A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

h/t Silicon Graybeard

Great space tech post at SiG's site. RTWT.

That graph is the picture.
Here's the thousand words.

Space-X, in six years, has CRUSHED everyone else, pushing China, Japan, and most of everyone else but a small Russian ability, and the ESA, completely out of the orbital launch market.

Like to nearly the "Game Over" stage, for all commercial intents.

I did not realize that until I saw the graph.
(This, folks, is why we read other people, because it makes us smarter. I mention that in case you only had a Common Core education.)

And the only reason they haven't done the same for manned launches is because NASA won't certify their vehicles for manned launches. IOW, NASA is subsidizing the Russian monopoly on manned launches in preference to home-grown absolute capabilities. This would be like the FAA telling Delta they could only fly cargo. (And whoever that sumbitch responsible is at NASA, he needs firing. If he's civil service, I'm sure he can be de-rated down to janitorial staff at that Australian space monitoring station, for life. More on Oz in a moment.)

What NASA is doing is the worst aspect of Democrat-pushed crony capitalism.
What Space-X is doing is how monopolies monopolize constrained only by the invisible hand of the free market, and why monopolies per se aren't necessarily a bad thing.
The same thing happened with railroads, and over time, they not only consolidated, but also lowered the cost of transporting goods and people from Point A to Point B, which benefitted everybody.

Not least of which, people named Vanderbilt, Carnegie, et al.

People (rightfully) give Elon Musk a lot of $#!^ for sucking off the government's teat when it comes to the Tesla, which he makes at a loss every time he sells one, and wouldn't exist at all without massive government subsidies. (Thanks Pres. Obozo: You built that!)

If Musk would leave the cars alone, and focus entirely on the rocket business, and the NASAtards would GTFO of his way, we'd be colonizing Mars and the Moon before I die, and turning a profit at it.

I noted a few days ago that we put men on the moon in less than a decade after Pres. Kennedy said we would. And we did it with transistor technology, before microchips. So in light of that, I don't think asking for a paying moon colony by 2050 is too much to ask.

Even if it's only to provide a penal colony, and a place to repatriate the Moonbats back to their native land when they reach Peak Stupid, and can't help themselves but transgress.

Don't laugh; look what the British Empire did with their reprobates.
Oz hasn't turned out too badly, now has it?

It may even turn out that by 2200 or so, when we launch NCC-1701, that Khan was actually the great-great-great-great grandson of the current mayor of London.
Wouldn't that be a hoot!

Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!

Odds are 2000:1 in favor that we can successfully clone Shatner by then, and the circle will be complete.

In Case Anyone Was Wondering...

Yes, I had a bit of fun today, a tad more than usual.
Thanks for linking, dropping by, and/or commenting.
Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
And btw, the graph of yesterday's activity resembling my hand gesture to the Left for passing four decades is purest coincidence, I swear.

9th Circus Discovers Second Amendment: Angels Sing!

h/t Minuteman News

For a record-breaking second time in as many weeks, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals seems to have discovered the long-missing amendment heretofore undiscovered by them, and apparently hiding somewhere between the right to free speech, and the one about not quartering troops in private homes. Almost as if it was actually in the US Constitution.

Closing majority opinion, Young v. Hawaii:

"the Second Amendment does protect a right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense."

This instantly invalidates multiple contrary and henceforth wholly unconstitutional infringements by state and municipal laws in Hawaii and Califrutopia, prohibiting loaded open carry to everyone entitled to possess a weapon legally, and restores the right of carriage and self-defense to the citizens of the nine states and two US territories within the scope of the Ninth Circus.

Details to be worked out after the momentary stunned shock wears off, on both sides.

Emergency decontamination and clean-up teams have been dispatched to Honolulu, Sacramento, San Fransh*tco, and Los Angeles, to mop up the residue of several thousand exploded heads at city halls, city councils, police departments, and the state legislatures when this was announced a short time ago.

(Cue the obligatory knee-jerk "blood in the streets" yammering from both Paradise, and Gomorrah By The Bay in 3,2,...)

Hawaii may decide to appeal this ruling and ask for an en banc ruling by the entire Ninth Circus, hoping the whole will reverse this three-judge panel, or else just lump it, and the ruling stands. IANAL, But as this decision was meticulously based on SCOTUS' rulings in Heller and MacDonald, getting the Ninth Circus to take it up again at all is an uphill row against long odds, given the likelihood of a sharp SCOTUS reversal if they did. Time will tell.

And Mr. Justice Antonin Scalia, smiling down on the court, was just given his wings in heaven, and announced, "It is good."

Just curious: Anybody out there tired of all this winning yet...?

Calm Down, Get Ahold Of Yourself!

Somebody somewhere, I'm not saying who or where out of politeness, seems to be having a hissy about the President "wanting" civil war.

If you stumble over it, I didn't send you there.

Team Lunatard, right there.


Option B: There is no “Blue Wave”. GOP keeps House and Senate this November, actually picks off a Senate seat or two, and the next day, Trump decides enough is enough, fires Meuller, Rosenstein, and tells Sessions to either start indicting people, or resign as AG as well.

In the ensuing 237 trials, including Obama, Shrillary, two former AGs, and all their minions, and after the House and Senate allocate the first $20B for the border wall,Trump then rides to re-election in 2020 with ease, and the GOP picks up 20 more seats in the House and 5 in the Senate. Ruth Bader-Communist has a heart attack, and Andrew Napolitano is confirmed to SCOTUS 69-30 in a week and a half.

