Posts Tagged ‘heroin’

Joe Rogan and Michael Shellenberger Discuss How and When San Francisco Became A Shithole

Saturday, October 23rd, 2021

So how San Francisco become the homeless, crime, drug and feces-plagued wonderland that it is today? Michael Shellenberger (an author and journalists who has argued for technological solutions to environmental problems) discusses with Joe Rogan how it came to its current state.

Some takeaways:

  • San Francisco has always been friendly to illegal drugs, and in the 1800s it was the last city to shut down opium dens.
  • The movement (well-intention) to treat pain with opioids.
  • When that was restricted in 2010, a lot of opioid addicts switched to heroin.
  • After that came fentanyl, which is much easier to overdose on than heroin.
  • Meth was (is?) a separate epidemic.
  • Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in 2011. “The activists just gave the tends to the homeless.”
  • “Women are rapped in those camps, mentally ill people are taken advantage of, people overdose and die, people are killed when you can’t make payments on their drugs, drug dealers stabs you with a machete. These are really violent, dangerous, terrible places. You get hepatitis from all the feces.”
  • “Progressives have badly misled people into thinking this is a problem of high rents.”
  • “The idea that all black people are victims is a racist idea.”
  • LinkSwarm for May 28, 2021

    Friday, May 28th, 2021

    Like inflation and unemployment, crime rates are rising again. Biden is really the 1970s gift that keeps giving!

  • Democrats are weaker than they appear:

    Vulnerable red- and purple-state Democrats need some bipartisan cover if they’re going to vote for another massive spending bill. And Biden would prefer to have a unified Democratic Party blaming Republicans for the inability to come to a consensus than to have a divided Democratic Party with one side of the Senate caucus blaming the other side of the Senate caucus for the inability to come to a consensus.

    Chuck Schumer is largely bluffing when he says the Senate will pass an infrastructure bill in July, with or without Republicans. Democrats can go down this path, but it’s a risk that at least a handful of their senators don’t want to take, and when the Senate is split 50–50, the Democrats can’t afford to lose anyone. Those with long memories can remember when Democrats were convinced all the legislation they passed in 2009 and 2010 would protect them in the midterms.

  • Speaking of Democrats in trouble, rising violent crime rates are another thing that might doom them in midterm elections:

    A rise in violent crime is endangering slim Democratic congressional majorities more than a year out from the midterm elections and threatening to revive “law and order” as a major campaign issue for Republicans for the first time since the 1990s.

    Homicides in cities increased by up to 40% over the previous year, the biggest single-year increase since 1960, a trend that has not abated so far in 2021. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one category of violent crime, ranging from homicide and rape to robbery and assault, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Homicides and shootings have gone up for three straight years in Washington, D.C., and at least a dozen mass shootings were reported nationwide over the weekend.

    Democrats’ flirtations with defunding the police — a handful of lawmakers on the Left nearly scuttled a $1.9 billion Capitol security bill in the House — may make them ill-equipped to handle the reemergence of crime as a top issue for voters.

  • Speaking of rising crime rates, having Soros-backed Democratic District Attorney Larry Krasner overseeing Philadelphia has helped create the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast:

    Mirrors are useful. A hooker walking down the street can easily fix their makeup. They can lean on them when they nod out too. In addition, when a heroin addict has no more veins left to inject in their arms, that mirror can help them find one in their neck.

    It’s kind of hard to inject a needle in your neck otherwise. Think about it.

    You’ll eventually get a sideview mirror ripped off your vehicle sooner or later. It generally happens as they nod out or “dip out” when the drugs kick in. When they slump towards the ground, they generally just take the mirror with them.

    You also become way to comfortable with people “dipping out”. It’s the local dance craze around here. As heroin takes effect, it’s almost like they fall asleep on their feet — slowly getting ever so close to the ground. Miraculously, they rarely hit the pavement. Many yoga masters couldn’t duplicate their prowess.

    Dippers are everywhere. It’s so common, YouTube has endless clips up and down Kensington Avenue; many have hundreds of thousands of views. A YouTuber named “HoodTime” has over 5 million views on a walk he captured through Kensington March of this year. Many others are following suit.

    Just walking through Kensington and filming gets you instant material. There’s always something to see here. It’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re in America or a third-world nation at points. But money hides in trash and addiction.

