Category: Flotsam and/or Jetsam

Catchall for whatever doesn’t fit elsewhere

ACAB

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Off the pigs.

Dallas cops laughed after disabled military vet was denied restroom, urinated on himself
A Dallas veteran said he was wounded while deployed but officers refused to review his medical paperwork.

Dallas’ police oversight office is investigating four officers caught on video laughing about a disabled military veteran who urinated on himself after he was denied access to a restroom at a Deep Ellum restaurant.

The Dallas veteran, Dynell Lane, told oversight members two uniformed off-duty Dallas police officers working security at Serious Pizza refused to review his medical paperwork around 2:15 a.m. June 10 after employees said he couldn’t use the restrooms.

Lane, who said he was disabled while deployed for the U.S. Army, called 911 but officers didn’t arrive in time. He said he had a urine and bowel leak issue and left the restaurant.

Dallas police’s internal affairs division — which handles administrative reviews — found the officers did not violate policy. Police spokeswoman Kristin Lowman said Tuesday “the department is looking into the complaint.” Asked if that meant the investigation was reopened, she said no. She did not elaborate.

After Lane left the restaurant, body-camera from one of two on-duty Dallas officers shows them enter Serious Pizza. They approach the two off-duty officers working security in their DPD uniforms. The on-duty officers ask about someone who reported “they pissed themselves.”

“So you guys made a guy pee himself?” one of the on-duty officers says, then brings a fist to her mouth as she laughs.

One of the off-duty officers smiles and says “yeah” and looks at the other off-duty officer, who appears to say “He called 911? He called 911?”

The officers say Lane called 911 about the officers, and one off-duty officer says, “He called 911 on us?”

The officers respond “yeah” and the off-duty officer yells “ahhh!” and slaps his knee as he laughs loudly. The other off-duty officer smiles.

“He got mad you guys wouldn’t let him use the restroom and then he calls back and said it’s OK he doesn’t need to pee anymore because he soiled —” one of the on-duty officers says before the other one appears to shut off their body camera.

Well hey, at least all these Dallas oinkers made it home to their families safely after going off duty, and that’s all that really matters for these “courageous” “heroes.”

They should all die in a fire screaming for their mommies, to most assuredly include the staff at the pizza dump who got the whole ball of shit rolling.

(Via GP)

Advice for the ages

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Bayou Peter offers some, and it’s truly great stuff.

Advice from An Old Hillbilly:

  • Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight and bull-strong.
  • Keep skunks, bankers, and politicians at a distance.
  • Life is simpler when you plow around the stump.
  • A bumble bee is considerably faster than a John Deere tractor.
  • Words that soak into your ears are whispered, not yelled.
  • The best sermons are lived, not preached.
  • If you don’t take the time to do it right, you’ll find the time to do it twice.
  • Don’t corner something that is meaner than you.
  • Don’t pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he’ll just kill you.
  • It don’t take a very big person to carry a grudge.
  • You cannot unsay a cruel word.
  • When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty.
  • Don’t be banging your shin on a stool that’s not in the way.
  • Borrowing trouble from the future doesn’t deplete the supply.
  • Most of the stuff people worry about ain’t never gonna happen anyway.
  • Don‘t interfere with somethin’ that ain’t botherin’ you none.

That’s a mere sampler, there’s plenty more at the link. Taken for all in all, it just goes to show that there really is such a thing as “timeless.”

Fucked around, found the fuck OUT

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The probable origin story of the well-known phrase.

What would happen if a local small time criminal, drug addict or gang member robbed a business owned by the Mafia or protected by them and even shot and killed or injured people bringing police and mob attention to themselves in the process?
These situations usually fall into one of two categories. The perpetrator doesn’t know the place they are robbing is mobbed up, or they do know and are just exceptionally dumb. Either way, the outcome likely won’t be good.

The various crews in the New York Mafia usually operated out of “social clubs.” The two best-known are the Ravenite and the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club. They were the HQ of Gambino capo and later boss John Gotti.

In 1992, Thomas and Rosemarie Uva were broke.

