When I bought my first car, a 1966 Mustang, my father insisted that I take it to his mechanic to go over it to make sure it was all working properly before I could drive it. It would stall out after 10 minutes of driving, so there was a problem.

The following was on the bill….
Clean top of carburator
Check oil filter for loosenes
Check window operation
Check exhaust system
Check steering, suggest replacement of steering box.

This was 1972 and the bill was over $300.00!!

The actual problem was a pinched fuel line. Rubber hose and two clamps. $1.50.
I replaced the oil filter and changed the oil. $7.50 total.
I removed the interior panels of the door, and greased the tracks. Already had grease $0.00
I replaced a broken hanger for the exhaust. $3.50
I pulled out the steering box and found it only needed grease and adjustment. Time and labor, already had grease $0.00.

The dude that worked on my car was a hack. I pointed out all this to my father and he only said “I guess your a better mechanic than the place we took it to. I never went back there.

It’s difficult for my legal bod cousins. As I’ve mentioned before in another post during CNY celebrations a lot of UK born cousins were back in HK. A lot of them were looking for a route to come live in HK.

One of them was my cousin from one of my dad’s sisters. She’s worked in a UK legal firm for ages and wanted a way to come back here. Her just like many UK born ones have HKID cards so do not need visa sponsorship.

She had work experience.

She can work for less because accommodation is provided, the Clan provides several fully fitted out portacabins right at the back of the village, Portacabins are used because the common houses are being torn down and rebuilt. Anyway these portacabins all you have to do is pay for the electricity used.

She’s also pretty damned good in Chinese, HSK6… but here’s the thing HSK6 is still considered by most China born Chinese to be illiterate!

So? You have none of the above advantages.

You have to answer the question to HK immigration – why should I let you work in HK? What skills do you have that are in demand or somebody in HK can’t do. AND it has to pay over $28,000 a month.

You’re competing against all the returnees.

A group of my friends was out drinking at a local bar where the music was loud, the floor was sticky, and the atmosphere was biker/tattoo/STD/obnoxious.

I was talking with someone who was an acquaintance-they were a friend of one of my friends. We knew each other, but only through these mutual friends.

Unfortunately, alcohol makes some people belligerent and, in the case of this one particular individual, paranoid.

I must have said something that didn’t sit well with him because the belligerent paranoid (BPA) accused me of disparaging him (I had not). He turned to my husband and told him he knew for a fact that our daughter was not his biological daughter (She is 100% his biological daughter). He started uttering non-sensical statements which I, for the most part, ignored and took as our cue to get the hell out of that dive bar.

The BPA went to the bathroom, my husband waited to pay the tab, and I went to get the car.

While I waited for my husband to come out, the BPA came up to my window and just stared into my car until I noticed him which caused me to jump and scream. I rolled down my window and told him he nearly gave me a heart attack.

Then he very calmly stared at me and said, “I’ll be by later tonight to stick a lighter in your outside dryer vent until your house catches and you all burn to death.”

Who the fuck communicates such a descriptive and specific way to unalive someone they barely know for reasons that are a complete figment of their imaginative paranoia?

My husband and I didn’t sleep well that night. The next day we installed cameras. And we have avoided all contact with the BPA since that unsettling and strange incident.

Oh I have a doozy.

1978. Houston. Near the Galleria Mall.

I was getting off the freeway when a police car cut me off, almost running me off the road, no signal. Just truly bad driving.

Being young and stupid, when I was beside him at the light, I called him on it.

Oh he lit me up. I had three friends in my car with me. He made me get out of the car and was just screaming at me, telling me he could do anything he damn well pleased and poking me in the chest the entire time. I politely asked him to stop poking me with his finger and he threatened to break all my fingers off. He was so mad he was spitting and his partner was standing next to him with a smirk.

I stayed calm and asked my friends to write down their name, badge number, and car number. That’s when they hopped in their cruiser and just zoomed off.

I didn’t like it, so I called and talked to the desk officer. He took all the information and I assumed absolutely nothing would happen.

Nope.

I got a call back from a lieutenant a few days later. They had done an investigation, because the location I reported them at was nowhere NEAR where they were assigned for that shift. What they discovered is that they were cutting out of their area, going to the mall, and catching a movie. Lots.

The lieutenant shared that this was not the first complaint, but it was the last, because they’d both been fired.

Moral of the story? If you’re doing something outright stupid, don’t light up the stubborn college kid.