Pres. Trump follows that by cutting all federal loan guarantees for college except for STEM programs, based strictly on merit and grades, and the college tuition bubble bursts nationwide overnight; millions of unemployed liberal professors suddenly have to get paying jobs as barristas and McDonald’s order takers. The military hits enlistment records. The downward pressure on wages compels Congress to drop the minimum wage to $6/hr. The Dow goes to 30,000.Threatened with nuclear annihilation, Iran agrees to stop screwing around, increases oil production for hard cash, and the Saudis respond by upping production to keep market share. Gas hits $2/gallon nationwide. GM and Chevy re-open three plants, and the top-selling car in America is the Chevy Gas-Guzzler, a 12-cyl. 6WD MRAP half-track with a front-end metal crusher that inhales Priuses (Priusii?) and shits them out the back end as little 2’x2’x2′ blocks.

The CDC drops opioid abuse, and starts investigating the sudden explosion of liberals’ heads in 50 states, as their entire empire starts to melt down.

Since we’re talking Fantasyland.

Go big, or go home.

More On Ms. Occasional Fame-Whoretez

 

Some people might mistakenly think I don't want to see her elected to a slam-dunk Democrat seat.

 

Au contraire.

 

While it would be best for all concerned if she gets jilted again when more than 9% of the overwhelmingly Dem district turns up to vote in November, by Rep. Joe Crowley, who she beat in the primary owing to abysmal turnout, who's still on the ballot for the same job on another party's ticket in the same district (and is, let's remember, a ten-term incumbent Democrat congressman, on the House Ways and Means Committee, with 20 times her political war chest, still) I think the best thing for the republic is if she wins despite all that, and that as often as practical before and after the election, she gets the maximum amount of media exposure possible for her goofy half-witted excursions into making America communist.

 

Mad Maxine and Alzheimer's Pelosi aren't going to be in Congress forever, so it's important to give voters a good close look at the Democrat Party, by having a lunatic airhead and avowed socialist outspokenly rubbing their noses in it, good and hard, pretty much 24/7/365.

 

Enter Srta. Avocado Chiquita-Bananas.

 

Better still, if she wins, it proves that the Democrat voters of the NY 14th can't tell a thorough-going moron when they hear one, gives them a functional retard in Congress for two years, and their opinions, valid only for their own representation, merely subject them to the scorn and derision of provinces less inclined to insanity, and given advocacy by a not just a misfit, but a novice socialist one. That'll play in Washington D.C., hoo boy how it will. She'll be one the subcommittee on napkins of the commerce committee, and in two years, some serious Democrat politician will shove her forcefully back to bartending. Game over.

So no matter whether she wins or loses, it's bad for Democrats and great for the country.
And I, as well as both political pundits of greater magnitude, and every talk show comic writer from coast to coast, will be praying for her victory pretty much daily.

That, my friends, is what political scientists call "win-win".

¡Viva Ms. Cassandra Apostrophe-Catastrophe!

Moonbattery

h/t to Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man

History Calling...

Not Quite The Island Ambassador You Were Hoping For

h/t The Last Tradition

(NYFC Twaddler)A Florida congressman dismissed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “this girl” over the weekend — prompting a rebuke Monday from the 28-year-old who brought down Rep. Joe Crowley in a primary upset last month.

“You look at this girl Ocasio-Cortez or whatever she is, I mean, she’s in a totally different universe,” Rep. Ron DeSantis said on at a campaign stop on Saturday that was posted to YouTube.

“It’s basically socialism wrapped in ignorance,” the Republican said of the Democratic Socialist’s platform. 

Ocasio-Cortez responded:

“Rep DeSantis, it seems you‘re confused as to ‘whatever I am.’ I am a Puerto Rican woman. It‘s strange you don’t know what that is, given that ~75,000 Puerto Ricans have relocated to Florida in the 10 mos since María. But I’m sure these new FL voters appreciate your comments!” she tweeted.

Dear Evita Guevara-Castro:

Um, no, you're a New York girl whose mother is a puertoriqeuña. You're just an unemployed broke liberal socialist from the rich 'burbs of NYFC, with a Boston U. worthless liberal arts degree, carpet-bagging in the Bronx for a shot at suckling the government's teat direct from the source.

And word to your mother, when someone notes that you're a clueless idiot, it's probably not the best choice to endear yourself to your cousins in FL by blaming as the cause of your utter ignorance the land of your parent's origin.



In Latin Estupida puertoriquensis

Calling your ancestors and cousins back home ignorant may be accurate, and "socialism wrapped in ignorance" may also explain why that island is still a shambles nearly a year after a major hurricane, despite literal tons and billion$ of assistance, necessitating vast hordes of the former locals to flee its Turd World living conditions and century-plus endemic Democrat Party/socialist utter corruption to the comparative paradise of Florida, but nobody likes to be smacked in the face with the wet mackerel of their own stupidity.

Even some carpet-bagging airhead from up river, as your response demonstrates.

Well played, Ms. Asopao-Idiota.

Your unending self-parody is effortless brilliance, and it makes it nearly impossible to satirize someone who ceaselessly beclowns herself in the national media seemingly every single time she opens her mouth.

Except, of course, by simply reporting your utterances verbatim.

"How did I know you're that girl from the Bronx?
Just a lucky guess..."

Don't forget to reload when you run out of toes.
But try to stop shooting yourself in the foot with your foot inside your mouth.
It's going to leave a mark.

