Bad

I became a widow at age 57, after 38 years of marriage to my husband, a good man I loved dearly and miss every day. He was a hard worker, employed in the logging industry for over 20 years until he was in an accident on the job. He was prescribed OxyContin, which at the time was being touted as a miracle drug with a low risk of dependency.

My husband was so functional and so discreet that I didn’t know for years he had moved on to heroin. 

When OxyContin Came to Our Valley, New York Times, November 15, 2023

I used to smoke cigarettes and drink a lot of alcohol when I was younger. Had to maintain that infamous drunken sailor image that the navy worked so long and hard to develop.

I quit smoking in 1990. I still miss cigarettes.

I quit drinking in 2009. The day I learned I had leukemia.

And after I developed severe graft versus host disease in my lungs and eyes as a side effect from my bone marrow transplant, I was placed on a high dosage of prednisone for many years. When it was finally decided it was safe to take me off the steroid immunosuppressant, it took over six months to wean me from it, such is the power of its addiction and the danger of its withdrawal.

So, unfortunately, I have some idea the overwhelming helplessness one feels when addicted to a life consuming habit that cannot be denied…

When it comes to pain killers, I also have quite the history with them. Fortunately, I am allergic to them. They make me itch madly.

I learned about the allergy after I had shoulder surgery at Portsmouth Naval Hospital a long time ago.

After the surgery I was placed in an open bay ward – there must have been maybe 30 post-op sailors in there with me. I was hooked up to a morphine drip and given a button I could press to activate it.

It wasn’t until much later when a nurse saw me pressing the button like crazy that I learned that the drip was on a five-minute timer.

I scratched and scratched for two days straight because of the opium.

I scratched so much, I had everyone in the ward unconsciously scratching themselves at phantom itches along with me. They begged the nurses to get me out of the ward.

So much for the good stuff.

But what I hate most about pain killers is the constipation… sadly we learned after Matthew Perry’s death that his addiction was so bad that at one point his colon erupted.

Yeah…

But, occasionally, I was still placed on pain killers for various cancer treatment reasons until finally I put it in my health record that I wanted nothing stronger than non-opioid pain killers.

Apparently per my request, after my bone marrow transplant in 2010 I was given a synthetic opioid pain killer I had never heard of before.

It was called fentanyl.

I don’t remember giving my consent to being given the drug. I’m not saying I didn’t give it, just if I did, I don’t remember. I don’t remember much post-transplant.

This drug was so strong, I essentially was in a medically induced coma for three days before my wife, afraid I was dying, finally went ballistic and forced them to take me off the drug.

The irony is, even in my zombie state, the drug made me itch so badly my under garments were torn and bloody from scratching so much. All without anyone realizing it until after I finally came to.

I did a lot of research on the drug for my novel The Good Kill.

It was gut wrenching.

I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines about children dying just for accidentally touching the residue of their addicted parents’ stash.

Some seriously deadly bad juju fentanyl is.

My heart breaks thinking about all the damage it and other addictive pain killers have done and are doing to so many addicts throughout my addicted country.

Yeah…

Xi Jinping is in town.

It is expected that Biden will confront him about China’s culpability in the illegal fentanyl production and trade.

I hope so.

If you have any doubt that it is China’s unwritten policy to get and keep our country addicted to the drug, you need to read this Propublica article.

It’s unbelievable.

It reads like an implausible movie treatment for an outlandish Hollywood action spy thriller…

David Fincher would be my choice to direct it.

If only it all were make believe…


#prayfortheaddicted
#andeveryonetryingtohelpthem


Featured image courtesy of the New York Times

When We Were King*

If only we had sane, country first politicians in office who could run a functioning Congress that could take strategic advantage of the economic woes and geo-political fallout from the heavy-handed bullying and uncivil friendships that China has brought upon itself.

Yeah… if only.

Twenty years from now, if not sooner, when the dollar is no longer king* and the sole international currency of choice and, leveraging all the secrets it has stolen during the past decades from all our previously leading sectors, China has become the world’s leading economy and has manned a military base on the moon strong enough to thwart our dreams of space dominance, we’re going to be kicking ourselves in our bloated and ignorant political butts for missing this window of opportunity.

Or something like that…


Mr. Xi has been trying to stabilize relations with Washington, apparently pressed by China’s economic troubles and a desire to reduce Beijing’s diplomatic isolation. “We have a thousand reasons to grow the relationship between China and the United States, and none at all to ruin it,” Mr. Xi told American lawmakers in Beijing recently.

But with mutual distrust running deep, any easing of antagonism between the two sides could be tenuous.

Behind Public Assurances, Xi Jinping Spread Grim Views on U.S., New York Times, November 13, 2023

*non-gender specific

Weaponized Words

scribbles on wall

It is the ongoing global war of misinformation that, long term, I am beginning to fear most.

The damage that has been done by it just from weaponizing social media sites alone is incomprehensible to me.

And yet, for the most part, this phase of the global misinformation war is being executed by slow-moving, mistake-prone, carbon-based humans…

When AI is fully engaged in the battle…

Oh boy*…

That’s when, I reckon fearfully, the doomsday clock strikes T-minus kaboom.

Read more

Chemical Warfare

Speaking from my privileged First World perspective, our, meaning the United States’, response to the Syrian war has always been a very conflicting and troubling issue for me.

Poor me, right, when there’s somewhere around 500,000 Syrians dead and over 10,000,000 displaced.