    As Mike Newall explains in his article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, some of the drug corners near where I work pull in over $20 million a year. He also quotes Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro as saying Kensington’s drug trade is close to a billion dollar a year enterprise.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.) There are ways to decriminalize drugs that don’t give a pass to widespread “quality of life” offenses. merely ceasing to prosecute people for open criminality doesn’t make the problems that open criminality engenders go away.

  • Even Ezra Klein says that rising crime rates are a threat to Democrats. Gee, I must have missed him expressing such concerns when antifa and #BlackLivesMatter were burning down large swathes of American cities last year…
  • In news of the Biden recession, both both inflation and unemployment picked up in April. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he opposes teaching critical race theory in the state’s public schools, calling the ideas pushed by its advocates as ‘based on false history’ and ‘teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.'” Good.
  • Kurt Schlichter: Bring on the ‘Asperger’s Republicans’:

    Far too many Republicans, for far too long, have found themselves distracted and/or enslaved by the elite consensus, restrained by norms and conventions that the liberal elite demands we observe, but that it itself flaunts when those rules limit its options. These Fredocons care what people who care nothing about them think, and they find themselves responding to the outside stimuli of the garbage mainstream media instead of focusing intently on conservative change while disregarding the slings and arrows of the haters. When it comes to fighting the establishment, political Asperger’s is indicative of awesomeness.

    And our next generation of Republicans needs to embrace their place on the Spectrum – the more inappropriate the liberal elite finds their reactions to its cues and signals, the better. No more tame, pliable sissies like Mitt (R-ish – Miracle Whip). No more of Nikki! Haley’s sucking up to the establishment while trying to grift the base by leveraging hack conserva-cliché’s from 2005 to present to us as hardcore instead of Jeb! in a dress. No more Kristi!s and Asa!s fronting as all tuff about men pretending to be girls to win races then folding the second the establishment disapproves. Instead, we need GOP politicians who are utterly immune to the siren song of a media and an establishment that seek to draw them in and crash them upon the rocks. Our pols need to ignore MSNBCNN and its hysterical horsehockey. They need to stop reading the NYT and WaPo and being scared that a bad write-up will get them uninvited to all the cool parties. They need to lock onto their target and take it out like an Israeli missile flattens a Hamas/AP frat house.

    Look at Ron DeSantis – he just doesn’t care what the bad guys say. Not at all. They scream that he won’t enforce face-diapering, that he’s too hard on election fraud, that’s he’s declared open season on those Antifa/BLM nimrods who trap normal citizens in their cars on public roads, and then DeSantis just goes ahead and does what he wants anyway. And it works – he’s super popular.

  • Also weighing in against Critical Race Theory: Austin Knudsen, Montana’s Attorney General.
  • How Democratic foreign policy “experts” are projecting their own failures on Jared Kushner:

    For the past four years, there was no greater laughingstock in the American foreign policy cognoscenti than Jared Kushner. A full-on consensus reigned that cast the previous administration’s Middle East policies as hopelessly ignorant and one-sided, a view that went unchallenged in the smart set’s Op-Ed pages. There was no easier laugh to be had, no quicker way to pull a nodding agreement, than to mock the intelligence and good will of the former president’s son-in-law, charged with crafting an American peace plan, and obviously in way over his head.

    But the Young Pretender in charge of the Mideast portfolio is gone, and the mommies and daddies are back in charge, their think tanks falling over each other producing glossy full-color booklets promoting policies that would bring to bear the priorities of people who actually understood a thing or two about Israelis, Palestinians, international law, justice, and most importantly, American strategic interests.

    And four months into the methodical implementation of all the bright ideas reflecting off those glossy booklets, the situation on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has taken a dramatic turn for the worst.

    Though Kushner is long gone, this latest conflagration has been laid at his feet. His name trended on Twitter for days as hostilities between Israel and Hamas escalated. “They really put Jared Kushner, the slumlord millionaire who couldn’t properly fill out security clearance forms, in charge of Peace in the Middle East. Failure was inevitable,” read one viral tweet. “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed” blared the headline to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column.