Thomas was an ex-convict, having done time for armed robbery. He and his wife worked for a collection agency but were not making ends meet. They decided a good way to remedy that situation would be to rob mafia social clubs.

Thomas had been a Mafia enthusiast growing up and knew that the people in the social clubs were usually unarmed, often carried large amounts of cash, and were unlikely to call the police. With this knowledge, Thomas devised a simple plan. Rosemarie would wait in the car while Thomas stormed into the club and robbed everybody at gunpoint. He then ran out, jumped into the car, and the couple drove off into the sunset.

The couple was confirmed to have robbed four social clubs, possibly as many as 10, targeting mainly those owned by Gambino and Bonnano crews. In one, Thomas forced the patrons to strip to their underwear when he robbed them.

That was likely the last straw. Both the Bonnano and Gambino families put out an open contract on the Uvas. They were to be killed on sight.

On Christmas Eve, 1992, Thomas and Rosemarie decided to get in some late Christmas shopping. At the intersection of 103rd Avenue and 93rd Street in Ozone Park, two men opened fire on their car. Rosemarie and Thomas were struck by three bullets each and died instantly.

In 2014, their adventures were made into a movie called Rob the Mob starring Michael Pitt, Andy Garcia, Nina Arianda, and Ray Romano.

Morons. That’s the kind of posthumous celebrity we could all do without.

Vegan sausage? WTF!!!

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Some people just can’t deal with being at the top of the food chain. Tough noogies for them, sez I.

The time has finally come when your intrepid food and cooking guru finally puts his money where his mouth is and tries those horrid, soul-killing, culture-destroying, taste-obliterating, post-modern monstrosities that are fake meat.

“Made From Plants.” That’s the full description of this “food,” (ie, Impossible™ breakfast sausage—M) which looked very much like some crap breakfast sausage that had been overcooked and was now rather dry and tough. “Made from plants?” So is steak and pork chops, and I don’t crow about it! But right next door was turkey sausage, which is also an abomination unto the Lord, so what did I have to lose?

A lot! My soul for one. My rapidly diminishing faith in Mankind for another. And more importantly, there was actual real bacon within arm’s reach!

Yeah…I chickened out. Maybe next time.

Heh. I see what you just did there, CBD, and I like it.

What’s always struck me as hilarious about all these “vegan” products is how their manufacturers always desperately (and deceptively) try to market them as almost exactly like bacon, hot dogs, ground beef, sausage, etc. If vegans want to eat meat so badly as all that, maybe they ought to just nut the fuck up and, y’know, eat some fucking meat then, instead of ceaselessly trying to convince themselves, you, me, and everyone else within arm’s reach that no, really, that flavorless, disgusting-looking, dried-out Not Dog or Fakin’ Bacon or whatthefuckever is just as good as the real thing.

Well, no, actually, it isn’t. Not even close. “Vegan alternatives” are usually overpriced, soy-rife, nutrition-bereft chemical compounds engineered and grown by scientists in a chem lab someplace. Do I like vegetables? Of course I do. But most of those Frankenmeats have precious few real vegetables in ‘em. Might not leave room for all that tofu, unnerstand.

Add in the cost of the family-size jugs of Beano you’ll have to buy and gulp down in handfuls to cope with the extraordinary bouts of ass-ripping flatulence those “vegan alternatives” bring on, plus the pallet-loads of Kaopectate to help you deal with the constant drizzling shits you’ll also be plagued by, and pretty soon that “healthy” alternative to real meat is going to put a serious dent in your bank account.

But hey, if it allows the vegan to feel all smug and superior to those barbaric, unevolved omnivores, then it’s a bargain at any price, amIright? Oh, and since I backhandedly mentioned evolution just now, wonder how those “enlightened” vegans explain away the fact that humans are equipped with molars, canines, and incisor teeth, hm?

All in all, I’m firmly and forevermore in my old friend Horton Heat’s corner on all this.

Analysis interruptus

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Proposition: America is no longer what it once was because Americans are no longer what they once were. Discuss.