Dad had stage four mastatised pancreatic cancer, double incontinence, dementia and crippling arthritis. His oncologists used to call him in every month for a check up that consisted of him looking at dad’s medical notes asking how he was then nodding his head, that’s it. But, the trip to the hospital took nearly an hours preparation, a forty minute drive each way, a ten minute walk from the car park to the clinic (dad in a wheelchair when I found one) and then the worst bit! The oncologist used to call ALL that days patients in at 0930 then see them in alphabetical order! Look at our surname! The first few times were bad but one time after dad returned to the hospice he had to be rushed back to the same hospital under blues and twos! The next appointment we managed about an hour in the waiting room and dad was struggling to hold back his tears of agony, so I wheeled him out and started along the corridors back to the car. First the receptionist tried to stop us and I told her what to do on a short pier, then the nurse came running up to try to return us to the clinic “as the doctor was very busy and would get to us as soon as possible”. Dad told her to go forth and fornicate or something similar! She ran back and told the doctor (don’t know if fornication was involved or not). Pushing a wheelchair with a mind of a shopping trolley containing a fifteen stone (210#) obese man (5′2″ ) in immense pain, who didn’t want to be there, you don’t move very fast! The doctor caught up to us to find out what was going on and exercise his presumed authority! Wrong move! My dad used to be a CSM and he taught me how to project orders across a parade ground! Don’t shout at me if you have sensitive hearing! Amongst other things (including the legitimacy of his birth) I told him we were there for the benefit of dads health and not his ego! And we left, luckily for him he didn’t try anything physical! I’m also 210# but six foot tall and very little of that was fat! Unfortunately the stress and strain on dad contributed to him once again that evening being returned to hospital by emergency ambulance.

Now my dad through a variety of reasons was no stranger to that hospital. In the ward he usually ended up on, all the staff knew him and were on first name terms, most since being students. One of the senior consultants had first met my dad when he was doing his medical training and had become friends (even came to dad’s funeral! What, you think you recover from stage four pancreatic cancer? At 81?) He wanted to know why dad was back in hospital once again. So we told him who, how and why! Now this senior consultant is married to the chief executive of the hospital, that may or may not be the reason that the oncologist changed his appointments policy from block appointments to individual appointments and a very significant attitude adjustment the next time we went to see him!

I started to work as a programmer with a large insurance company.

I was also going to a university at night for an engineering degree.

So, the job was just a paycheck for me until graduated.

My supervisor called me into her office and let me know that she knew that I was just using the job as a steppingstone until I graduated. She was a quaker and peppered her speech with thee and thou. A lovely lady.

She told me the company had its own problems and if I showed some diligence in my job, she would ensure that I would be rewarded for my effort.

I took her advice and made a great effort to please her and focused on my job.

When the company put together a planning group, she insisted that I be a part of it.

The group consisted of two vice presidents, three directors and one programmer.

The first problem we tackled was the number of boxes of paper documents shipped to all our service locations at the end of the month. The cost of shipping the boxes and how hard it was to look up the data at the service location.

This was in the late sixties and personal computers were not common.

I was a tech magazine reader at the time, so I suggested to the group that we output the data to a fiche machine because the fiche produced would be less costly to ship than sending boxes,

It would require the home office to buy the fiche machine and the service locations to rent fiche readers, which at that time were very cheap.

The benefit to the service location was the fiche was easy to handle and never got torn.

Well, the company and the service locations loved the idea, so it was accepted.

The planning group stayed together for a year, and we solved some smaller problems.

That 15-minute conversation with my supervisor changed my life forever.

When I received my degree, I no longer had an interest in engineering and chose to stay in the computer field.

She is gone now but not forgotten.

I can try.

It’s a long story, though. But, like most other people, my political leanings are the result of my influences early in life, and my experiences. And, to some degree, what I didn’t experience, that others did experience.

For example, it’s easy to be supportive of the police, when you’ve only ever had positive encounters with them. It’s easy to assume that most people can avoid negative encounters with the police by simply obeying the law.

That door swings both ways. It’s easy to have an adversarial view of the police when you or someone you know had a negative encounter with them.

Once you get a political idea in your head, you start to see it everywhere you look. This is true for people across the political spectrum. You’re influenced to see certain things and, by God, now that you’re looking for them, you see them everywhere.

For me, my journey to the right side of the political spectrum is more of a journey of being pushed away by the left, rather than willingly moving towards the right. I’m more libertarian than conservative, but, in contemporary America’s binary political landscape, it seems that anything that isn’t progressive is often all grouped under “conservatism.”