    This is not just wrong; it’s complete projection. Kushner-era policies—on Jerusalem, UNRWA, and regional diplomacy—were promised again and again to lead to an “explosion,” but didn’t. The return of the experts was supposed to improve lives and prospects for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but hasn’t. In fact, it was the foreign policy intelligentsia’s values and vision that have led to disaster.

    Back in March, mere weeks into the new Biden administration, a leaked internal State Department memo outlined the contours of a new direction on American policy toward the Palestinian issue. The document called for renewed diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority, restoring aid that had been cut, renewing American contributions to UNRWA, putting pressure on Israel for moves in Jerusalem that would make a new Palestinian Authority election possible, and pursuing a two-state arrangement based roughly on the pre-1967 lines.

    These were all priorities of the smart set miffed by a previous administration that was too close to Israel for their tastes. But they were also terrible ideas. Take the renewal of UNRWA funding. UNRWA is the U.N. agency dedicated to perpetuating, rather than solving, the Palestinian refugee problem. By cultivating the myth of a non-existent “right of return” rather than rehabilitating displaced persons and their descendants, UNRWA ensures that a negotiated two-state deal cannot be reached.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Drew Holden takes us on a trip down memory lane of various MSM talking heads declaring that the Wuhan coronavirus lab leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory,” including all the usual suspects (New York Times, CNN, etc.).
  • “Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Tuesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unfairly raised prices and hurt innovation.”
  • Glenn Greenwald: “A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”
  • “Moms Demand Action [AKA another branch of the Brady Bunch Hydra] member-turned-congresswoman in hot water over bribe.” Allegedly newly-elected Illinois Rep. Marie Newman bribed opponent Lymen Chehade to drop out of the race, then reneged on the cushy congressional job.

  • “Support for Black Lives Matter Movement Collapses Among Whites and Hispanics, Drops For Blacks.” The only question is why it took so damn long, when it’s been obvious for a long time that it is radical marxist garbage.
  • Christian teacher suspended after opposing the district’s transgender doctrine. “The teacher, Byron “Tanner” Cross, made the defiant declaration at a Loudon County school board meeting on Tuesday, according to the nonprofit group, Parents Against Critical Race Theory.”
  • Ted Cruz gets Biden ATF director nominee David Chipman to admit under oath that he wants to ban the AR-15. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Speaking of Ted Cruz: Israel has a right to defend itself.
  • “Hunter Biden’s Ukraine salary was cut two months after Joe Biden left office.” What a curious coincidence!
  • China Warns Australia’s Military Is “Weak“, Will Be “First Hit” In Any War With Western Alliance.” Knowing Australia, this is far more likely to piss them off than make them cower. Maybe Australia should develop it’s own nuclear arsenal…
  • CNN hits new lows. I suppose I should clarify that’s new ratings lows… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Screwed up even by the standards of Baltimore.
  • Politifact tries to fact check The Babylon Bee yet again. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • IDF stats:

  • Interesting: Higher reasoning functions wake up first from anesthesia. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Enjoy the original video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”.” A very different sound mix as well.
  • If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day Windows would run Linux apps, I’d give you a funny look. But that appears to be happening. “New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL.” That’s “Windows Subsystem for Linux.”
  • Now you’ll finally get a chance to read John Steinbeck’s werewolf novel.
  • “Public School Teachers Issue Students Their Summer Book-Burning Lists.”
  • “Newsom Announces Sweepstakes Where 5 Lucky Winners Get To Move Out Of California.”
  • A vicious pack pulls down its pray:

  • Three Cheers for Drug Legalization

    Tuesday, November 10th, 2020

    Let’s take a break from election results to look at an election result: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs:

    Oregon became the first state to decriminalize small amounts of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs on Election Day, according to New York Times’ Thomas Fuller. In South Dakota, Montana, Arizona and New Jersey, voters chose to legalize recreational marijuana. Mississippi also adopted an initiative to create a medical marijuana program for patients with debilitating conditions.

    These Election Day results effectively mean cannabis is now legal across a broad swatch of western states, from Arizona to Montana.

    Due to Oregon measure 110, the possession of small amounts of harder drugs like heroin and cocaine will now amount to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. It is no longer punishable by jail time. The Oregon measure passed by 60 percent of the vote and serves to help treat people with addictions rather than giving them jail time.