The left isn’t wrong when they paint conservatives as natural enemies of “our democracy.” There is nothing conservative about the radically egalitarian system that governs the country, which turns politics into a race to the bottom, a game at which the left naturally excels. The left, in all times and places, has thrived on destruction and decay. The muddled, obese, foreign mass that is today called “the American people” has only a faint connection to the sturdy, adventurous Anglo-Saxons who founded the nation. Their values – freedom of speech, property rights, religious toleration, free enterprise – it is not surprising to find, are being trampled by the government we now have, which imposes tyranny from above with the support and legitimacy of “we the people,” or what has become of the people, below.

As the country degenerates, the left grows more and more extreme without ever paying a price at the polls. On the other hand, the right is under constant pressure to moderate an already liberal agenda in a futile effort to delay extinction. What passes for conservatism has retreated to the slippery redoubts of “parental rights,” platitudes about women’s sports and “nation of immigrants” pablum.

The ugly beast of socialism, led by the stalking horse of “democracy,” is killing America from the inside. Politics and culture revolve around the grievances of the weak and the envious. To speak of great projects, or even the low bar of sobriety in government, is an absurdity amidst the deafening cry for revenge against white men and the civilization they built. Our courts have been taken hostage by lynch mobs. Decadent judges showboat for approval from the crowd. Power is wielded with a heavy hand against the enemies of the revolution, while violent criminals roam free. No one in authority accepts accountability. The soul of “democracy” is captured well by the obscene spectacle of Donald Trump’s show trial, led by patently unqualified, racially aggrieved prosecutors.

Those who find the present state of things tolerable, or even good, will never be shaken out of their delusions. One cannot feel too sorry for them when they come face to face with the creatures vomited out of the belly of their beloved “democracy.” If there is any hope of leaving this cesspool of mediocrity and disorder, it lies not with soft and flabby conservatism, which has utterly failed to yoke its vision to an unwilling, degenerate nation, but a politics that is willing to raise the bar.

And there it is yet again: The only hope, the last hope, is “a politics that is willing to raise the bar.” Sweet Christ on a crutch, what does that word-salad even mean? In such an emergency as Real Americans now confront, can it be said to mean anything at all, in practical terms?

There’s some merit to be found here and there in what the author is saying, admittedly. Moreover, it’s too true that with the bloated central government we now groan under, a cautious circumspection about what one says publicly is certainly a good and neccessary thing, if only as a matter of simple self-preservation. In times so parlous, you can’t fairly fault a guy too much for stepping a bit lightly.

That said, I’m beginning to feel more and more as if I want to just go through my browser bookmarks with a weed-whacker, trimming away all the mealy-mouthed tapdancing around what we all know the central issues and options to be, so as to allay all the steadily-mounting angst, frustration, and heartburn this kind of thing causes me. I swear, if I never have to read another article wherein the author rocks it hard right up til the last paragraph or two, spraying the landscape with full-auto blasts of high-caliber Truth only to pull out and wave that flaccid “political solutions” pud around as if it was an insight to take pride in, I’ll be a much happier man for it.

If you’ve noticed of late that I’m wandering further and further afield from national politics and current affairs—for most of its existence the primary focus of this hogwallow—instead writing more and more on subjects like music, cars and/or motorcycles, military aircraft I dig, and such-like fripperies…well, now you know why.

MYOB, serf

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Know what quite possibly the best thing of all is about living in a free, open society? Gotta be the total transparency on the part of our dedicated, conscientious public servants, who always see to it that their employers are kept fully informed about what the government Of, By, and For The People is getting itself up to.

Regrettably, this is assuredly NOT that society.

IRS special agent killed at Phoenix gun range during training exercise
The FBI is investigating after a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service was killed at a gun range at a correctional facility in Phoenix on Thursday afternoon.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the shooting happened at the firing range at the Federal Correctional Institutional in Phoenix, located near Pioneer Road and Interstate 17 in north Phoenix. Aimee Arthur-Wastell, spokesperson with the FBOP, said the range was being used by multiple federal agencies at the time.

The FBI specified that the agent was there for “routine” training when they were killed, but didn’t offer specifics as to how the agent was killed or if anyone was in custody.