What Happens After Crossing The Rubicon

{WRSA linkers: If you got here because of a bad link there, the Z-Man blogpost you were trying for is here. I've e-mailed CA at WRSA, and I'm sure he'll fix it ASAP. If this is the post you were looking for, press on. - A.}

More thoughts on that last post, courtesy of comments:

"...I've never been that sanguine about Americans finally taking up arms against the Left. Maybe that's because I haven't grown up in military/gun owner circles and don't fully understand the readiness of those who have. But for the short term at least, I think the networking and the will for an extended conflict, like what Matt Bracken and others have portrayed, is lacking. The fact that so many of our "conservative" leaders are desperate to kowtow to Schumer Pelosi et al. at the first opportunity doesn't help."

No one sane on our side (and everyone isn't, sadly) wants armed open conflict, or is sanguine about it, least of all this author. Having been there first hand, the guy least enthusiastic about jingoistic saber-rattling is the guy riding the landing ship towards the beach. But ultimately, that's a bilateral deal, and the Left isn't even that sane. They don't just want it and fantasize about it frequently and publicly, they brag and gloat about unleashing it. Our side understands that sort of posturing as a precursor to it actually breaking out, because we, unlike they, understand human nature and the behavior of flawed human beings.

And/or the aggression rituals of chimps and apes, take your pick.

Verily, I know somebody running a gun store who once asked a teenaged idiot employee to stop playing around with an actual unsheathed samurai sword. Said teenager responded, "Make me" and raised the sword above his shoulder from twenty feet away, as if to indicate he was willing to open the ball. And found himself looking at the gaping muzzle of a cocked-and-locked .45 steadily pointed right at his face, by someone who's actually killed bad people before with one. That's the exact metaphor for what's going on with all the #Resistance horseshi*t now, except the "firing" and "termination" this bunch of teenaged-mentality idiots will get won't be anything as gentle as the one received by the former employee on that day.

They think they'll open the ball and "that will show us". Look at how they've thought everything they've done since Nov 9, 2016 - the bonafide World's Greatest Succession Of Failure Strategies, would "show us" that they were right, and we were all wrong, and Trump would miraculously not be POTUS anymore. This level of magical thinking, coupled with their actual adult abilities, is the equivalent of handing live hand grenades to toddlers. Both comedy and pathos will inevitably ensue.

As one of my drill instructors cautioned my group: "I see a baby, I'ma throw a grenade at dat baby. If da baby blow up twice, da baby was booby-trapped."
It was hilarious, and totally contrary to the letter and spirit of the Marquess of Queensbury Rules concept of "The Laws Of Land Warfare" amidst a rather grim period of basic training, but the lesson that sometimes even babies can be lethal, and what happens after that is just tough nails, was nonetheless one of the grimmest reality impressed upon us about the truth of war: you get the conflict you get, not the one you imagine, and then you do what has to be done to survive and win it.

Our would-be, now disdained and mostly discarded "leadership" of milquetoasts is the reason the Left is such a problem in the first place, and also the reason Trump is the president now. Had they manfully opposed utter socialist nonsense when it was far cheaper and easier to do so, they would not now find themselves in the role of political appendix, and about to be removed like a wayward and infected organ.

And when conflict, near inevitably now, breaks out, they will be overtaken by events, overruled, the lucky ones simply voted out, the hangers-on even bum-rushed and whacked over the head, and it'll be nothing but wartime consiglieres after that, until happier times.

Observe the derangement and fall of former icons like George Will et al for how that works out in reality. Once a voice of deep-running reason, now an aging and senile embarrassment to everything he once stood for, a caricature in utter foolishness and petulance, and a short step from non-existence. Only the leftards propping him up as a shill gives him even a soapbox at the present time, and he's considered a sad reminder of no one as much as Neville Chamberlain, who fails to understand that it's 1940 again, and he was as wrong as wrong could be, not about everything, but only everything about the most important thing.

The current Left is, metaphorically, re-arming against the Versailles Treaty, occupying the Rhineland, annexing the Sudetenland, rounding up Jews and dissidents, and happily dividing up Poland. (To modernize the parable, this time their co-conspirator is Islam and the Turd World, they themselves being actual Mussolini, actual Hitler, actual Tojo, and actual Stalin simultaneously. Oh, and BTW, Mike Godwin can once again kiss my ass. Calling Nazis, acting like Nazis, Nazis isn't Godwin's Law: it's quaintly been known as "Reality" for at least 6000 years of recorded human history.)

The Left have shown no ability to function any longer in the prior peacetime model, nor can grasp the most basic concept in a democratic republic of taking their lumps, learning the  lessons of those lumps, and waiting their turn again, should it ever come. They're not only doubling down on their Stupid, they can't believe it didn't work the last time, and now they've completely jumped the shark, and have decided that since their manifest fitness to rule was denied, war must be declared. They have spent the last nearly two years angling with every fiber for the Harper's Ferry or Fort Sumter moment to finally instigate the conflagration, and they take every predictable fresh failure as nothing but an excuse to try again, "More, harder, faster!"

Conditioned by a long tradition of Phony War and appeasement, and the faux "conservative" ilk that would institutionalize it, they think they'll merely have to shoot a couple of egregious examples, and then we'll all similarly retire to the fainting couch, and acquiesce to the destruction of our entire society and culture, and its cheerful re-imagining in the model of Lenin and Stalin, because they delusionally fantasize "this time, we'll make communism work!"

They won't realize the magnitude of that error until we firebomb Dresden. Some of them still won't figure it out walking up the gibbet steps at Nuremburg once it's over.

Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

I'm not sanguine about conflict starting, but once it does, I want the response to be to remove the instigators not just from power, but from existence, once and for all. The half-stepping victories of 1918 and 1991 only taught tyrants that if they just endured, they could come back again and have another go. If you're going to fight a war, it has be 1945, or the Third Punic War: turn their capitol to rubble, burn the sand into glass, leave no stone on top of another, kill their men, enslave their women, cheerfully dash their babies' heads on rocks, slaughter their livestock and salt their fields, that they might never, ever trouble sensible and peaceful humanity again.

