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US Politics: Four Days and Counting


Fragile Bird

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Just now, Fragile Bird said:

No responses in 11 hours? Is this a record?

For something different to wrap your head around, the FDA just approved a new opioid 10x more powerful than Fentanyl.

Sufentanil, made by a company called AcelRX, will be sold under the name Dsuvia for a price between $50 and $60 per pill. The 30 microgram pills, to be placed under the tongue for rapid absorption, will deliver tha equivalent of 5 milligrams of intravenous morphine. It is authorized for use in health care settings and perhaps on the battlefield.

How long before it hits the streets and you see the first deaths? How long before it’s duplicated at $5 or $10 a pop?

You ain’t seen nothing yet, folks.

It's stupid that it was approved, there's not a large enough legitimate market for it to make sense (unless DOD is interested). However, its also unlikely to have a major effect on the opioid epidemic. The prescription drug side of the epidemic is/was always driven by misuse of the mid-level (though obviously still quite dangerous when misused) opioids, like Oxycodone and Hydrocodone. The really heavy hitting legal opioids have generally always been pretty tightly controlled, and that's only gotten moreso as measures like state Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs have come online. Its from the illegal side that the really extreme stuff comes into play.

Fentanyl is a good example. Legal, prescription fentanyl exists and has the potential for really bad misuse, but it doesn't happen all that often because the supply of legal fentanyl is generally tightly controlled. The fentanyl we hear about all that time, which has caused a huge spike in overdoses over the past 5 years, almost all comes from illegal production sources that are entirely outside of the FDA and DEA purview.

I strongly suspect the same dynamic will be in play here. And illegally produced opioids with the same extremely high morphine-equivalents as Sufentanil already exist anyway.

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17 hours ago, DMC said:

Yes, this is a further articulation of my point.

Disagree, the differences are manifest.  The country club elite have wanted immigration reform for well over a decade now.  Hell, they'd probably be cool with "amnesty" a la Reagan 86.  They would not have subjected refugees and/or their children to internment camps.  They would not have instituted the travel ban.  They would not have shat all over the TPP.  They would not have entered this foolish game with the North Koreans.  And they would most definitely have not simultaneously bent over and got on their knees to a common thug like Vladimir Putin.

I have always thought that part of Trump's appeal to working class Whites is precisely because he is one of the few among the wealthy elite who acts like fictional rich people do in popular media. He is in many ways a character out of the old TV shows Dallas or Dynasty.  Part of why a lot of his base accepts his outrageous behavior is because they think that's what rich successful people do because it's how wealthy business people characters act on soap operas and in the movies. They aren't as bothered by his cozying up to Putin and acting like a bully as they should be because those sorts of things are normal behavior in terms of how the wealthy are depicted in fictional media.  In many ways I think the far left and the Trump base have the same view of what the wealthy elite is like -- the Trump base just thinks that's a good thing.

One of the many ways in which Trump acts more like a soap opera character than a real "elite" is what he named his two younger kids. Tiffany and Baron are the sorts of names wealthy characters have on TV shows. Normal "preppy elite" parents don't give kids names like Tiffany or Baron unless they have a proven genealogical connection to families with the surnames Tiffany or Baron.

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The playbook of American First, MAGA, nativism, anti-immigration, etc. even the rhetoric and vocabulary, are already well in place with Pat Buchanan and his cable network show back in the 1970.  And that's what he campaigned on against GHBush in 1992.

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11 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

No responses in 11 hours? Is this a record?

Indeed. This is a common occurrence after I make a post. Oftentimes people need to take a few hours to completely absorb the fullness of my imparted knowledge. :D

That or it's a Saturday and a lot of people post from their work computers when they're supposed to be doing their jobs. But on the weekends they have other things to do. 

Naaaah. It's of course the former.

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White nationalist / supremacist terrorism, and why US law enforcement knows nothing and has done nothing about it for years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/magazine/FBI-charlottesville-white-nationalism-far-right.html?

 

Quote

 

.... White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around “foreign-born” terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and several other analysts met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”....

 

 

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Comic strips refer to Tuesday:

Voter disenfranchisement = Jim Crow; Doonesbury tells us what it is:

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2018/11/04

Woo -- so do strips that don't do politika:

Foxtrot, which like Doonesbury, only puts up new material now on Sundays:

https://www.foxtrot.com/2018/11/04/tuesday/

Hi and Lois's whole family comments:

http://comicskingdom.com/hi-and-lois/2018-11-04

 

 

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Voting: ballot measures for the North Dakota midterm:

Quote

 

NORTH DAKOTA MEASURE 2: A statewide initiated measure that would amend the North Dakota Constitution to state that "only a citizen" of the United States is qualified to vote in elections, as opposed to the current language in the Constitution that says "every citizen" of the United States is qualified to vote.