According to Phoenix police, officers who responded to the area found a person shot, later determined to be the IRS agent. The agent was taken to a hospital with serious injuries. It wasn’t immediately clear if the agent died en route or at the hospital.

According to Arthur-Wastell, no FBOP or firing range employees were injured.

“To preserve the integrity and capabilities of the investigation, details of the ongoing process will not be released,” the FBI said in a statement. “Findings of the FBI investigation will be turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Arizona for review.”

Phoenix police remained on the scene assisting the FBI, which took command of the investigation.

Arthur-Westell directed all inquiries regarding the incident to the Department of Treasury’s Office of Inspector General, which as of Thursday evening had not responded to a request for comment.

And there you have it—that’s it, the news “report” in its entirety, nothing redacted,  expurgated, or left out by little old moi. Not a jot or tittle therein of anything resembling actual information, other than  that one of our notional “employees” went to the range and then “was killed”—somewhere, somehow, somewhen, who really knows? Inquiring minds would surely wish to know more, but in Amerika v2.0, inquiring minds can just go suck themselves a fat dique for all their “public servants” give a shit.

From the notable lack of interest on the part of our dogged media establishment in pursuing things any further, one can safely assume that no Ultra Mega Mucho MAGA Americans© whatsoever were involved. As such, expect this story to disappear quicker’n lightning, no further elaboration sought or neccessary, as far as They’re concerned.

Multiple indictments of one Donald J Trump for causing this “tragedy” to follow, naturally.

Via Insty, who quips: REMEMBER, ONLY TRAINED GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS CAN BE TRUSTED TO USE FIREARMS SAFELY. Yes, if there’s any reasonable takeaway here, that would have to be it.

Ingrates

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Looks like them dang Injuns think they’re allowed to arrive at their own opinions or something.

Native American Group Threatens Boycott if Washington Commanders Don’t Change Name Back to Redskins
In a plot twist no one saw coming, a group of Native Americans is threatening to boycott the Washington Commanders unless they change their name back to the Washington Redskins.

The Native American Guardians Association (NAGA) posted a meme to its X account (formerly known as Twitter) with the message to “Educate not eradicate,” and wants the team to go back to its original name.

“At this moment in history, we are formally requesting that the team revitalize its relationship with the American Indian community by (i) changing the name back to ‘The Redskins’ which recognizes America’s original inhabitants and (ii) using the team’s historic name and legacy to encourage Americans to learn about, not cancel, the history of America’s tribes and our role in the founding of this Great Nation,” the letter said.

“Should we need to encourage a national boycott similar to what happened with Anheuser Busch (Bud Light) which is now down $27 billion (note, not one brick thrown, not one highway blocked, not one bridge burned) — WE WILL DO JUST THAT,” the letter continued.

The letter also warned that it would stand its ground because, if “you don’t acknowledge history, we are doomed to repeat it.”

Boy, the irony just doesn’t come any more delicious than that. In another note-perfect Tweet X Whatthehellever, the NAGA takes NY-state high school sports teams to task for the same thing, dubbing the sudden wave of PC-mandated name changes “the eradication movement.” Yep, you better just believe you’ll be seeing that one again around these h’yar parts, people.

SO, how’s that “get woke go broke” thing workin’ out for ya?

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For faltering retailer TarZhay, not too good. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes, if you ask me.

Target Sales Are Punished by Pride Month Backlash
Retailer lowers profit goal for full year; executives say they will modify Pride Month promotion

Target said shopper backlash over its Pride Month collection, as well as cautious consumers, pushed sales sharply lower in the most recent quarter.

The retailer said it expected sales to decline again in the current quarter and lowered its profit goal for the full year. Executives said they would still mark Pride Month next year but with a more focused assortment of merchandise.

“As we navigate an ever-changing operating and social environment, we are applying what we learned,” Brian Cornell, Target’s longtime chief executive, said on a call with reporters.

Yeah, from the looks of the radically-declining graph—DURING PRIDE MONTH!!!—included with the article, I’d say it’s best that you do. Note that the above link isn’t to the WSJ article, but to the safely paywall-evading archive.is snapshot thereof. You’re welcome.

