Drug overdose death rate rises since pandemic

The New Neo Posted on by

This is no surprise whatsoever:

America has seen a spike in overdose deaths since the pandemic, when drug overdose deaths rose more than 14% from 2020 to 2021.

The biggest increase, perhaps surprisingly, came from adults aged 65 and over, but rates for adults 35-44 remain highest. As synthetic opioids like fentanyl continue to displace heroin, overdose deaths have increased.

Seems to me that the over-65 crowd has been especially hard-hit by the pandemic, because they’re even more vulnerable to isolation and loneliness, which has been exacerbated by lockdowns and social distancing. But if you look at Figure 2 from the CDC report, actual rates for the over-65 group remain quite low – in fact, lowest of all the groups listed (which start at age 15-24).

More:

The data, released by the CDC, also show the rate of overdose deaths increased slightly faster for women than for men, though the rate for men remains more than twice as high as for women.

And it’s not just opioids, it’s also cocaine and “psychostimulants with abuse potential.” Amphetamines?

And that 14% rise is an age-adjusted rate rise. The increase are pretty staggering, and remember these are rates and not just connected with a rise in population:

Among the total population, the age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths increased from 6.8 in 2001 to 11.5 in 2006, was stable from 2006 through 2013, then increased from 13.8 in 2013 to 32.4 in 2021; from 2020 through 2021, the rate increased 14%, from 28.3 to 32.4.

Here’s a chart from the CDC. You can see that the slope of the line sharply increases since 2019:

Going to the CDC link, here’s a chart by race:

I find it interesting that the charts there do not include racial breakdowns by age and sex, although they could because the CDC has the data. My guess is that the rate for young-to-middle-aged white men has shot up more than for any other group, but I don’t know.

Democrats are horrified by the lies of George Santos and demand that he resign

The New Neo Posted on by

After all, Republican lies are SO much worse than Democrat lies (which don’t exist).

This is particularly hypocritical, in light of Joe Biden and family:

Another New York Democrat, Rep. Ritchie Torres, urged the House Ethics Committee to probe the Republican’s fundraising on the campaign trail, saying the “complete fabrication” of his background could signal other issues.

“George Santos admits his life story is a complete fabrication. His pitiful confession should not distract us from concerns about possible criminality and corruption. The Ethics Committee MUST investigate how he made his money. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Ritchie said.

I have to say that Santos is indeed quite the fabulist, which is not the same as being fabulous:

“I am not a criminal,” Santos said at one point during his exclusive interview. “This [controversy] will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good.”

Santos’ professional biography was called into question earlier this month after the New York Times reported that he misrepresented a number of claims, including where he attended college and his alleged employment history with high-profile Wall Street firms.

“My sins here are embellishing my resume. I’m sorry,” Santos said Monday.

You have to read the article to comprehend the extent of Santos lies. They involved just about everything the guy said – including that he was Jewish when he is Catholic, that he is a college graduate although he’s not, and on and on and on. His answers sound like a Saturday Night Live sketch, but unfortunately these are the excuses he’s actually made. Here’s my personal favorite:

“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos said. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”

But as Don Surber says, in this day and age:

After Fetterman, all that matters is if the candidate is an R or a D because that is all that matters. That is how Democrats play it. That is how conservatives should play it. What makes us any better than Democrats? The high road leads to Loserville…

If we can live with the lies that Biden’s wife was killed by a drunk driver (he was sober and she ran a stop sign), that his son Beau died in Iraq (he had cancer), and that Biden knew nothing about Hunter collecting bribes, then we can live with the fibs that Santos used. If Democrats can embellish their life stories, so can he.

The real threat to this nation are not the resume liars in Congress but the perjurers at the FBI, CIA and the bowels of the bureaucracy. The FBI spied on Trump at the behest of Obama. As long as that crime goes unchallenged, anything goes…

Democrats love to try and pick off people they see as the weak ones…[Santos] may be a lying sack of pus but by golly, he is our lying sack of pus and if Democrats can stand by their liars, Fetterman, and that wife-beater Warnock, then darn it, I stand by him.

Sadly, that’s what it’s down to.

I wonder if Santos is also lying about being a Republican, though…

The Kari Lake election fraud verdict: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: It turns out I have more to say on this topic than I originally anticipated, so this will be a two-parter.]

