How fentanyl became Seattle’s most urgent public health crisis
What is described below is mass insanity. How has America come to this? I think the decline of religion is part of the answer. From the begininng with the Pilgrim fathers, religion has been a powerful influence in America and it has to a considerable extent held America together. And Christianity has a large puritanical streak that for a long time protected Americans from the dangers of artificial sources of satifaction. "Prohibition" is an example of how strong that puritancal influence was. You have to go to Muslim countries to find anything comparable elsewhere. So many Americans have now lost their moral anchors and have nothing to replace them
One interesting question is why there is nothing like the Seattle situation in Australia. Australia is even LESS religious than America. There are any number of disused churches and regular church attenders are a small minority.
One answer is that Australians of British stock DO have a strong moral code. It is an informal one, not found in any holy book. It is simply traditional, an informal code of mutual loyalty. I grew up with it.
It evolved from the English working class values of yesteryear via our convict origins and was essentially a code of giving mutual assistance to the downtrodden. Australia's convict days are long past but the attitudes the convicts held have been passed down. My rough enumeration of that code is here. It includes a strong underlying value for quiet manliness and restraint. Men who cannot "hold their grog", for instance, are looked down on -- and drug dependence is similarly regarded. It is seen as "weak"
One place you can see in Australia widespread deplorable drug and alcohol abuse reminiscent of that described below is among Australian Aborigines, who do not of course have British ancestry and the values that go with it
Illicit fentanyl kills at least two people every day in King County, and the powerful opioid was responsible for over 700 fatal overdoses last year, roughly triple the death toll of traffic crashes and gun violence combined.
How did the little blue pills — which were virtually nonexistent in the local drug supply just five years ago — become the most pressing public health crisis facing the greater Seattle area?
Today, The Seattle Times embarks on a collection of stories about the fast-moving fentanyl epidemic. We’ll explore how the dangerous drug has taken hold, why it’s so potent, and the ways it’s overwhelming emergency responders and the health care system. We’ll delve into how elected officials and social service providers are responding to the crisis. And we’ll explain how the opioid has disproportionately affected some of the region’s most vulnerable communities.
Fentanyl was first introduced in the 1960s to treat severe pain, particularly for patients recovering from surgery. Some pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl made it to the streets, but at $30 to $40 a pill, it was exorbitantly expensive compared with drugs like methamphetamine and black tar heroin.
Now, however, the Mexico-based Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, which have long run street drugs up Interstate 5, are responsible for producing the vast majority of fentanyl smuggled into the U.S.
Making the drug with precursor chemicals from China, the cartels’ chemists aren’t concerned about quality control. So the concentration of fentanyl — cut with acetaminophen when pressed into pills, and with sugars like lactose and mannitol in its powder form — varies widely from pill to pill and batch to batch.
“It is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced,” Anne Milgram, who heads the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, said earlier this year in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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Protesters demand trans inmates be removed from all-female New Jersey prison, where 10 were born male
Protesters are demanding that transgender women be removed from New Jersey’s only all-female prison — where 10 transgender women, including one who says she has a “taste for blood,” are held out of a total of 356 prisoners.
#GetMenOut activists held a protest at the state Capitol in Trenton on Friday, reading letters from four biologically female inmates at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, where one transgender inmate impregnated two women last year.
The women described from behind bars their fears at being housed with biological men who identify as women.
“I was repeatedly raped as a child until I was in my teens,” wrote Dawn Jackson, 51, who stabbed her adoptive stepfather in 1999 after what she said were years of sexual abuse.
Jackson was featured on Kim Kardashian’s “The Justice Project” on the Oxygen network last year.
“Being subjected to live amongst (trans women) who remain equipped with their manhood is extremely overwhelming and difficult for me.
“Am I living amongst any rapists? (Trans women) do not belong in closed/confined in prison settings meant to house women/females born feminine.”
Activists Jennifer Thomas, 53, and Brittany Ortiz, 35, of Justice Speaks: Free Speech for Women read the letters and spoke on behalf of female inmates.
Forcing women prisoners to be housed with male prisoners is a human rights violation, according to Article 14 of the Geneva Convention, Thomas and Ortiz told The Post.
