Vice President Kamala Harris and Nevada Attorney General Aaron D. Ford met.

I know this because there was a picture on Facebook of the VP at a table with our AG. The caption said they were discussing “working together to end the fentanyl crisis”.

Wow, the end of the fentanyl crisis is in sight? Pardon my skepticism, but wouldn’t that mean it was actually slowing down now?

So, I asked the always affable Nevada AG Ford: “Is there a plan to make this happen?” He replied “yes” and referred me to a website entitled: “Readout of Vice President Kamala Harris’s Meeting with State Attorneys General on Efforts to Stop Illicit Fentanyl Trafficking and Save Lives.”

Essentially, the plan is for Nevada and other states to employ and implement the president’s already existing National Drug Control Strategy.”

What – we’re not doing that now?

Apparently we are because this includes “the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) Program, the xylazine National Response Plan, key state model laws to address substance use disorder and overdoses, the non-fatal opioid overdose tracker, and key announcements from the Bureau of Prisons and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services aimed at expanding treatment for substance use disorder for people who are incarcerated.”

Jeez, could we be any more unclear than that?

Let’s tell it like it is: This was a photo-op to show people that the feds are “working together” with states to end the fentanyl crisis. The truth is there is, in fact, nothing new (or effective) taking place.

As any law enforcement agency in Nevada can tell you, illicit drug use is far from under controlI, or even showing signs of slowing.

Pictures of Harris and Ford “working together,” I am sorry to say, mean nothing.

DARK SIDE I

The Los Angeles Times reported last week that scientists remain baffled about why some people with a certain gene got infected with COVID-19, but never developed symptoms.

I don’t understand it completely (who does?), but it sparks questions in the darkest part of my creative writing mind. Is the human rac on the verge of engineering viruses that target groups of people? Could, as a completely random example, the Chinese develop a virus that kills Europeans but skips Asians? Or vice versa?

All I know is what I read, and the LATimes reports that the newest studies show that COVID-19 infected some, but those with a version of the gene HLA-B*15:01 were twice as likely to remain asymptomatic.

“This is the first time where, in a really rigorous and robust way, anybody has shown that there is a clear, definitive genetic underpinning to asymptomatic disease [from the coronavirus] — not all asymptomatic disease, but some subset of people who stay asymptomatic,” said UC San Francisco neurology professor Jill Hollenbach, a co-author of the study.

Yikes! You can bet that Hollywood’s already writing that scary script.

DARK SIDE II

Couple this with last week’s release of private emails between the scientists who authored the so-called “Proximal Origin” paper that Anthony Fauci and others in the U.S. government used to dismiss the theory that COVID came from a Wuhan lab leak.

The emails would give the impression to reasonable minds that the Proximal Origin paper was written as a propaganda tool to blame COVID on China’s wet market, and not the U.S. funded Wuhan Institute of Virology lab.

Dr. Kristian Andersen, from Scripps Research, (the primary author of Proximal Origin) wrote in the paper: “The presence in pangolins of an RBD [receptor binding domain] very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also I probably in the virus that jumped to humans.”

But in his now released private email he wrote this to other scientists just before the paper was released: “For all I know, people could have infected the pangolin, not the other way.” Then the day after publication, he wrote privately: “Clearly none of these pangolin sequences was the source though.”

I’m not a conspiracy theory advocate, but, c’mon man, something’s clearly not right here.

JUST NUMBERS

The last day of this year will be Dec. 31, 2023 or 123123.

ONE MORE THING

– It’s so hot my garlic took all its cloves off.

– Where do bad rainbows go? Prism – it’s a light sentence but it gives them time to reflect.

Thanks for reading and for once again putting up with my lame jokes. Until next week, avoid knuckleheads, laugh a little and always question authority.

“Properly Subversive” is commentary written by Sherman R. Frederick, a Nevada Hall of Fame journalist and co-founder of Battle Born Media, a news organization dedicated to the enhancement and preservation of community newspapers. You can reach him by email at shermfrederick@ gmail.com.