Via Insty, who correctly calls it “Another example of the diversity problem within nearly all of our major institutions.” What can one say but, heh. Indeed.

Smackdown: DEALT

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The effete True Conservatives™ currently dragging Bill Buckley’s once-indispensable magazine through the shitlib sewer-pipe had the unmitigated gall to sniff, in the manner of Thurston Howell III, at Oliver Anthony’s smash song, and John Nolte is all over ‘em like white on rice.

This establishment elite is so above it all he dissects “Rich Men North of Richmond” lyric by lyric. Honestly, the best way to read these excerpts is in the voice of Thurston Howell III:

“Yes — it is a damn shame what the world’s gotten to. But we can fix it. We don’t have to just dream about it. Indeed, if we want to, we can fix it on our own even if Washington is standing in our way or looking down its nose at us,” lovey.

He also suggests Anthony remind everybody in a song of “what makes America a great land — a land of opportunity, not of guaranteed success,” lovey.

It gets worse:

My brother in Christ, you live in the United States of America in 2023 — if you’re a fit, able-bodied man, and you’re working “overtime hours for bullshit pay,” you need to find a new job.

There’s plenty of them out there — jobs that don’t require a college degree, that offer good pay (especially in this tight labor market) and great benefits, especially if you’re willing to get your hands dirty by doing things like joining the Navy, turning wrenches, fixing pumps, laying pipe, or a hundred other jobs through which American men can still make a great living. If you’re the type of guy who’s willing to show up on time, every time, work hard while you’re on the clock, and learn hard skills — there’s a good-paying job out there for you. Go find it.

What did the pedantic do before the Internet?

How out of touch do you have to be to rip apart a song that speaks to a disaffected group of people and says I get you, I hear you, I’m with you, you’re not alone, we’re in this together…? That’s what art does. The best art grabs hold of something inside of us and helps us to make sense of it. Art is firing on all cylinders when it examines and explains the human condition. All Oliver Anthony is doing is commiserating and reaching out to a group of people who feel they are under assault by America’s dominant culture because they are under assault by America’s dominant culture. He’s commiserating with us in the same way Sinatra commiserates with the lonely, Patsy Cline embraces the brokenhearted, Woody Guthrie speaks for the scorned, and the blues offer everyone a shoulder to cry on.

Hey, National Review. Why are you whining about a song? This is America, you crybabies, a land where you can write your own songs. You don’t need to sit around and wait for Oliver Anthony to write a song about how great America is–not in America. Why aren’t you pulling those bootstraps, showing some initiative, and writing the song yourself, my brother in Christ?

Finally, what’s interesting is how National Review failed to comment on this specific lyric in Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond”:

I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere

But that might be because National Review was publishing gushing articles about Jeffrey Epstein years and years after his conviction for procuring underage prostitutes.

What whores won’t do for a dollar.

But DAYUMMM, that one stung from all the way over here. Let ‘im up, John, I think he’s stopped breathing.

Flailing, floundering, desperate beer company self-beclowns AGAIN

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My grandma, bless her soul, had a wonderful phrase to describe this: They shit and fell back in it.

Budweiser Humiliated at Sturgis After Woke Company’s Stunt to Win Back Fans Epically Backfires
The punishing conservative boycott of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Bud Light brand continues unabated, as the beer giant was unceremoniously blackballed at a major motorcycle event it sponsored in South Dakota.

The grim situation was captured in a TikTok video by user CycleDrag, who posted shocking footage Tuesday showing tent after tent with row after row of empty Budweiser booths that had been set up to promote the beer.

The TikTok video was shared on Twitter by a user who noted that there were “ZERO attendees at the Budweiser tent in Sturgis. This may be the BIGGEST marketing blunder of all time!”

The no-show was especially jarring because Budweiser was an official sponsor of this year’s City of Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. So even when it lavishes money to woo customers to a free event, beer drinkers stayed away in droves.

Aww, what a shame.