Progressives: What’s your stance on [this issue]?

Me: Total indifference. It has nothing to do with me.

Progressives: So you don’t support the people who are dealing with it?

Me: Does my support or lack of it have any impact on the issue whatsoever? No? Then why must I choose to support it or not? Why can’t I remain indifferent?

Progressives: You sound like a conservative. Your silence tells us all we need to know, and it won’t protect you.

Me: If indifference on this topic makes me a conservative in your eyes, okay then. I’ll add your labeling of my political stances to the list of things I don’t care about.

If I’m being super honest, in the last decade or so, I’ve gone from identifying as “libertarian” to identifying as “cynical.” I assume that most politicians are only looking out for themselves, most government attempts to fix issues will fail, or make things worse, the government has more than enough money to fix society’s problems, but a lot of that money is wasted, etc…

For example, there’s a ballot measure here in Chicago to raise taxes on real estate sales over $1m, to raise funds for housing options for homeless people. My view on that is that it will likely pass, but not a single homeless person will be helped by this. Any money raised by this will find its way into the pockets of politicians and their supporters, while the expenses will just passed on to renters. The people who support it will get to pat themselves on the back for caring about the homeless, while ignoring the complete lack of tangible positive outcomes from it. The goal here is virtue signaling from the rank-and-file voters, sticking it to “rich people,” and lining the pockets of the Democratic machine. Homelessness is just the necessary reasoning for it all.

Basically, I assume that, for the rest of my life, the general situation in the world, and in my country, will be roughly the same as it is now, and my best move is to put myself and my children in a position to avoid the worst of it. The “status quo,” when it comes to politics, is too hopelessly entrenched to be uprooted, and too hopelessly corrupt to be effective.

But this question is about the origins of my conservatism, not why I stick with it in middle age.

I suppose my political journey began as a child in the 80s and early 90s. My father worked for the U.S. Navy, as a civilian machinist. Among other things I remember him saying about his job were:

• He was forced to spend millions of dollars on machines that he didn’t really need in his shop, but the companies who made those machines donated to the right politicians.
• He was forced to spend every single dime he was allocated for the fiscal year, or, the next fiscal year, he wouldn’t get as much allocated. Saving money isn’t rewarded, but is actually punished, when you work for the government.
• He would never be promoted beyond his current level, no matter how well he did, because he was a white male. Back then, the federal government was only interested in promoting racial minorities and females.

That last one was something I heard versions of from most white men I knew growing up. Of course, half of them worked at the same base where my father worked, so they dealt with the same policies. None of these were rich white men. They were all working class white men, and they all felt like they were being punished for things they didn’t do, in the name of “fairness.” And they placed the blame for that injustice directly at the feet of liberals.

The same white “social justice warriors” of the 50s and 60s found themselves, by the 80s, on the receiving end of social injustice, in the form of Affirmative Action. It seemed like every middle-aged white male I knew growing up was a “live and let live” and “don’t judge a book by its cover” kind of guy, with a serious chip on their shoulder that others weren’t adhering to the “don’t judge a book by its cover” mantra. Every single white guy who felt like they were falling behind in society was able to blame Affirmative Action for their slipping, no matter how true it was.

The message, for younger white guys like me, was easy to pick up: it is legal to discriminate against you because of your race and gender, and you just have to accept it.

And, once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere.

Why does my high school have a counselor specifically for helping minority students get into and pay for college? That’s discrimination. Why is no one calling it out? My parents are taxpayers, too. That counselor should be helping everyone who needs help with those things, and not discriminating against students based on race.

You just have to accept it… or, affiliate yourself with the side of the political aisle which points out the hypocrisy of it all.

So it wasn’t so much “we’re conservatives,” as it was “liberals are working against people like us, so I guess that makes us conservative by default. Where else would we go?”

By the time I got to high school, I was socially liberal, in the sense that I simply didn’t care about people’s personal business, particularly in the bedroom. I was also very concerned about environmentalism, and even started a small paper recycling program in my school. It didn’t last, but at least I tried. I wanted to be a “part of the solution.”

My environmental views have skewed heavily to the cynical side in the 30 years since starting high school. I think recycling paper is a huge waste of time.