Lake’s loss of her election fraud suit was a foregone conclusion. And yet the court is closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, because you can’t force people to trust elections by shrieking, “You must trust us!” Trust must be earned, and once lost it must be regained or it continues to be lost.

I have been consistent in saying that election fraud must be prevented because courts will not redress it after the fact except in very minor cases such as a person submitting two ballots instead of one. The Kari Lake trial is a good example, because the plaintiffs (Lake’s side) had unusually good evidence for mass fraud that may indeed have mattered in the outcome. And yet it was always clear that the evidence wasn’t enough for a verdict in her favor and could not possibly be enough. Here’s a discussion of the ruling against Lake [emphasis mine]:

Judge Peter A. Thompson ruled in favor of the defendants on all counts on December 24 2022. A copy of the opinion is here 4531 (maricopa.gov).

The court permitted two counts from the original ten in the Complaint to proceed to Trial: 1) the claim that ballot-on-demand (“BOD”) printer malfunctions experienced on Election Day were caused intentionally and that these malfunctions resulted in a changed outcome (Complaint Count II); and 2) the claim that Maricopa County violated its own election procedures manual (“EPM”) as to chain of custody procedures in such a way as to result in a changed election outcome (Complaint Count IV).

After laying out the “clear and convincing” burden of proof Lake needed to carry, the court summarized and evaluated the witnesses and evidence Lake presented. The court looked to Arizona case law going back to 1898, before we became a state in 1912, for the proposition “it is . . . unwise to lay down any rule by which the certainty and accuracy of an election may be jeopardized by the reliance upon any proof affecting such results that is not of the most clear and conclusive character.”

I submit that, realistically, that standard cannot be met. I also submit that the standard’s existence is understandable. It would be enormously chaotic if every suspicion of election fraud – even a strong suspicion that many people share – could overturn any election. Nothing would be certain, every election that wasn’t a landslide (and even some of those) would be challenged, the remedies might have to be to repeat elections over and over, and might result in a rapidly ever-changing succession of public officials none of whom were trusted or respected. It would be a nightmare.

But it’s another kind of nightmare to see obviously suspect elections, exacerbated by the omnipresence of computers and the prevalence of mail-in voting (especially in states where everyone on the obviously-flawed voter rolls is mailed a ballot whether requested or not, and once ballots are taken from envelopes there’s no saying where those ballots actually originated), with no redress in the courts. The frustration and distrust builds and builds and builds in the losers and it’s not even just limited to them.

In a case such as Kari Lake’s, what sort of proof would be enough for the court? The only sort of thing I can imagine would be a set of emails or recordings in which those in charge of the machines are seen or heard while plotting to reprogram them in order to aid the left. Or a mass confession on the part of said officials. Short of that sort of thing, forget about it.

We have to be able to trust our elections. But the only way to foster trust or restore it is to have more safeguards in place at the outset against fraud. In the name of voter inclusion as they define it, Democrats seem determined to jettison even many of the elementary and obvious safeguards such as voter ID, and this effort raises the amount of suspicion that their goal is to enable fraud – which is easiest to perform in the populous blue counties they usually control (Maricopa County is a GOP-controlled anomaly, but the GOP there detests Trump supporters such as Lake). Calling people who see the evidence as strongly indicative that fraud occurred “election deniers” might actually work to demonize them in the eyes of others, but it does absolutely nothing to increase the trust that is so necessary to a functioning democracy or a functioning republic. And we have most definitely lost that trust.

I don’t see us getting it back anytime soon.

Whenever I write about this sort of topic, many commenters write to say that the GOP doesn’t care and has made little effort to fix things. I often see statements like that all over the right side of the blogosphere. But it’s not the case; there have been many efforts, and I’ve documented some of them in many posts and comments of my own. I want to call your attention to this post as well as this one. In both of those posts I describe only a fraction of those efforts and why they have mostly failed unless a state is already quite Republican/conservative to begin with.

I strongly suggest you take a look at those posts if you haven’t already. And no, my motive isn’t to defend the GOP. It’s to inject more reality into the discussion. Has the GOP left no stone unturned? I very much doubt it. But they’ve done quite a bit and the deck is stacked against them. This is the last paragraph of that second post of mine that I linked, and I’ll repeat it for emphasis:

It’s instructive to do some basic research and discover what actually was tried, and what failed, and why, and what the obstacles are that need to somehow be overcome. But the left feeds on ignorance – not only of its own voters, but of some GOP voters as well.

