"opioid savings cards" to encourage patients to stay on the drug longer, which led to increased sales and profits. Purdue's sales reps were rewarded with bonuses for generating more prescriptions, and the company's executives had no incentive to question excessive sales.

Jin's operation was based in China, and he used encrypted communications and cryptocurrencies to conduct his business. The investigation involved a team of agents from various federal agencies, including the DEA, FBI, and IRS, who worked together to gather evidence and track down Jin's associates in the US. One of these associates, Bin Wang, was arrested in 2017 and later sentenced to six years in prison. The team discovered that Jin was using a company in Tonga to ship his packages, and that he was offering a wide range of synthetic opioids, including carfentanil and U-48800. As the investigation continued, the team found that Jin's operation was linked to numerous death cases across the US, and that he was using his websites to sell drugs to customers in the US. The team eventually identified Jin as Fujing Zheng, a 35-year-old man from Shanghai, and his father, Guanghua Zheng, who was 62. The Zhengs were found to be operating a sophisticated online drug trafficking operation, using encrypted communications and cryptocurrencies to conduct their business. Despite the evidence gathered, the Chinese government refused to extradite the Zhengs to the US, citing a lack of evidence. The US government eventually indicted the Zhengs and shut down their websites, but they remain at large in China. The investigation highlighted the challenges of combating online drug trafficking, particularly when it involves foreign nationals and jurisdictions.

Leroy Steele, a local drug dealer, who had been purchasing fentanyl from a Chinese chemical company using the alias Gordon Jin. Detectives found emails and phone records showing Steele's communication with Jin, who was advertising fentanyl and other illegal drugs on the open internet. The detectives ordered fentanyl from Jin as part of their investigation, which was delivered to them in the mail.

Bryan Stalnaker, had worked for Steele and Robinson, performing odd jobs in exchange for dope and serving as a "tester" for new batches of fentanyl.

Steele's involvement in the drug trade, including protein powder, baby formula, and powdered sugar used to mix with fentanyl, as well as a tub containing Magic Bullet blenders used to mix the drug.

Magic Bullet was often found alongside other blenders and coffee grinders. The ease of access to the Magic Bullet, which was widely available at stores like Target and Walmart for $29.95, made it an attractive tool for amateur mixers.

amateur mixing of fentanyl, often using household blenders like the Magic Bullet, was leading to inconsistent and often deadly doses, highlighting the "failure of content uniformity" on a national scale.

n 2006, a fentanyl outbreak in the US was linked to a Mexican company called Distribuidora Talios, which was raided and shut down, ending the outbreak. The mastermind behind the operation, Ricardo Valdez-Torres, also known as El Cerebro, was arrested and revealed to have a background in business and a history of cooking fentanyl.

deal to distribute fentanyl in China, which marked the beginning of China's ability to produce fentanyl.

Valdez-Torres began producing fentanyl instead, creating a batch of ten kilos. He warned the cartel that the fentanyl needed to be diluted 50:1 to avoid killing users, but this warning was not heeded by street dealers. The fentanyl was sold as heroin, leading to many overdoses and deaths. The case was investigated by Ryan Rapaszky, who later saw the connection between this incident and the rising opioid epidemic in the US.

unknown author named Siegfried, which describes a method for making fentanyl. This method, known as the Siegfried method, was later used by underground chemists to produce the drug. Fentanyl had benefits in medicine, but it also had a darker side, as it could be produced in a laboratory and replaced heroin, generating significant profits with minimal risk. The story then shifts to Dr. Michael Rhodes, a pain doctor in Tennessee, who was prescribing large amounts of OxyContin, a narcotic painkiller made by Purdue Pharma.

Janssen's work on fentanyl and its analogues has had a significant impact on the medical field, but also raises concerns about the potential for abuse and addiction.

Janssen's most notable invention was fentanyl, a powerful painkiller that changed surgical anesthesia. He also synthesized fentanyl analogues, which were molecularly similar to fentanyl but tweaked to be considered separate drugs.

As a result, meth lab seizures decreased, and the cooks and workers from Apatzingán returned to Mexico. The Mexican traffickers then shifted their focus to producing meth in Mexico, taking advantage of the country's access to world chemical markets and compromised authorities. This led to the creation of the modern Mexican meth trade, with traffickers controlling production from raw materials to finished product.

mporting ephedrine from Mexico, setting up labs in California and teaching others how to cook meth.

