Is stopping people that suffer from chronic pain from getting painkillers any more legitimate than stopping them from getting abortions?

I agree with the author about this. Indeed, I have a friend who suffers from pain that incapacitates per, and perse can't get enough painkiller for every day of the month, which results in a few days each month when perse can't get out of bed.

Some lawyers call for impeaching the bullshitter for his bogus national emergency.

There are plenty of grounds to impeach him. That won't result in removing him from office, because the Republicans in the Senate will protect him. So impeaching him now would be a political gesture -- which could be useful or not, depending on what it would politically achieve. I can't judge that question.

A new AI program can generate coherent-sounding bogus text following the style of a sample text.

It is much more coherent than what the bullshitter says.

Clever hacks are permitting users of iMonsters to break Apple's censorship and install patched versions of malicious apps, turning off some of the malicious functionalities.

This is a step forward, ethically, but it does not make them ethically equivalent to free software.

"Protecting" students from the extremely rare danger of a shooting in school is cited as the excuse for surveilling and tracking them all the time in school.

This surveillance would be used to shove some of them into the school-to-prison pipeline. If extended to all US schools, it could wreck tens of thousands of lives each year.