    “This is the most significant reform in our nation’s failed drug policies in a generation,” The Executive Director of Drug Policy Alliance Kassandra Frederique told Washington Post’s Jaclyn Peiser. “It’s particularly significant because most people don’t realize that drug possession is the number one arrest in the country.”

    Reasons this is a good thing:

  • The purpose of government is not to protect people from themselves. Ending the war on drugs should theoretically free up resources for police to go after more important crime. (That is, if lunatic leftists don’t defund the police.)
  • Clearly previous drug war policies have not ended the problem. It’s time to try something else.
  • The states are intended to be laboratories of democracy. Let Oregon legalize hard drugs and let the other states observe results. Maybe things will get better (it’s possible crime may be lowered if there’s more jail space and resources to fight more serious crimes), and maybe they’ll get worse (Portland can become the junkie capital of the world).
  • Speaking of which, in a totally self-interested view, I think Austin residents should let every homeless adler know that Oregon has now decriminalized drugs…and provide them with bus schedules from Austin to Portland.
  • However, decriminalization is only a halfway measure that doesn’t break up illegal drug cartels, doesn’t prevent minors from getting hooked, and does nothing to prevent junkies from continuing to commit property crimes to continue feeding their habit. Legalization and regulation of the drug trade are the far more promising avenues to reducing crime and drug abuse that simple decriminalization. There are myriad possible ways to test different carrot-and-stick measures (like legalized drug use licenses…but only for the employed; welfare recipients need not apply) to see which works best.

    I fully believe that drug prohibition should be ended at the federal level because it’s not an enumerated power of the federal government. Let each state decide its own approach to narcotics and look at the resulting data to see what policy mixture works best.

    Colion Noir on Dystopian Seattle

    Saturday, November 10th, 2018

    Colion Noir takes a look at deep blue Seattle’s rampant heroin epidemic, where citizens wake up every morning to find used needles littering their streets and parks.

    A few sobering takeaways:

  • Someone dies of a heroin or opioid overdose every 36 hours in King County.
  • Seattle gave homeless junkies a small encampment to live in. Result? 103% increase in area crime.
  • Jewish cemetery had problems with addicts and prostitutes, so they hired security guards. Suddenly, city officials took notice…of people having guns. “Jews with guns? Can’t have that!”
  • The police want to enforce the law, but elected official won’t let them.
  • “Seattle stopped enforcing their own laws.”
  • “I lived in New York under Giuliani, and I watched the broken windows thing in action. It showed how you can clean up a city.”
  • “MS-13 has moved into Seattle because they know no one is going to do anything about them.”
  • Homeless people walk into the local supermarket, grab stuff off the shelf, and walk out, and employees are instructed not to intervene.
  • “If you want to be a criminal, Seattle is a very good place to be.”
  • Keep in mind that the last Republican Mayor of Seattle was James d’Orma Braman, who left office March 23, 1969.

    LinkSwarm for October 26, 2018

    Friday, October 26th, 2018

    Greetings from Austin in October! The skies have finally cleared to deliver some beautiful autumn weather, but we’re still required to boil our water due contamination from the massive rains.

  • The Fort Worth Democratic Party fraud ring we covered Wednesday has widened:

    A former Democratic Party official is accused of funding an organized voter fraud ring busted earlier this month that targeted elderly and incapacitated voters in north Fort Worth.

    In court documents filed Tuesday, state prosecutors allege former Tarrant County Democratic Party executive director Stuart Clegg funneled money to Leticia Sanchez, one of four paid campaign workers arrested and charged with submitting false and forged mail-ballot requests in an organized criminal voter fraud scheme.

    The documents say Sanchez, her co-defendants, Clegg, and others collaborated to cast mail-in votes for down-ballot candidates in the 2016 Democratic primary “without the voter’s knowledge or consent.” The state claims Sanchez used funds from Clegg, now a campaign consultant, to pay her three co-defendants and others for their part in the illegal mail-ballot harvesting scheme.

    Sanchez, her daughter, and two other women are charged with a total of 29 felony voter fraud counts. Sanchez’s charges include one count of illegal voting and 16 counts of providing false information on a ballot application. The court notice filed Tuesday implicates Sanchez in hundreds more crimes for which she hasn’t yet been charged.