When you abide by the rules of peaceful exchange of power, as we have in this republic for 229 years, when you lose, you get to go back to your mansion, sulk, and get book deals and speakers' fees, or bide your time for the pendulum to swing. But if you tried to win by going to guns, you're not going back to the villa afterwards, even if you only preened about "bombing the White House", or mock-beheading the President for a cheap laugh. You lot doing that, if you get the war you dream of, are going to get dragged out of your houses by your hair, strung up to a nearby light pole by whatever length of cable is handy, or simply shot in the head, if folks inclined will even waste the bullet.



Change your moonbat rhetoric, or we'll open your minds, 158 grains at a time.

Only then will you realize that some people ought to have been left alone.

Neither the Carthaginians of old, nor liberal idiots of today, seem adept at learning that lesson.
Learning it properly will only require one lesson, and that one will last the rest of their brief lives.

This won't be Appomattox Court House: once you get the Right out the door with weapons in hand, what follows will see the Democrat Party as the Nazi Party circa 1946. What will happen to survivors and relatives will make Manzanar and even Auschwitz look like summer church camp by comparison. You heard it here first.

What Selco, FerFal, and others who've been there get right is that meltdowns are gradual, and far more brutal that what prepper doom-porno fantasies think they'll be.

What they get wrong is that once you move this body politic to war, the ensuing conflict will do justice to Antietam and Gettysburg, except with the weapons and sensibilities that created Dresden and Hiroshima. This is a nation of over 300M people, with nuclear weapons and a military whose annual budget dwarfs that of the next ten nations, year over year, and 60% of the weapons held in private hands, in the entire world. It is not Spain in the 1930s, or Zimbabwe, former Yugoslavia, Argentina, or Venezuela. Scale your expectations up, good and bad, accordingly.

It is in the nature of wildfires to get away from people, and a cultural society-wide civil (it will, in truth, be anything but) war of absolute survival will not stay a well-tended backyard trash fire, but sparks will fly, winds will swirl, and pretty soon, the whole damned forest will be gloriously and fearfully ablaze, and the only thing that controls it then will be what's left to burn, and when a merciful heaven sends a rainstorm.

Nothing less.

Wrap your heads around that.

People thinking in terms of a limited conflict, or any sort of happy, civilized divorce and secession, are whistling past the graveyard, and about as bright as those who talked about waging "limited" nuclear warfare. I'm here to tell you they're stupidly misinformed at best, and deranged at worst.

And no one will be blindly foolish enough to think they've achieved some personal unbreachable Maginot Line to contentedly sit behind, and wait until The Problem arrives on their own doorstep. When they hear that "It's on!", they're more likely to go out looking for people to tear up. And they won't come home again until they're either out of ammunition (including rocks and pointed sticks), or they cannot find any more.

Imagine throwing a lit road flare into a western US forest some windy day, and tell me what you'll have in half an hour. That is what happens once you cross the line from political struggle to enforcing your will through force of arms, or attempting such.

Don't believe me, though.

Ask the Caesars.
Or Genghis Khan.
Napoleon.
William Tecumseh Sherman.
Mussolini.
Little Adolph.
Tojo.
Mao.
Castro.
Ho Chi Minh.
Saddam Hussein.
The Taliban.
And a countless legion of lesser examples of the phenomenon.

Poll the city fathers of Carthage, Jerusalem, Atlanta, Warsaw, Nanking, Hiroshima, Saigon, and Fallujah about the idea of "limited" conflagrations.

That's what lies at the Von Clausewitz transition between politics and other means.
Every. God-damned. Time. Forever.

But the dirtiest brawls are bar-room brawls, and the bloodiest are always those between friends and family. The individual exemplars we all know illustrate the tendencies of the group rather succinctly.

As they will in this case.

You might think that after Lexington, Bull Run, 1914, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, and countless other ball-openers, folks would learn that conflict at the civilizational survival level isn't "one quick volley, a whiff of grapeshot, and then glory", with brandy and cigars afterwards in the drawing room, nor are the "troops home by Christmas". Ever.

Once it opens, people in that sort of struggle will not fight until they can't, but rather until you can't. And usually because your bloody charred remnants can no longer pull themselves together to attempt another blow.

Never do your blood enemy a small injury.

Okay, Lunatic Leftards: challenge accepted.
"Tell the sheriff that his posse had best be well-mounted, and to leave the married men at home."
Call that toss in the air.

What Will It Take To Start A Domestic Conflict?

h/t "Sam Culper"

From today's germinal post over at Forward Observer:

"Here’s the key thing about our future conflict: it won’t be a conventional war. We’re not talking about tanks in the streets or bombing insurgents into submission. The combatants of tomorrow won’t take part in pitched battles of maneuver warfare, but they’ll engage in what we’re already seeing:

• political warfare
• economic warfare
• information operations/propaganda
• cultural/class war
• sporadic political violence

In other words, our war includes all the activities below the threshold of conventional war, but above routine, peaceful competition."

RTWT.

Von Clausewitz famously wrote,
"War is a continuation of politics, by other means"

The reverse is also true:
Politics is a continuation of war, by other means.

As polarization, public revulsion, and loss after loss at the ballot box closes off the Left's political options, (and given that they aren't the most rational, stable, and patient bunch to begin with), they have and will continue to push beyond mere political solutions, and use the means noted to wage the multi-front war they seem to desire from deep down inside.

