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atomicwinnerdreamland · 5 months

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do you have any headcanons on texahoma or NY/NJ/CA? (or opinions on them?)

also here's two headcanons of my own: Oklahoma sometimes lets Texas brush his hair since he knows how much Texas loves it. Texas likes to run his hands through it, play with it, and style it when Oklahoma lets him. His hands are pretty roughed up (scars, burns, etc) from wars/Mexico/farm work so Oklahoma's soft hair feels nice on his rough hands. New York, California, and New Jersey go skateboarding together a lot. New Jersey and California saw New York eyeing a rat stuffed animal at a store and instead of being smart and just paying for it, they stole it for him. New York yelled at them for being stupid (he treasures it and keeps it next to his bed)

Hii! I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to answer this, life just hit me with everything these past few days and I just saw your ask. I hope you know that I appreciate you and your request so much & I'll answer it the best way I can :D

Texahoma

OPINION: I love this ship so much! I love how they have an enemies dynamic that has the potential to turn into a love story (some enemy dynamics can be toxic to the point a potential romance is out the window, but that's not the case here). To me, they have a married couple vibe where they bicker over the smallest stuff but wouldn't hesitate to comfort each other when needed. "Must be exhausting thinkin' about me all day, huh?" is a banger line, and it defines their romantic tension to me. They're so awesome :D

(also I reside in Texas, and I can confirm that many of my Texan fellas dislike Oklahoma bc there's nothing much to do there as opposed to Texas & Oklahomans hate Texans bc they think Texans are mean, but honestly I wouldn't call it full hate. Just a rivalry)

YOUR HEADCANON: I love your hc for them! Oklahoma definitely has soft long hair that he maintains in the best way he can (even if the hair products can be expensive) and Texas definitely knows how to treat hair :D That's such a sweet hc and definitely one of my favorites I've heard.

-Texas has taken Oklahoma to an HEB before and has raced with him to get every single item on their grocery list. Texas knew that Okie would lose bc Texas knows this HEB like the back of his hand, but to his own surprise, he let himself walk through the aisles slower than he usually does so he could see Okie be proud of himself when he gets all the items first. It worked. Okie bragged like there was no tomorrow but Texas wouldn't dare change the happiness Okie felt.

-They go to HEB every weekend. They don't even shop there sometimes, they just roam around the store and somehow entertain each other as they do so. "Remember that time you tried to microwave this cake mix?" "I did that so I could poison you, idiot." "Mhmm.."

-Oklahoma and Texas go tornado watching in Okie's state. They're not scared though since Okie's used to it and Texas practically goes hurricane watching with Loui and Florida. One time they blacked out from hitting their head in their shaky car when it caught into the tornado, and Texas was the one who managed to wake up first and get them home safe.

-Texas cooks for Oklahoma & Oklahoma chooses the outfits that Texas wears. Big dude can't dress himself in something other than a button-up, old jeans, and cowboy boots, so Okie changes it up. Okie also validates Texas when Texas wants to wear something that's considered more feminine (dresses, skirts, crop tops, etc).

-Oklahoma humbles Texas. Big dude is super prideful and can sometimes forget to be humble, so Oklahoma never hesitates to humble him. Kind of like how Washington called Texas out ("Texas, you're killing jobs!" from Table News: Ida goes North, Texas goes Backward)

-Oklahoma and Texas both have scars, and occasionally, they caress each others' scars to tell each other that they'll love their scars just as much as they love every other part of each other. <3

-Louisiana and Arkansas have been their go-to when it comes to Okie & Texas' at-home dates. Louisiana cooks the food for the dinner and Arkansas sets the mood up with decorations and music.

-Loui and Pirate Kansas have also been one of the main reasons the 2 got together in the first place. Loui and Texas are best friends & Okie and Arkansas get along somewhat, and once Loui and Arkansas found out their best friends like each other, they got to planning. Florida has also joined in, and while neither Texas or Oklahoma wanna admit it, Flo's goofy wingmaning is another reason they got together.

-They had a heavy, angsty confession over in Texarkana (a city that's in TX, OK, and AR) that led to crying and a short trip to Buc-ees to feel better :D

-[this one is kind of suggestive] Before they got together (a.k.a when they were still rivals), Oklahoma dragged Texas out of Texas' little hut in the countryside and took him to see his state, saying, "Who said there's nothing to do here?" and Texas lowkey thought, I'd do you here if only you'd let me. Texas left Oklahoma still thinking that the state is far inferior than his though. Of course, Texas couldn't get the dirty remark out of his head, and that's when he realized that shoot, he likes Oklahoma.

-They like to listen to country music and ballads together and even sing on occasion. Since Texas knows so many languages, he knows ballads from all around the world and sings them to Oklahoma to put him to sleep (preferrably Spanish & Filipino love songs). Oklahoma also puts Texas to sleep except with folk songs or old stories.

California/New York/New Jersey

OPINION: Honestly, I'm not sure if I love it or if I'm neutral about it, but I know I don't hate it. I usually ship CaliYork or California/New Jersey separately and never really thought about putting the three into a poly relationship, but I've seen your take on the three and it's actually growing on me. My fav's still CaliYork, but I like these three goofballs together too. I need to read more stories on them though 😅

YOUR HEADCANON: Oh they definitely skateboard a lot together and are competitive when doing so. I betcha their clumsy selves have gotten injured before too :3 And the stuffed animal theft is beautiful, they'd do anything to see their bf York happy. Aww :3 (you have such a creative mind omg)

I don't have many headcanons on them, but here are a few that I have:

-They all ride motorcycles together. Sometimes New Jersey's the one that drives and Cal & York ride with him, and other times they each have their own bike and race each other in whatever road they please (they all agree that I-4 is a no)

-Jersey and York cook for California to make sure he is well-fed. They've tried to teach Cal how to cook, but they've all decided that it's better that he doesn't 😅

-They're all fashionable goofballs and have been mistaken as models once when they were walking through the streets of Hollywood. New York's fashion is either business-casual or punk, New Jersey's usually in shorts and a casual tee but the accessories make it stand out, and Cal changes his style a lot but usually is in a crop top w/ shorts or a designer fit. Despite all of them having different fashion tastes, they like to match outfits.

-They maintain a garden filled with their state flowers. When they all got together, New Jersey showed the other two his personal garden filled with violets and sunflowers (in courtesy of Kansas, whom I think Jersey likes to talk to sometimes), but as their relationship progressed, it slowly turned into a garden of violets, California poppies, and red roses.

-They all like to go to beaches in California to de-stress. Sometimes they go there at 3am just to avoid crowds and hear the waves, other times they go at noon to feel the sun as they swim in the waters. They always go home with a smile on their faces.

-They've driven in each of their states to see which state is the worst to drive in. California has traffic, New York's kinda disorganized, and Jersey has roads where you're doomed if you take a wrong exit. All of these roads trips have ended in arguments, but nothing violent because they all learned to communicate w/o violence.

That's all I have for now 😅 Thank you sm again for your ask, and happy new year to you!

#wttt #welcome to the table #wttsh #welcome to the statehouse #ben brainard #wttt texas #wttt oklahoma #wttt california #wttt new york #wttt new jersey

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nohappinessinthisworld · 6 months

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Here are some questions about the fandom to cure your boredom :D

1.) Which state's your favorite and why? and do you have any favorite ship(s)?

2.) Which state(s) do you think would drive a motorcycle recklessly on a busy highway?

3.) Which state(s) do you think cooks the best food?

4.) They're a wholesome bunch (for the most part) but what criminal activities do ya think the Midwest states have participated in?

5.) Most underrated state and why?

1. Texas because I’m from Texas. TexCal Texas/Louisiana, LouiFlo, and NewYork/California.

2. Florida, because he crazy as hell

3. Louisiana. He can cook almost anything.

4. Car jacking, robbery, and Ohio alone has set someone on fire before.

5. Wyoming. Because he hardly around, but I read a few fanfic with him in it. I think he would make an interesting hurt/comfort character.

#welcome to the table #welcome to the statehouse #wttt #wttsh #ben brainard #wttt headcanons #this is fun

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tacky-jack-with-a-hat · 8 months

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Florida canonically writes fanfic and ships other states

so some headcannons...

• He attempted to write fanfic by himself (to mixed results) until Cali told him about a 'speech to text' app which he uses to write down his fanfics.

• he participates in many fandoms but before he found fanfiction, he was only interested in fanart bc he found reading exhausting and difficult.

• He then discovered in the 2010s the read aloud feature on his phone and started listening to fanfics but he didn't start writing fanfics until lockdown when the other states stopped visiting and he started getting bored.