  • Cahnman notes how well Republicans are making inroads into Hispanic South Texas:
    • Strong Border Security positions help in November — While Hurd is a sometimes squish, Flores isn’t. That this is happening at the same time as Trump is doing what he’s doing (and the legislature is, however reluctantly, doing what they’re doing) tells you everything you need to know. If the GOP’s immigration position were “toxic,’ they wouldn’t be winning in Southwest Texas.
    • The Democrats are simply too liberal (esp. on Guns and Babies) — We’ve made this observation before, but it remains true.
    • The Failure to address Carlos Uresti has cost Democrats DEARLY — Another observation we’ve made previously. But all they had to do was do the right thing when either the financial or the sexual stuff came out. But they didn’t….
    • Southwest Texas REALLY isn’t into Bobby Francis — These are the same counties that he lost in his primary disaster.
  • Blue wave? Not so much.

    Think about it. You’ve got Hollywood, the media, the Tech giants and big education behind you. You’ve got tends of millions of dollars being spent in races all over the country and you and yours. you’ve got every possible advantage going your way. Add to that you and your allies are completely energized and engaged, literally counting the days until the election so you can defeat Donald Trump…

    …and you STILL lose.

    How will they deal with the realization that their anger, rage and panic over Donald Trump is not shared by the voting public?

  • Voting to confirm Kavanaugh may not be enough for Senator Joe Manchin, who is now two points down to Republican Patrick Morrisey in the state the voted for President Trump by a bigger margin than any other. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Chik-Fil-A more popular than Starbucks among teenagers.
  • “Americans’ support for a ban on semi-automatic guns in the U.S. has dropped eight percentage points from a year ago,” now opposed 57% against to 40% in favor. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked to know that Google’s male feminist executive ranks are filled with creepers. Some interesting details:

    Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms. The last payment is scheduled for next month.

    Also this bit of enlightened thinking:

    In a civil suit filed this month by Mr. Rubin’s ex-wife, Rie Rubin, she claimed he had multiple “ownership relationships” with other women during their marriage, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to them. The couple were divorced in August.

    The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”

    Our “moral superiors” sure seem to have a fetish for slavery…

  • Want to read something super, mega depressing? Here’s the New York times on the Walmart of heroin in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington.

    n the summer of 2017, when I first toured the area with Patrick Trainor, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, he called Kensington the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast. It’s known for having both the cheapest and purest heroin in the region and is a major supplier for dealers in Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland. For years, the heroin being sold in Kensington was pure enough to snort, but that summer, it was mixed with unpredictable amounts of fentanyl. In Philadelphia, deaths related to fentanyl had increased by 95 percent in the past year.

    Philadelphia County has the highest overdose rate of any of the 10 most populous counties in America. The city’s Department of Health estimates that 75,000 residents are addicted to heroin and other opioids, and each day, many of them commute to Kensington to buy drugs. The neighborhood is part of the largest cluster of overdose deaths in the city. In 2017, 236 people fatally overdosed there.

    Snip.

    In the early 2000s, Dominican gangs started bringing in Colombian heroin that was not only purer but much cheaper than heroin imported from Asia, which historically predominated. Kensington’s decentralized market kept competition high and prices low. Most corners were run by small, unaffiliated groups of dealers, making the area difficult to police; if a dealer was arrested, there was always someone there to replace him. The Philadelphia prison system has become the largest provider of drug treatment in the city. The police have realized that they can’t arrest the problem away, and they spend many of their calls reviving drug addicts with Narcan, an overdose-reversal spray. The D.E.A. focused on the high-level drug traffickers, not the guys working the streets, but the arrests did little to curb the growing demand.

    “They call this the Badlands,” Elvis Campos, 47, said about Kensington. “Good people are held hostage in their homes.” Campos, who moved to the neighborhood 22 years ago, lives on a small, crumbling block next to a demolished crack house. “I didn’t know about the drugs when I came,” he said. “I found the house, and it was cheap.” No one on his block used or sold drugs, he said, and his neighbors worked hard to keep it clean. But dealers were always around their homes trying to sell. “I tell them to leave,” Campos said. “I served in Iraq, and I think that’s why I’m good at telling drug dealers to get off the block.”

