Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Joe has more important things to see to.
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Important. Interesting word. How do we measure important? Particularly when it comes to human fatalities. The mass media like blood. “If it bleeds it leads,” they used to say. It’s still the way they act. Why they let Biden get away with the repulsive excuse he gave for not paying more attention to the crisis at the southern border. Yes, there’s talk of millions of illegals flooding across the border in states where the only unaffected people are the elected politicians who I’ve in gated communities surrounded by heavily armed guards. Even the word ‘millions’ has lost its meaning of late. Quick — how many millions in a billion? A thousand. How many millions in a trillion? A million. That’s right. This government has put our nation in debt by (conservatives, in just one year of Congessional spending) by more than 3 million million dollars. Which you have to pay for. But it’s not important enough to you to vote these catastrophe merchants out of office. On the whole, Americans have more important things to do than take action against the utter destruction of their children’s and grandchildren’s future. Got it. That Trump fella’s Tweets. Intolerable. Ripping away women’s right to get an abortion if she wants one. Darn near evil. Along with his racism and sexism, three millions of millions of dollars thrown down a rat hole are a small price to pay. Right? Who’s got time to keep up with big numbers when gas prices over $3 a gallon actually hurt where it counts?
Who hasn’t heard that people are dying from Fentanyl. Last year it was oxycodone. The year before that it was methamphetamine. Who gives a damn. Drug addicts have been killing themselves forever, or at least in, you know big numbers since the 1960s. That’s not our problem. Our kids wouldn’t do that shit.
But they are doing that shit. In addition to the pot, the coke, the meth, the Ecstasy, the oxy, and now the Fentanyl. If you don’t know of any kid who’s died from these poisons in your neighborhood it can only be because you don’t want to know about it, hear about it, or see it laughing in your face. Like Joe the Potato.
If you knew or remembered how to add, you’d know these numbers add up. Even to the oh-so-organized, Fentanyl has become a major crisis, growing ferociously fast with no end in sight.
No, the 300 number can’t be proved yet. It takes a while to add up a year’s worth of dead when you only start your adding next year. Local reports from states and municipalities are consistent with the higher number, however. You can look these up for yourselves if you care. But do you? What do 300 deaths a day mean to you, especially if they’re occurring among the lame and the halt, and, yeah, true, the too young to know better?
Some canny reporter put it this way the other day. “It’s like a major commercial airline crash every single day.” Would that get headlines do you think, if it started to happen? The airline example isn’t the only one that drives the problem home. There are others, which we’ll get to, but flaming, dismembered passengers are a vivid image to start with.
The following dry facts and figures come from Wikipedia.
The people whose job it is to keep a major crash a day from happening have been doing an excellent job for many decades. The bracketed list includes just 13 airliner crashes that have ever killed 270 or more souls in every nation on earth since commercial aviation began a hundred years ago. It would take just 13 days for Fentanyl fatalities to exceed that total. If we were losing 100,000 people a year to airline crashes, heads would roll. Drugs? Meh. Wanna pass me that dooby, hon?
Is the number starting to seem more important yet? Drug overdoses are not natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and viral epidemics. They are a function of greed, money, official negligence, and popular indifference. Your indifference is also a cog in the killing machine.
300 a day is a higher death rate than American troops suffered during World War II. That number was about 270 a day for 1,612 days. Yeah. I’ve done the math on that too. (Why I drew the plane crash line at 270, the total being like 13 days of World War II spread over a century; plane crashes are scary, and wars not so much somehow. The ‘somebody else’ factor no doubt.)
We’re all aware, I know, of the costly national losses that are still commemorated with wreath laying sand reading of names and 21-gun salutes for decades after the fact. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 come to mind, both accounting for about 3,000 fatalities in a single day. How long do you calculate for a Fentanyl to rack up a number like that? Simple arithmetic. About 10 days. But there won’t be any wreaths or 21-gun salutes for those dead ones. Just the occasional 😲😟🙄 newspaper account of a vaguely described bust somewhere down south with completely hypothetical numbers in the millions just to keep people reading to the, yawn, end of the story.
It kinda looks like weed, doesn’t it? We been here before. We all know how to keep this kind of reporting from getting to us, don’t we? Why I’ll close here, with some pictures worth a few thousand words at,least, when the weed-looking stuff starts to look like recreational pills and even candy. Might be a good idea to check the Halloween loot your kids bring home from trick or treating next year.