In one testimony, inmate Kokila Hiatt wrote about what she said was the reality of what happens when biological men who say they identify as women arrive at the prison.
“Many of them are sex offenders,” Hiatt wrote in her letter. “When the males arrive they cease hormone injections and continue living their lives as men.
“In other words, they drop the act and start doing what it is they came here for.
“They engage in sexual relationships with women, manipulate them into purchasing their commissary and have no qualms about bullying anyone who disagrees with them.
Cerf was convicted of murdering a sex worker. She is currently incarcerated at Edna Mahan.
“I personally have been threatened with violence and multiple false allegations for speaking up.”
“The truth about my case?” the murderer told the Daily News in a 2002 jailhouse interview.
“Yeah, I killed her. I punched and kicked her to death, crushing her skull in the process.”
He added: “Since I have a most unusual taste for blood, I drank and licked and lapped up my fill … Let it be known: I am Lucifer’s maiden servant, sent to earth born of sin, to bring suffering and pain, darkness and evil.”
Before he began identifying as a woman and was transferred to Edna Mahan, Cerf was placed in solitary for assaulting other inmates.
He told his prison psychologist in 2005 that he wanted to kill associate administrator Michelle Ricci by beating her up, breaking her neck and choking her, New Jersey court records show.
In 2022, a transgender woman named Demi Minor, who was convicted of stabbing her foster father 27 times, impregnated two female inmates at Edna Mahan.
One woman chose to terminate the pregnancy but the other, Latonia Bellamy, a convicted double murderer, gave birth to their child.
Demi Minor, as a troubled foster kid — then called Demetrius — had a record for burglaries and at least one carjacking at gunpoint before brutally stabbing foster father Theotis “Ted” Butts 27 times in 2011 at age 16.
“It was the worst murder scene I have ever seen,” Brad Wertheimer, one of Minor’s defense lawyers in 2011, told The Post last year. “There was blood everywhere. The community was outraged. “The [foster] dad was considered a great guy, an angel.”
Demi has become a transgender woman activist fighting to be returned to Edna Mahan.
After administrators discovered the pregnancies, she was sent to a juvenile lockup last year where she was for a time the only person identifying as female.
And until recently, a convicted murderer named Dejshontaye Would, now 25, was housed at Edna Mahan.
Would was living under his birth name, Daryl Graves, and was high on drugs when he fatally stabbed his aunt, Patricia Graves, 47 times and beat her over the head with a frying pan in July 2018.
Sometime after his 2019 incarceration, Would began identifying as a woman, although The Post could not locate a female name. Would was listed as an inmate at Edna Mahan in July 2022.
Current New Jersey Department of Correction records indicate Would is being held at the Northern State Prison in Newark, which is for male offenders.
However, Would is listed as “female” in DOC inmate records.
“This just shows how insane the whole system has become,” Ortiz told The Post.
“These male inmates change their gender and their names and so it makes it difficult to even locate them online.”
Thomas said, “Women are the largest growing population in American prisons. Most are women of color, 86% are victims of sexual violence, and few are violent offenders.
“It is painfully obvious that caging this exceptionally vulnerable group of women with men is an abhorrent human rights violation.
“The solution to male violence in male prisons is not male violence in women’s prisons. This needs to stop. Get men out!”
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Bud Light fiasco should wake up corporate America to drop all wokery
“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” blurred Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Brendan Whitworth on Friday in a belated bid to cap outrage over the Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney idiocy.
Pathetic. At best, this is a confession of sheer out-of-touch idiocy.
Shipping the “influencer” a case of cans bearing her face in hopes she’d share her joy was guaranteed to backfire.
Bud Light execs have already admitted the stunt was a bid to buy some profile with young people. But her followers are a tiny, self-selected sliver of the larger public — people amused by a former man prancing around in a parody of girlhood.
It’s only deeply-siloed progressives (including President Joe Biden’s handlers, sigh) who’ve concluded that Dylan-worship is an “it” thing.
Any marketing professional should know better — and realize how badly appealing to wokery would annoy the brand’s existing customers.
