Fentanyl

Muskingum County Courthouse, Zanesville Ohio

John Litle, a Muskingum County, Ohio, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, has a few things to say about fentanyl. It's definitely worth reading.

Fentanyl has been mentioned here before.

Near the end of the Netflix series Yankee, the anti-hero is proposing that the Mexican drug lords increase their production of fentanyl. I thought that was a dumb idea. Fentanyl is much more dangerous, do you want to kill off your customers? Heroin has a long history, people are familiar with it. Moving to fentanyl is going to cause problems. Evidently I was wrong, drug lords don't care about their customers dying, there seems to be an endless supply of people seeking relief from living.

Fentanyl is being used to make counterfeit prescription opioids.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

Health Care Debate

Dialysis Machine
Because this blog is about things, and I'm not going to clutter it up with a bunch of yucky sick people.

The Detroit gang dropped a couple of links in my inbox this morning. First, a YouTube video: Jimmy Kimmel Fights Back Against Bill Cassidy, Lindsey Graham & Chris Christie, and second, a Washington Post story. I didn't watch or read either one, because:

This whole medical insurance debate is complete and utter horseshit. (Heh, my new catch phrase.) What we need is real information, but we're not getting it. It might be out there, but digging it out would be a lot of work, and why bother? Nobody in power is listening, they are all listening to each other trying to score political points by telling bullshit stories.

Our healthcare system is built on a fantasy, a fantasy that is carefully nurtured by everyone with a financial interest, like doctors, lawyers, insurance executives and media moguls. This fantasy has doctors curing all diseases, patients recovering fully and leading happy, productive lives. Oh, that happens occasionally, and for common afflictions that are well understood, it might even be the norm. But the more people you have, the more variation you have and the more obscure, inscrutable diseases show up. Life is a terminal disease. People spend their lives trying to be happy. They should spend their time getting ready to die.

Health care is a trillion dollar business in this country. All those people who are engaged in the debate over insurance are just trying to influence the trajectory of that money so that more of the random spray that emanates from such a powerful stream will land on them and make them rich. Because even a single droplet from that trillion dollar stream is worth a million bucks.

Since we don't have any facts (not that they would do us any good), here's a couple of stories.

A guy I know works as a dialysis nurse. He hooks up patients who are in need of dialysis to the machine and monitors the blood cleaning process. One Sunday he gets called in to run the procedure on a patient. The guy is old and in bad shape. He is swollen up like a whale. Joe (our nurse), hooks him up and runs the process for a while, but eventually the guys blood pressure starts falling and eventually it falls so much that he has to stop. The guy is still as big as a whale and still in bad shape, but he's done all he can do. Joe (all male nurses are named Joe, at least in this blog) estimates that the guy only has a few days to live, but his wife is demanding that the doctors do something. Like what, sweety? He's dying. Sad, but life is like that.

A couple of months ago a friend had gone into the hospital for some kind of test. The test involved anesthesia, so after the test we were waiting in a hospital ward for the anesthesia to wear off. While we are waiting a nurse starts talking to another patient (an elderly woman by the sound of it, they were obscured by drapes), getting her medical history, and in particular, a list of the drugs she is taking. So the patient starts telling the nurse all the drugs she is taking. It's not just one or two or even a dozen. I swear there must have been a zillion, she went on and on and on. When she gets near the end, she tells the nurse she is taking Oxycodone. And why are you taking that, asks the nurse? Because I'm addicted is the reply. WTF? I didn't think addiction was a valid medical reason to prescribe narcotics, but then I'm old. Maybe the rules have changed. Or maybe the old lady was just a garden variety addict and the rest of her story was just a cover she was selling in order to get more of that sweet, sweet oxy.

Update six hours later: Here's another story from one of my correspondents.

