You know who first invented the idea that Obama and Clinton are the founders of ISIS?

Of course, it’s Putin’s media. I’ve been hearing this idea for quite a while from Russian TV journalists and pundits. And as we all know, they only say what they are told to say. 

God, I thought I’d never see the day when a major presidential candidate in the US would so submissively and obediently repeat lines invented by KGB employees to rubbish a sitting American president. Somebody in the Kremlin is having a fantastic time observing all this. 

P.S. Don’t believe me, listen to McFaul. He knows Russia very well. 

I’m very eager to go back to work. I like work. I’m good at everything, and it’s pleasant to be good at everything. But I will suffer horribly because I will have to be separated from Klara. She’s still been a part of my body for longer than she hasn’t.

P.S. Caring for the baby in many ways creates the opposite image of myself than I have at work. At work, I’m elegant, calm, fast, efficient, organized, and emotionally uninvested. With Klara, I’m disheveled, covered in spit up, never managing to do anything on time, and emotionally invested. 

Here is another story from Dreamland. A fellow got injured on the job. Nothing major, just a few deep bruises, some soreness. He went to a doctor to get his workers comp paperwork signed, and the doctor handed him a prescription for a month of twice-a-day Oxy.

The fellow took the Oxy for a month and expected just to move on and forget all about it after the pills ran out.

But the moment he stopped taking the pills, he started feeling like absolute hell. Diarrhea, extreme agitation, gut-wrenching pain. The poor guy had no idea what was even happening until somebody finally told him that his condition looked like withdrawal. The man was hopelessly hooked, and the doctor now had a guaranteed long-term patient who would come in like clockwork for his scrip.

Tens of thousands of people got addicted this way and later moved on to heroin. Many of them are now dead of an overdose.

Of course, this fellow carries a large part of responsibility here. He allowed himself to grow so alienated from his own body that he never even questioned the need to take pills for a month when he wasn’t even in pain. He was dishonest with himself about the high he was feeling thanks to the pills. He allowed the doctor to handle him like a mechanic handles a broken car. 

Still, though. A heroin addiction is a harsh penalty for people whose only sin is buying into the widespread cultural narratives about individuals’ relationship with their bodies and the godlike powers of the Mighty Pill.

“Yes, Obama is a founder of ISIS, he removed the troops from there.”

A founder is not a person who created the conditions that led to the creation of something by somebody else. If I forget to lock the door and robbers will use that to come in, this won’t make me a robber. If I leave a sheet of paper lying around and somebody writes an award-winning poem on it, that won’t make me a poet. 

As a linguist, I’m almost physically in pain when I observe the spillage of this verbal mush. 

We’ve been away for only 10 days, and now we have discovered that half of Klara’s clothes don’t fit anymore because she grew out of them. In just 10 days! It’s like we came home with an entirely different baby. Her hair is thicker, she doesn’t fit in her infant bathtub any more, and even her face is more mature. 

OK, can anybody explain this weirdness because we are feeling like we are losing our minds. Last night our flight was cancelled and we were stuck at a motel, feeling exhausted. To relax, we decided to watch some Netflix but it turned out there were no unwatched episodes of Scandal. So we started watching a new show called Homeland. 

The show was good, and after we finally got back home we decided to watch some more of it. But now Netflix tells us that the show is unavailable for streaming. 

Are we going nuts? Is it a case of folie a deux and did we collectively imagine watching that show?

In LaGuardia we saw a big airplane that said TRUMP on the side. 

Until 1990, there existed in the US a world-class, absolutely brilliant system of treating chronic pain. The doctors who worked in these clinics knew that medication should only constitute a tiny part of comprehensive pain treatment that includes psychological, occupational, behavioral, etc components.

These clinics were finding it hard to survive, however. Insurance companies refused to cover anything but meds. And even when doctors managed to convince the insurers to pay for other things, patients clamored for an instant fix and resisted the clinics’ philosophy of individual responsibility for pain.

In the 1990s, an alternative kind of clinic started to spring up. Unscrupulous or downright criminal doctors would sell prescriptions for opioids to anybody who asked for them. It took less than 3 minutes for a patient to see a doctor and leave with a bottle of pills. That these patients started to become horribly addicted, switching to heroin and dying of overdoses interested nobody. 

And the comprehensive clinics that offered non-opioid treatment all closed down for lack of demand. 

Today, even mentioning that chronic pain doesn’t need to be treated with meds makes people angry. (See my previous posts on the subject.) And even just 25 years ago it was an entirely mainstream medical approach. 

I’m also tired of hearing how what Trump said was misunderstood or maliciously misinterpreted. If he wants to be president, he needs to know how to express himself clearly. A sloppy, careless talker is unfit for political office. 

Trump in North Carolina:

“If she gets to pick her judges, [there’s] nothing you can do folks. Although, the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.”

Who are these people? What is their shared disease?