As we learned from Guido the Killer Pimp in Risky Business, "In a sluggish economy, never, ever f--- with another man's livelihood..."

The Left will ignore that lesson, due to hubris, delusion and unmitigated stupid, and there will be pushback.

Unrest turns to boycotts turns to strikes turns to bombings turns to leg- and head-breakers, and that's here, in the United States, in still-living memory. (Knowing L.A. history pretty well, even for one of the few actual natives in that town, I was one day nonetheless rather astonished to find myself standing in front of, while on a film shoot in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on the backside of Paramount Studios' lot, a memorial crypt from the 1910 L.A. Times bombing, committed by leftist union thugs, with all the names of the 21 victims buried there on the large monument. Over a hundred more were injured by the blast. Anti-union Publisher Harrison Gray Otis used to carry a pistol everywhere and every day, because he needed it. Now the communists run the L.A. Times, and they all hate guns, editorially, and love leftists. That's another topic. But the Left's tactics haven't changed much in a hundred years, have they?)

But we don't teach history any more.

Ignorance, stupidity, delusion, and gullibility will be the midwives that bring about the birth of a hot war with multiple loci from those different asymmetrical warfare approaches, rather than a great classic conflict. And no one will be more surprised when it gets away from them, both by incompetence and malign design, than the Left.

Agitation turns to shouting turns to shoving turns to punching turns to shooting.
It's true when psychotic patients escalate in the hospital, it's true during police confrontations, and it's true in mob actions. Except in the last case, with less reason or accountability, once groups descend to mob mentality. People that start out from a basis of irrationality and incivility don't give birth to calm, considerate discussions of issues.

We're already regularly at Stage 4 and occasionally Stage 5 in that continuum, above.
People who've experienced it describe personal financial disaster as happening "Slowly at first, and then all at once." The meltdown of society probably isn't going to be a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 sort of moment. It's going to be the more frequent,  shorter, and sharper escalations, leading to greater amounts of violence, until suddenly anything, everywhere, turns into maximum meltdown.

At that point, I suspect the biggest crowds with diversity will be the worst, and the places with near-parity the likeliest flashpoints, i.e. all the places where big red areas rub up against those little blue islands on the political maps, or those closest to a true 50/50 split. Mostly- and all-red or all-blue spots probably won't be as bad, though woe to those in the minority in either case.

Matt Bracken's "Bosnia times Rwanda" quote applies.

Those are the political fault lines I see.

Zip codes, neighborhoods, blocks, streets, house-by-house, and door-to-door.

That red-yellow-green-blue map may become a lot more important, at least in the faultline areas.
Just like the no-go areas in Eurostan, it always takes a certain amount of diversity to make a mob, and then it just wants a leader or three, a push, and a spark.

It might be in five years, or five minutes.
But don't think for one minute that it cannot happen here, or that it magically won't.

The main mystery now is when, not whether.

Just One More Thing...

Here's Your "Opioid Crisis": CDC Confirmation

(CDC MMWR July 13 2018) Fentanyl and fentanyl analogs are increasingly involved in opioid overdose deaths, and new fentanyl analogs continue to be identified (1). Carfentanil, the most potent fentanyl analog detected in the United States, is intended for sedation of large animals and is estimated to have 10,000 times the potency of morphine (2). It has recently been reported in an alarming number of deaths in some states. Ohio reported nearly 400 carfentanil-involved deaths during July–December 2016, and Florida reported >500 such deaths for all of 2016 (3,4).
CDC funds 32 states and the District of Columbia (DC) to abstract detailed data on opioid overdose deaths from death certificates and medical examiner and coroner reports through the State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS). Twelve states began reporting in August 2017, and 20 states and DC will begin reporting in August 2018.* CDC analyzed trends in overdose deaths testing positive for carfentanil and other fentanyl analogs during July 2016–June 2017 in 10 SUDORS states (Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Wisconsin).^† States abstract data on all substances (both opioids and nonopioids) that contributed to death, as well as all substances for which the decedent tested positive.^§
During July 2016–June 2017, among 11,045 opioid overdose deaths, 2,275 (20.6%) decedents tested positive for any fentanyl analog, and 1,236 (11.2%) tested positive for carfentanil. Fourteen different fentanyl analogs were detected.^¶ Among overdose deaths with fentanyl analogs detected, the analogs were determined by medical examiners or coroners to have contributed to the death in >95% of deaths.

Exactly as I explained to you in a series of posts* way back last September, and now confirmed by months of multi-state research from the CDC, the only "opioid crisis" is more junkies dying from using garage-brewed fentanyl analogs.

Not from Doctor Feelgood writing too many narcotic prescriptions to Ma and Pa for chronic pain control.

Almost like I work at the bleeding edge of that problem, and might, perhaps, have some vague idea of those subjects upon which I speak. Oh, wait, that's exactly what I do.

In short, this is nothing but Darwinism in action, as the current home-cooked get-high concoctions are so strong, Narcan (the antidote of choice for plain old heroin) is too little, too late, so a generation of smack addicts is checking out with a smile on their face, and the needles still sticking in their arm.

Boo frickin' hoo.

I doubt you could find much sympathy for that problem nationwide, even if you dredged with concertina rolls. Even from the nexts-of-kin.

It also shows that the Clinton Foundation-sponsored calls to hype (you should forgive the pun) everyone to stock Narcan, down to pre-school first aid kits, won't do Jack or Squat to help the problem either.

Wait - the Clintons lying for...personal financial gain?? STOP THE PRESSES!!

Just kidding. What else would Clintons do?