I remember, however, in high school, being annoyed by some of my more politically involved classmates, demanding that I (and everyone else) not only form opinions in line with theirs on certain topics, but openly express our support. They had the “if you’re not openly supporting us, you must be quietly opposing us” attitude that I’ve seen in other progressives in my adult life.

Some of my most common PG-rated thoughts throughout my high school years were versions of “I’d care more about this person’s point of view if they weren’t so damn loud and obnoxious all of the time.” And, of course, a sarcastic “the problem you’re in could have been easily avoided has you made more conservative choices in life.”

It was during those years that my own sister, of her own volition, developed a drug habit, became a teen mom, and dropped out of high school. I had a front-row seat, starting around age 12, of how to ruin your life through really shitty decisions, and it sapped a lot of the sympathy I had for people who were dealing with the consequences of their own shitty decisions.

Although I’m getting better about it, when I hear that someone put themselves in a bad situation, and is now begging “society” to bail them out of it, one of my first thoughts is, “how is this anyone else’s problem but yours? Why should we all have to pay for this?”

Anyway, that’s my evil conservative origin story.

While inprocessing for the military, I worked at a radio station selling air time in a town of 30,000. When I took over my route a retired Army major was occasionally hitting $6,000. That was pretty good in 1979. I took billings over $8000. Three months later, I was fired (I was the only man), and a young cutsie 22-year-old girl was hired. She had zero experience.

My sales manager/station owner’s wife told me to “clean out my desk.” I did just that, trashing everything including sales invoices for the month. She made a big point of letting me know I wouldn’t be getting my commissions. I waited patiently for my salary check ($1,500 at the time) at my desk, then walked to the bank and cashed it.

Two days later I got the call. “Where are all the sales invoices for August?’

“In the trash.”

“What!?”

“You said clean out my desk. I did.” Then I hung up.

I heard later the young girl didn’t work out, and the station went bankrupt.

Sad, isn’t it?

I absolutely do

Coaching has become an Industry today and whenever such things happen, everything becomes counter productive

Xi Jingping rightly said

In China :-

Private Tutoring Apps had become an Industry and had commercialized education so much that the newer generation was no longer going to such coaching facilities to LEARN OR ADD TO THEIR KNOWLEDGE OR UNDERSTANDING but to specifically orient themselves to scoring marks in a specific examination (Gaokao)

Private Tutoring Apps had become exploitative and were commercializing learning to an extent where it was feared that the entire Gaokao could be modified to suit the whims of the Private Tutoring Apps

So he wiped out the Industry mercilessly

“F*** the Billions of Dollars in Paper value”

Today Tutoring has gone back to the old 60 RMB per Hour student tutors or Volunteer Tutorials and Extra Coaching

---

India and China both have predators who suck the blood of common people and exploit them in the name of capitalism

The Difference is CHINA BANNED THIS

In China, if any Institute publishes the list of toppers for admissions

• Their license is suspended for 5 Years
• They are fined not less than 60,000 RMB but upto 250,000 RMB

Ministry of Education Bans the Idolization of China’s Top Gaokao Scorers

Stories of the top achievers of China’s national exams can no longer be propagated by state media; the emphasis should shift to the average, harmonious student.

India not only allows this to flourish but ignores cases where Institutes LIE about their students by paying money to the students and making the students lie

Most Coaching Institutions are run with political contacts

Now my point is

Is Unacademy really predatory?

Just because they offer coaching for a fee doesn’t make them predatory

Just because they have referrals doesn’t make them predatory. That’s just business. Same as a Tutor asking you to give her cards to your friends.

• Do they exploit the situation in India and claim if you don’t take their course, you will lose badly
• Do they help you learn or do they force you to structure your brain into clearing the JEE or NEET rather than learning the topics?
• Do they prostitute education by paying more money to marketers than teachers?

So far at least I dont think they are that bad

Please correct me if they have become that bad

Coz that’s what happened to BYJUS

From being a place that helped students sharpen their brains to understand CAT better, they prostituted and pimped education spending more on “Celebrities” like SRK who also prostituted himself like he did with Arindam Chaudhari

Unacademy are also going BYJUS WAY

Using Tendulkar the dropout of Xth Standard to promote an Education Product

So they too are starting to pimp out education

It won’t create the Students India needs

Not the thinkers, analysts, people who understand fundamentals – they aren’t born from KOTA FACTORIES or Prospective Pimping Edtech Apps

They are born by self study with tutoring to help them sharpen their brains

One thing to learn and understand Physics, Maths and Chemistry and USE THIS KNOWLEDGE AND WRITE THE JEE

Another is to learn Physics, Maths and Chemistry BECAUSE YOU WANT TO WRITE THE JEE

The former is a winner

The Latter ends up mediocre in life in every aspect

Solution?