And I never even mentioned the name ‘China,’ the President’s good buddy on the other side of the world.
This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a tooic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the cukture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular. A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that whe...
If you’ve never seen an Asylum production of their “Saving the World from Imminent Destruction” series, you’re excused from this post. The rest of us already know the basics. A once prominent, now disgraced scientist (often Sam Baldwin, but not always) is minding his own business making a living income and trying to mend his struggling family life when he notices that something is seriously amiss in the cosmos. Gravity isn’t working quite right. Or all the birds seem to be migrating at the same time. Or some local pond suddenly ejaculates a pillar of lava. You know. The warning knell of an extinction-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, where are the kids? They were supposed to be home by now. He calls his ex-wife. She doesn’t know where they are. He calls an old colleague at the agency in DC where nobody else will take his calls anymore. In a whisper, the colleague tells him the experts in charge haven’t noticed anything to worry about cosmologically speaking. This far in, we already know wh...
Invocation of Nemesis by the Summoners Click on Rosie. Thought I’d get this part out of the way right up front. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the upper class British sport of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” As it happens, I’m working on two different posts at the same time this morning. This one and another one about the sad PR plight by the unfortunate middle child of the three worst First Ladies in American history. . What the posts have in common is that the dominating element of both stories is a function of female psychology and can only be understood in those terms. There’s also the irony that Wilde’s jibe can be applied with some justice to both predator and prey in the two posts. Because I’m going to admit at the outset what most of the MAGA faithful won’t. You are right that Donald Trump is responsible for much of the imminent danger we are facing as a nation. Without his arrival on the political scene 11 years ago, the...
The last group photo I’m a part of that’s still in my possession. My sister’s wedding in the late1990’s, with me and my mother in attendance, here in Salem. I don’t get out much anymore. Haven’t for a long time. If I didn’t take pictures of myself, nobody would, or could, anymore. I don’t give them the chance. Why in recent years I’ve made a point of doing an official birthday selfie, to keep track of the wear and tear of the years and see if the falling apart process is gaining speed. This year was not a good year for hair. That much I’ll tell you. But here’s the Official 74th Birthday Selfie I took on Friday. Not as young as I used to be. I hadn’t really shown this pic to anyone, but imagine my surprise when I received a gift yesterday by parcel delivery from a young lady I helped raise who will always be close to my heart. She and I hadn’t spoken about the Rolling Stones in years, but somehow she must have divined I’d been thinking of them, because here’s what she ordered sent ...
Happy Independence Day No. 250! I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial. In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
Yeah. Click on the blue headlines. There are two precursor posts to this, both still in-process. I’ll finish and link them later. One is about the death of the historical novel, which mirrors a lot of other deaths in our culture. The other is about divorce, an absolutely transformative and deadly factor in what has become of us as a nation. What does that leave us with? The end result of our progressive devolution, largely invisible to all, because it is a function of the variable we tend to think of as a constant, human consciousness. Which it isn’t. I’ve written quite a lot about the consciousness problem over the years, and Instapunk Returns, as well as a couple other of my blogs, contain 5+++ years worth of thoughts on the topic. I’ll be sending you to those posts here, providing you with an excerpt, usually the lede, a sample graphic or two, and a link. The order is roughly chronological. I’m not going to give you any particular setup from piece to piece. The relevance to the main...
Marc Antony: “ Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest– For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men– Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.” [Worth noting, Gaius Julius Caesar was not an emperor; the successors who fought for absolute power and took his name as a title were emperors and brought about the death of the several hundred years of Roman Republic.] The American Republic is now at an end. We had a good run. He will be forced to concede, because Trump will not declare martial law....
The Valley of the Jerseyikes When you’ve decided to your own satisfaction that life doesn’t end with physical death, what have you got to worry about? That probably depends on where you come down on the age-old questions about ghosts. Do they exist? Are they a possible fate of troubled souls after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil or been yanked out of it too suddenly? What if you expire peacefully and find yourself waking up in the attic of your own house, somehow tethered to it with no watch you can trust to keep track of time? I know I’ve stopped wearing a watch at all, like almost all of you out there. Are we taking some kind of risk that we’ll miss the departure signal for the trip to the other side? One side effect of getting old and not liking most of what’s on teevee is that you wind up watching too many paranormal shows, which have the virtue of no politics, no gratuitous sex scenes, and extended stretches of restful watching with almost nothing happening on screen. ...
Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
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