The measure also states that "only a qualified elector may vote in any general, special, or primary election for a federal, statewide, state legislative, district , county, township, city, or school district office or ballot measure."

 

How far then are we to putting restrict voting to those who own a whole lot of property, are white and male?

That's how it was, folks, not that long ago.

Doing everything to take the right of the vote away.

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7 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Voting: ballot measures for the North Dakota midterm:

How far then are we to putting restrict voting to those who own a whole lot of property, are white and male?

That's how it was, folks, not that long ago.

Doing everything to take the right of the vote away.

 

I'm guessing this is specifically targeting the NA population, to start.  

This country needs mandatory voting so bad, but I'd settle for some voting reforms.  If the Dems don't make this a priority when and if they ever get any kind of control back they're even more incompetent and useless than ever.

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4 hours ago, Zorral said:

Comic strips refer to Tuesday:

Voter disenfranchisement = Jim Crow; Doonesbury tells us what it is:

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2018/11/04

Woo -- so do strips that don't do politika:

Foxtrot, which like Doonesbury, only puts up new material now on Sundays:

https://www.foxtrot.com/2018/11/04/tuesday/

Hi and Lois's whole family comments:

http://comicskingdom.com/hi-and-lois/2018-11-04

 

 

The "funny" (or sad) thing is that encouraging everybody to "get out and vote" (which is basically all that the 'Foxtrot' and 'Hi and Lois' comic strips do) used to (and should) be about as uncontroversial as it gets. The fact that it isn't just shows how far off the rails the U.S. has gotten lately!

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5 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Well there is some shady as fuck shit going on I Georgia but I’m busy all day.

I'm pretty sure Kemp tried the same thing in 2016 and got shot down. Georgia Democrats should call his bluff and ask the FBI to investigate. That should shut him up.

He must be losing badly.

Russian election observers were in Georgia right before he said this, or so the Twitterverse has it. Rumors are now swirling that they've gone to Montana. 

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3 minutes ago, Ser Reptitious said:

The "funny" (or sad) thing is that encouraging everybody to "get out and vote" (which is basically all that the 'Foxtrot' and 'Hi and Lois' comic strips do) used to (and should) be about as uncontroversial as it gets. The fact that it isn't just shows how far off the rails the U.S. has gotten lately!

Hi and Lois, among these other strips has been making more overt political statements in the last two years.  The strips post the 2016 election for instance, shows Lois very, very depressed.  Hi is commiserating and trying to comfort her.  The girl-baby, Trixie,  is on the floor, and her baby thought balloon says something like (I can't recall completely), "Cheer up, Mommy. When I grow up, I'll be President!"  People in comments went ballistic about that.

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On 11/3/2018 at 2:28 PM, Fragile Bird said:

No responses in 11 hours? Is this a record?

For something different to wrap your head around, the FDA just approved a new opioid 10x more powerful than Fentanyl.

Sufentanil, made by a company called AcelRX, will be sold under the name Dsuvia for a price between $50 and $60 per pill. The 30 microgram pills, to be placed under the tongue for rapid absorption, will deliver tha equivalent of 5 milligrams of intravenous morphine. It is authorized for use in health care settings and perhaps on the battlefield.

How long before it hits the streets and you see the first deaths? How long before it’s duplicated at $5 or $10 a pop?

You ain’t seen nothing yet, folks.

Suf has been around forever in the OR and other medical contexts. I'm not sure why we need an oral preparation, though, except that it won't accumulate in renal failure (much like fentanyl). 

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49 minutes ago, Aemon Stark said:

Suf has been around forever in the OR and other medical contexts. I'm not sure why we need an oral preparation, though, except that it won't accumulate in renal failure (much like fentanyl). 

So it’s only the oral med that’s new? What was it before, an injection? Or given intravenously?

More reports now said the US military was behind it’s development, for use on the battlefield. 

In any event, the point is it’s now a pill.

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As of late, a thought about the polls keeps crossing my mind.

 

I am deluged with pollsters.  Political season, I often get two or three calls from them a night - on the landline. 

 

Yet, while landlines remain popular with older folks such as myself, they are scarce amongst the younger set, who prefer cellphones. 

 

So...do the pollsters bother calling cell numbers? I don't seem to recollect pollsters calling on cells.  If they do not call cells, that could indicate a demographic skew in the polls - possibly enough of one to tip some of the closer contests.

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13 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

So...do the pollsters bother calling cell numbers? I don't seem to recollect pollsters calling on cells.  If they do not call cells, that could indicate a demographic skew in the polls - possibly enough of one to tip some of the closer contests.

This was a concern a while back, but surely the pollsters correct for it nowadays -- even my parents' generation uses cell phones now (the people I personally know from that set either definitely no longer have landlines or at least don't give out their landline numbers).

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