    Like Campos, many residents had come to Kensington simply because they couldn’t afford housing anywhere else, and though many expressed empathy for the users, they also wanted them to leave. People cleared needles off their lawns, their front steps and the sidewalks where their children played. Some wouldn’t go anywhere unless they were in a car, but a lot of families were too poor to afford a car. They organized cleanups, lobbied City Council members and state representatives and asked for help from church groups, but the problem seemed insurmountable. The drug market, institutional racism, joblessness and the ravages of the war on drugs in the ’80s left the community struggling. “You see everything here,” one female resident told me. “Overdoses, shootings, killings. We are exposed to trauma every day just living here. It’s constant.”

  • Were the “explosive devices” sent to several Democrats fakes? They may or may not have been hoaxes or false flags, but they are at the least very suspicious. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Chuck Todd’s theory? Russians!
  • “‘Segway Jeremy’ — a central character in the 2011 Wisconsin protests — has been arrested for trying to buy a lethal dose of radioactive material.” He’s a far left anti-police loon who ran against Paul Ryan in the 2014 Republican primary on a legalize weed platform. Via Badger Pundit, this is what he looked like back in 2011:

    And here’s his booking mugshot:

    If you’re trying to make the case that marijuana is a safe recreational drug, you’re not helping…

  • Effective weapons for your planned high school murder spree: Guns, bombs. Ineffective weapons: pizza cutters. Do I even need to name the state? Bonus: Preteen girls who claim to be Satan worshipers. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig on Twitter.)
  • Interesting Essay on Anthony Bourdain’s Suicide

    Monday, June 11th, 2018

    I wasn’t going to write any more on Bourdain’s suicide because I haven’t actually read any of his books (just excerpts) or watched his shows (just clips).

    But this is a pretty interesting essay from one of Bourdain’s fellow ex-heroin users.

    Lets look at who Bourdain was – at least to me. To me, he was “one of us.” By that I mean those of us who were misfits who succeeded in spite of ourselves. Bourdain was very open about his prior drug use – not shy at all about it, in fact. He regularly dropped references to his prior heroin habit. I loved that about him. “Yeah, I used to shoot smack, and look at me now.” He was not a “say no to drugs” guy. He was a keep-on-raging guy, even if he did gain a high degree of responsibility in his older age. He let that flag fly, and in doing so, he sent signals to some of us who understood him on that level.

    Bourdain was not the kind of guy to get an honorary degree and then give a speech extolling the virtues of studying hard and working hard. Bourdain was a pirate. I can think of no higher praise than to call him that.

    After he died, a wise man (Julian Sanchez) wrote: “Very successful people often become successful because they are unhappy.” And that makes sense when you look at Bourdain. Nobody shoots heroin because they are happy. A demon chases you into that place. That demon talks to you. He lies to you. He tells you to go ahead and jam that needle into your arm, because you are different. It won’t hurt you because you’re different – and that difference makes you alone, and that heroin makes you forget about being alone. Not the “alone” like being in the house all by yourself. The “alone” someone feels while they are the center of attention in a huge crowd. That alone. That cold-alone that is more alone and cold than you’d be if you were strapped to Voyager One like a dark frosty vacuum-dried interplanetary hood ornament of freezer-burned meat. That alone that isn’t even black – because at least you can lose yourself in blackness. Blackness and darkness at least has quiet and tranquility. The real evil aloneness is grainy. T.V.-static-alone. That alone of “did I just hear something?” And you didn’t hear anything. You wanted to. You wanted to hear something so badly that your ears start creating sounds that make sense out of the static.

    The noise.

    Just. One. Fucking. Sound. That. Makes. Sense. Please. God. Fucking. Dammit.

    I’m not suicidal or a heroin user (ex or otherwise), but I too keenly feel the loneliness of crowds.

    Someone in the comments mentioned Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nail’s “Hurt,” which is as good an excuse as any to post the video:

    And here’s original songwriter Trent Reznor talking about the Cash cover and the video for it.

    And as long as we’re on the subject, neither the original nor the Cash cover are my favorite version of that song. This is:

    LinkSwarm for September 30, 2016

    Friday, September 30th, 2016

    Another Friday, another LinkSwarm. On a personal note, I am once again looking for a Senior Technical Writing position in the greater Austin area. If you have any leads in that direction, please let me know.