Poor me, indeed.

But since all pain is relative, all I can do is acknowledge/empathize with/pray for the atrocities external from me while focusing on finding some way to mitigate or at least reconcile with the conflicts and turmoil internal to me.

So far I’ve been unsuccessful…

Read more

All that is certain to me are Death, Taxes, and that…

China will soon be replacing the [less-than-]United States as the world’s new Evil Overlord

And will soon thereafter be usurped by the Evil Robots.
 
Yeah…
 

Anyway, speaking of Taxes and seeing how ‘Tis the Season of and all that… Did you know that, as Americans, we spend annually:
 

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To Be a Superpower or Not To Be a Superpower, That Is Not the Question…

22/52 : Tian an Men
Eric Constantineau – www.ericconstantineau.com / Foter / CC BY-NC

Whether China is or is yet to be, or if it even wants or wants not to be a superpower are not the important questions to me. One way or the other, the answer is or will be yes. An important question for me is, how will China manage its increasingly powerful role in the world while also managing the consumption requirements of its increasingly demanding and aggressive population.

Of course, controlling the flow of information — internet censorship, for example — within and without of the country, will be key to its strategy of ascent to the highest heights of global power. But even censorship and governmental intimidation and societal manipulation will serve little purpose when the country’s water wells run dry from its hyper-industrialization and the ongoing desertification of large swaths of the country. When this happens we can certainly expect an explosive rise in the price of global food commodities. And as we’ve seen in our very recent past, when food prices rise beyond the reach of the least affluent, tempers rise right along with them.

And when tempers rise…

Governments fall.

Resource Wars are inevitable, and I foresee China opening up the first major front in the assault.

Exactly when this will all happen?

Now, that is the question.

~~~~

Look it up, folks. It’s all out there.

Scary stuff, for sure.

But scary as it is, it’s all delectable fodder for the imagination of the author intent on creating a world of horrific dystopian proportions and perfection…

 
 

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Bookies on the Books

Haruki MurakamiThe Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced next week and the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the odds makers are making noise for the usual suspects.

Of course we all know it’s all just a guessing-game (as most gambling is) as to who will win, a game depending on the author and scholars who make up the selection panel, and, unfortunately, the international politics at play.

That said, still it’s fun to guess. Here are some of the odds:

Haruki Murakami is the favorite at 5 to 1
Joyce Carol Oates is at 12 to 1
Philip Roth is at 16 to 1
Thomas Pynchon is at 25 to 1
Don DeLillo is at 33 to 1
Richard Ford is also at 33 to 1
Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie, and Bob Dylan are all at 50 to 1

I don’t think I’ve ever read a winner before he or she had been announced (or too many thereafter, either). My reading list is way too full of dead authors that I’m supposed to read so it’s darn near impossible to find time for the living ones I’m also supposed to read.

But I have read many on the list here and I personally like Oates (at least she’s interesting on Twitter — but I’d guess her chances are diminished somewhat since a woman was chosen last year).

However, when considering this list along with the politics du jour, I’d have to go with Murakami, even though (especially since?) they have recently awarded an Asian writer, Mo Yan from China, which was highly politicized.

But the recently aggressive China and somewhat recently humbled (the past couple decades anyway) Japan have been going at it pretty good lately, so this might be a chance for the Nobel Prize pickers to stick it in China’s government’s eye again.

Unfortunately, I have no idea if there are any contending Ukrainian, Iranian, Uighur, or any other writers from politically sensitive countries.

But, I’m looking forward to finding out who the winner will be…and the sure-to-come guilty letdown I’ll get when I realize it’s yet another writer I have never read.

F### You Motherland I Am A Grass Mud Horse

I wonder if I would have the courage to stand up to a government like China’s as Ai Weiwei has. Heck, I don’t even have the guts to spell out the word “fuck” in the title of this post so I highly doubt it.

Ai Weiwei, image courtesy Wikipedia

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on LAST CALL WITH CARSON DALY from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

The Power of Money, the Money of Power

Chinese Currency
By: Paul. B

There is much ado in the news about China’s Wen Jiabao, the supposed People’s Premier, accumulating a massive fortune, for both himself and his extended family, while serving within the highest ranks of China’s government.

According to New York Times reporting:

Many relatives of Wen Jiabao, including his son, daughter, younger brother and brother-in-law, have become extraordinarily wealthy during his leadership, an investigation by The New York Times shows. A review of corporate and regulatory records indicates that the prime minister’s relatives — some of whom, including his wife, have a knack for aggressive deal making — have controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion.

No one is surprised by this, right? I mean, when in history has there ever been an authoritarian, non-transparent government where its leaders — and often…well, usually…okay, you’re right, always…those close to the leaders — did not become fabulously wealthy as a result of their position within the government?

We all know the quote, Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so it is not news that Jiabao, or any other Chinese government senior leader, and their families and friends, have profited because of their positions.

And you know what else isn’t news? The fact that China has blocked all internet access to the New York Times, as well as to other major news outlets, such as the BBC, that are reporting on the story.

Without a doubt, Western-style democracies are far from perfect; and, without a doubt, many politicians and government officials within these supposed transparent governments have amassed huge, unknowable, amounts of cash because of their positions. Still, at least we who live in countries governed by democracies, with our right to vote and with our freedom of speech, have a semblance of a notion that we can contain the corruption. Whether it’s true or not is debatable, but having a semblance of a notion is better than having none at all.