• Subsequently, almost every state has heard him read and write fanfics out loud...

• his least favourite fanfics are the ones Loui dies... he gets really quiet with occasional dramatic outbursts and will spend the next week checking on Loui.

• He canonically is a multishipper, shipping both texcali and texas/Oklahoma but he will do any ship imaginable nevermind how cursed.

• he will read any fanfic from any fandom but he never reads the tags. He tells everyone his favourite tags is smut or vore or "dead dove do not eat"... his favourite tag is actually domestic fluff.

If he finds a fic when California dies he will try to prevent them from leaving the house. Sometimes he'll break the blinker from California's car to prevent Cali from getting himself killed (FM in SoCal)

If any other state dies he goes to see if they're awake. If they're not he'll poke them with a stick until they wake up... Wisconsin is often too drunk to wake up so he panics and shakes him around until he does.

• He participates in kinktober... again he does this out loud.

•Only a few states know about his fanfics and they most choose to ignore it however some start arguing with Florida if they hear their name during October. The argument ends up getting recorded along with the fanfic Florida is writing and he'll publish it anyway.

• this is because Florida never proofreads or spellchecks his work before publishing. He also has no sense of structure and sometimes forget which characters are in the scene or what they're doing. Oh and paragraphs either don't exist or show up randomly. He's also inconsistent with any details about how characters and rooms look.

• his best fanfics are the ones where it's not even a fanfiction but a long vent post made by him or the character he's speaking through.

•His favourite line from this is

"Gov is the rSeason that shampoo has instructons not because he's dumb but because hes boring"

• to demonstrate a few of these headcannons here's a short extract- note it's bad

#wttt #welcome to the table

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beardedmrbean · 1 year

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A 30-ton shipment of a chemical that can be used as fertilizer or an explosive is missing from a California-bound railroad car after rail officials confirmed it disappeared during a trip across the West last month.

The railcar, loaded with 61,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, left Cheyenne, Wyoming on April 12, a Union Pacific spokesperson told USA TODAY Tuesday. Two weeks later it was found empty at a rail stop in the California Mojave Desert, according to a report filed with the federal National Response Center on May 10.

Dyno Nobel, an explosives manufacturer, told local station KQED News the material − "transported in pellet form in a covered hopper car similar to those used to ship coal" − likely fell from a rail car on the way to a rail siding (a short track connecting with the main track) about 30 miles from Mojave in Kern County, just east of Bakersfield.

"The railcar was sealed when it left the Cheyenne facility, and the seals were still intact when it arrived in Saltdale," the company told the outlet. "The initial assessment is that a leak through the bottom gate on the railcar may have developed in transit."

In addition to Dyno, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and Union Pacific are investigating the case.

Neither the FRA nor CPUC could immediately be reached by USA TODAY on Tuesday morning.

'Seal still intact'

Officials told KQED the railcar was transported back to Wyoming where it will be inspected.

"At this point in the investigation, we do not believe there is any criminal or malicious activity involved," said Kristen South, a spokesperson for Union Pacific, who works with its customers to investigate any loss of commodity or damaged freight.

"Our investigation is in its early stages because the customer recently reported the possible loss of fertilizer from one compartment of a multi-compartment railcar," South told USA TODAY Tuesday. "The fertilizer is designed for ground application and quick soil absorption. If the loss resulted from a railcar leak over the course of transportation from origin to destination, the release should pose no risk to public health or the environment."

What is ammonium nitrate?

Ammonium nitrate is explosive under certain conditions. Mixed with something flammable and exposed to flame, it can explode.

Timothy McVeigh used 2 tons of ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel oil to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in 1995.

But it's not a danger that exists in many places. That's because the chemical, once a popular fertilizer, is rarely used these days, USA TODAY reported in 2013.

Ammonium nitrate was the main suspected chemical in a Texas explosion that killed 14 people in April 2013.

The explosion at West Fertilizer Co. also injured more than 200 and left at least 50 homes uninhabitable.

#nunyas news #good grief

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rjzimmerman · 23 days

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Excerpt from this New York Times story:

California draws more electricity from the sun than any other state. It also has a timing problem: Solar power is plentiful during the day but disappears by evening, just as people get home from work and electricity demand spikes. To fill the gap, power companies typically burn more fossil fuels like natural gas.

That’s now changing. Since 2020, California has installed more giant batteries than anywhere in the world apart from China. They can soak up excess solar power during the day and store it for use when it gets dark.

Those batteries play a pivotal role in California’s electric grid, partially replacing fossil fuels in the evening. Between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on April 30, for example, batteries supplied more than one-fifth of California’s electricity and, for a few minutes, pumped out 7,046 megawatts of electricity, akin to the output from seven large nuclear reactors.

Across the country, power companies are increasingly using giant batteries the size of shipping containers to address renewable energy’s biggest weakness: the fact that the wind and sun aren’t always available.

“What’s happening in California is a glimpse of what could happen to other grids in the future,” said Helen Kou, head of U.S. power analysis at BloombergNEF, a research firm. “Batteries are quickly moving from these niche applications to shifting large amounts of renewable energy toward peak demand periods.”

Over the past three years, battery storage capacity on the nation’s grids has grown tenfold, to 16,000 megawatts. This year, it is expected to nearly double again, with the biggest growth in Texas, California and Arizona.

Most grid batteries use lithium-ion technology, similar to batteries in smartphones or electric cars. As the electric vehicle industry has expanded over the past decade, battery costs have fallen by 80 percent, making them competitive for large-scale power storage. Government mandates and subsidies have also spurred growth.

As batteries have proliferated, power companies are using them in novel ways, such as handling big swings in electricity generation from solar and wind farms, reducing congestion on transmission lines and helping to prevent blackouts during scorching heat waves.

In California, which has set ambitious goals for fighting climate change, policymakers hope grid batteries can help the state get 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. While the state remains heavily dependent on natural gas, a significant contributor to global warming, batteries are starting to eat into the market for fossil fuels. State regulators plan to nearly triple battery capacity by 2035.

#batteries

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mentally-illenial · 1 year

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I'm still here!!!

If you've noticed my absence I apologize. Things have been wild and crazy for about two weeks now, but have finally started to settle. I look forward to catching up with all my Tumblr faves ❤️ (tldr at the end, sorry it's a novel!)

The tire incident was simple and manageable, thankfully. Just another random, painful expense, and reminder that life is chaotic-neutral and meaningless at best, but possibly chaotic-evil and maliciously masochistic at worst. 🙄

All the stress of the past few weeks or so reminded me that I may have an autoimmune disorder of sorts; it seems any time I experience a high stress load, my body creates extreme inflammation or something, which causes me intense and chronic pain in my muscles, joints, and bones, as well as extreme fatigue. My poor, ever patient and graceful husband reminded me that last year I was prescribed some Celebrex for the very same symptoms, and I should give it a try. It helped almost immediately; I have a telehealth appointment with my PCP today to discuss seeking a specialist's evaluation for this. I'm honestly quite tired of doctors, diagnoses, and medication, but I can't exist successfully in the prior state of pain, so I will do as I must.

We got the new stove installed, finally. The whole process only cost us nearly $2500 from start to finish though lol 😂😭. We had to hire an electrician to wire the correct wire gauge and outlet through the house. We had to hire a plumber to cap off the gas line. We had many delays and miscommunications. But it's finally here! And it's been amazing so far. It's like the electric car of ovens lol: all torque all the time. I've been relishing in simply being able to make myself whatever I want whenever I want. I think I forgot how integral cooking is in my lifestyle until it was no longer accessable. I'm beyond grateful for the ability again. We can also stop spending tons of money on takeout, and can have healthier meals and snacks again, which is a blessing 🙌

Work has been off the rails too lol. It's the busiest time of the year for the bee farm, and it's my first time experiencing it. We're really feeling the pressure, but I think we're all doing our best to make it work. We are simply chronically understaffed and stretched thin. We have a general policy of flexibility; they purposefully cross-train as much as possible so that we can jump back and forth across different responsibilities throughout the day, but there are some fundamental flaws with that. I have noticed a lack of monetary compensation for the added responsibilities and skills, and of course without proper coverage, when someone hops from one need to another, a different hole is created and a new situation can arise. So we're trying to find the balance between what we need as a company, and what the human body and mind are actually capable of lol.

Two weeks ago was supposed to be our first bee pick up of the year. It was pushed to this past weekend due to weather, so we had about 400 orders stacked for one weekend. We sell two types of bees: Italian bees, which we source from California and Florida breeders, and our own specialty, chemical-free bees, which we breed on site. Due to the poor weather (climate change, lets be real), the spring season had yet to kick off, and it was impossible to ship the Italian bees during freezes and floods, as well as initiate the queen breeding process in the cold. So this past weekend our pick up volume doubled.