  • Polls show Hillary losing ground after debate.
  • Likewise, LA Times poll shows a slight bump for Trump.
  • Professor says there are 13 keys for an incumbent to lose the White House. By my count, Democrats suffer from just about all of them.
  • Minnesota, the only state to vote for Walter Mondale in 1984, is now a battleground state. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Democrats give up on Ohio. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Nineteen dead people registered to vote in Virginia. Yet more of that voting fraud Democrats swear up and down doesn’t exist… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Republicans cave on everything and leave town. But somehow it’s Trump that’s going to sully the spotless reputation of the Grand Old Party…
  • But at least congress overrode Obama’s veto of bill allowing 9/11 survivors to sue the Saudis 97-1. One wonders why Obama even bothered vetoing the bill, given how he had already stabbed the Saudis in the back with the Iran deal.
  • Blue Cross/Blue Shield drops out of ObamaCare exchange in Nebraska.
  • More illegal aliens on the way. (Hat tip: Praire Pundit.)
  • Two Maryland Democrats fight over which is more responsible over making Baltimore burn.
  • Chicago schools are boned. (Hat tip: The American Interest.)
  • Taxis vs. Uber.
  • Will Franklin of WILLisms put a lot of work into this school choice video:

  • Texas among four states to sue to stop the transfer of ICANN to an international governing body.
  • “Target Corporation’s transgender bathroom pander costing its shareholders billions.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Scott Adams think that the Middle East is just building a wall around the Islamic State.
  • Ace of Spades declares war on the Republican leadership:

    Apparently, some in this party really do think they’re going to hand the election to Hillary, and, bizarrely, they think this will bully the rest of us into knuckling under to their agenda in 2020.

    Rather than simply getting payback and tanking their candidate in return.

    This party is on the verge of self-destructing. The upper class of the party is upset that the lower class has finally had its say, and they’re determined that should never be permitted to happen again.

    Why then would anyone of the lower class ever vote for the GOP again? Are they required to sign a piece of paper confirming that they are Lessers who should know their place in order to have the privilege of voting against their own interests?

    He’s also turns his fire on #NeverTrump:

    we have a hundred people who claim to be #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary but, strangely enough, never talk about the downsides of a Hillary presidency. Oh, they’ll talk up how much of an authoritarian Trump is, but not Hillary’s sense of entitlement, grievance, vengeance, and her own history of authoritarianism and lawlessness in covering up her crimes.

    They talk all day about “Principles,” but discard the most basic principles — such as keeping a proven lawbreaker out of the White House, or just honestly admitting which candidate they’re actually supporting to their readers — as convenience may recommend.

    In fact, right now they’re howling about Ted Cruz’ “calculations” in endorsing Trump, while not admitting their own pose of “Being Against Both Equally” is in fact a completely contrived lie they’ve calculated will permit them to agitate for their candidate (Hillary) while not compromising their career prospects within Conservatism, Inc. too much.

    How much can I agitate for Hillary while still retaining plausible deniability?

    How much can I agitate for Hillary to appease my anti-Trump donors while still keeping enough pro-Trump readers that my anti-Trump donors will feel they’re getting enough eyeballs per dollar of their patronage?

    The party — not just the party;the writers who are supposed to have telling the truth as their first mission, but instead of become nonstop liars all the time decrying Trump as a liar himself — has declared war on all of the Lessers beneath their station, those not in The Media and who should, therefore, not have quite as much of a say in things as they themselves have.

    They’ve made themselves into exactly what they pretend to oppose — and exactly what I do in fact oppose.

  • Canada launches prescription smack. Part of me wants to see how the experiment turns out. And part of me wants to start offering junkies one-way bus tickets to the Great (China) White North.
  • Other Canadian craziness: Montreal to euthanize all non-owned pit bulls. Way to jerk those knees, French Canadians.
  • Navy changes the way it categorizes sailors.
  • Burning Man camp vandalized.
  • More of that vaunted liberal tolerance we hear so much about these days. “Kill yourself bitch.” (Hat tip: Will Shetterly.)
  • There’s a proper and an improper way to turn down an orgy. Proper: “No thank you.” Improper: Getting stabby. Don’t they teach kids basic manners these days?
  • I picked up some signed William F. Buckley, Jr. books cheap.
  • LinkSwarm for August 31, 2015