• Ban full page Ads of Toppers by various Institutions
• Regulate the Coaching Fees
• Make sure Coaching Institutes remain Sole Proprietorships Or Partnerships and dont become Companies
• Ban any Coaching Institute taking over another Institute
• Register all Coaching Institutions with Ministry of Education with select standards

Otherwise the next two generations of students, the so called FUTURE OF INDIA would be the most worthless

Anyone who exploits students like this must be taken to Gulags and forced to labor for 20 hours a day in the -17 degree weather

Well, let’s start with some basic principles of U.S. constitutional law.

Under the constitution, the Supreme Court may only hear original cases in very limited circumstances. One of those is when one state sues another state. That’s not uncommon, but usually its due to disputes about the right to use water from rivers that pass through more than one state. The usual procedure is to refer the case to a special master (usually a federal court judge) who holds the trial and reports back to the Supreme Court which can then affirm the decision.

Congress cannot expand the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to hear cases that aren’t listed in the constitution. That was what Marbury v. Madison was about – the court was given power by congress to hear cases involving disputes about judicial appointments in the District of Columbia, and ruled that Congress didn’t have that power.

Now, onto the case. The State of Texas attempted to bring a case shortly before Congress was to meet to confirm the result of the 2020 election to sue the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for not following its own election laws. Essentially, they wanted to disqualify all the mail-in ballots cast during the election on the theory that Pennsylvania law hadn’t authorized them. This issue had already been tried by Pennsylvania courts which ruled such suits were “untimely” – any such suit had to be brought before the election, not after.

But the only issue before the court was whether they HAD to take the case. As a rule, the Supreme Court chooses which cases it hears, but again if this is a case within its jurisdiction to hear new cases, they might have to take it.

What the court ruled is that no state has the right to start a case in the Supreme Court unless the judges agree to hear it. That’s probably good policy as it appeared this case would have asked the Supreme Court to allow one state to enforce laws in other states, which in any other case would be a no-no. For example, Texas could not sue to prevent Pennsylvania physicians from performing abortions on Texas residents just because it’s illegal for a Texas resident to leave the state for an abortion, or based on some theory that Pennsylvania law doesn’t allow physicians to perform abortions except on Pennsylvania residents. Once again, the issues in this case were already settled in Pennsylvania courts, and those could have been appealed to the Supreme Court if there were a constitutional issue (that’s what happened in Bush v. Gore).

But let’s get back to the rule about the Supreme Court only being able to hear a narrow range of original cases. The president does not have the right to sue in the Supreme Court (although he could be sued in, for example, a case involving the appointment of an ambassador – that’s within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction). Members of Congress don’t have the right to sue in the Supreme Court either.

I worked in a loan department as a loan clerk. A man was hired as a new manager for one of our branch offices. Our Vice President asked me to train the man on the loan process and how to type out the form letters, etc.. This man gave me grief from moment one.

He was arrogant and a smart aleck. I wanted to slap him about every five minutes. He was also a male chauvinist pig. He kept making sexual remarks to me and about me. When I sat him in front of the computer to type out the form letters, he refused to do them, saying “Typing is women’s work. I’ll have one of the women do it for me.”

The final straw came when I took him back to our Vice President’s office. The VP was asking me how he had done and before I could respond, the man said something to the effect of “Well, she wouldn’t sit in my lap, so I think she needs to be spanked.”. I just stared at the VP. He turned to the new manager and said “You’re fired. This is one great lady and you’ve disrespected her since the moment you walked in. Get out before I turn her loose on you.”.

Adolf Hitler was a chronic drug addict. His drug use was of epic proportions.

Hitler was prescribed by his doctors so many various drugs (including cocaine) that he was rarely in a state unaffected by powerful mind-altering substances.

According to his doctors, Hitler was “a good patient.”

• He was meticulously adherent to the regimen for his chronic sinusitis: cocaine in aerosol form.
• The German Fuhrer also took amphetamines, sedatives, and hormones.
• Hitler relied on daily injections of the “wonder drug” Eukodol. It contained oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opioid. The drug caused the state of euphoria, practically rendering the user incapable of making sound judgments.