To make things more interesting lol, we also hosted this year's Texas Mead Festival! It was a fun display of 6 different meaderies from all over the state (including our own meadery, Wildflyer), with samples and gifts and live music and food. All week up to the day of the event, it was down-pouring rain daily. Our farm is mostly grass and gravel. The location for the outdoor festival was now officially Woodstock 1999 lol: a mud pit. But they set up booths and tents nonetheless and we went for it.

On that day, I was meant to run the farm's cafe, and flex between retail/bee pick up as I was needed. They also pinned me with hosting the gourmet honey tastings, and the history tour for the day. Why we allowed these extra events during such a chaotic day is beyond me.

We were busy from hour one. The festival didn't start until noon, and pick ups weren't supposed to start until two, but our owner made the executive decision to start pick ups early since we were technically 'ready', so we were bombarded with already frustrated bee keepers out the gate. Bee folk are strange folk, too; trust me on that. Thankfully I was sequestered in the kitchen for coffee service until noon, when I ran across the yard to host the gourmet tasting. The group was friendly and it went well, but I left right at the start of lunch service, and came back to it in full swing. We were slammed until I had to leave again at two for the history tour, and it was painful to abandon the crew, but I did my due diligence. It was another great group of customers though, and it went well. But when I got back to retail to check in, chaos had broken loose; the shop was overrun with regular weekend customers, day drunk festival goers, and cranky beekeepers. There were only two people at retail trying to do the work of at least four. But I couldn't stay to help, as the cafe had a line out the door and were in the reeds to say the least. We cranked out orders until we literally ran out of everything, and I had to ask the people in line to leave for an hour so we could desperately scramble to prep more ingredients and continue service. People grumbled but I think the mead was playing the part of placater that day lol, and we were barely able to scrape it back together. We stayed open until seven; retail was only open until five. One of the retail gals came and helped us close, because she's an angel and easily my favorite coworker right now lol. We had over-prepped in preparation for the event, and it still took us by surprise, so it was a heavy lesson to learn in the moment. But we survived and probably even thrived; all the customers had positive feedback, and we left for the day feeling satisfied.

Selling delicate livestock has its drawbacks though. We've been fielding calls all week about unsuccessful transport and installation of colonies and queens. I've been playing customer service all week, trying to troubleshoot bee issues and manage replacements and refunds. It's kind of a case by case thing; we're responsible for the bees' wellness up to the point of leaving the property, and the customer must sign a waiver agreeing to such. But accidents can happen despite how seasoned and knowledgeable the beekeeper might be, so we try to be flexible and accommodating if the situation is right. It's been a bit stressful. I've also spent any free time I've had just trying to restock the absolutely obliterated equipment room of all its hive bodies, gear, tools, etc.

I had a nice debrief about the weekend with the owner though, and I think I succinctly communicated the reality of the flex ideology on me and my fellow workers, as well as the needs of the kitchen as an independent entity during big events like this. It was a fruitful talk and I think the next pick-up, this coming Friday and Saturday, will go much more smoothly, and not just because there won't be a festival cherry on top of the chaos pie lol. There will be many more large events at the farm this year, so I think Mead Fest was a harsh but necessary test run.

✨TLDR: It's been trial after tribulation, but I think I'm rounding a corner and coming out better for it.

I'm grateful for everything I've learned, the support of my loving friends, family, and husband, a safe home to come back to every day, a stable job with owners and coworkers whom I think genuinely care, and the general reclamation of my health lol. I'm beyond grateful for the stability and privilege in my life to be able to experience so much struggle at once and somehow bounce right back, possibly even stronger than before.

Thanks for sticking around 💖

#personal fitblr #2023 me #bee farm #stress #health & fitness #healthblr #medical speak #autoimmine disease #adhd

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giraffeonstrike · 1 year

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In gearing up for a career change, I've been considering what my passions are and I've been a little stuck. It's an odd thing to go back and think about at my age...not that we don't change a ton between 20 and 43, we absolutely do and that's a good thing, but to really sit and take a good look at what moves you is typically a thing that younger people do before they start their careers and to a degree their minds and attitudes are better suited for self reflection and exploration.

When I was a teenager ten thousand years ago, my father decided we were going to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. He liked building stuff, I also liked it, people needed houses...simple. It was about a year into that when a guy we worked with asked me if I wanted to come work with him in his shop building cabinets and furniture. People were ordering things for Christmas, it was just him and one other guy, they needed help. So I went and worked with him, he taught me a lot, and it was hard but very fun so I'm 17 and have decided this is what I want to do.

I tell my father and he's confused. A carpenter? Really? No, no...you have to go to college. He didn't come all this way for his son to do manual labor.

I remember asking him "so it's good enough for Jesus but I can't do it?" which he was silent about for a while. No good reason, it's just not what he envisioned for me and eventually I gave up. Went to college, had a variety of jobs that were fine until I ended up here in the job I have now. I've sold cars, I put my own schooling on hold for some years to put my ex wife through school when her parents cut her off, doing the highest paying thing I could do with my skillset (talking) and an unfinished degree...being shipped around the country selling software. I can't even tell you what that was like, it was so mentally taxing and I was just always going.

But I did learn something incredibly valuable, which leads me to my really drawn out point. Frequently there were language and access barriers that prevented me from being able to close deals. You can't sell English language only software (of which there are almost none now but this was long time ago) to schools with strong ESL programs. They need a Spanish option...huge roadblock in southern California, the southwest, and south Texas. We had very little for special needs schools.

There were always handouts but frequently there were no actual people or departments that dealt with the care and management of special needs students. A secretary would hand me something and then disappear. I would never get a feel of what their needs were and if I ever asked they couldn't tell me.

When I came to work at my branch, that still bothered me. What bothered me even more is that I was coming up against the same problem. We had no audiobooks, no books in braille, no bilingual staff, only English language books, no one knew sign language but me. A library should be a place where anyone can go to get the information and enrichment that they need to learn and thrive. It's better now, but lack of funding has always been an issue and we never have been able to get to where I'd like us to be.

I'm 43 years old and realizing that my real passion is accessibility. Ease of use. Making what is difficult less so in whatever way possible. There are so many apps and programs now that hit that mark, but in talking to people who would know I've found out that the human element is lacking. For better or worse we are social creatures and sometimes you just want another person there to guide you.

I will formally resign my position soon, when I can set some things in motion to ensure that my assistant, Angela, will be asked to take over for me. I love my branch, I believe in it, and she's the only one I know who loves it like I do and will make it stronger. We're the only two who know, she's asked me if I'll still do storytime and I'm just delighted that she'd keep me for such an important job.

This is going to be a big year.

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mariacallous · 1 year

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In a nondescript house on a quiet street in a middle-class suburb of Houston, Texas, Alaa Allawi hunched over his black and gold laptop. It was early 2017, and Allawi ranked among the top 10 vendors on AlphaBay, at the time the dark web’s biggest bazaar for all manner of illegal wares. Every week he moved dozens of packages of illegal narcotics: cocaine, counterfeit Xanax, and fake OxyContin.

An order came in from a young marine in North Carolina. He wanted Oxy. Allawi went about fulfilling the order, choosing from among the bags of powders and chemicals strewn about his attic and garage. He had precursor chemicals, binding agents, and colored dyes from eBay, as well as fentanyl—a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin—from China. “Man, you can order anything off the internet,” Allawi once told a friend. It was the secret to his success.

Allawi poured the ingredients into a Ninja blender, pulsed it until the contents seemed pretty well mixed, then went outside to the shed in his backyard. Inside were two steel pill presses, each the size of a small fridge and dusted with chalky residue. He tapped the potent mixture into a hopper atop the press, which came alive with the push of a button. Out shot the pills a few minutes later, stamped to look like their prescription counterparts. Soon, the fake OxyContin was ready to be shipped, sealed first in a bag and then stuffed into a parcel. A member of Allawi’s crew dropped the order off at the post office, along with a pile of other packages addressed to buyers all over the country.

If Allawi believed the dark web’s anonymity was enough to shield him from the prying eyes of law enforcement, he was wrong. Allawi’s work—slipping small amounts of fentanyl into counterfeit pills, making them effective but highly addictive and sometimes lethal—was fueling the latest deadly twist in a national opioid epidemic that has taken more than 230,000 lives since 2017. Allawi’s contribution to that crisis had made him a prime target for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and federal agents were intercepting parcels containing his fentanyl-laced pills from Kansas to California. Allawi didn’t know it at the time, but shipping these pills to North Carolina would cement his downfall.