The sales disaster is plainly epic (not to mention the stock-price collapse), or Whitworth wouldn’t be trying to put out the fire with blather like, “We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
(Heck, that touchy-feely claim probably further infuriates Bud drinkers.)
Let’s hope the lesson sinks in far and wide across corporate America: Neither politics nor culture-war activism is the way to sell anything.
Better still, take it a step further: The minions telling you to embrace everything from climate hysteria to racist “diversity, equity and inclusion” ideology don’t have a clue what average Americans think.
Campuses and the cultural elite may be deep in woke delusions, but business leaders need to keep their grip on reality.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/14/bud-light-fiasco-should-wake-up-corporate-america-to-drop-all-wokery/
**************************************************Political correctness out of hand; we must push back
Let's talk political correctness. And the people who enforce it. Who are these people? Who are these unelected officials who tell us what is proper to discuss and what is not? How to phrase things and how not to? Words we can say and words we can't say? Even things we can and can't do? Who are they?
We don’t really know, and that's a problem. There are any number of individuals and organizations tripping over each other to "expose" people for their violations. There is no one entity which can be called to task for its actions.
I refer to whomever they are collectively as the Politically Correct Gestapo. Ironically, long before I came up with that term, I read via Wikipedia that political correctness was first used in the 1930s by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as a forced adherence to an ideological cause.
In the News Tribune about a month ago was a front-page article about a Hamline University teacher who showed some dignified, 200-year-old drawings of Muhammad to her class. Even though she went to extreme lengths to prepare her students and shared a syllabus with the department head and others so they knew, too, what was happening, she was fired , publicly criticized, and humiliated by the administrator. A student said she was traumatized by the images.
The Politically Correct Gestapo came running in from all directions, like a SWAT team, shouting over each other; how shocked and astounded they were over this bigot. One of the first among them, of course, was the university administration. Many Muslims believe it is blasphemous to show an image of Muhammad, but some don't. The administrators apparently didn't know that.
My point is — hold the phone, stop the presses! — how is it that one religion and none other can tell the world what they can and cannot do? Worldwide, there have been bloody reprisals by extremists for violating the Quran.
Political correctness came about in this country for righteous reasons: to protect people's feelings. However, it has warped out of all proportion.
In 1987, there was an art exhibit in New York featuring photographer Andres Serrano. He displayed an upside-down crucifix dunked in a jar of his own urine, a picture of Mary with human feces on it, and other gems. The then-senator of New York, Hillary Clinton, said she didn't like it, but it was art and this is a free country. Try doing the equivalent with Islamic items.
I was sitting on a bus-stop bench, daydreaming, when a guy sat down and we began to chat. I remarked that he seemed kind of down. He said he'd been looking for work for the past few weeks because he was fired for saying, in the lunchroom, “No offense to gay guys, but I'm glad I was born heterosexual. I like the ladies too much." Someone told the boss, and the boss proudly proclaimed he would have no homophobes in his employ.
If the guy was BS’ing me, he was a great actor.
So, it's not just the people in the public eye who have their careers and personal lives ruined for not triple thinking what they're going to say before saying it.
We're supposed to have freedom of speech, but sometimes I think we'd be better off without it.
In Canada, you can face jail time for hate speech. Some people here would prefer that.
And the Politically Correct Gestapo will accept no apologies, so don't bother getting on your knees.
What's with tearing down statues and renaming buildings and institutions? Some people have lived heroic public lives that produced better futures for all of us, but because they said or believed certain things, their existence was later denied.
You simply cannot judge people from the past with today's enlightenment.
Christopher Columbus was far from perfect, but his discovery and exploration brought on many good things along with the bad.
A middle school in New York served chicken, waffles, and watermelon for lunch on the first day of Black History Month. In rushed the Politically Correct Gestapo, flags waving. Those foods, you see, are considered stereotypically African American.
A Catholic high school — Catholic — expelled a student and had him arrested for stating that God created just two genders. The student should have cleared that with the Politically Correct Gestapo first.
If you got into your time machine and went back 60 years and told the people then all of the above, they'd never stop laughing, thinking it was a big joke. But it's not, and we need to push back. We can't allow ourselves to be inducted into others’ beliefs or we, too, will become mindless members of the Politically Correct Gestapo.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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