Budweiser has actually been a Sturgis sponsor for about fifty years or so, if I remember right, and one of the most popular ones too. I’ve never attended the Black Hills Classic myself, although I always wanted to. I HAVE seen tons of pics, however, thanks to Easyriders magazine’s annual coverage of what is easily the biggest rally in all of bikerdom (estimated attendance: half a mill or thereabouts) back when it was still a biker rag, and in nearly every wide-angle event photo there’ll be a Bud tent, sign, or pennant flying in the breeze—literally hundreds of them, maybe even thousands.

Those days appear to be done now, and one of the Busch heirs is definitely not amused.

Earlier this week, Billy Busch, an heir to the Anheuser-Busch beer empire, said that his ancestors would have “rolled in their graves” over Bud Light’s recent decision.

“I think my family—my ancestors would have rolled over in their graves,” Busch told TMZ. “They believed that transgender, gays, that sort of thing was all a very personal issue. They loved this country because it is a free country and people are allowed to do what they want, but it was never meant to be on a beer can and never meant to be pushed in people’s faces.”

Busch said that the type of customers who would drink a Bud Light are “common folk” who work hard every day and do not want political messaging shoved in their faces.

“You know, I think people who drink beer, I think they’re your common folk. I think they are the blue-collar worker who goes and works hard every single day,” Busch said.

“The last thing they want pushed down their throat or to be drinking is a beer can with that kind of message on it. I just don’t think that’s what they’re looking for. They want their beer to be truly American, truly patriotic, as it always has been. Truly, America’s beer, which Bud Light was and probably isn’t any longer,” he added.

When you can’t sell beer to bikers at Sturgis, you have well and truly screwed the pooch. At this point, though, I have to doubt whether Buttweisel would have even been able to give their tranny-pimping pisswater away.

Hitching a ride

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Family learns the hard way that they’d be better off to spit on their asses and slide than relying on a coal-powered EV for their transportation needs.

Family ditches electric truck on drive from Winnipeg to Chicago after charging troubles
Road trip completed with rented gas-powered vehicle, while Ford says charging infrastructure is improving

The owner of a 2023 Ford F-150 Lightning Lariat with an extended-range battery regrets buying the electric truck after attempting a road trip, only to abandon it and finish the drive with a gas-powered rental vehicle.

Dalbir Bala of La Salle, Man., left the truck in Minnesota last month after he said he tried unsuccessfully to charge the battery at two different charging stations.

“It was really a nightmare frustration for us,” Bala said.

He bought the truck — which is advertised as having a range of 515 kilometres — for $115,000 in January. He spent an additional $16,000 installing chargers at his home and his trucking business, and upgrading his residential electrical panel.

Bala, his wife and three kids left on a trip to visit Wisconsin Dells, Wis., and Chicago for business, on July 27. The truck was fully charged when they left their home just south of Winnipeg, and Bala had plans to stop at level 3 charging stations, which provide faster charges, located along the planned route.

Bala’s first stop was about 350 kilometres south of Winnipeg in Fargo, N.D. He paid $56 to charge his vehicle’s battery from 10 per cent up to 90 per cent.

The trouble started at his next stop in Albertville, Minn., where Bala said the only fast charger brought up a faulty connection message in his truck when he plugged in. He called the number on the charger for help but never got a response.

He headed to another charging station in nearby Elk River, Minn., but a charger there wouldn’t work either, he said.

With only 15 kilometres remaining on his battery and no fast charger within that range, he decided to ditch his Lightning. Bala got it towed to a Ford dealership and the family rented a gas-powered Toyota 4Runner to finish their trip to Chicago.

A nightmare indeed. The ultimate lesson here was expressed in a great movie from many years ago:

There’s another great old movie clip that is quite apropos to this sad story.

Heh. Indeed.

What a way to go

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As a lifelong sci-fi geek, I used to think I’d love to hitch a ride on a ship to space, just for the sheer hell of it. After reading this, ehh, not so much.

Here’s Exactly How You’d Die in the Vacuum of Space
In the depths of interplanetary space, it’s not the unimaginable cold that kills. It’s everything else.