If people won't learn not to try that sh*t, go ahead and let them have what they wanted.
The problem self-corrects in one dose, then solves itself forever.

If, however, you'd like to summarily execute the importers, garage-lab drug cookers, and dealers on sight, I have little or no problem with that.

It would also make it a lot tougher if you couldn't get the crap here, because the wall from San Diego to Brownsville was 20 feet high, and everyone trying to get into the country got the same level of groping, X-rays, and cavity searches the TSA routinely applies to handicapped children and 70-year-old Swedish nuns at the airport, while they're allegedly looking for Muslim terrorists.

I don't know everything about everything.
But what I do know about the things I know makes my analysis on it surer than most people's "facts".
Especially when there's a buck to be made in it, for the people selling baloney as steak.



* Linkage: 
Medical Statistics I
Medical Statistics II
Medical Statistics III
Proof Of the Point

It's Not Nice To Fool Mother Nature

h/t Kenny

Public Psychosis Department:

(Diversity Navy via WaPoo) A biological female who transitioned to become a male is experiencing the other side of the gender coin, and is being accused of committing what feminists allege are male behavior sins.
“I was an outspoken radical feminist,” before transitioning, 52-year-old San Diego resident Zander Keig told The Washington Post Friday.
Keig now works as a clinical social work case manager at San Diego’s Naval Medical Center. She started transitioning in 2005.
She told WaPo that she was encouraged to speak up loudly and often when she was a woman, but now that she looks like and identifies as a man, she gets accused of “mansplaining,” “taking up too much space” or “asserting my white male heterosexual privilege,” by outspoken feminists like her former self.

Sorry Snowflakes: It doesn't matter if you take buckets full of hormones, or even have a surgeon do an addadicktomy, you're never going to "transition" to being a man. She's a male like Rachel Dolezal is black, or Elizabeth Warren is Indian: it's merely a form of untreated psychosis.

"Hello, Cultural Appropriation Police? I'd like to report a crime..."

It's a free country; you can even deny reality.
You just don't get to avoid the consequences of denying reality. Which, in this case, is her feminazi friends not liking her, because her denial cuts into their fantasies, and steps on their toes.

The question of her sex was settled for this loudmouthed whackjob 53 years ago, in the womb.

That reality is harsh, but it's always fair. She can claim any one of 57 genders she wants, but she doesn't get to lay off her personality disorders and rampant psychosis on the one thing she knows nothing about, firsthand: the male sex.

So even though she doesn't really have one, she's just guilty of being a dick.

And now she's finding out the hard way it's also not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.

Somebody should tell her to transition back: loudmouth pushy androgynous women are about as rare as white on rice, in most cities, especially in 'Dago. Even more so on board a Navy base. She'll fit in just fine there. If it makes her feel better, she can even still dress like a grown-up tomboy, and no one will care.

They'll just have to deal with the reality that she's really just an ugly overbearing butch lesbian, rather than a dude, and she'll have to take responsibility for her own actions, instead of trying to blame her attempted adopted gender.

 

Wakanda Is Real



Wakanda is real.
Don't go to South Africa, or South Central, if you have no business there.
True since 1965.

Color me shocked.

“LAPD advised our on the ground leadership that LAPD could not guarantee the safety of any protesters, and strongly advised that the protest not be held because of the danger.  LAPD added that if a riot occurred, and we were attacked, the LAPD officers would withdraw and we would be on our own.   
Given the high likelihood of lethal force violence (steel pipes and baseball bats to the head are clearly lethal force), and out of concern for the safety of other peaceful protesters such as the MAGA Girls, our advance team leader, Johnny Itliong, made the decision to cancel the protest.”  – Stewart Rhodes

(LOS ANGELES) –  Exercising your 1st Amendment rights is fine with the radical left, as long as your point of view mirrors theirs. 

If it doesn’t, you may be struck in the face with a bicycle lock, or have a brick tossed at your head in the name of fighting fascism.
Recently, California Democrat Maxine Waters proclaimed that she fears “armed protests” from members of the Oath Keepers , a non-partisan group with chapters nationwide.
Before the peaceful protest even began, members of Oath Keepers were threatened with physical violence and faced the scenario of facing counter-protesters who were armed with bats and lead pipes.The kicker, the LA Police informed the more peaceful of the two groups, Oath Keepers, that they could not guarantee their protection.

Told ya so.

Word to your mother: NO police agency can guarantee anyone's protection. It's not their job to be lifeguards for those of you in the shallow end of the gene pool. At best, they'll try and keep things civil, but when you throw on your meat suit and do a cannonball into the shark pool after pouring in a few buckets of fish blood, you're on your own...Chum.

If this is news to you, get back on the short bus, and go back to sampling the flavor of the windows.

Keep your stupid @$$tards out of the 'hood, and stop playing dumbass street theater games in places you don't belong, shouldn't play, and have no chance of doing anything but embarrassing yourselves. Exactly like you did.

And if you're such f###ing rank amateurs at this sort of thing that you couldn't figure this out before stomping all over your own dicks with baseball cleats by announcing the protest first, then doing some basic research, and then publicly having to chickenshit-cancel because you were overcome by hubris and near-terminal stupid, until some bare modicum of common sense belatedly kicked in, you're not tall enough for this ride, and should seek some adult supervision, immediately. "Ready! Fire! Aim!" hasn't worked as a strategy since the Chinese invented gunpowder.

+1 point for belatedly having a moment of clarity, -50 points for being such stupid f##ks you announced the idea in public in the first place. Minus another 50 points, because you had a week or two between Mad Maxine's Meltdown and your announcement to do some due diligence before even thinking about announcing this sort of jackassery.