Today, Allawi sits in a federal prison in northern New York, where he’s serving a 30-year sentence. His case was the first prosecution for dealing fentanyl using the dark web and cryptocurrency in the American Southwest, and investigators described his operation as a bellwether for the growing counterfeit pill market in the US. Over the course of more than two years of email exchanges, he told me his story: a criminal odyssey whose seeds were planted thousands of miles away, on a US Army base in Iraq.

When the United States invaded Iraq, Allawi was a 13-year-old living in a suburb of Baghdad. On his 18th birthday, he applied to become an interpreter for the US Army. His uncle, a doctor, had encouraged him to learn the language from a young age. Allawi’s English wasn’t great, but he had been a sharp student, the kind of kid who dreamed of going to medical school himself one day. He got the job.

He was quickly dispatched to Rasheed Airbase near Baghdad, where he bounced from one unit to the next. The job paid well by Iraqi standards at $1,350 a month, but it was dangerous. Al Qaeda didn’t look kindly on Iraqis who collaborated with the US. Allawi says that insurgents tied one of his friends, also an interpreter, to the back of a car and dragged him around the neighborhood until his limbs tore apart. They hung another from an electric pole and left his corpse up for days as a warning. Allawi took to wearing gloves and masks while on patrol in his neighborhood so he wouldn’t be recognized.

The work was also occasionally heart-wrenching. Allawi recalls one house raid where the Americans were searching for someone suspected of cooperating with al Qaeda. After they made an arrest, the soldiers realized their satellite phone was missing. An officer proceeded to question several women who were in the house. When he got to an elderly woman, he ordered Allawi out of the room. Minutes later, the woman ran out after him, tears streaming down her face. All the women there fell to their knees, begging Allawi to stop the search. The officer, they said, had frisked the older woman and reached for her private parts. Allawi was livid, but there wasn’t much he could do. “I felt not only enraged but also the feeling of a person that belongs to an invaded country and the humiliation that comes with it,” he says. Eventually, the soldiers found the phone on top of a fridge, where one of them had left it.

Most of the time, though, Allawi got along well with the Americans. Thanks to years of watching Hollywood movies, he had a good grasp on their culture and wouldn’t say anything when they crossed their legs or exposed their soles, which are considered insults in the Arab world. “Everyone liked Alaa,” says Daniel Robinson, who worked with Allawi as a contractor in Iraq. The two men spent a lot of time together on base, sharing meals and swapping stories about their lives and families. Robinson smoked his first hookah on the floor of Allawi’s barracks.

Steroids were prevalent on US bases. “As easy to buy as soda,” one military contractor told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. Allawi began selling them to American soldiers and was dismissed from the unit he’d been serving with. Within a few months, he got another translation job, this time with AGS-AECOM, a private contractor rebuilding maintenance depots at Camp Taji, near Baghdad.

Now Allawi spent his days sitting behind a computer in a cubicle, translating operation manuals for Humvees that the US was reselling to Iraq. Allawi had always loved being around computers. When he was 14, he’d purchased parts one by one—a hard drive here, a RAM module there—until he had assembled a functioning machine. At Camp Taji, he immediately dove in, probing the company’s internal networks like a deep-sea diver exploring an unknown world. “The depot job was a boring one,” he says. “Not much was happening, but I used half of my job time to learn coding and hacking.”

It was also at Camp Taji that Allawi met Eric Goss, an impish 25-year-old Texan who shared his love of hip hop and would become a friend. Goss recalls one day when the camp’s head of operations called a meeting with the translators and contractors on the base. Allawi, he announced, was now cut off from accessing the internet on his computer. According to Goss, Allawi had hacked their boss’s email, found messages he was sending to his mistress, and forwarded them to the boss’s wife. (Allawi denies that he did this.) But the new restrictions didn’t stop Allawi. He found a way to install a password recovery tool on his computer that he could use to crack his way into the company’s wireless network. Around Camp Taji, Robinson recalls, “the running joke was, don’t let Alaa on your computer.”

Allawi put his burgeoning tech skills to use off base, as well. He built a website called Iraqiaa.com, an online dating and chat platform aimed at young Iraqis. At least one guy ended up marrying a woman he met on the site, Allawi says. At Iraqiaa’s height, he was earning a cushy $5,000 a month from subscriptions. People started asking Allawi to design sites for them. He purchased a server from a cloud provider and started his own hosting company. For a time, it looked like he could put together a tech career in Iraq.

Many of Allawi’s fellow interpreters had chosen to leave Iraq for the US as part of a special visa program. Goss, who had returned home to Houston, kept probing Allawi on MySpace: “When are you getting your ass to the United States?” For a while, Allawi put him off, but his outlook on life in Iraq was changing. It dawned on him that his options for pursuing a full-fledged IT career there were limited. “I realized that I couldn’t go further in my country,” he says.

In 2012, Goss received a message from Allawi. He was coming to the US.

On September 12, Allawi landed in San Antonio.

He was ready to start a new life in Texas. Catholic Charities set him up with a driver’s license, food stamps, a $200 monthly stipend, and a free place to stay. He received an online high school diploma, then enrolled in a pre-nursing program at San Antonio College. He managed to complete four semesters, but eking out a living soon took priority. The food stamps were valid for only six months, as was the rent-free arrangement. Allawi found a job as a machine operator at a door manufacturer 45 minutes away. The pay barely covered his commute and college expenses.

Allawi moved in with another former translator named Mohamed Al Salihi, who had arrived in Texas more recently and was moonlighting as a bouncer. They had a spare room, which they advertised on Craigslist to earn extra money. Their first renter, Allawi says, was a young woman who liked to party with a group of weed-smoking friends. Soon enough, Allawi was hanging out with them.

Allawi was spending enough time with American college students to sense a business opportunity. He started selling weed at parties near the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). “It was just for surviving,” he says. He was intent on furthering his education, he insists, and took on a student loan. The plan was simple: pay his bills, sell weed at parties, and go to school. But this new venture put him in contact with other drug dealers and harder substances. “There is American saying,” Allawi adds. “If you hang around the barber-shop too long, you will end up with haircut.”

In 2014, he was evicted for failing to pay $590 in rent. For a brief period, he slept in his car. He started selling cocaine on the street. On January 14, 2015, Allawi was arrested while driving with a small-time drug dealer who was known to local law enforcement. An officer searching the vehicle found less than a gram of cocaine, 10 Adderall pills, and about 100 Xanax pills, according to Allawi, who says the tablets belonged to the passenger. Allawi was charged with the manufacture and delivery of a controlled substance, but because he had no criminal record, he was sentenced to community service. His run-in with the law didn’t dissuade him from selling drugs. He was just getting started.

Allawi had reconnected with Goss by then. Sometime in 2015, Goss got him a job designing a website for a business in Austin. One of the employees confided to Allawi that he’d been buying drugs on the dark web. “It’s like an Amazon for drugs,” he said. Intrigued, Allawi did his own research. “I went and asked the wizard of all time, Mr. Google!” he says.

The introduction blew the doors of drugmaking wide open for the Iraqi. Allawi wasn’t content dealing on the street anymore. He was chasing a broader market than San Antonio—hell, a broader market than Texas. He bought a manual pill press on eBay for $600, eventually upgrading to a $5,000, 507-pound electric machine capable of spitting out 21,600 pills an hour. He also used eBay to purchase the inactive ingredients found in most oral medications, such as dyes. On May 23, 2015, Allawi created an account on AlphaBay. He named it Dopeboy210, most likely after the San Antonio area code, according to investigators. That fall, Allawi dropped out of school for good.

At the time, AlphaBay was one of a handful of would-be successors to Silk Road, the infamous dark-web market that had been shut down in 2013. If you had a Tor browser and some bitcoins, AlphaBay offered drugs by the kilo, guns, stolen credit card data, and more, all with complete anonymity—or at least that’s what many customers believed. Between 2015 and 2017, the site saw more than $1 billion in illegal cryptocurrency transactions, according to the FBI.

DopeBoy210 eventually offered no fewer than 80 different products. X50, a package of 50 Xanax pills, was one of Allawi’s flagship items and earned enthusiastic reviews. “Good shit,” one AlphaBay customer wrote, according to data provided by Carnegie Mellon professor Nicolas Christin. “Kick ass,” wrote another. The pills were fake.

At first, Allawi blended chemicals with methamphetamine and used his press to churn out tablets stamped as Adderall and Xanax. Students looking to pull an all-nighter or riddled with anxiety craved this stuff; UTSA made for a lucrative outlet. Allawi then moved on to fake OxyContin pills laced with fentanyl that he ordered from China on the dark web. (Allawi declined to say why he switched to fentanyl, but investigators told me that drug dealers like it because they can make thousands of pills using minute amounts.)