In his book “Blitzed”, German author Norman Ohler described how the Third Reich was permeated with drugs, including cocaine, heroin and most notably crystal meth, which was used by everyone from soldiers to housewives and factory workers.

Pervitin, an early form of methamphetamine, was available in Nazi German without a prescription.

In Nazi military during WWII, drug use was encouraged.

In September 1939, Ranke tested the drug on 90 university students and concluded that Pervitin could help the Wehrmacht win the war.

The effects of amphetamines on an person are similar to those of the adrenaline produced by the body, triggering a heightened state of alertness. In most people, the substance increases self-confidence, concentration, and willingness to take risks while at the same time reducing sensitivity to pain, hunger, and the need for sleep.

Later, a dose of cocaine was added to Pervitin tablets, to increase the drug’s potency and encourage continuous use.

When Hitler’s drug supplies ran out by the end of the war, he suffered severe withdrawal from serotonin and dopamine, paranoia, psychosis, rotting teeth, extreme shaking, kidney failure and delusion.

Technically yes but realistically an emphatic no.

I never thought I would be saying this but Jake Paul is likely to beat Mike Tyson.

Why? That’s a legitimate question since we are talking about one of the greatest and most feared heavyweight champions ever V a relatively junior pro boxer with very few fights.

I’m afraid it all comes down to age, activity and conditioning. At age 40 or even 50 I’d give Tyson a great chance but he’s nearly 60 now, been out of the ring close to 20 years and been doing a lot of other things. Put simply he’s just not in condition to fight a professional fight. He could beat the hell out of the normal types of guys in the street no doubt about it but this is a professional boxing fight we’re talking about. It’s very likely that after one round of intense fighting he’ll be totally finished from a cardio perspective. After that last stand, Jake Paul who if nothing else can at least hit hard will probably get him.

Don’t be fooled by the videos of Tyson looking fast and powerful in training. They have been carefully edited to make him look good. In reality in the fight (if it’s a real one) he won’t look that good or fast. He’ll still have a bit of power so there is some danger to Jake Paul but probably only for one or two rounds max. After that it will a big advantage to the younger man.

No matter how good a condition a fighter is in, the age aspect of this is relevant. A 60 years old head isn’t supposed to get hit hard by a pro fighter. The blood vessels can’t be trained to take those shots like they used to.

For people of my generation it’s pretty sad to see the great Iron Mike Tyson reduced to doing this kind of circus act.

This fight could end pretty badly and shouldn’t really be happening at all. That’s capitalism for you.

EDIT : I guess the most likely thing here is that they’re both in on it as a money grabbing exercise and have agreed with each other not to hurt each other. The fight will probably be the least interesting part of the next few weeks. It’s all about the build up.

I can’t believe I am going to admit this….

When I was 14 years old in 1982-ish. I was recently uprooted from my lifelong hometown. I moved from upstate New York to Pennsylvania with my mom and step-monster. A friend of mine had just gotten sentenced to serve time in a NY state jail. I wrote to Scott frequently, as I thought he must be bored and lonely. I used this same stationary every time, with little unicorns on it. After the third or fourth letter, I realized just how bad it was for him in there.

I got together a little bit of money and bought some pot. I put it in a little matchbook, and sent the matchbook to Scott, along with a letter saying something like “I hope this helps.” I was smart enough not to sign my name, just in case anything bad happened. I thought that it was illegal to tamper with someone’s mail. It never even occured to me that the jail’s officials in charge were allowed to open up Scott’s mail and go through it. I used the same stationary as normal. Little unicorns. Can you see where this is heading?

My parents were surprised when federal detectives showed up. The formal charges were:

“Using the Federal Government (The United States Post Office) to transport illegal drugs across state lines.” To a correctional institution, no less.

Okay, you can laugh your a** off now…

I’ll wait.

Thank God I was 14. I was sentenced as a juvenile offender (the record was sealed); deemed “incorrigible”; had a PINS petition put in place against me (Person In Need of Supervision); had to perform 100 hours of community service and was almost placed in foster care because my parents couldn’t handle it or me anymore. Thankfully, my grandmother took me in, instead. My parents called me all sorts of stupid. Yes, I have to agree. But my answer to them at the time was “I thought he could use a buzz.”

Hugs.
-Valeri

I am soon to be 64. At this stage in my life, I have a VERY low tolerance for a**hattery. I don’t bother trying to be polite to people that aren’t polite.