    Monday, August 31st, 2015

    Welcome to the final week of traditional summer. Of course, it used to be that everything (school, football, the new TV year, etc.) started after Labor Day Weekend, but that’s not the case any more…

  • “it’s cute to pretend that Black Lives Matter is actually about making policing better when it’s really just another Democratic party constituency agitprop group.”
  • Texas mandates E-Verify for all state employees.
  • Ten questions about the Iran deal.
  • Indeed, the Iran deal stinks so badly that even Debbie Wasserman Schultz wants to keep the stink of Eue De Failure off herself and the DNC. (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
  • Europe has begun to reform its welfare systems. (Hat tip Instpundit.)
  • Thanks to government efforts, heroin is now cheaper than cigarettes in New York City. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • McCarthy critic turns out to be a Soviet spy. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • UK Labour leader candidate Jeremy Corbyn: Apologist for oppressive dictatorships.
  • Oh, and he wants to give the Falkland Islands to Argentina. Why, it’s almost as if the hard left yearns for nothing so much as undoing every conservative foreign policy triumph out of spite…
  • And he also called Osama Bin Laden’s death “a tragedy.”
  • Criticizing Muslim antisemitism? That’s a $750 fine in Denmark.
  • Widespread street protests in Kuala Lumpur over corruption and embezzlement by Malaysia’s Goldman-Sachs-underwritten Prime Minister.
  • Still another reason not to use Ashley-Madison: “For every 7750 men, there were 3 women.” “Sausage Fest” doesn’t even begin to cover it…
  • Speaking of sausage, San Antonio woman steals $3000 worth of sausage.
  • Conservatives push back on victimhood identity politics guidelines from the College Board and win.
  • Austin Bag Ban backfires. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • A look back at 1945 plans for the invasion of Japan. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Ten years of Tam.
  • I Guess He Wasn’t Faking

    Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

    From Dwight comes word that Amado Pardo, Austin Restaurateur, convicted murderer, Democratic fundraiser, and accused heroin dealer has died. Last week I reported that he was in a coma and released to hospice care.

    Obviously he won’t stand trial February 11 on the heroin distribution ring charges he was facing (though his wife has already plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute a controlled substance).

    Amado Pardo: Murderer, Restaurateur, Heroin Dealer, Democratic Fundraiser

    Monday, July 9th, 2012

    Dwight has been all over the story of Amado “Mayo” Pardo, owner of South Austin Mexican restaurant Joviata’s, who just happens to be a two-time convicted murderer (a third murder charge was dropped as part of a plea bargain for the first) and the accused leader of a heroin-dealing ring.

    He’s also a noted fundraiser for the Democratic Party.

    I have not been able to find any direct political donations at the state or national level for Pardo (and the Travis County website doesn’t seem to have a way to search for individual donations, only rank upon rank of PDFs), but Jovita’s seems to have been the site for numerous liberal and Democratic fundraising events:

  • Democratic Candidate for Travis County Tax Assessor Collector Candidate Bruce Elfant had a fundraiser there May 15, 2012
  • An event benefiting PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth) was held there April 26, 2012.
  • Democratic Candidate for Sheriff John Sisson had a fundraiser there March 27, 2012.
  • The “Million Musicians March for Peace” had a pre-march event there March 4, 2012.
  • The Travis County Democratic Party had a fundraiser there October 19, 2008.
  • The Texans for Peace group had a fundraiser there June 7, 2008.
  • Far-left anti-war group Code Pink had a fundraiser there June 1, 2008.
  • The Statesman article mentions fundraisers for Democratic State Representative candidate David Rodriguez.
  • There are more, but you get the idea. If these people were just renting Jovita’s as a venue, fine and dandy. But if they were specifically approaching Pardo to hold fundraisers for them, perhaps a bit more due diligence was in order on the part of the Austin Democratic establishment? The Austin Chronicle named him “Mayor of South Austin” in 2009. Here’s their profile of him, also from 2009, in which discusses his reading Marx and his love for Cesar Chavez, but omits his two murder convictions. How could he spend two decades hob-nobbing with Austin’s liberal community and no one bothered to find out that not only did he have two murder raps, but the FBI believes he had been dealing heroin for 25 years?

    Of course, Pardo hasn’t been convicted. Instead of a heroin-dealing convicted murderer and liberal activist, he may only be a convicted murderer and liberal activist…