Methamphetamine was initially produced by biker gangs in the US, but a new recipe using ephedrine was rediscovered in the 1980s. This method was easier and allowed for mass production, democratizing methamphetamine. Donald Stenger, a middle-class, organized individual, played a significant role in popularizing this method. He was eventually caught and died in 1988, but his innovation led to San Diego becoming a major meth production hub.

Mexico's first traffickers were peasant farmers who grew drugs to make a living, but they eventually abandoned their traditional crops to focus on drug trafficking.

realized that this was why overdoses were exploding in Chicago and other cities.

The traffickers invested in the lab, but when they realized the profit potential of fentanyl, they killed Montoya, seized the lab, and took control. This marked a shift in drug trafficking, with the Sinaloa cartel discovering fentanyl and wanting more of it. The lab had enough ingredients to produce sixty kilos of fentanyl, which could lead to millions of street doses.

The project, known as "the Project," is led by a chemist known as "the Brain," who is producing fentanyl, a painkiller that is far more powerful than morphine. The fentanyl is being manufactured in a lab in Mexico and is being sold on the streets of Chicago, leading to a rash of overdoses and deaths. Rapaszky's investigation leads him to uncover the truth about the Project and the Sinaloan traffickers' involvement in the fentanyl trade.

I'm going to give it a 10 just because the IMDb rating for this film is so surprisingly low. It deserves a higher rating.

turning conscientious objectors . . . into heroes of the antimilitarism movement could unwittingly perpetuate exactly the sort of masculinized privilege that nurtures militarism”

archetype of the hypermasculine wheelchair-bound veteran dissenter.

The figure of the grieving mother is a collectivity, with women characterized as part of a population of mothers with a collective experience of loss. Their dissent is practiced through invocations of a dead or imperiled soldier child, who signifies the claim to associative military masculinity. In contrast, the perspective of the returning veteran is grounded in individual experience. The film depicts women as caregivers, with their dissenting subjecthood derived from their relationships with men.

this narrative of personal growth and triumph is complicated by the fact that Tomas's newfound power and authority are rooted in traditional masculine ideals. The film ultimately suggests that the military peace movement is shaped by masculinized privilege, which can be both productive and limiting.

White Ribbon Campaign, which originated in Canada and has a branch in England, is a group of men committed to discussing and ending male violence against women. However, there is a lack of groups of men in the anti-militarist and peace movements who analyze and resist the deformation of manhood by militarization. For war to end, men need to become self-aware and refuse the violence expected of them, and the association of masculinity with militarism. Some men, such as those in the Turkish conscientious objectors movement and South Korean anti-militarist men, are starting to listen to feminist ideas and take on board their perspectives.

hat governments cannot militarize without making women complicit, that wars rely on specific forms of masculinity, and that grappling with the militarization of women and men must be done together.

The party used stereotypes of Muslim men as rapists and Hindu goddesses to mobilize women's support, while also enforcing control over female sexuality and personhood.

No Pride in War (NPIW) challenged the involvement of BAE Systems and the Red Arrows in Pride marches, accusing them of "pinkwashing" and glossing over militarized violence by focusing on LGBT inclusion.

Sisters, formed an all-women and non-binary anti-militarist group to highlight the gendered politics of the arms trade and build solidarity with Syrian women affected by conflict.

opposing militarism requires resisting patriarchy, heterosexism, and racialized configurations of queer inclusion/exclusion.

The failure of evangelical culture to develop elites who are deemed worthy of the Supreme Court or top think tanks is another major area of interest.

For more details see this github comment which answers the "why?" question from the creator of tini.

When to use an init

Globalization, rather than unite the world has split societies asunder: creating a wine-sipping, somewhat wealthy and sophisticated class which is swept into the wonders of the wider world, and an embittered working class that cannot compete as well. It is from that embittered class that authoritarian populism gets its followers. What we are seeing is the backlash to globalization.

there's a number of studies that show um I know of two and three of them one about alcohol one of methamphetamine that shows that belief in the disease model itself is a predictor of relapse

the disease model of addiction isn't just wrong it's also harmful

the book I tell the story of Five addicts um one is a heroin addict one's a meth addict one was addicted to pharmaceutical uh opiates um the fourth one was a British man who was an alcoholic very serious alcoholic and the fifth one was an eating disordered person

that little yellow spot is the region in the brain that shows a reduction in synaptic density for people who spend more time on the internet and go back to the brain picture that I showed you before for heroin coke and alcohol addicts it's exactly the same spot

all the brain changes that people associate with substance abuse you find them in gambling porn sex addiction uh and uh uh binge eating disorder and obesity

Psychotherapy changes the brain

London cab drivers have a hippocampus that's part of the brand in charge of uh of memory certain kinds of memory which is uh 20% more dense or more heavy than normal people why because they have to learn the location of like thousands tens of thousands of streets

ohnson & Johnson eventually succeeded in getting the DEA to exempt thebaine, a key ingredient in OxyContin, from the 80-20 rule. This change allowed for a significant increase in the importation of CPS-thebaine from Australia, which contributed to the expansion of the opioid supply and the subsequent crisis.