I don't think anecdotal stories move our knowledge base forward. That being said, my aunt, may she rest in peace, had a lousy rheumatologist. He prescribed so many bad meds to avoid operating on her arthritic knee that she developed serious health issues from the drugs. Ultimately at 80+ years old we had a big conference. The right solution was a morphine patch. She became an addict. We spoke daily and I could tell by her voice when the patch needed to be replaced and she was starting withdrawal. They tried taking her off to no avail. So for the last 15 years of her life she was a morphine addict. She still did volunteer work as a retired licensed clinical social worker. She still worked as a locally renowned stained glass artist, she still traveled, she still...  Looking at her life from the outside, one could wonder at and judge the medical interventions. But she had quality of life and wanted more until the day she called me and said she was ready. 

So the politicos are making a big fuss about the dangers of narcotics, but they aren't telling us the whole story. Meanwhile, here in Oregon simple possession of heroin is now a misdemeanor. Will this put a curb in the fentanyl trade?

On the left, a lethal dose of heroin; on the right, a lethal dose of fentanyl.

“Anyone who is so deep into their addiction that they would use fentanyl is not worried about jail.” - Jordana Goldlist

Addiction

Manfred got thrown in jail over the weekend. He had started drinking again. Then he started calling 911. They would come pick him up and take him to the emergency room where they would give him an IV which would hydrate him and give him some nourishment. He couldn't eat anything. He did this a couple of times and then the Fire Captain told him not to call 911 anymore. And he called 911. So they threw him in jail. He is out now. Maybe he was released because of overcrowding, maybe someone bailed him out. I don't know.

Addiction is a terrible thing. I remember a story I read about an anesthesiologist who worked in a hospital. He started "playing" around with Fentanyl a hyper-addictive anesthetic. He wasn't worried, after all he was a professional, he knew what he was doing, he had it under control. And then one day he noticed that maybe he was using a bit more than he should. So he took a two week vacation, which removed him from the hospital and put the fentanyl out of reach. The two weeks passed and he went back to work. The first thing he knew he was in the medicine closet shooting up and he had no idea how he got there. An addicted brain cannot be trusted. That is what makes addiction so bad.

War On Drugs

Stupid groupthink is what has got us into this mess, and make no mistake we are in a mess. A certain amount of groupthink can be beneficial. If you are trying to organize people to all work together on some massive project, it helps if most everyone agrees with what you are trying to do. But when your group gets locked into one way of thinking, and everyone in that group is making money, it's almost impossible for any divergent opinions to be heard.

Lots of people are dying from overdoses of strong drugs, even more than the number of people dying in automobile accidents. Near as I can tell there are two problems at play here. One is that you don't know exactly what you are getting when you are buying drugs on the street. Some shifty-eyed dude tells you the pill is Ecstacy, but he doesn't know, he's just telling you what somebody told him. Only the guy who made it knows what's in it, and he may have added Fentanyl to the mix.

A second problem is that the line between adequate pain relief and dying can be very thin, especially for heavy users. The more you use, the more it takes to get the same amount of relief and then one day you step over the line and that's the last step you take.

A third problem is that while many people use narcotics to relieve chronic pain, many others use it to get high, which some consider to be relief from mental pain. There are other ways to relieve mental pain, but they require working with other people, and working with other people can be painful in its own way.

American Gangster Official Trailer #1 - Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe Movie (2007) HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

What we need is a trusted agency that certifies the purity of drugs. It would be nice if it was a government agency, but that ain't gonna happen anytime in the near future. I remember in the film American Gangster, Denzel was marking his heroin packets with some kind of logo. Here's a guy providing a public service, but because he wasn't paying off the right people, he got busted.

Blue Magic Heroin Packets

I suspect that the economics of dealing drugs is forcing prices down and the general level of morality of drug dealers is going down. The economics are that since more people are out of work, more people are looking for a cheap way to kill time, and more people are getting into the business, and Fentanyl is cheaper than heroin. Thanks, Uncle Joe.

Wikipedia page about the movie.

 

From Dreamland to Nightmareland

Temple of Dendur Egyptian art at the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Photograph: Alamy

From Taki's Magazine:

From Dreamland to Nightmareland by Steve Sailer, an excellent book review of

The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth by Sam Quinones (available on Amazon)

The story sounds much like the one told by Peachy Keenan in Pass Tents.