Allawi expanded his operation to a small circle of trusted associates. Some he had met at house parties, like Benjamin Uno, a twentysomething Dallas native whose promising basketball career was cut short by injury, and Trevor Robinson, a mustachioed fan of Malcolm X (with no relation to Daniel Robinson, the contractor). Uno helped Allawi manufacture the pills, and he and Robinson took charge of mailing out the merchandise. (Uno and Robinson didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Allawi also recruited Al Salihi, his old roommate, to guard drugs stashed at an apartment 10 minutes from UTSA.

Sporting a beard and a tattooed right arm, Hunter Westbrook had come to UTSA after toiling away in the oil fields of West Texas. The patrolman was used to dealing with the occasional marijuana trafficker on campus. But toward the end of 2015, something changed. Adderall pills, not just weed, flowed into dorms and parties. Then the overdoses began. When UTSA analyzed some of the pills in a lab, they were found to be laced with meth.

As a campus cop, Westbrook could do little more than stop cars for traffic violations, so he reached out to the San Antonio Police Department for help. In the spring of 2016, he sat in a coffee shop and compared notes with Janellen Valle, an SAPD narcotics officer who was on a joint task force with the DEA. The two cops realized that their findings lined up. A Middle Eastern guy was apparently flooding the campus with marijuana and counterfeit pills. Tips from students led to a name: Alaa Allawi.

Soon after, the DEA took over the case. Investigators say that some pills at UTSA contained fentanyl. (Allawi says he never sold fentanyl on campus, only online.) The country was drowning in the opioid, and stanching the flow was a priority for the agency. The number of overdose deaths attributed to it had skyrocketed, from 1,663 in 2011 to 18,335 in 2016, surpassing those from prescription painkillers and heroin.

The DEA’s San Antonio office was used to handling street dealers and Mexican cartels. But in July, an informant tipped off the DEA about Allawi’s AlphaBay shop and sent the investigation spinning in a whole new direction.

The San Antonio office didn’t do cybercrime. Sure, they had heard of Silk Road. But to the DEA agents in Texas, the dark web might as well have been Baghdad—a faraway land “out of sight, out of mind,” in the words of one investigator.

Westbrook became the office’s de facto guide, largely because he was one of the few people there to have a vague understanding of what the dark web was. He met with cybersecurity professors at UTSA on how to access Allawi’s account. He was by far the youngest member of the task force; around the office, he was known as “the millennial.”

The agents purchased a MacBook and a VPN subscription to access the dark web. They were floored when they saw DopeBoy210’s shop. Based on the hundreds of comments left by satisfied customers, Allawi was a massive retailer.

Getting a peek at Allawi’s online operations was relatively easy. To arrest him for it, the DEA would need to definitively link Allawi to his AlphaBay account, which meant they’d need to buy drugs from him. And to do that, they’d need bitcoins.

This had daunting implications for a governmental office, Westbrook realized. The task force might buy $1,000 worth of the volatile currency, only to wake up the next day and find their wallet’s value down to $900 or up to $1,100. Agency bigwigs didn’t love schemes deviating from tradition, investigators say. They certainly were reluctant to become bitcoin speculators. “It was a headache,” Westbrook says. (But not unheard of: As part of a parallel investigation into AlphaBay, DEA agents in 2016 bought drugs using bitcoin. Before that, they purchased crypto as they sought to shut down Silk Road.)

In the meantime, the agents kept pounding away at the work they knew how to do: tailing suspects and working informants. As the new year began, the task force persuaded a judge to authorize the GPS tracking and tapping of Uno’s and Allawi’s phones, and later Al Salihi’s. In March, Westbrook followed Uno from Allawi’s house to a post office, where Uno delivered three boxes and a trash bag stuffed with what appeared to be envelopes. After that, postal inspectors would periodically intercept mail and packages intended for Allawi.

When he wasn’t tailing members of Allawi’s crew, Westbrook worked at a DEA desk that was unofficially assigned to rookies due to its awkward position in the middle of the open room. During the investigation, someone hung a handwritten sign that read MILLENNIAL ISLAND.

Westbrook usually sat alone, but on March 17 the rest of the task force was peering over his shoulder as he logged in to AlphaBay. The team had gotten the green light from DC: They could buy bitcoins and purchase drugs from Allawi. Navigating to the DopeBoy210 page, Westbrook bought 500 Adderall pills for $1,400 worth of bitcoins, and an ounce of cocaine for $1,200. He listed a mailbox at UTSA and finished the order.

About a week later, he drove to the campus to retrieve the package. Looking giddy under a beige ball cap, he inserted a key into mailbox number 825. The drugs were inside. There were only 447 pills and no cocaine, so Westbrook initiated a dispute with AlphaBay (which ended in favor of Allawi). But this was a detail. What mattered was that the agents had conducted an undercover buy on the dark web. The San Antonio DEA had entered a world its agents barely knew existed a year before.

Allawi’s profits were rolling in, but they were still in the form of bitcoins, and he needed to convert them to cash. On LocalBitcoins.com, a bitcoin exchange platform, he met Kunal Kalra, a cheerful Californian who favored Mao collar shirts and a gold bitcoin pendant—a sign of his unwavering dedication to cryptocurrency. Kalra ran a bitcoin ATM out of a cigar shop in Los Angeles. Allawi began visiting the shop to exchange his bitcoin earnings for cash, and paid Kalra a fee for his help. By the fall of 2016, the two men moved their arrangement online. They transferred more than half a million dollars in total.

With plenty of cash, Allawi went on a buying spree. He made a $30,000 down payment for a two-story slab house in a residential San Antonio neighborhood just south of UTSA. “I didn’t know how much money he was making until he came to Houston,” Goss says. The Texas native accompanied his friend on multiple trips to luxury car dealerships in the city that fall. In October 2016, Allawi set his sights on a white 2013 Maserati GranTurismo, which cost $49,000. He began pulling wads of bills from a Louis Vuitton backpack and handing them to a salesman. Goss worried that paying cash would attract attention, but his friend refused to take a loan and owe interest. “Why am I gonna fucking pay?” Allawi said.

A few months later, Allawi took one of his cars in for an oil change. When mechanics lifted the car on a hoist, they found a curious black box affixed to the undercarriage. It was a tracking device. Allawi had it promptly removed. He was disturbed by the discovery, but not enough to stop. “I needed money, and things had to keep going,” he says.

Otherwise, though, Allawi was on top of the world. By spring of 2017, he had the cars, the luxury sneakers, and the bottle service. He was even in talks to open a local franchise for a juice bar chain. Ever the party guy, on March 23 he flew his crew out on a trip to Las Vegas. Allawi, Uno, Robinson, and Goss walked into Drai’s, a gigantic nightclub known as one of the most expensive in town. Lil Wayne was performing as the group huddled in the VIP area. Allawi was wearing a $2,000 suit that he’d nabbed on a whim at Caesars Palace—they all were, courtesy again of the boss. Allawi passed around an enormous bottle of Veuve Clicquot, a flashy move that didn’t go unnoticed by the rapper onstage. “I don’t know who these n––––s is, but I need to be partying with them,” Wayne shouted, according to Goss.

The four men snapped selfies, sticking out their tongues like a bunch of eager teenagers. They were having the time of their lives.

While Allawi’s crew partied in Vegas, a man in the Midwest named Vincent Jordahl was recovering from a close brush with death. He’d snorted a blue powder—fentanyl—and collapsed on his living room floor. His mother found him and performed CPR before medics revived him with Narcan, a fentanyl antidote. He was taken to a hospital in Grand Forks, North Dakota. On March 25, city medics would rush to the home of another man, named Orlando Flores, who’d also overdosed on fentanyl-laced pills and also survived. The tablets originated in the same package, sent by Allawi sometime in March.

Less than a month later, on the East Coast, two other young men readied for a party of their own. Mark Mambulao and Marcos Villegas were marines stationed at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. It was Friday, April 14, and the duo were starting their weekend with some gin and tonics at a friend’s house in Richlands, about 32 miles north of the base. Around 9:30 pm, Mambulao sent a girlfriend a photo on Snapchat of a friend’s dog chewing his hat.

Then, Villegas pulled some pills out of a small black plastic bag and passed them around. Mambulao had experimented with drugs before, including LSD, mushrooms, ecstasy, and oxycodone, which he would either gobble up or crush and snort. These pills were advertised as OxyContin. Villegas had purchased them directly from an AlphaBay vendor named DopeBoy210. The friends all swallowed the pills at the same time.