Well played, Oaf Keepers. ROWYBS. This is why we can't have nice things.

Maybe next time, talk to your "on the ground leadership" before walking out in public with your heads that far up your fourth point of contact.

Just a thought.

I only mention it because the light in my refrigerator is brighter than this.

Good News, Bad News

Another Left Wing Success Story, Right There

 full size

 

I have to admit to a guilty pleasure following the tulipomania surrounding the current candidacy of Evita Guevara-Castro, current room-temperature-IQ darling of the people that brought every disaster to befall this republic in the last 116 years.

 

Democrats' knee-jerk line is always that Republicans/conservatives are stupid.

"Goldwater was dangerous and stupid."

"Nixon was evil, dangerous, and stupid."

"Reagan was stupid and dangerous."

"Bush (41) was stupid, evil, and dangerous."

"Dubbya was stupid, dangerous, and evil. Oh, and really stupid."

"Trump is stupid, evil, and dangerous."

 

It's really the only card in their hand when dealing with conservatives.

 

I'm thinking that says more about Leftards' self-projections and delusions than about objective reality. But I'm not a psychiatrist.

 

Leftards, on the other hand, as the name implies, are only called stupid by the Right because of two things:

1) what they say, and

2) what they do.

 

Now, let's be fair, there have to be some smart liberals, somewhere.

Right?

Right??

 

 

I'm saying this based on statistical averages, not any actual evidence.

 

Because all I can think of is the wit and wisdom of Chuck U Schumer. Dianne Fineswine. Al Frankenstein. Nancy Pelosi. Babs Boxer. Jerry Moonbeam Brown. Mad Maxine Waters. Charlie Rangel. Keith Ellison. Stupid Hall-of-Famers Joe Biden, and of course Al Gore.

(The moment, between election and inauguration, where criminal-elects Gore, Fat Bill, and Shrillary were on a tour of Monticello televised on C-SPAN, and Algore looks up at the busts of Washington, Franklin, etc., in Jefferson's study, and he asks "Who are those people?" as Clinton all but face-palms himself over Gore's incredible stupidity, was pure comedy gold. And almost permanently memory-holed in about 0.2 seconds, except for one guy.)

 

 

Stuff like that is why Brilliant Democrats is in the Top Ten of World's Thinnest Books.

 

Ms. Ocarina-Piñata is right in line with that rich tradition, stumbling over basic answers to softball questions on statements she made in the first place last week on NPR's Firing Line (which, fortunately for her, not even Bronx Democrat voters probably watch, ever.) Her rookie mistake, when she was sincerely and politely asked by a socialism-friendly interviewer to clarify her babbling incoherency, was to actually attempt an answer.

 

Bill Clinton would have molested the interviewer, Biden would have groped her after a hilarious malaprops, Shrillary would have fallen on her face and blamed the faulty chair and some obscure film on YouTube, and Pelosi would simply have given the most sincere impression of having a stroke as anything since her last televised press conference.

 

Instead, Ms. Obrador Chavez-Maduro chose to brazen it out using raw honesty, and after nearly choking on her tongue and stammering for a minute or two, cheerfully announced she didn't know sh*t from shineola, because in the immortal words of Gwen Stefani, "I'm just a girl!"

 

To be fair, when asked why unemployment was so low, she savaged President Trump by sagely noting that it was because "most people have two jobs." For a socialist, this is perspicacity that's off the charts. As someone unlettered in economics, especially from the likes of Boston University, I was under the impression that people having jobs is the exact defintion of low unemployment. In other news from the frontiers of economics, hunger is down too, because most people eat three meals a day.

 

And though the camera can lie - by only telling part of the story where it's aimed, and hiding everything behind it - this interview is one of those times when television shows you everything, painfully, if not actually showing too much. Watching her verbal paroxysms as she struggles to make a coherent point, and fails over and over, one cannot but realize that Ms. Acapulco-Paella is not only manifestly unqualified for Congress, or even to be merely a congressional page, but must also inevitably confront the clear truth that even when she was only bar-tending, she was probably still fathoms beyond her depth.

 

Despite her demonstrable affirmative-action graduation from a supposedly prestigious university, and making the rounds of the Usual Suspects' lib-whoring shill platforms with the harpy crones on The Spew, and on Colbert's late-night unhinged whinging rant-fest, solely due to her professed and unabashed love of a form of government that would round those same hosts up and throw them all in gulags (and has!), just being that blisteringly stupid is not necessarily an absolute bar to winning a congressional seat, even for such mental ciphers as Ms. Che Avocado-Salsa. But speaking of bars, her sole employment success to this point, a mere seven years after graduating college, after squandering a couple of hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer-provided money - which is definitely great job experience for any potential congressweasel - is what gives me the greatest hope for the future of America.

 

That best argument for the robust survival and certain triumph of capitalism over socialism, is that even in 90% liberal NYFC, adopted land of her upstate suburbia carpetbagging  candidacy, no one in a position to hire people would put this babbling brainless twit in charge of anything more difficult to operate than a beer tap, in her pitifully few years since she attained legal majority.

 

Without affirmative action, and the optimistic forbearance of the committee in 1787 that thought 25 years of age was old enough to serve a term in the House of Representatives, she'd be cleaning houses with her mom, and probably not even doing it as well as mama does, instead of having nothing else to fall back on except Congress.

