane prigs.

Then this weekend, out waddles the president to stand in front of a camera and nonchalantly ramble on about WhoTF even knows. Families who suffered real loss, real deaths, and who were betrayed by our government, might even have been watching as he dithered about his maybe or maybe not assassin, and isn’t that interesting how we were all sitting together when it happened.

I just wanted the contrast between two seemingly unrelated events to highlight this moment in the Fall of Rome.

W