About two hours later, Mambulao started to feel sick and passed out on the living room couch, so his friends laid him down in a spare bedroom, making sure he was on his side. When they checked on him later, he wasn’t breathing. The men called 911 and started to perform CPR, but it was too late. In the early hours of April 15, Mambulao died in a Jacksonville hospital. He was just 20 years old.

It turned out that the pill Mambulao ingested contained a lethal dose of fentanyl. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service began looking into his death. Cooperating with the Postal Inspection Service and DEA, the NCIS traced the drugs to Allawi. (Villegas pleaded guilty in 2019 to distributing oxycodone and fentanyl and was sentenced to 10 years in prison; a second marine was also charged in connection with the case.) Why did Mambulao overdose and not the other revelers that night? There was “no real science” informing Allawi’s pill-manufacturing, says Dante Sorianello, then the head of the DEA’s San Antonio office. “Some of these pills probably got very little fentanyl, and some got too much.”

On May 17, a utility worker in a neon-yellow vest and hard hat walked up the driveway to Allawi’s house in Richmond and knocked on the door. “Sorry, power’s out,” he told the occupants. “We’re going to be working on it for a while.” Anyone who’s been in Houston on the cusp of summer knows what these words mean: Without AC, your home is going to turn into a furnace in no time.

Westbrook and Valle, clad in black bulletproof vests, watched from their cars as Uno and Robinson left the house. The utility guy was a DEA agent, and the whole thing was a ruse so they could raid the house without risking any lives. Law enforcement saw fentanyl as a threat to eliminate at all cost, which meant shutting down the drug manufacturing before moving to arrest Allawi.

At 1:38 pm, men sweating profusely in hazmat suits swarmed the house, lending an otherworldly look to this ordinarily quiet neighborhood. The suits were meant to protect the agents from fentanyl, which they thought could incapacitate or even kill them if they simply touched it. They knocked on the door and got no response. They went in.

The search was fruitful. The agents placed their bounty in front of the garage in a spot demarcated by yellow cones. Among other drug paraphernalia, there were two pill presses, cardboard boxes from China containing ingredients, and enough drugs to put Allawi away for a long time: 500 grams of fentanyl powder, 500 grams of meth, 500 grams of cocaine, 10 kilos of fake oxycodone tablets laced with fentanyl, 4 kilos of fake Adderall laced with meth, and 5 kilos of counterfeit Xanax tablets. Agents found a Ruger revolver and a Sig Sauer pistol hidden in a couch in the living room. They walked out of Allawi’s bedroom carrying an AR-15-style assault rifle and a loaded Glock pistol.

As the agents worked, Uno and Robinson drove by the house and realized what was happening. Far from being scared off by the raid, they returned to the scene with Allawi, Westbrook says. As they drove away one last time, all three men tossed their phones out the car window. Soon after, Allawi called Goss from a new number and asked to meet him at a ritzy house he was renting east of Houston. There, he retrieved a bag stuffed with $50,000 in cash, Goss says, and asked his friend to drive him to the airport. The ringleader had decided to hole up in LA, where he had a condo—and an extravagant collection of sneakers—in the upscale Westwood neighborhood.

His operation was unraveling fast. “I’m fucked. It’s over,” he kept repeating in the car. Like any good drug boss, Allawi started planning his escape. He considered hiding in Dallas or California, according to Goss. When things settled, he could go back to Iraq, where the money he’d sent over the years had allowed his family to start a strip mall. He could flee to Mexico and fly out from there.

But for weeks after the raid, there were no cops in sight. Allawi wondered whether he’d dodged a bullet. Eventually he felt secure enough to return to Texas. One evening at the end of June, he and Goss went to a club. The two men sat in the VIP area, a $500 bottle of champagne on the table. But Allawi wasn’t his usual gregarious self. He remained quiet, his glass untouched. The two men drove back from the club in silence. “I feel like I’m a martyr,” Allawi suddenly said. “All my family’s taken care of. If I die tomorrow, it wasn’t in vain.”

Just a few days later, the DEA moved to apprehend Allawi’s team in simultaneous takedowns across Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston; Uno, Robinson, Al Salihi, and Goss were all arrested. So was Kalra, Allawi’s bitcoin guy. Valle was with a SWAT team at Allawi’s gargantuan rental home in the suburbs of Houston. They tried ramming the door down, but Allawi had splurged on a $10,000 reinforced model, Valle says. The team had to break in through a window.

Inside, they found Allawi clad in black pants and a white polo. He told agents they had nothing on him, even as investigators seized a bitcoin wallet, two money counters, 12 burner phones, four small bags of blue chemical binder, and a .45 Colt.

After the DEA agents made clear that they had more than enough evidence, Allawi quieted down. Sitting on the driveway, handcuffed, cross-legged, and slightly disheveled, he looked more like the young Iraqi who’d smoked hookah alongside US contractors than the leader of a drug ring. He rolled onto his left side, curled into a ball on the pavement, and closed his eyes.

In June 2017, a grand jury indicted Allawi for conspiring to distribute fentanyl, meth, and cocaine; possession of a firearm during a drug trafficking crime; and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, among other charges.

The mountain of evidence against Allawi was overwhelming—so overwhelming, in fact, that Anthony Cantrell, his court-appointed lawyer, said a trial would take months and put a strain on his practice. Instead, Allawi pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 400 grams or more of fentanyl resulting in death or serious bodily injury, and to using a gun during a drug crime. Investigators estimated that Allawi had made at least $14 million off his criminal activities, and had sold at least 850,000 counterfeit pills in 38 states. Sorianello says that Allawi saw the growing market for pills and capitalized on it with his operation. “He was one of the first we saw doing this at large scale,” he says. “He was a pioneer.”

At his sentencing, Allawi adopted a contrite tone. “I messed up. It was a great mistake.” He concluded by asking for mercy, for the US to give him a second chance. But the court showed no such clemency: As part of his plea deal, Allawi was sentenced to 30 years in a federal prison in northern Louisiana; he has since been transferred to a medium-security facility in New York. After that, he will be deported back to Iraq. Uno, Robinson, Al Salihi, and Kalra, meanwhile, all pleaded guilty and received prison sentences ranging from 18 months to 10 years. The judge was more lenient with Goss, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to posses with intent to distribute cocaine, and was sentenced to five years’ probation.

Allawi maintained that if the US had been in the throes of a devastating opioid epidemic while he was running his drug ring, he’d never heard about it, “never heard about overdoses or the damage it can cause.” But it was operations like his—dealers selling counterfeit pills laced with illicitly produced fentanyl—that authorities say contributed to so much death and destruction.

Roughly a month after Allawi’s arrest, authorities took down AlphaBay. But it didn’t do much to relieve the opioid epidemic in the US. More than 106,000 people died of a drug overdose in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a record high. Dark-web markets, meanwhile, logged $3.1 billion in revenue that year, according to Chainalysis, a research firm that tracks cryptocurrency activity. Revenue dropped last year, thanks in large part to the takedown of another major dark-web bazaar called Hydra, but illegal marketplaces still raked in $1.5 billion.

China provided most of the fentanyl present in the US before 2019, with traffickers shipping the powder through international mail and private package delivery. But controls that China has since imposed have disrupted the flow. Today, Mexican cartels lead the charge, procuring precursor chemicals from China, which can be legally exported, and churning out enough fentanyl to drown the US. The DEA seized the equivalent of 379 million potentially deadly doses of fentanyl last year, more than the population of the entire country. Distributors are active everywhere. The agency’s Rocky Mountain office, for example, which covers Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming, seized nearly 2 million fentanyl pills.

Sitting in a hip coffee place in Houston last summer, Westbrook pulled out his phone and flipped through pictures of recent fentanyl busts he’d participated in. In mirror images of the takedown of Allawi’s drug house, federal agents in flashy hazmat suits prowl the driveways of nondescript homes. Industrial pill presses sit on the suburban concrete. DEA offices across the country are establishing groups focused on fentanyl investigations, he says. “It’s weird times,” he later told me, reflecting on the destruction that tiny amounts of fentanyl can wreak. “I went from chasing kilos to grams.”

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scattered-winter · 2 years

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also. im suddenly intrigued by this “911” thing u keep talking about. it looks like homosexual activity (that might actually be somewhat healthy for once??)

IT IS IN FACT!! I'm gonna ramble about it a bit because it's my current new favorite thing of all time. it's the show for the girls and the gays <3

there's 2 separate shows, 911 (the og, set in california) and 911 Lone Star (a spinoff set in texas). my favorite thing about both of them is that they have very wide diverse casts of characters, and the writing is overall very well done which is a nice change of pace from dc lmao

in 911, the main cast consists of two black women (one of which is a lesbian married to another black lesbian and they're raising a son together), a korean man, a mexican man who's also a single parent to a kid with cerebral palsy, and a woman who is a victim and survivor of domestic abuse. there's also a popular ship between two of the main male characters that isn't canon but it's widely believed that it will be soon. it's a character-driven show that doesn't have any set main character because everyone in the main cast and every main relationship gets the same amount of care and attention. my favorite favorite thing is that the familial/platonic relationships are JUST as important as the romantic shit and the found family in this show is SOOOOOO <33333 its a show for the aroaces, truly. it also has some of THEE m/f ships of all TIME.

there are also a lot of queer/poc side characters!! and the main female characters all have a life and friendships outside of their male (or female) love interests and it's sad that that's such a high bar for media but it's soooo <3333

911 lone star is my least favorite of the two, but I still love it a lot! the writing focuses a lot more on a specific Main Character (and he's like. the blandest most obnoxious white guy of all time smh) but there's still a very diverse cast and the found family is once again very <333333 in the main cast there's a black trans man, a hispanic man with dyslexia, a muslim hijabi, a black woman, a gay jewish man, and a gay hispanic man (who are one of the main canon pairings and one of my personal favorites in the 911 universe.) sadly the main white character is played by a more famous actor so a lot of the storylines center around him, but there's still quite a few storylines for the others!! there's a more correct 911 lone star in my head where owen (bland obnoxious white guy) dies in the first season for his son and wife's character development <33

so tldr if you're wanting good writing and a wide cast of characters who each get their own chunk of the story, I'd recommend watching 911 first, but lone star has its good moments too. it's also worth mentioning that both shows are about first responders (mostly firefighters/paramedics and dispatchers, but there's a few cops too) so there could be some triggering content since they're dealing with car crashes and earthquakes and shit. and there's also some copaganda vibes surrounding the cop characters but again, there's a more correct version in my head where they're vigilantes instead of cops

#this got long but i got so used to dealing w dc's shit that when i found something with good writing #that makes me want to eat BRICKS because of how good it is #well brother (gn) i had to fixate on it.#so here's a ramble. take it.#911 lone star ALSO has THE m/f ship of all time. they invented love. if you even care #asks #peren 🥟

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lundgrenscarborough95 · 3 months

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Bat City Usa - Austin, Texas

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quick-ship-cars · 3 months

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Zip-Zap Across State Lines with QuickShipCars' Interstate Car Shipping Bliss

Imagine this: You're a busy professional who just landed your dream job in sunny California but left your beloved ride back home in chilly New York. Or perhaps you've got a classic muscle car that needs to make its way from Texas to Florida for a vintage car show. Enter QuickShipCars – the interstate auto shipping gurus ready to whisk away your wheels with ease!

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ultrajaphunter · 3 months

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America came with an "I win" button, and I'm not joking.

-This came into play before modern boats, barges, canals, trains, and cars. -Still continues to this day.

Waterways EVERYWHERE. -

Waterways allowed for 3X faster travel and remained cheaper until this day.

-The United States has more navigable waterways, in the Mississippi alone,

than the rest of the world combined.

-This is not even counting the Great Lakes or the barrier islands.

-America has the largest chunk of farmland in the world, conveniently connected to the same waterways.

-The country also boasts the largest freshwater lakes that connect to the ocean through the St. Lawrence River. -

The barrier islands, stretching from the tip of Texas to Baltimore, protect ships and extend America's coastal reach. In 1825,

the Erie Canal was completed, connecting the Great Lakes to the East Coast and allowing ships to circumnavigate half of the United States. -28,000 miles of connected navigable waterways.

-12,000 miles of it can be used for heavy commercial transport.

-Water transportation is 10 to 30X cheaper than using trucks, trains, or planes.

-630 million tons of cargo are shipped on the Mississippi River annually.

-The waterways are also connected to the largest farmland in the world.

-80% of America is within 150 miles of a waterway.

But we're not done yet! America's harbors and coastline are also impressive.

-Chesapeake Bay alone has more coastline than all of India.

-The country has the 3 greatest natural harbors in the world:

-Puget Sound (Washington state)

-San Francisco Bay (California)

-Chesapeake Bay (between Maryland and Virginia).

Considering America's natural assets, it's astonishing that the country isn't dominating and cannot afford to help other nations lift themselves out of poverty.

-How much do you think the United States government is really suppressing and stealing from the economy?

-How much corruption would that take? One picture Mississippi (obviously)

Another of a section of barrier islands on coast

(in case you had not seen them before)

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shipvehicdiegosan · 4 months

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What are the key determinants influencing the cost of shipping a car from Texas to Seattle, and how can individuals obtain accurate quotes tailored to their specific vehicle transportation needs?

The cost of shipping a car from Texas to Seattle is influenced by several determinants, and understanding these factors is crucial for obtaining accurate quotes tailored to specific vehicle transportation needs. Navigating this process requires attention to key considerations. For a detailed insight into the cost of shipping a car from California to Texas, visit https://www.shipvehicles.com/what-is-the-price-to-ship-a-car-from-california-to-texas/ to obtain accurate and tailored quotes for your specific transportation needs.

1. Distance and Route: The primary factor impacting car shipping costs is the distance between the origin (Texas) and the destination (Seattle). Longer distances often correlate with higher shipping expenses due to increased fuel and time requirements.

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7. Insurance Coverage: The level of insurance coverage during transportation is crucial. While higher coverage may result in slightly increased costs, it offers greater protection for the vehicle.

Obtaining Accurate Quotes:

Provide Detailed Information: When seeking quotes, furnish precise details about the vehicle, including make, model, size, weight, and operational condition. Accurate information aids in generating precise quotes.

Choose the Right Shipping Method: Decide between open and enclosed transport based on the vehicle's needs and budget. Understanding the trade-offs between these methods will help in making an informed decision.

Research Reputable Shipping Companies: Research and select reputable car shipping companies with positive reviews, proper licensing, and insurance coverage. Requesting quotes from multiple providers allows for a comparison of services and pricing.

Consider Flexible Pickup and Delivery Options: Being flexible with pickup and delivery locations can impact costs. If possible, choose central or easily accessible locations to potentially reduce transportation expenses.

Plan Ahead: Planning ahead and booking car shipment in advance allows for better availability and potentially more favorable pricing. Last-minute bookings during peak seasons may lead to higher costs.

By understanding the determinants influencing car shipping costs and implementing strategic approaches when obtaining quotes, individuals can navigate the process effectively. Choosing a reliable shipping company and providing accurate information about the vehicle will contribute to a smooth and cost-effective car transportation experience from Texas to Seattle.

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total-killer-brainrot · 7 months

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Warmed Up

“You get off on getting stabbed? I wonder… if I finished the job, would you cum?” You trailed the blade over his adam’s apple, feeling him gulp under the sharp metal. His hips rutted upwards into you. Grinding against you through your clothes. His lips were parted and his breath came out as hitched gasps. You cleaned close and grinned at him. “Oh you’d like that wouldn’t you… if I gutted you right… now…”

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Johnny lures in a new victim on the side of the road. Little does he know she is also a serial killer. And she is not one to be underestimated.

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All my fics are also on AO3

Not Beta Read. Rating: Explicit. Length: 2,284. Ship: Johnny Slaughter x You. Fem!Reader. Tags: Submissive Johnny, Canon-Typical Violence, Blood, Knife Play, Threats, Degrading Kink, Praise Kink, Riding, Vaginal Sex, Grinding, Orgasm Denial, Bratting, Dom/sub Undertones, Public Sex

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Hurt Pride: Part 1 | 2 | 3

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Your fingers tapped in tune to the radio. The lyrics mumbled through your parted lips. It was so hot. You hated Texas. It was all endless nothing and baking sun. Perspiration dripped down your forehead as you sighed. Only a couple more days and you would be out of this state. Maybe settle down in California. Or even up north. Just somewhere new. Where no one recognised you. That was the plan at least. Something up the road caught your eye. Heat waves making you squint to make it out.

In the hazy distance you spotted a truck, and what looked like a man waving, silhouetted in the setting sun. Your lips curled into a smirk. Perfect. It had been too long since you had scratched that itch. And what better time than in the middle of nowhere with no witnesses. You leaned for your glove box, taking the large knife from the box and sliding it into the back of your belt right as you pulled up to the stranded man. As you hopped out of your old car you eyed him warily. Sizing him up. He was a big guy, strong too. But surprisingly, those types usually went down the fastest. Always relying on their strength and ego that by the time a blade was lodged into their throat it was too late for all those muscles to help.