[NOTE: Part II will be specifically about the efforts that were made to tighten voting security in Arizona prior to this election, and why so many of them failed.]

Reflections on the COVID Twitter files so far

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the Twitter thread itself.

I don’t really need to reinvent the wheel and do a blow-by-blow analysis. I’ll just link to this, this, and this.

From the latter:

In its pathetic attempt to meet the Biden administration’s demands while meekly attempting to protect free speech on the platform, Twitter made three significant mistakes: 1) Using bots, 2) Relying on foreign contractors as content moderators, and 3) Allowing biased executives to prune the decision trees to determine the fate of specific tweets.

This meant many essential voices in the covid debate, which turned out to be correct, were silenced at critical times.

Thing is, it was obvious that this was happening. Anyone who looked could see it. I’m not a Twitter user, but there was plenty of discussion on the right side of the blogosphere and in other media on the right of how alternative points of view were being silenced.

I think the only really new evidence in this first batch of Twitter files on COVID is the extent of government involvement in the censorship, but even that could have been assumed. Early on, the government point of view became the only allowed point of view. I noticed it mostly on YouTube because I vist that site far more than I go to Twitter, and huge disclaimers appeared there attached to any video that even dared to tentatively whisper a thought contradicting the official government line, plus YouTube was “suggesting” tons of videos to me that parroted that government line and only that government line.

And yet the problems with the government line were also obvious from the start. It was easy to see, and I wrote about it early on. For example, here’s a post of mine from March 17, 2020, not long after the entire COVID business began. In it, I ask a question that would later have gotten me banned from Twitter had I been active there:

So here’s my question for all you epidemiologists and infectious disease experts out there…

Wouldn’t it be better to have only high-risk people stay home? People over 60 and those with pre-existing conditions? That way, if all those at low risk kept mingling, a lot of them would get a mild flu and herd immunity will be achieved fairly quickly, to the benefit of all, without overwhelming the health care system…

I just don’t see the end game for the current mitigation strategies. Wouldn’t we still get an overwhelmed health care system when everyone emerges?…

I was looking at a spate of recent articles on how Philadelphia and St. Louis handled the flu differently in 1918, with Philadelphia holding a big war bond parade despite the fact that the flu was beginning to make inroads in the city, and St. Louis canceling public gatherings (see this for just one example). The Philadelphia death rate soared and that of St. Louis did not.

However, most of the articles don’t mention this depressing fact:

“According to a 2007 analysis of Spanish flu death records, the peak mortality rate in St. Louis was only one-eighth of Philadelphia’s death rate at its worst. That’s not to say that St. Louis survived the epidemic unharmed. Dehner says the midwestern city was hit particularly hard by the third wave of the Spanish flu which returned in the late winter and spring of 1919.”

So, St. Louis did flatten its curve. But the deaths stretched out longer there.

And this apparently was a common occurrence in many cities…

The lockdown continuation already didn’t make sense, and that was obvious to anyone who had crunched the original COVID numbers from the Diamond Princess (I had) and looked at history from 100 years earlier (I had). I’m not saying this to brag, I’m saying it because it was easy to see rather than difficult. The fact that the authorities didn’t seem to see it – or refused to see it, or pretended not to see it – was obvious as well, and suspect. They were either incompetent (“fools”) or deceiving us (“knaves”) or both.

Why were they doing this? Well, one reason was also obvious pretty early on. Here’s a post of mine from April 27, 2020, entitled “Fear is an opportunity for tyranny”:

One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 response is how easily public officials embrace tyranny, and how many people accept it because of fear…

I didn’t like the initial 2-week shutdown, but I thought I understood the reasons – flatten the curve and keep the health care system from being totally overwhelmed – and I knew it would buy us time to learn more about the illness.

Mission accomplished. It’s been far more than two weeks, and the damage from the shutdown itself has gotten to the point that it becomes crystal clear it needs to be removed. The benefits have been less clear, too. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that shutdowns mattered all that much in the curve of the COVID-19 toll in various states and various countries. We understand more than we did, but although we don’t understand enough, we have to take a few leaps because one thing we do understand (and was clear from the start, actually) is that the shutdown itself is causing tremendous damage. And that damage is not limited to economics; it involves mental and physical health as well.