The picture is here because Steve mentions the Sackler family. They own a couple of pharmaceutical companies. Some people blame them for the opioid epidemic.

I still think drugs should be legalized. I have my own vision of what that would be like, but it's probably unrealistic. It might cut down on the number of deaths from unintentional drug overdoses and from gun battles over 'turf', and it might reduce the amount of craziness that comes with the synthetic drugs that people are cooking up, but it wouldn't cut down on unemployment and would probably exacerbate it. And those folks who are looking for a way to quickly make large sums of money are still going to be with us, and if dealing in illicit drugs is no longer a viable way to make a fortune, who knows what they will turn to.

Meanwhile, here in Oregon, a number of drugs have been decriminalized. Supposedly, users are going to be encouraged to seek treatment. Some tax money has been earmarked for that purpose. It may take a couple of years before we see any effect. We shall see.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

Tweakers

Fentanyl pills on the streets on Portland, where such doses of the great annihilator cost as little as $1 apiece. (Credit: Tara Faul)

IAman is looking to move to Bingen, Washington. Bingen is about 60 miles east of Portland across the Columbia River from Hood River, Oregon.

The main reason for the move is our neighborhood is the drug / murder epicenter.  3 middle aged good Samaritans murdered in last few months. 

This article captures the bad stuff that I see. 

Oregon’s Drug Apocalypse - Matt Thompson

The linked story is pretty horrofic.

Previous posts about IAman's current residence:

• Witness to the end of Civilization
• The Borg Have Landed

War on Drugs

Stolen entire from Willamette Week.

Have Illegal Drug Prices Increased Since the Military Started Blowing Up Boats?

Even if U.S. drug policy weren’t being created by people with the analytical skills of a meth-addled raccoon, it probably still wouldn’t make much of a dent.

By Marty Smith

Now that Trump has “closed the border” and blown up “drug boats,” are there fewer illegal drugs available? Have illegal drug prices increased? —Just Curious

I’m sure you will be stunned to learn, Curious, that the Trump administration—normally so careful in its research and planning—appears to have no strategy in the Caribbean beyond “reach new heights in dickishness.” That might win you a Republican primary, but it won’t have much effect on the drug trade beyond making Latin American authorities less inclined to help us stop it.

There are two tiny mitigating factors, however—nothing that will keep Pete Hegseth from burning in hell, but worth noting. The first is that, shockingly, drugs from Colombia really do leave Venezuela in small boats bound for distribution hubs in the lesser Antilles. It’s cocaine, not fentanyl, and it’s mostly bound for Europe, not America, but by Trump administration standards, getting even this much right is an intelligence coup to rival the cracking of the Enigma code in World War II. If the military were to interdict these boats rather than blowing them up, they might even find drugs. Too bad we’ll never know!

The second caveat is that even if U.S. drug policy weren’t being created by people with the analytical skills of a meth-addled raccoon, it probably still wouldn’t make much of a dent. Drugs are kicking ass—if cocaine were a person, it would probably act so arrogantly you’d think it had just snorted a massive rail of itself. Over the past decade, the yield of coca per acre has doubled, while the number of acres devoted to the plant in Colombia increased by two-thirds. The fact that U.S. officials seized a record amount of cocaine last year almost certainly reflects a bigger crop rather than better policing.

Mind you, the Trump administration is still finding ways to make things even worse. In spite of those record seizures, drug prosecutions are down 10%, thanks to the pivot from drug enforcement to immigration. And the fact that federal prosecutors have been leaving the reeling Justice Department in droves will only accelerate this trend.

Meanwhile, back here on the home front, two young people at the hippest bar I can get into confirmed that retail prices for blow are still holding steady at around $100 a gram, with no recent supply or quality shocks. Further evidence that drugs won the drug war: It didn’t even occur to them to worry I might be a narc.

I Love L.A.

Starcrawler - I Love LA
Starcrawler

In Pass Tents, Peachy Keenan explains the exploding number of homeless people on our city streets. Her (I think it's a her, but I could be wrong, that's just the feeling I got from the reading the article) explanation is the first one I've heard that makes any kind of sense. This excerpt gets to the root cause of the problem.