The expansion of the opioid supply was facilitated by the privatization of poppy fields. The US relies on imports of narcotic raw material, mainly from Turkey and India, to produce legal opioids. Johnson & Johnson, one of the certified importers, sought to change the regulations to allow for more imports from Australia, which would give them a competitive advantage. In the 1990s, Johnson & Johnson lobbied to undermine the "80-20" rule, which stipulated that at least 80% of the narcotic raw material imported into the US had to come from Turkey and India.

Much later followup-

Lost to myself

Summary per language:

what's more important from the perspective of a software architect is why a particular implementation or approach was chosen over its alternatives. A common way to document decisions like this is to use architecture decision records, ideally stored in source control with or near the application(s) impacted by the decision.

Private militias have provided criminal groups with greater mobility and fighting power, enabling them to engage in large-scale violence and seek control of criminal markets and territories beyond their home towns. The Mexican case highlights the need for democratic elites to reform authoritarian judicial and security institutions and to punish state agents who protected organized crime, in order to prevent the intertwining of democratic politics and the criminal underworld.

efectors from the state judicial police

The spread of subnational party alternation in states with drug trafficking routes and the proliferation of private militias led to the outbreak of intercartel wars. The development of private militias allowed cartels to contest their rivals' control over drug trafficking territories, leading to largescale criminal violence.

the state judicial police in Mexico became the main repressive force against political dissidents, and also gained the upper hand in providing informal protection to drug cartels.

In Mexico, the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy did not introduce major security-sector reforms, making the expansion of OCGs and the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence more probable. Subnational political alternation, particularly the variation in party alternation across subnational regions, can also contribute to the outbreak of criminal wars. The structure of informal networks of government protection for criminals forged during the authoritarian period is crucial in understanding this link.

political alternation and the rotation of parties in state gubernatorial power undermined the informal networks of protection that had facilitated the cartels' operations under one-party rule. Without protection, cartels created their own private militias to defend themselves from rival groups and incoming opposition authorities.

The Peña Nieto administration in Mexico proposed a government commission to spend $9 billion to combat drug violence in the most violent municipalities. The plan included longer school days, drug-addiction treatment programs, and public-works projects. The administration also focused on disrupting street gangs and criminals hired by cartels, rather than targeting top drug traffickers. However, despite initial gains, violence in rural Mexico surged again by 2017 due to Mexican cartels' increased involvement in the heroin market and the boom in methamphetamine production.

orrupt agents have been found to be in the pay of cartels, waving tons of drugs and unauthorized immigrants across the border in return for millions of dollars. By 2018, it was estimated that corrupt agents made up around 1 to 5 percent of the CBP's 60,000-strong workforce.

The US government provided funding and training to the Mexican government to fight the cartels, but the efforts were criticized for being ineffective and corrupt. The Mérida Initiative, a $2.3 billion plan, was launched to help Mexico confront threats to its national security, but much of the money went to private US contractor corporations. Corruption was a significant problem, with cartel gunmen killing over 2,200 policemen, 200 soldiers, and scores of federal officials. The cartels also infiltrated the government, with many officials being bribed or working directly for the cartels. The drug trade was linked to Mexico's incomplete transition to democracy, and the cartels took over essential local and regional administrative functions in many regions.

The power dynamics shifted when the Colombians began paying Mexican traffickers in product rather than cash, allowing the Mexicans to invest in their own drugs. This led to Mexican gangs controlling 90% of the cocaine entering the United States, worth an estimated $70 billion a year.

naloa Cartel, in particular, was successful in cooperating with the authorities, using informants to snitch on their enemies and leaking information to the US and Mexican agents.

The Mexican and US authorities employed a "divide and conquer" strategy in their drug war efforts, which involved exploiting existing divisions between trafficking groups and creating new ones. This tactic led to catastrophic consequences, including the deaths of many people who got in the way or were killed as suspected informants.

The Zetas' business model was based on imposing protection fees on businesses, including illegal activities such as drug trafficking, and licit businesses such as farming and shopkeeping. Those who refused to pay were killed or threatened with violence. This led to a culture of fear and intimidation, where businesses were forced to pay protection fees to avoid violence. The violence in Mexico was further fueled by the struggle between powerful groups for control of drug protection rackets and the pursuit of aggressive counternarcotics policing. This led to a cycle of violence, where struggles between rival groups sparked aggressive policing, and aggressive policing generated increasing struggles between rival groups.

The sale of drugs was no longer limited to tourist areas and border cities, but spread to small towns and rural areas. This led to an increase in violence as local drug gangs fought over control of drug-selling areas.

In Mexico, drug traffickers began selling drugs in bulk to the domestic market, leading to an increase in drug use and addiction.

The violence in Mexico escalated due to several factors, including changes in American narcotics demands, the gun market, and criminal practices in Mexico. The availability of guns increased after the ban on semiautomatic assault weapons was lifted in 2004, leading to a global boom in gun manufacture and sales.

New organizations emerged, armed with high-caliber weapons and prepacked political creeds and religious messages. The Familia Michoacana, a Sinaloa-linked group, tossed the heads of five Zetas into a Michoacán bar, declaring that they did not kill for money, but for divine justice. The conflict continued to spread throughout Mexico, with cartels fighting each other, and soldiers and police often caught in the middle.

extort small-time smugglers, torturing and killing those who refused to pay.

In the mid-1990s, the Gulf Cartel recruited members of the Mexican army special forces, known as the Zetas, leading to an increase in violence connected to the drug trade.

"narco-democracy" was characterized by a gradual and uneven takeover of the state by drug traffickers, with the taxed becoming the tax collectors.

In return, they received protection, with local cops blocking roads to allow cocaine-packed planes to land, federal cops lifting roadblocks to allow smugglers' trucks to pass through, and generals giving traffickers warnings about imminent raids.

Traffickers also paid off members of leading political families, including President Salinas's brother Raúl.

This "state capture" involved massive bribes, with estimates suggesting that traffickers spent nearly $500 million on corrupting state authorities per year.

nearly 80 years, the Mexican authorities had protected drug traffickers from prosecution, but this arrangement began to break down in the 1990s. The increased profits from drug trafficking and the decline of state power put the narcos in control, and they took over running the country's drug protection rackets.

elationship between drug traffickers and the Mexican authorities changed, with the power dynamics shifting in favor of the narcos.

Toypurina is quoted as saying that she participated in it because she ‘‘was angry with the Padres and the others of the Mission, because they had come to live and establish themselves on her land.’’

Toypurina was known as a healer and they spoke about attacking the mission.

The Bering Strait Theory is one such attempt. More and more evidence is being found that dates the bodies of our ancestors before the Ice Ages. We don’t need their scientific evidence to prove we were created here, we have our stories of creation that mention in detail specific locations with landmarks, extreme weather events, stars and their locations in the sky to document our creation, existence, and so much more.

We’ve also been accused of indoctrinating our students and of spreading hate, or that we are anti-white.

Ethnic Studies instructors will illuminate some of the misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of our beloved discipline.

As Ethnic Studies has recently become a requirement for the California State University (CSU) system, and soon the University of California (UC) system, California Community Colleges (CCC), and California high schools, more attention has been placed on Ethnic Studies

#> 1 OpenAlex Only 12427

api_endpoint <- oa_query(
  entity = "works",
  title_and_abstract.search = search_string,
  from_publication_date = from_date,
  to_publication_date = to_date
)

(a) Failing to detect higher MW ions for PE is an indication of a false positive.(b) Using FTIR with low threshold matches increases the risk of false positives (by the way, FTIR only works on particles >10 µm, not nanoplastics).(c) Using microscopy without chemical confirmation of plastic particles and presenting images of unconfirmed plastics is a misleading application of the method.Altogether, these flaws render their results and conclusions fundamentally incorrect at best.

Dusan (Matt) Materic Thanks Dusan. That makes sense. Would it be feasible/worthwhile, to try to replicate their experiment with these three issues addressed? I assume, given Gauert et al's 2025 paper, the results would still be imperfect, even with their "best" method 3 for minimizing lipid issues, but it seems worth re-testing, as an approximation? Based on their comment in the paper "refinements to the analytical techniques, more complex study designs and much larger cohorts are needed" and their response to a comment on an earlier paper, perhaps they would be game to collaborate?https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/toxsci/kfae137/7829158 …more Like Celebrate Support Love Insightful Funny Like Reply Gabriel Enrique De la Torre • 3rd+ Microplastics | Plastic pollution | Antifouling paint particles 1w Dusan (Matt) Materic this pretty much summarizes it

Friedman is correct, for example when he points out the importance of changes like the rise of India or China, the spatial fragmentation of the production process through offshoring or the lowering of transaction costs that makes more and more services tradable.

So, if we have a class that is a repository dealing with invoice entities, we should name it something like `InvoiceRepository`, which will tell us that it deals with the Invoice domain concept and its architectural role is that of a repository.

Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, author Harald Jahner

“[Weimar]… Yes, we all know how it ends. But its participants… could have no idea what was in store for them. Will we be any the wiser? I ask because Weimar now beckons us. But, not at all in the way we think. We think about Weimar only in terms of the weakening of American democracy. While we should really think about it in terms of the world."

To destabilize the current society and accelerate the fall of liberalism, some Silicon Valley protagonists like Peter Thiel finance extreme rightwing media and actors.

Longterminism has its own research institute in Oxford and is financially supported by Thiel, Bezos, Musk and other relevant libertarians.

Life is a war and only the strongest warriors will survive. Compassion with the weak is a luxury, which neither Fascists nor Libertarians can afford.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a procedure in which magnetic pulses are applied to the brain of a living person with the goal of temporarily and safely deactivating a small brain region. The p

L.A. tenants have one advantage that renters in Hawaiʻi did not: a spreadsheet cataloging alleged incidents of price-gouging compiled by tenant activists with The Rent Brigade, a new collective organized by Chelsea Kirk and Philip Meyer.

The city's elite was forced to acknowledge the poor as equals, and the government recognized the need to treat the comuneros (community leaders) with respect and give them responsibilities and opportunities.

The city's traditional industries declined, leading to economic dislocation among the poor. Many rural migrants settled on precarious slopes, leading to a high level of illegal housing settlements. The distribution of income in Medellín became increasingly unequal, with the wealthy elite holding a disproportionate amount of power and wealth.

Pablo Escobar, became cultural icons, and their extravagant lifestyles fascinated many.

new era of violence, conspicuous consumption, and social change emerged.

Beauty queens who might have expected to make a brilliant match with a businessman or politician instead became molls and mistresses of drug lords.

Beggars disappeared from the streets, and petty thievery declined as unemployed youth found work in the drug syndicate.

how do we know this this all wasn't planned that Trump and all of the Maga robber barons in communication hey I'm going to say I'm going to do tariffs I'm going to announce that I did tariffs they're probably going to retaliate and then at the last minute I'm going back off from it but there's going to be a market crash bet on the market to crash and make billions of dollars right now in the short term real quick over one day's work

“The big joke on democracy,” he observed, “is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.”

Development in Progress

Poincare anticipated the frustration of an important group of would-be computer users when he said, "The question is not, 'What is the answer?' The question is, 'What is the question?'"

M. Chirimuuta

I think the book is fantastic I'm now going to outlined review of a book and then at the end briefly point out some potential implications for psychiatric diagnosis and neurodiversity

inected

as if all this wasn’t enough, English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages

Learning a new language meant listening hard and trying your best.

There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort.

But before that, such sentences would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker – as they would today in just about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones.

German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao.

Old English is so unlike the modern version that it feels like a stretch to think of them as the same language at all

In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition

Once e-book sales are working seamlessly, Hunter has other ambitions, including building an alternative to Goodreads, the book review site owned by Amazon.“That’s still on my to-do list,” he said.

the greatest risk is always the bio like biow weapons

Welsh legend supports that this happened, with stories such as Breuddwyd Macsen Wledig (English: The Dream of Emperor Maximus), where he not only marries a wondrous British woman (thus making British descendants probable), but also gives her father sovereignty over Britain (thus formally transferring authority from Rome back to the Britons themselves).

Drones are "genderqueer bodies" that do not track onto male-female, human-machine binaries.

The experience of killing with drones deviates from two main axes that orient killing in war: the home-combat and distance-intimacy binaries.

On the path we were on, the sludge had been thickening even under Democratic administrations. There were fundamental systemic flaws that remained unaddressed. Inequalities have continued to widen. Corruption and bribery have worsened. We were on the way to losing our democracy without even knowing it. But, as a friend put it, authoritarian forces have been building for years, “like the pus in an ugly boil,” she said. The only way we work up enough outrage to lance it is for the boil to get so big and ugly that it disgusts all of us.