The last time one of my sisters came to my house and made a comment about a few papers laying on the floor, I didn’t let her get away with it. I left them laying on the floor after they fell off the desk; for a good reason, but that was none of my sister’s business. I don’t believe in explaining to people why my house looks the way it does. Why SHOULD I? So, what I said to her was this: “You don’t REALLY want me to start critiquing YOUR housekeeping, do you?”. After I said that to her, she never said anything about anything that was on the floor again.

You see, her and her husband always leave their dining room table FULL of all different kinds of papers, looks real messy, but you know what? I never say anything because it’s THEIR house! They can keep it the way they WANT to! Plus, I don’t CARE about it, it’s not MY house! They SHOULD have the same respect for me!

AND, that’s the same way I feel about someone coming into my home telling me they don’t like it. Depending on who it is that is saying it, I MIGHT say something like “I don’t care, you don’t live here.” or maybe ”What did you come over for then?”. See, the FUN thing about messing with RUDE people, is because they never expect people to be rude BACK, which is why they are rude in the first place, because people LET them get away with it. *I* don’t. The looks on their faces when they are rude and I am blunt with them…PRICELESS!!!

Cowboy Burgers

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

• 1 pound ground beef
• 1/2 teaspoon seasoned salt
• 1/2 teaspoon seasoned pepper
• 2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons butter
• 1 large onion, thinly sliced
• 1 (1.0 ounce) envelope taco seasoning or 2 tablespoons Taco Seasoning
• 4 slices Cheddar cheese
• 4 Kaiser rolls
• 4 lettuce leaves
• 4 tomato slices

Instructions

1. In a medium bowl, combine ground beef, seasoned salt and seasoned pepper; shape into four patties.
2. Grill or broil to desired doneness (about 5 to 6 minutes on each side for medium).
3. Meanwhile, in medium skillet, melt butter.
4. Add onion and taco seasoning; mix well.
5. Cook onion over medium high heat until soft and transparent.
6. Top each patty with onions and cheese.
7. Return to grill or broiler until cheese is melted.
8. Place each patty on a roll; top with lettuce and tomato.

I was a mainstream reporter (NYTimes and NY Herald Tribune) when Donald Trump was in his early 30s in NYC. I got to know him at his hangouts and on several more private occasions.

He was not then, nor is he now, “stupid” as so many anti-Trumpers continually proclaim. He was, however, a man whose word meant absolutely nothing. He spoke almost nothing but outright lies and “gut” fabrications. He’d betray a “friend” in a blink; he loathed any woman whose “pussy” he could not “grab”. He was a physical coward in private and in public. He was frightened to wetting his pants of his Nazi-loving, face-slapping, fascist father, to whom he lied and groveled. He had no friends since he only took and never gave. Both men and women immediately felt his creepy, duplicitous, despicable ways and avoided him unless they wanted to be close to what they thought was his money. Her learned how to manipulate and twist the American legal system from his evil genius lawyer Roy Cohen (“Don’t tell me about the law, tell me about the judge.”). I believed then that hate is stupid and as a reporter I did not hate Trump. But I understood him, and understanding is the opposite of hatred.

Trump is now and was then (as any woman who knew him even a bit well would agree) —- a mentally vicious, endlessly traitorous, sickeningly self-absorbed adolescent with feminine soft hands (no manual labor) and a filthy tongue. That was in his early 30s. Any honest observer and reporter quickly found him out and in New York and environs his name was a dirty joke. . . Then came TV “reality” shows and millions of unfortunate Americans watched how he behaved and they want to be just like him, and get away with it. If anyone who reads this considers themselves a friend of Trump, may their gods help them. He will make America and Americans poorer in mind, money, than it ever was, The only way to beat the Russian-sponsored thug is to confront him with a community of people who will oppose him and his fellow liars, cheaters, thieves, and those who tolerate them,

Bad Traffic day in Orlando, FL. As a legal motorcycle rider, I was following traffic laws and traffic lights, and traffic wasn’t moving at all. The *ssh*l* in the car behind me started to lean on his horn. After 5 or 10 horn blows I started to respond with my 139 decibel horn everytime, followed by a turn of my head to look at the driver banging his hands on his steering wheel and yelling again. When he tried to pull up next to me in the space between me and the car in the next lane, I moved to block just enough of the lane that he would have to hit either me or the car in the next lane. At this point he starts yelling at me. He continues to try to move up. The Car next to me gives him just enough space, and I continue to control my lane.

