patrick.net

Just a drop in the pond of endless tragedy brought to you by the drugging down of the worlds citizenry

Thanks, PhRMA!

"Bild am Sonntag also reported that investigators found evidence that Lubitz feared losing his eyesight apparently because of a detached retina. However, it was unclear whether this was due to an organic failure or psychosomatic illness, when physical problems are thought to be caused or aggravated by psychological factors such as stress.
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Bild am Sonntag also reported that Lubitz’s girlfriend, a teacher at a secondary school in a small town near Duesseldorf, recently told students that she was expecting a baby."

Co-pilot ‘planned to marry pregnant girlfriend’, claims German report

I wonder if he bought insurance and named the girlfriend and child as beneficiaries, and, if so, will they collect?

"Before he plunged a plane into the French Alps, Germanwings Flight 9525 co-pilot Andreas Lubitz feared he was going blind and went to see dozens of doctors, a French prosecutor said Thursday.

German police searching Lubitz's apartment after the crash found prescription drugs to treat depression and anxiety. Robin said he has ordered toxicology tests on the co-pilot's remains and is still awaiting results."

I have observed a disturbing trend in many commercial "news" outlets to blame German privacy laws. They seem to want rationalizations to take away what tiny fig leaves of privacy and dignity humans might have left. That isn't necessarily conspiratorial, only the sort of non-conspiracy that Noam Chomsky has described many times, where these institutions and the people running them pursue their own self-interest, and cultural norms form around them. One might call it a manifestation of "the single standard," i.e. different rules for those in power vs everyone else. From that POV, the problem is that the pilot's employer, his corporate master, didn't have enough personal information about him, and should have had a right to know everything about him.

The real problem is that those drugs don't work. Even the manufacturers' own cherry-picked studies show 90% failure. They bury those numbers in a haystack of advertising, but if you look at the actual prescribing information, it's right there: 10% of patients "benefit" vs placebo, the other 90% don't, while more than 40% experience toxicity. And, again, those are cherry picked numbers, sometimes from "rescue countries" where the manufacturer paid somebody to rescue a drug that had proven totally ineffective. This is part of why I call Obamneycare a cult. It's a new religion, and people want to believe. They want to be part of a community of faith. They don't want to believe that they are going to die someday no matter how much they spend; they want to believe there are "no lifetime caps." Trying to tell an Obamanaut that most of the money goes to waste, fraud, and abuse is like trying to tell a Moron that the cult of Moroni doesn't need tax exemption or more donations. Instead, Obamneycare insists on infinite spending, which means infinite incentives to peddle whatever form of denial they can sell. With so much lucre available, the body count scarcely matters; the only question being how to conscript more people into the machine; as it was in the Viet Nam war, so it is with Obamneycare.

In fact, some of the symptoms Lubitz described sound like side effects of the Rx drugs he was taking, especially after his prescribed dose had been recently increased. (The WaPo, aka the Voice of Obamneycare, said he had "upped" his dose, but due to the Rx mandate he would not even be allowed to do that without permission from a paid PhRMA salesman.) This was not an issue of privacy at all: he told dozens of people about his problems. The issue was, nearly all of those people were paid to put him on more pills, so the more problems he told them about, the more pills he got. Even those closest to him were part of a culture sadly conditioned by that mentality.

Nobody seems to have told him that those pills don't work, and more likely make matters worse. Nobody seems to have told him he could have had a successful life in a different line of work, e.g. as a test pilot or a drone pilot or practically anything other than a commercial pilot. I wonder if he was even warned that many of those drugs double the risk of suicidality, especially in young people; he was only in his 20s.

I mourn the loss of Robin Williams, and I can't help suspecting the Germanwings passengers and crew might have lived if the co-pilot had got better advice.