That’s how soon it was obvious. The rest is just the details.

I’ll close this post with a description of some thoughts of Thomas Sowell’s from his very fine book The Vision of the Anointed:

Sowell argues that American thought is dominated by a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision.

–the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.
–it is so necessary to believe in a particular vision that evidence of its incorrectness is ignored, suppressed, or discredited
–empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshalled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence.

The book was written in 1996 and was the very first book of Sowell’s I ever read, probably around 2004. So these trends were already quite clear back then and even far earlier, with the Soviets. And what he describes is even more than a vision – it’s also a relentless drive for power not just to implement that vision but also for power’s sake itself.

Twitter files #9

The New Neo Posted on by

This one’s about COVID information censorship.

The link to the twitter thread itself is here.

I may write more about this later tonight or perhaps tomorrow. Right now I’ll add that the clampdown was so widespread and so unreasonable even at the time it was happening that it was obvious something like this was going on. But I don’t think that back then I suspected the amount of direct government involvement in the social media censorship, although it would not have surprised me and does not surprise me.

One more thing – I think they should have paused for the holidays and waited till after New Years to drop this stuff. Christmas season is a very low traffic time.

[NOTE: I’m purposely keeping blogging a bit lighter than usual today. I plan to get back to the regular volume tomorrow. One of the issues I plan to write about tomorrow is the dismissal of Kari Lake’s lawsuit.]

Victor Davis Hanson on the FBI

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another recommended article by VDH. There’s so much in it that it’s hard to select just a few quotes, but here are some of special interest to me:

The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.

Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was.

Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.

While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax.

Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.

Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.

Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified.

While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators…

The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so…

To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”

“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,” Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.

Much much more at the link.

The day after

The New Neo Posted on by

My Christmas Day was fine although very very quiet.

The following is an effort of mine from the past. That’s one of the advantages of having been a blogger for umpteen million years – you have a backlog of these sorts of things.

holiday-cheer-christmas-tree.gif

On Christmas Day—blog?
I’d rather have grog,
Or maybe eggnog,
Then go walk the dog.
Or watch a Yule Log,
And eat like a hog,
Then go for a jog.
Blogging’s a bog.
My mind’s in a fog,
Or maybe agog
From much dialogue.
I’ll return to the slog
Already, and blog.

[NOTE: On the words “the dog,” the link goes to an article on the type of dog we had when my son was little.]

Twas the blogger’s night before Christmas

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This small poetic effort of mine has become somewhat of a holiday tradition at the blog. So here it comes again—just like the holiday itself.]

‘TWAS THE BLOGGER’S NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the ‘sphere
Bloggers were glad to see Christmas draw near.
Their laptops were turned off and all put away
The bloggers were swearing to take off the day.

Their children were nestled all snug in their beds
While visions of extra time danced in their heads
With a father or mom not distracted by writing
No posts to compose, and no links to be citing.

But we all know that vows were just meant to be broken
And the vows of a blogger can be a mere token.
There’s always a chance that some sort of temptation
Will rise up to make them of fleeting duration.

For instance, there might be found under the tree
A sleek Mac; well, what better sight could there be?
And who could neglect it and wait the whole day?
It cries to be tried out, one just can’t delay.

Or maybe somewhere there’s a fast-breaking story
Important, and possibly leading to glory.
It can’t be ignored, there’s really no choice,
So add to the din every blogger’s small voice.

And then there are some who may just like to rhyme
(I’m one who at times must confess to this crime),
And it’s been quite a while since Clement Clarke Moore
Wrote his opus (though authorship’s been claimed by Gore).

So it seems about time it was newly updated
And here’s my attempt – aren’t you glad you all waited?
Forgive if it sounds a bit awkward to read.
In writing, I set a new record for speed.

I had to get under the wire and compose it
Before Christmas Day. Now it’s time that I close it.
But let me exclaim (or, rather, I’ll write)
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!

Here’s a video of the original, with some 50s-type nostalgia for those who remember. There are a few odd anomalies (“safe in their beds” instead of “snug in their beds”). But it brought back memories of pincurls, and the days when parents were assumed to sleep in twin beds (even though I don’t recall that most people did).

I’m pretty sure I had the book on which this is based. The illustrations look very familiar: