Culture ‘J.D.’s Mom! J.D.’s Mom!’ Let’s celebrate a small victory in the battle against the opioid crisis. Credit: image via Getty Images In a time of international unrest, with cold and hot wars raging between and among the U.S., its allies, and hostile foreign nations like North Korea, Russia, and Iran, it is easy to forget that we have an ongoing deadly battle raging here in the homeland: that waged by fentanyl, prescription opioids, heroin, and the like against ordinary American families. And we are losing. In 2017, President Trump declared the opioid crisis a “national public health emergency” because “[n]obody has seen anything like what is going on now.” But since that declaration, more than 454,000 deaths related to opioids have been recorded by public health officials. Consider that there were approximately 405,000 U.S. military deaths during the whole of the Second World War. Or, as the conservative economist Oren Cass recently commented, “Americans are now dying from drug overdoses at a higher rate than the Russians died from alcohol use disorders in post-Soviet Russia’s worst years.”  The deaths alone do not capture the true human toll in the United States of the crisis. According to one estimate, between 2011 and 2021, more than 320,000 American children lost at least one parent to an overdose; many were left orphaned. As Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute writes, “based on the outcomes, policymakers appear to have more or less given up” on fighting the drug war. Against this grim record of almost constant defeat, the campaign of Senator J.D. Vance offered one symbolic victory. During the Republican National Convention, he dedicated time to recognizing his mother, Beverly Aikins. Ms. Aikins struggled for many years with drug and alcohol abuse, but has now been clean and sober for almost a decade. After Vance announced her ten years of victory over addiction to the audience, there was a loud chorus of “J.D.’s mom! J.D.’s mom!”  Ms. Aikins is well-worth celebrating. According to a profile written by Salena Zito for the Washington Examiner, Ms. Aikins was able to tame her addiction with the help of a 12-step program through Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. Due to what must have been incredibly hard work on her part, she was also able to get back the nursing license she lost because of her addiction. Even more unusually, she was able to rebuild the family ties that had been broken, including being able to play a role in the lives of her grandchildren. She now works as a nurse helping others at a substance-abuse treatment center. As the millions of Americans who have family or friends that struggle with addiction know, the kind of recovery achieved by Ms. Aikins is unfortunately rare. Most people in treatment for substance abuse relapse. Opioid use disorder is particularly difficult to treat, with a relapse rate possibly as high as 91 percent. Even for those who do achieve and maintain sobriety, rebuilding careers and ties with family and friends is an uphill battle.  One factor that can help? Hope. Addicts who have hope for the future, according to scientific studies, are significantly more likely to achieve and maintain sobriety. For example, one study found that among a group of participants who had used opioids for (on average) more than 14 years, “high levels of hope had a protective effect on the rate of relapse … during the study period.” As another scientific paper put it: “Hope may be an important part of recovery from substance abuse, a goal that must be pursued with incredible willpower given repeated challenges.” But too often, our society offers little hope to the people struggling with addiction and their families. Earlier this fall, I spoke with Jackie Lewis, who is raising her granddaughter after her son and his girlfriend both passed from drug overdoses. Lewis told me that when her son first became addicted to prescription painkillers as a teenager, “[I]n society back then, this thing was really looked down on. There was such a terrible stigma….”  Lewis’s son, an “extremely intelligent, a very good-hearted young man” who “loved people” struggled with addiction for almost 20 years. Ms. Lewis spoke repeatedly to me of the stigma and condescension he faced from others. Instead of hope, he received messages of shame and defeat.  We rightly celebrate Memorial Day, remembering our fallen during American battles over the last 250 years. There is no Remembrance Day for those lost to the opioids, and perhaps we don’t want one. It might be too painful and bleak—and a national holiday focused on the lost could destroy the hope addicts and their families desperately need to achieve recovery. But during the GOP convention, Vance suggested that his family might celebrate the official tenth anniversary of his mother’s recovery at the White House in January 2025.  This is a campaign promise he should keep. The office of vice president comes with few formal powers, but certainly encompasses the ability to encourage a country still grappling with the devastating toll of opioids. Indeed, our scientists tell us doing so might help with recovery. Let’s celebrate “J.D.’s mom” and the others who have beaten addiction and encourage them, their families, and those still struggling a little farther along the road.  The post ‘J.D.’s Mom! J.D.’s Mom!’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Unbearable Obviousness of Being Claiming your ticket is the “obvious” choice invites disaster. Credit: image via Shutterstock In my home state of Ohio, the announcement of the newly minted Harris-Walz ticket approximately coincided with the commencement of yard sign season. To be sure, a certain number of MAGA enthusiasts and Democratic diehards cheerfully (or not) turn their front lawns into year-round political advertisements, but, in my neck of the woods, some not entirely unappealing combination of Midwestern reticence and homeowner association rule compliance usually results in the first crop of signs coming towards the end of summer in an election year.  In any case, by the time I first began seeing strong evidence of yard-based support of the Democratic ticket, the signs were in support of the replacement candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. It is hardly surprising that Democratic voters would not hang onto their Biden-Harris yard signs—antiques on par with the “Dewey Defeats Truman” Chicago Tribune—but I must admit that I wasn’t prepared for one particular Harris-Walz sign that I encountered during those heady post-Biden weeks. One Saturday afternoon, while taking a stroll through an idyllic, strongly left-leaning college town in the otherwise deep red Buckeye State, I encountered a yard into which was planted a sign that I found genuinely troubling in its framework: Beneath the names “HARRIS” and “WALZ” was the word “obviously,” in smaller but still prominent lettering. What bothered me about the sign was not its entirely predictable endorsement of Harris-Walz—entirely predictable, that is, in the context of a woke college town—but the invocation of the adverb “obviously” to explain or defend that endorsement. Contemplating the sign from the sidewalk, I found myself asking: Among all the ways in which one could describe the Harris-Walz ticket, “obvious”—as in self-evident, clear-cut, or plain to see—was simply not one of them. After all, it wasn’t “obvious” that the vice president and the governor were the answers to the Democrats’ Trump problem earlier in the year, when the party actually held its primaries, such as they were. Back then, cooler heads reasonably judged it far from “obvious” that the practitioner of a failed 2020 presidential campaign (Harris) and a highly goofy far-left governor (Walz) would fare any better against Trump than Joe Biden. Why was the duo “obvious” now but not then?  Of course, the “obviously” yard sign was less a reflection of its owners’ fealty to the Democratic standard-bearers than to the Democratic Party machine that had selected them—a faith akin to the expression of confidence in “the experts” that was popular among liberals during the pandemic. According to this logic, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and George Clooney were “obviously” to be trusted in their electoral judgments in the same way that Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Big Pharma were “obviously” to be respected during a public-health crisis. I digress.  Contemplating that Harris-Walz yard sign, I wondered whether there was any Democratic ticket that would not have been seen by the party’s faithful as “obviously” superior to Trump-Vance. Would not the same folks who regarded Harris-Walz as being the “obvious” choice have felt just the same way had the Democrats swapped out Biden-Harris for some equally random combination—say, Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom? Or Newsom and Gary Peters? How about the Taylor Swift-Billie Eilish ticket? Or perhaps an “all-doctors” ticket of Jill Biden and Anthony Fauci? This is a party of followers who will brand as “obviously” superior whichever candidate and whatever program their overlords prescribe. Above all, to characterize a presidential ticket—any presidential ticket—as being “obviously” superior to another is a bald-faced expression of confidence, indeed, arrogance: a kind of thumbing of one’s nose (or waggling one’s yard sign) at the quaint notion that there is even a decision to be made in the election. This was a variant of the Biden-Harris-Walz argument that their side, no matter its nominal standard-bearers, stood for the democratic process itself. Arguments, debates, persuasion were rendered immaterial when the choice was so “obvious.” Happily, perhaps even miraculously, this belief in the inherent logic and obviousness of the Democratic brand was turned down by somewhere around 76 million voters on Election Day. Those who voted for the Trump-Vance ticket exercised independence from the groupthink that laughably judged a Harris-Walz administration an inescapable fact of history—“the end of history,” one might even say. To vote for Trump-Vance was a way of saying: “Hold your horses—I do not find anything at all obvious about wokeism in the military, an uncontrolled immigration crisis, and men in women’s sports.” I begrudged no one their right to express their support for Harris-Walz in the form of signage alongside their begonias, but the idea that their preference was “obvious” was an insult to common sense. Instead of the allegedly “obvious,” voters in the last election opted for the wild, the unpredictable, the productively disruptive, the entirely non-obvious. Anyone who doubts that this was the intention and the consequence of the American public need look no further than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The post The Unbearable Obviousness of Being appeared first on The American Conservative.

Don't Let Them Get Away With Saying "Never Again", While The Baby Killers Commit Genocide Now - The Evil Ones Cry, Never Again While They Commit Far More Evil Acts of Genocide on Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen... NEVER FORGET INDEED!!! - The Best is Yet to Come. But Not For You, Silly Goyem... - RBD3 - FAIR USE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES Mirrored From: https://153news.net/view_channel.php?user=RBD3

Republicans have achieved the government trifecta — keeping control of the House as well as winning the Senate and the presidency. It will be the first time Republicans have had full control of Congress and the White House since 2018. House Republicans have been quietly preparing their legislative agenda on tax cuts and other priorities for months, though an expected narrow majority will likely complicate those efforts, as well as Speaker Mike Johnson’s bid to hold onto the gavel in a...

Moscow's failed attempt to stamp out inflation is driving the country towards its worst-case economic scenario, according to a Russian think tank tied to the government. On Wednesday, TsMAKP condemned Russia's tight monetary policy, warning that high interest rates will trigger an economic downturn. With inflation still running hot, that could create a nightmare outcome for Kremlin officials: stagflation.

by Eric Zuesse, The Duran: Donald Trump’s appointment of Tulsi Gabbard (a former U.S. Representative, whose focus had been to end the control over the U.S. Government by America’s armaments manufacturers) as his Director of National Intelligence, is being treated by America’s main media as being traitorous, because she has pointed out many of the war-promoting […]

Sky News host Chris Kenny condemns the Albanese Labor government for its “capitulation to Islamic extremism and terrorism in the Middle East, by caving in at the United Nations and voting to support the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.” 

Jesus showed us by the way He lived and loved that we have incredible gifts to offer, which cost us nothing but have eternal value. They offer someone a glimpse of Jesus—a glimpse of true hope, a glimpse of everlasting life, and a moment to see that they have eternal value in the eyes of their Creator.