Random New Years Day mutterings

Random thoughts to start the New Year:

        Between watching unnecessary bowl games until they got boring and switching to “Myth Busters Marathon,” which didn’t, because they blow stuff up a lot, I was exposed to ads for yet three more drugs whose names I hadn’t seen previously, apparently designed for three more disorders which I hadn’t seen identified as such previously. Of course, all the invented “new” drug names, like Japanese car models are nonsense words, designed to be memorable vice simply identifying the substance by its chemical name which is usually hard to pronounce and even harder to remember. This, naturally is so, as the last sentence in every single one of such ads advises, you can, “Ask your doctor about XXXXX!”

         We have met the enemy and it is our Congress/FDA/Big Pharma, and in far too many cases, the physicians who are wooed (pronounced “bribed”) into preferentially prescribing, whose collusion allows this huckstering to continue.  As one of only two industrialized nations allowing TV drug ads (The United States and New Zealand are the only two countries where direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs is legal) we should stop bitching about high drug prices and do something about it. Even scarier than many of the symptoms/diseases targeted by these newly patented panaceas are the much less strenuously mentioned side effects, some of which lists include such game changers as stroke, sudden death, cancers, uncontrollable bleeding,  etc. My all time fave, however, is still the faux-fat “Olestra” cautionary warning. I found myself wondering how long the ad-men struggled with “uncontrollable diarrhea” before deciding on “anal leakage.”  

        Speaking of Trump: (I wasn’t but who has time for a segué?) I also wonder just how much “more of the same” the deplorables will tolerate before one of them wakes one morning and decides that their emperor is, in fact, naked. We have, just in recent weeks, seen blatant lies to the military re: pay raises, seen  a deployed SEAL Team’s location disclosed, been chided (last night) for partying on New Year’s Eve by a Fox News binge watching, non-reading President whose work day starts at 11 am, and who after chiding his predecessor for playing golf has played more than twice as much over the same amount of time in office.

        Amazingly, such realities still just seem to bounce of the “wall” (nice tie in, huh?) these bumpkins and their Koch masters have erected to deflect the increasingly blatantly obvious truth -  that the current occupant of the White House is inept, narcissistic, cares little about those he panders to, save as votes, is a pathological liar and exaggerator, has no actual religious conviction, and knows little or nothing about economics, military matters, diplomacy, or how the average American lives day to day. Of course, this doesn’t hurt him with his small circle of like-minded acquaintances (he has no friends in the true sense of the word) such as the Saudis, Russians, Turks and Israeli militants.

And I do believe that’s all I have to say about that! (for now)