The New Meth

There is a simple explanation for the dramatic increase in homeless zombies in our cities: It’s the meth, stupid. You won’t hear this from anyone who gets paid to “solve homelessness.”

But this is not your grandfather’s meth. It still all comes from Mexico, our “friend” to the south. But this new meth is not the form made from ephedrine, the “party” meth, which got regulated into oblivion and could never be made in large enough quantities to wreak too much havoc anyway. Since then, the Mexican cartels figured out how to make meth with other chemicals. It’s called “P2P meth,” for the phenyl-2-propanone precursor, and it’s the kind you see in Breaking Bad. This stuff is put together with a poisonous brew of easy to source industrial chemicals — no pilfered cough syrup needed.

The problem is that P2P meth has the unfortunate side effect of causing schizophrenia. Oops!

Reporter Sam Quinones has written for years on the meth situation, and he explained what P2P meth does in a recent podcast: “it turns people schizophrenic, paranoid, [with] horrible hallucinations–cheetahs coming out of the walls, the government inside my brain, people unable to speak…incapable of basically living in a regulated society.”

The new meth doesn’t keep you dancing at the party. This meth turns you inward—into a cozy little tent. Quinones debunks the homeless-as-housing-crisis myth. “The tents and meth almost go together like hand in glove. You want to be in a tent because the tent is where you can just be alone. You don’t have to be around everybody else. These encampments are a direct result of that. People view these tents as benevolent things, as keeping people from the cold weather…but they are simply enabling spaces for folks with horrible psychiatric problems created by this staggeringly, potent and prevalent methamphetamine that’s coming out of the Mexican trafficking world.”

Add in a few grains of Chinese-supplied fentanyl, which enters Mexico in huge quantities via ship at the Pacific ports of Lazaro Cardenas and Manzanillo, and you get Mexican-made P2P schizo meth that’s also insanely addictive. You go from your house in the suburbs to a tent on the street—after just a few hits.

This is not a housing crisis.

She also talks about all the sleazy politics involved and offers a possible solution. Her solution sounds like pie in the sky until you remember the zillions of dollars that have already been dumped on this problem.

If you want to go a little deeper, I would say our foreign policy in regards to Mexico and China is the cause of most of our problems. Nixon's opening of China may have helped the Chinese climb out of the hole they were in, but our lack of tariffs has destroyed our industrial base and put zillions of American's out of work. What do you do when you have nothing to do? You look around for a way to kill time, and nothing kills time better than drugs, which is why America has such a huge appetite for drugs. I don't know why Mexico is so fucked up, but I suspect our foreign policy had something to do with it. Or maybe we were too concerned with the really bad crazies in Asia and just couldn't be bothered with our own backyard since it didn't seem to be an imminent threat.

Note on the video: Peachy references Randy Newman's song, which is completely different than Starcrawler's. Starcrawlers version is just a tad sarcastic, which I think suits this discussion better. Plus I really like the tune. And the intro. Teenagers are just great.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Gangs of Galicia: Season 2 - Netflix Series

Gangs of Galicia: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Our girl, Ana, the female lawyer, has been in Madrid for the last three or four years, raising her daughter, the daughter that was fathered by Daniel, the son of the Padin patriarch that runs the Galicia drug smuggling empire. Ana and Daniel are our Romeo and Juliet. He's been in jail for the last three or four years and has just been let out on account of they haven't gotten around to holding his trial. The trial may still happen, but for now at least, he's out. 

Ana left Galicia on bad terms with some people, Now in order to make amends, she offers to go to work for a Columbian drug smuggler, setting up a lab to process their drug, which doesn't make a lot of sense, unless maybe they were just doing packaging, but it sure looked more complicated than that with screens being dipped into tubs full of liquid. I mean, I can understand setting up a packaging operation. The drugs (heroin or cocaine) come in lots of hundreds of kilogram size blocks that each need to be cut into at least a couple of thousand pieces for retail delivery. But a lab for producing heroin or cocaine doesn't make much sense. The raw material would be much bulkier which is going to make shipment more difficult. Then again, maybe they were making a totally artificial drug like meth or fentanyl. But in that case I think you would need like full-on hazmat suits and respirators. Or maybe losing a few factory workers isn't a problem. Or maybe I wasn't watching that closely.

Anyway, the Columbian is conspiring with Paco (Luis Zahera - famous to me for his role as Ezequiel in the Netflix series Wrong Side of the Tracks) to take down the Padins. To do this they setup an elaborate trap. When a shipment of drugs comes in, it gets manhandled from the go-fast boat to a waiting van. This happens in a matter of minutes and then the van and the boat disappear into the night. On this night though, the Columbian gets tipped off and sends a squad of fake policemen to raid the scene and snag the van as it was driving away. Now Paco and the Columbian start selling off portions of their haul. Naturally the Padins find out about it, and go raid the warehouse where the Columbians stashed the drugs. The Columbian has been waiting for this - he has lookouts watching the warehouse. When they spot the Padin crew approaching, they call the cops who swoop down and arrest Nilo, Daniel's best bud.

Now things start to unravel all around. I think all of the shooting was confined to the 9th episode, and there was a bunch. Naturally all the principal players survive so we can have another season. Maybe.

Colombia-Galacia-Brazil

Why is the Colombian from Brazil? Maybe because Colombia doesn't have any seaports on the Atlantic Ocean. Umm, no. Colombia's busiest seaports are on their Atlantic coast. Maybe because Brazil is a thousand miles closer, or maybe northern Brazil drug enforcement is not as formidable as what you find in urban Colombia.

Season 1 here.

The Thursday Murder Club - Netflix Movie

The Thursday Murder Club | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Medium funny movie about old folks investigating old and new murders. Quite the aging cast:

Age	Actor	Character	Role
80	Helen Mirren	Elizabeth Best	MI6 (spy)
72	Pierce Brosnan	Ron	Labor Union Organizer & Rabble Rouser
73	Celia Imrie	Joyce	Nurse
81	Ben Kingsley	Ibrahim Arif	Psychiatrist
46	Tom Ellis	Jason Ritchie	Ron's son, celebrity, former professional fighter,
47	Daniel Mays	DCI Chris Hudson	Copper
54	David Tennant	Ian Ventham	Evil Landlord
78	Jonathan Pryce	Stephen Best	Elizabeth's husband, suffers from dementia
34	Naomi Ackie	Donna De Freitas	Constable
40	Henry Lloyd-Hughes	Bogdan	Polish handyman
48	Ingrid Oliver	Joanna Meadowcroft	Joyce's daughter
68	Richard E. Grant	Bobby Tanner	Gangster
82	Paul Freeman	John Grey	Key role in climax
62	Geoff Bell	Tony Curran	Good landlord

I didn't recognize Paul Freeman, I suspected who he was, but I wasn't sure so I asked Google and Google replied:

In the Netflix movie adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club, John Grey is a retired veterinarian and a resident of Coopers Chase, married to Penny Grey. He plays a crucial role in the film's climax by killing Ian Ventham to prevent the discovery of Peter Mercer's body, which Penny Gray had buried, and then taking his own and Penny's lives with fentanyl to protect her secret. - Google

I'm glad I asked. That's a better explanation than I could have come up with, expect now you wonder who Penny Gray and Peter Mercer are. You'll have to watch the show, it's too complicated for me to explain this late at night.

The fancy building is the Englefield House.

War On Drugs

Philadelphia Street Scene

America’s Worst Drug Crisis Ever Is Causing The Streets Of Many U.S. Cities To Look Like A “Zombie Apocalypse” Has Arrived by Michael Snyder

Michael paints a gloomy picture of life in the big city. Yeah, well, big cities have big problems. But what are you going to do about it? Michael wants to stop the flow of illicit drugs into the US. Good luck with that. The government has been ruining countless people's lives since forever. I don't see anything changing anytime soon. Anyway, it prompted me to comment, and since I don't know whether it will ever see the light of day, I copy-pasted it here:

Securing the southern border, even if you could do it, is not going to do anything to reduce the drug problem. At best everything the DEA does simply insures that drug prices remain high enough that the drug dealers are making a good profit.

If you want to stop overdose deaths, end the COVID-19 lockdowns and put people back to work.

If you want to stop the production of fentanyl, you might want to think about making heroin legal. I mean, making it illegal hasn’t done anything to stop people using it. Of course, making it legal might very well cut into the American drug cartels’ profits, and we can’t have that.

Airplanes

We've been watching Season 5 of Detective Harry Bosch on Amazon Prime. It's entertaining. We've got multiple story arcs all winding through the season. Some are serious, some are funny, the characters are all well settled in their roles. A couple of airplanes make an appearance.

de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter

The Otter plays a continuing role ferrying shills from Los Angeles to an encampment in the desert. The bad guys are running a scam collecting prescription opioids from a pill mill. The purported reason for using an airplane is so that Russian mobsters won't find out where their base is, which is important because they are stock piling supplies to make fentanyl. So they are using the pill mill scam to finance the stock piling. Once that is complete, they can break into the big time!

Jerry Edgar talking to an airport copper
That's a Fouga CM.170 Magister sitting on the other side of the fence.

A Fouga Magister makes a brief appearance around 9:55 in episode 3.

The Iron Law of Prohibition

From Windypundit's post about Backpage:

The Iron Law of Prohibition says that making something illegal will make it stronger and more dangerous. Nobody drank bathtub gin in America until the Prohibition laws of 1920 criminalized alcoholic beverages. Almost nobody smoked crack until law enforcement started a war on cocaine, and we didn’t have much of a fentanyl problem until the government started cracking down on opioids. Legal alcohol and tobacco distributors didn’t shoot each other in the streets the way drug-smuggling gangsters do.

Criminalizing a good or service necessarily drives it underground. The need to hide makes it harder to build a good reputation, which makes it less rewarding to have good business practices. Customer service and attention to product quality fall by the wayside. Without transparency, public regulation, or access to the courts to redress grievances, there is little penalty for being a bad actor. Thus bad actors enter and thrive in the market, engaging in fraud, theft, and violence, which can often only be countered with more violence. Prohibition drives good people out of the business, resulting in entire markets being controlled by gangs of criminals, and the harder the prohibition laws are enforced, the more power gets transferred to people willing to endanger themselves and others to make a buck.

 

Witness to the end of Civilization

IAman reports from the eastside of Portland. A neighbor pushes a lightweight, two drawer Craftsman tool chest out in the hall. He snags it and advertises it on Facebook:

June 27,2024

Amazingly it received 235 clicks & 10 messages, within a couple hours.

Guy came right over, his wife wants it as a base for a flower planter

The guy retired after 25 years driving city bus.

So I asked him about this neighborhood.

He said it is getting better. It is certainly better than the "nums" street slang for the streets 122nd through 188th (or thereabouts), that area houses poor people displaced by gentrification. More crime there.

My building super says all of Portland was so nice, back 1992. He attributes the shitty streets to the homeless (bums) drawn in by $1000 a month they get & lack of cops.

Speaking of Cops, Joe, tonight's security guard has an app for his work with a magic-cop button, pressed, guarantees a cruiser within minutes. Only used once in 2 years for some recalcitrant homeless female that refused to leave a property. Joe trained as a boxer for a couple years and has an electric zapper on his flashlight. His company is going to upgrade their defense weapons soon.

I went to mail a letter tonight, riding on the KPX.

No lobby, no mail slots, drive-up boxes removed. WTF! Angry as I pull out of the USPS parking lot I am faced with one of those littered nasty looking homeless sites, a couple of greaseballs standing around. I pull up & call out "Heh, you know why the post office removed the mail boxes?" "Yeah" the head tweaker reponds "because of people like you!" Whoa... Haha he beat me to the punch.

Greaseballs 2 IAman 0

I watched a bum rifle through our dumpster without leaving a mess, then he pulled his two wagons next door and cleaned up & picked up trash before looking for cans. Takes all kinds I suppose.