 

 And surely there must be some federal job she's better qualified for than one of the 545 positions total, as an actual Decider and policy-maker for the republic, in a nation of over 300,000,000 souls. All I'm saying is, there are dozens of VA hospitals, for instance, where her janitorial cleaning abilities and mental talents would be a much better match. Maybe even a McDonald's on a military base where there's a vacancy running the register at the drive-thru window, and she could use her formidable prior talents with the choices narrowed down to three sizes and a dozen drink options. But if the bar for getting into Congress, even for dim-witted Democrats, is going to be just being young and latina, couldn't you guys try going for smarter, more talented, more accomplished in life, and even prettier, by nominating Shakira, Jessica Alba, Jordana Brewster, or Penelope Cruz?

 

Just saying.

 

But hey, NYFC liberals, thanks so much for the laughs.

If you didn't want politics to be this funny, you wouldn't keep sending in the clowns, right?

Saturday Leftover Puttering

Some baked at home, and the rest stolen from around the internetz...

 

 

Happy Peak Of Western Civilization Day

Forty-nine years ago today, and just a few hours from now, is the exact anniversary of when 50,000 steely-eyed missile men, crew-cutted geeks with pocket protectors, test pilots, fighter pilots, and hundreds of metric tons of raw testosterone kicked the rest of the world's ass right to the bottom of the heap, going back to the dawn of time, from the moment that Eagle landed, to when this guy's foot stepped off the LEM ladder.

Neil Armstrong, ace X-15 test pilot, and mission commander of Apollo XI, became the first man from earth to ever set foot on the Moon, and if and until we ever get people to Mars, he put every explorer in history, and even every guy to follow, below him on what Tom Wolfe correctly called "the top of the pyramid."

He was there because he and his sidekick, lunar module pilot, and outside-the-box revolutionary thinker Buzz Aldrin

had managed to land the lunar module manually*, off course, and with mere seconds remaining for landing before a crash-tastrophe, because you don't fly 250,000 miles to puss out at the last 12 seconds, just for such piddling concerns as running out of fuel.

Meanwhile, as command module pilot Michael Collins

was searching the Moon's surface from lunar orbit to spot whereinhell (or rather, where in the Sea Of Tranquility) Eagle had actually landed, Armstrong and Aldrin were running through checklists and getting ready for the culmination of the combined effort of tens of thousands of people at NASA (back when they had a purpose, and a clue) and hundreds of thousands of contractors and subcontractors, all accomplished to make the trip possible, less than a decade from Kennedy's speech promising we'd do it.

Because that's what Americans do.

There are countries that use the metric system, and those that have landed on the Moon.

It wasn't until 8 years later, with the lackluster premiere of uber-mediocre science fiction government conspiracy trope film Capricorn One in 1977 (James Brolin and O.J. Simpson as heroes in that movie should have been the tip-off there), after the moon landings had all concluded, that any one of countless hordes of fruitcakes started seriously espousing the idea that we'd somehow magically faked the landings, necessarily including hundreds of thousands of people, from NASA, to the Russians, to every country with a radar, as being somehow "in" on the hokey asstardian imaginary conspiracy suggested, and all agreeing to STFU about it. Until it was cleverly revealed by people showing how they did it, using special effects and video technology completely unavailable anywhere in 1969. Well played, lunatards.
Occam's Razor alone slashes the throat of that nonsense, but some of these former alien seekers, bigfoot hunters, and Loch Ness monster fisherman still cling to their flat-earth retarded psychosis, despite the fact that people were regularly bouncing laser beams off the reflectors placed there in during the Apollo missions to prove the lie of such nonsense,

and the mental illness persists today despite even recent high-res fly-by photography of the lunar surface that has photographed the sites of all the lunar missions, including spotting the astronauts' footprint tracks and the tire ruts from the buggy explorations of later flights, and spotting the pieces of our space leftovers from altitude, right where they're supposed to be.
Because, as news to a previous America-hating president, we built that.

But you can't argue mentally defective lunatics out of a position with reason and logic when they didn't use that to get there in the first place.

The inescapable truth, for those sane enough not to fart simply to smell their own tailwinds, is that we went there, as the only nation that could, and the one that did, and the glory of that belongs to those who did it, for all time.



America haters at home and abroad: This is what it looks like when patriotic geeks
 cut loose and freak out. So you losers can suck it.

But on the day, that summer Sunday afternoon in 1969, when Armstrong stepped out the door to rendezvous with destiny, there wasn't one single car on the streets, anywhere. I was there, and I went outside, and I saw it with my own eyes, kids, from a house just up the street from where Rocketdyne made the Saturn V engines that took us there, again and again. 
Nothing outside moving, anywhere. Not. One. Single. Person.

Every single human on the planet with access to one was huddled in front of black-and-white or color TVs, back when TV had those choices, and each holding their breath waiting for the moment that the cream of 1969 video technology broadcast the shadowy moment to the waiting world.

Not Adidas. Or Nike. But totally made in America, baby.

Of the only twelve men who've ever walked on the Moon, only four remain alive today, including Buzz Aldrin. Neil Armstrong passed away at age 82, nearly six years ago.

But they, the other astronauts (and even cosmonauts) who made it possible, and the other men and women who built the machines and the systems that allowed us to conquer space and take our first steps on another spinning orb, deserve the eternal glory and thanks of the entire world, both that was and that is, for fulfilling such a primal urge, and manifesting the best and brightest of human destiny.

We need to go to Mars, and beyond that, because that's what we were made to do.
We plan, we measure, and we accomplish, because we have minds to think, imaginations to soar, and dreams to fulfill, always beyond that next horizon.
And we're only at our best when we're doing just exactly that.

We came in peace for all mankind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*{My thanks to Ian for the clarification in comments. -A.}