You did it. You annoyed your crewmates enough that they did the unthinkable: they shoved you into the airlock and kicked you out of the space station. No suit. No air. Nothing. Just you and the vacuum of space. If you want to survive this grisly scenario, you’re going to have to act quickly.

First, It’s Going To Be Colder Than You Can Imagine…
But you’re not going to have to worry about freezing to death. Yes, space is generally cold, around 3 Kelvin, due to a bath of radiation soaking the universe known as the cosmic microwave background. However, the human body is rather inefficient at getting rid of heat, especially in the vacuum of space. There are three ways to transfer heat from a warm body to its surroundings: convection, conduction, and radiation. Convection is the movement of a fluid, like warm air rising to higher altitudes. Conduction is the transfer of heat through physical contact, like when you accidentally touch a hot stove. Radiation is just that: emitting electromagnetic radiation.

Without any air or water to surround your body, there’s no way for convection or conduction to transport heat and cool you off. Instead there’s just radiation. A typical human body emits around 100 watts of infrared radiation (about the same amount of energy as an old-school incandescent light bulb). That’s not all that impressive, and it will take several hours to bring your internal body temperature below freezing.

But the coldness and the vacuum of space is going to affect you in other, faster ways. For starters, any oils or moisture on your skin will immediately evaporate in the vacuum, leaving a nasty frostbite behind in their departure. Even though you’ll be surrounded by vacuum, you won’t explode. Your skin is pretty good at keeping your insides on the inside of you, so your blood won’t boil and your eyes won’t bulge out. Instead, you’ll suffer a rare vacuum-induced malady known as ebullism (not to be confused with an embolism, which is a type of blood clot).

Ebullism occurs when the surface of your skin is exposed to vacuum (which it now unfortunately is). The lower pressure on the outside of your body causes the liquids just inside your skin to expand, causing you to swell up. Fortunately we don’t have a lot of experimental evidence that has explored the full effects of ebullism, but in some cases of accidental exposure to vacuum, people have experienced swelling of up to twice their normal size.

That’s not going to be pretty, but it is generally survivable as long as you return to a pressurized environment within a few minutes.

But you’re not going to get a few minutes.

Don’t Hold Your Breath
The moment the atmosphere escapes the airlock, you might be tempted to hold your breath to buy you more time, the same way you would when going underwater. That is an extremely bad idea. The problem is that your squishy bits (particularly your lips, throat, and upper respiratory system) are not designed to hold in a lungful of air against a vacuum. All that air in your lungs will come out, despite your best efforts, and if you try to hold it back it will escape in an especially violent and sudden way, causing irreversible damage on its way out.

Just let the air out; it’s gone.

And so, unfortunately, are YOU. Yeah, not interested, no thanks.

Texas Tough

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This poor woman had a VERY bad day.

SILSBEE, Texas – A snake fell out of the sky and landed on a woman mowing her yard.

The bizarre incident didn’t stop there. Peggy Jones was then attacked by a hawk.

“The snake was squeezing so hard, and I was waving my arms in the air. And then, this hawk was swooping down clawing at my arm over and over,” explains Peggy Jones. “I just kept saying, ‘Help me, Jesus, Help me, Jesus.’’

The hawk eventually ripped the snake off of her arm and flew away with it. Jones thinks the hawk came down on her at least four times trying to get the snake. She says blood was everywhere. Her husband heard the commotion and came running.

“I was yelling and screaming. He didn’t know what I was saying. I thought I was bit by a snake.”

Jones says people have told her she must be the unluckiest person alive to have a hawk and snake attack at the same time. She says it’s the opposite, “I feel like the luckiest person alive to have survived this!”

This wasn’t even her first encounter with a snake. Jones survived being bitten by a venomous snake a few years back.

In case you are wondering, in true Texas-tough style, Jones has already been back on the tractor. Jones had her husband walk beside her on the first ride back just to keep an eye out overhead. But she thinks she will be fine next time.

May be, may NOT be. Personally, I don’t know that I’d be willing to so much as open the door into the backyard without a full suit of armor on. No, I don’t mean modern body armor, I mean the kind that knights in days of auld used to wear at a joust.

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

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