Later the same day:

Worried about my KPX250cc security, from face book I buy:

• Heavy chain & lock
• Brake rotor lock
• Cover (perimeter) alarm 

The nice fella I bought them from said the cover alarm served him well alerting 3 times to thieves. Says he lives in Vancouver because “yeah where you live is a jungle of crime”

Driving back to PDX I stopped by the scene of the crime (ebike theft) at Winco. Couple greaseballs scoping out the parking lot. I take their pictures and they leave. I go to the front desk and tell the head clerk my tale of whoa, she responds “crime is bad here, that's why I moved”, I tell her that Winco has been offering platitudes but otherwise is unresponsive, she takes my info and promises to give it to the manager. Outside I talk to the security guard and he says they typically have 10-12 thefts per day in the parking lot while they are on patrol.

I did everything corporate Winco told me to do, just to ignore me. Winco had 3 nice emails to me says their 3rd party was CSC and they would help me. They ignore me is what they do. (Using AI to write emails of empty platitudes to customer inquiries)

I ask the apartment manager if I was robbed could I see their video. “No.” Is there any circumstance I can see it. “No, cops only.”

So this video surveillance is a crock of poop…..until someone with $money$ or a gun needs to see it.  And then the video has looped or the camera lens was on, or other horse hockey.

Returning back to the Apartment, I see the building construction manager, a no nonsense sort of guy, Bill. I said I am getting spooked about the neighborhood, he conveys “good”. Talking he relates a couple anecdotes.

The construction site were losing tools and materials to greaseballs. Then a greaseball tent compound is built next to their parking lot. Cops don't do anything. Once the greaseballs were out of their tents, Bill had his boys throw the entire compound into a 20 ton trash bin and covered it with broken concrete. Greaseballs haven't been back since. Yay!

Several of his crew were mugged. A couple at knife point. A couple beat the shit out of one set of greaseballs. And then 3 teens held up a crew at gunpoint and tried to steal their tool trailer. The victims call the cops, the teens scatter. Cops leave, teens come back immediately, guns drawn. Victims call the cops bus. card number cops come back immediately and at gunpoint detain the teens and haul them off.

Then there was that evening, cops serving a warrant across the street, the respondent came out guns blazing, the cops shot him dead.

Bill’s solution? Move to a small town in idaho. “This is not going to get any better here.”

Once the construction security leaves, there will be a feeding frenzy of the greaseballs on every aspect of the apartment securities weak points.

BTW don't feed the street people. Bleeding hearts here drop boxes of food or feed them out of the car trunk. After they leave, piles of trash is thrown to the wind.

I'm called to the lobby, Fedex has a delivery for me and the property managers are not allowed to accept packages. The little black gap toothed driver responds to my question “how is the neighborhood here?” “not as bad as east of 122nd, there they follow my truck around waiting for an opening.”

I cannot depend on the cops, stores, nor my apartment management. My neighbors look helpless.

Life has gotten very interesting, like how war is interesting. 

 My Bike is “secure”. I am less enthusiastic about tracking down greaseballs who thieve from me. I’ll need to find another use for my Appletags.

Maybe a quick draw handgun is in my future. I may just stay castled up here, only leave by Tundra for destinations deemed safe.

PS As I finished this I called my cousin, while talking I spy out the window a greaseball walking to a neighboring dumpster, thinking the worst that he will dump trash everywhere, just looking for bottles/cans…….but wait he holds up in a corner of the lot , a buddy comes over they exchange packets, light up something in foil, puffs of smoke, the bottle boy doubles overs for a few minutes, a “fentanyl pose” me thinks, while his buddy walks in circles. After 5 minutes the bottle boy straightens up, then leaves while leaving trash behind him. I yell “Pickup your trash” he does so without complaint. His buddy tries to backtalk, I ask him to just wait there, I have somebody he wants to meet. He leaves. It's funny they cannot see me, just a big Borg like structure talking to them.

Related news:

In major decision, Supreme Court allows cities to ban homeless camps