“Oh! Thank you so much… I’ve been out here for hours… was wondering if you could give me a jump start. Or even a ride into town if that's not too much trouble..” You did like his accent. Thick and southern but with a slight grit to it. Scratchy and pleasing when it reached your ears. But there was something about his eyes. Maybe it was the dimming light, but the darkness in those pupils ignited something deeply familiar to you. Like… a predator. Sizing you up as his prey. You had gone so long without feeling that uneasy sensation in your gut. But you knew how dangerous it would be to push it down and ignore it. This man was not to be trusted. Though, neither were you.

You kept your distance from the man as he stepped closer. Making the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. You rested your hand on your hip, in easy reach of your favourite blade. If this had to be quick, so be it. You preferred to savour your victims. But something about this man unsettled you so deeply.

He held out his hand for you. “Names Johnny. I’m sorry to bother you so late.” This guy was sloppy. His grin was far too toothy. Too menacing. He needed to work on his social act. Something you knew you had perfected long ago. You gave him your sweetest smile and stepped closer.

“No bother at all… what can I do for you?” You knew how to play a target just as much as you knew how to end one. And this would-be killer was none the wiser. You could practically see the excitement in his eyes as you happily followed him away from the safety of your car, to the front of his. Normally you would never let yourself be led into such an obvious trap, but you weren't worried. When he met your blade you would relish the surprise on his face.

As predictable as every other man who had crossed you, once the two of you were outside of view of the road, he grabbed you. Gripping your arm and pulling you closer with a low growl.

“Now don’t you dare move, sugar. I don’t wanna gut you just yet.”

You couldn’t help it. You scoffed. His knife wasn’t even close enough to you yet to be even remotely dangerous. Before he could move any closer, or question your attitude to being threatened, you drew your own blade and plunged it deep in his upper thigh. He yelled and stumbled back against his truck. Hitting the door heavily and very nearly losing his footing. You chuckled as you turned to face him. Reaching for your knife and twisting it harshly before tugging it out. Making him gasp in pain.

“You’re sloppy. You should work on your technique.” You cooed as he slid to the ground. Crouching down as he gripped his leg. Gritting his teeth as he stared down at the blood seeping into his dark jeans. “I saw you play a mile away, buddy.” You tilted the knife under his chin. Forcing him to meet your eyes. To your surprise, instead of fear in his eyes, he looked excited. Aroused even. You raised an eyebrow skeptically as you watched him stare at you in awe.

“Not often a pretty lady bests me…” he bit lip as he gazed up at you. Eyes dark with desire. You tensed as one bloody hand reached for you. But it just rested on your outer thigh, sliding up to meet the hem of your shorts. “Not often a pretty lady survives…”

You can’t deny his voice, and his tone, are doing something for you. You had a rule about not fucking your victims. It typically just gets messy. But hey, there was never a rule against fucking another serial killer. You grinned at him. Leaning close and kissing him rough. Keeping the blade pressed close to his throat. A warning. He groaned into your mouth, you could feel his blood on your cheek as he cupped your face. Pulling you closer with a strangely possessive growl.

Suddenly the hand on your thigh slid up to grip your hip. Pulling you into his lap roughly. From this position it was very easy to tell how hard he was. It made you laugh.

You moved to get off him. But he gripped your wrist. Tugging you back and holding you in place. Even if you had the upper hand, he was still stronger than you. No amount of skill with a blade could beat pure brawn. You tried to twist your wrist free but his grip was iron.

“You ain’t leaving, sweetheart. No way you get to be a tease, make me all hot and bothered, then leave me helpless on the side of the road?” His face contorted in mock pain and betrayal. “You stabbed me for pete's sake! That ain’t fair!” He rolled his hips upwards once again, hitting a spot that made you bite your lower lip. “Besides�� I know you want it too…” You didn’t know that you were so easy to read. But he was right. It had been so long. Alone on the road, hopping from place to place. Killing was all fun and good, but it had been forever since you’d been even remotely intimate with anyone. You could always just kill him after. Heck, maybe during. That was always fun.

You dug your blade deeper into his neck, feeling it break the skin ever so slightly. Blood dripping down to soak his collar. And he fucking whimpered. Eyes fluttering closed as he rutted up into you. You grinded down on him roughly just to make him moan, then lifted your hips and scowled down at him.

“Get my shorts off. Hurry. Less time I spend doing this the better.” You honestly would have preferred to take your time and enjoy this, but you couldn’t let him get the upper hand on you. If he thought he could take control of the situation you would be dead in a ditch in minutes.

Johnny nodded quickly. His hands shaky as he reached for your short zipper. You liked that. Liked that he was nervous. Anxious to get inside you. You trailed the blade down his cheek. Smirking as you met his eyes and watched him look away.

“Oh don’t be embarrassed, Johnny baby…” You leaned forward to kiss him, lifting your hips so he could slide your shorts and panties down your thighs. Discarding them somewhere along the dusty road. You nodded for him to start on his own pants. Which he did. Oh so obediently. “Good boy…” You purred in his ear. Laughing when you felt him shudder beneath you. You could feel how hard he was, pressed against your thigh. You slid yourself against his cock slowly, teasingly. Watching his head drop back against the door of his truck as your slick ran down his length. Proof that you were enjoying this little roadside interaction just as much as he was. You keep your eyes steady on his face. Watching him lose himself in the minor touches.

“You act this desperate with every girl you pull over?” You scoffed. Digging the blade deeper into his skin as he whined. Struggling to draw his focus to you again.

“Just… just you, sugar…” he mumbled. Voice shaky with need. You fully believed him. You could tell this guy prided himself on his kills. His ability to overpower people, probably usually women. You had no doubt that this was the first time anyone had gotten the best of him, and that it had ever led to this.

Finally you lifted yourself up, allowing him to slide inside you. Settling down on top of him at your own pace. Ignoring him when he tried to rut up into you. A happy sigh escaping you as he filled you so wonderfully. That seemed to please him. He was cute as he realised that you were enjoying his cock just as much as he was enjoying being inside you. You rolled your hips slowly. Just riding the fullness of your position. Ignoring his little grunts as he tried to buck you and force you to go faster. You were surprised he hadn’t held you down and moved you exactly how he wanted you. He was being surprisingly well behaved.

You dragged your slightly bloodied blade down his chest. Slicing his old shirt clean in half. Before trailing it back up to tease his nipple with the sharp point. Making his breath hitch in his throat and his cock twitch inside you. You leaned forward to kiss him deeply. Your teeth catching his bottom lip as you started to properly ride him. His hands drifted up your thighs to rest on your hips. His grip bruising as he used you as leverage to keep your rhythm. Rocking up to meet you with every firm thrust. He groaned against your lips, then once again louder when you bit down hard. The metallic taste of blood filled your mouth and you smirked as he whined pathetically.

“You cum before me, pretty boy, and I slit your throat.” You purred in his ear. Grinning as he shuddered beneath you. He couldn’t even speak anymore. So lost in his own pain and pleasure. Your steady movements faltered as you felt his long fingers feel for your clit. His thumb flicked over you skillfully and your head dropped back with a long moan. He was good. You’d never in a million years tell him that. But he clearly knew what he was doing. Briefly you wondered how many other women had had a night of endless pleasure with him, only to have it cut short at the end. You would be different. You were sure of that.

Your peak neared much faster than you were expecting. Your eyes widened with a gasp as you felt your orgasm hit you like a freight train. Sparks flew up your spine as you arched your back against his firm chest.

“Fuck…” You heard him utter from beneath you. Struggling to hold back as your insides fluttered around him. You grinned down at him, rolling your hips to see if you could get him to beg. Your blade dragging up the side of his neck slowly. “Not bad, hot stuff.” You pecked his cheek, and just as you watched the hope swell in his eyes, you swiftly stood off him. Laughing and skipping away from his hands as he reached out to grab you.

Your fingers threaded through his dark hair and tugged his head forward, watching his lips part, about to let out yet another pathetic, needy moan. Then you shoved him back, slamming his head against the door of his old truck. You weren’t quite strong enough to knock him out, but he was dazed for sure. Vision spinning as he watched you slide your shorts up your legs again. He groaned and you smirked as he grasped for you again.

“Darlin’... you can’t… you can’t just leave me like this… come on now.” He called after you as you headed for your own car. “You fucked my leg… now you gon’ leave me high and dry in the middle of nowhere?” You heard him slam his fist into the dirt behind you.

“Hey if you manage to make it back to civilization alive, come find me.” As you slammed the door to your car shut you heard him swearing at you. Poor baby. Had never been so easily played in his life.

“I don’ even know your name!”

#texas chainsaw massacre #johnny slaughter #johnny slaughter x reader #johnny slaughter x you #TKB Fics

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