When he gets close enough he started yelling “You! On the motorcycle! ….” and a flood of anti-hispanic, anti-biker rhetoric just comes spewing out of his mouth. Not being hispanic and not considering myself a “biker”, I calmly turned around, looked him in the eyes, and said “No hables espaniol”.

The drivers is ENRAGED! He starts to get out of his car. And he keeps screaming about immigrants. Once he is out of the car, I turn to him again.

I say to him “I was born in Philadelphia PA. Am I an immigrant? And aren’t you smart enough to understand that I don’t speak Spanish? That is what “No hables espaniol” means.”

The man is flabbergasted, stops in his tracks, flaps his mouth several times, and the best revenge, the log jam broke and the light changed, at the same moment. As I pulled away, the man was left standing in the middle of the street with every car behind him laying on the horn, and trying to get around him.

Yes, I had to take on the most difficult challenge of all, a man telling a woman that her attire was inappropriate for the office.

To set the scene, this woman was a young adult, a peer and also a work-friend. She had just lost a bunch of weight and also taken a European vacation. She was feeling good about her body and bought a dress in Paris that showed it off. This dress was so low-cut that it showed the underside of her breasts. If you wanted to pick up a casual hookup in a bar, this was exactly the dress you wanted to wear. But I would never, could never say that.

What I said to her was that this dress looked awesome on her with her weight loss, and if she was looking for a date, it was a great choice. But if she wanted to be taken seriously as an engineer and not distract people, something more conservative and businesslike might be a better choice. She was, in fact, having difficulty being taken seriously, so she took this advice on board and dressed more professionally after that. I got to keep our friendship and not get sued. I’m super glad I won’t ever have to do that again.

The American Correctional Association (ACA) came to do an inspection at the Federal prison I was in.

A failed inspection would mean loss of accreditation. I’m not aware that means anything other than egg on some suit’s face.

For a prison inspection to be meaningful, hordes of inspectors should rappel from helicopters into the yard in the dead of night without warning. They could carry badges, clipboards, and maybe a few pieces of equipment. (OK… five minutes warning so nobody gets shot).

Instead, the prison had months of notice. They had enough lead time that they could leisurely waste weeks, doing nothing to get ready. When the visit was about two weeks off, suddenly stuff started happening.

New paint was slathered on everything, thick enough it could’ve stopped an escape all by itself.

In the chow hall, we had a persistent leak in the roof. Because it wasn’t fixed for years, the drop ceiling soaked up water, several tiles collapsed, and ominous mold was growing in the insulation around the duct work. At about the same time that paint was being poured over every surface, a crew of inmates came in to patch the ceiling. They didn’t fix the leak, they just patched the drywall and drop in sections that were affected.

Our dishwasher could never get up to temperature. The water was so hard that the heating coils were continually clogged with deposits several inches thick. Pick up any tray that had gone through the thing, and you’d immediately see that the luke warm water wasn’t getting trays clean (of course we never bothered with soap or surfactants either). Instead of trying to fix the dishwasher, the staff, experienced in many an inspection, simply stopped using it. It was “temporarily out of service” for the visit, and we used thousands of dollars worth of disposable foam plates and cups for each meal. This kept the inspectors from finding out that the machine was actually permanently out of service.

So, no. The inspections didn’t help us at all. Our food did get dramatically better for the couple of days that the visit went on, but that was really the only change.

After the visitors left, the dishwasher was plugged back in so it could moisten the dirt on the plates, and the ceiling started to crumble again, revealing mold that had blossomed nicely in the humid darkness.

A bolt of lightning hit the right wing of the aircraft, and suddenly LANSA Flight 508 was plummeting toward the ground. Over the screams of dozens of others, Juliane Koepcke — who was sitting at 19F, a window seat — heard her mother say from the seat beside her: “Now it’s all over.”

Seconds later, the plane is disintegrating in mid-air, and Juliane’s mom is gone. Juliane is still strapped in her seat, but she is not inside the cabin anymore — instead, she is all alone in the open air at a height of 10,000 feet, tumbling down from the heavens.

The last things she will ever see are packed treetops that look like broccoli heads. Or so she thinks.

Because the next day, she wakes up on the Amazon rainforest floor, still very much alive and miraculously only modestly wounded:

She had a concussion, a broken collarbone, some deep cuts. The forest, she wrote in her memoir, “saved my life,” the foliage cushioning the impact of her 10,000-foot fall. She went in and out of consciousness before finally pulling herself to her feet.

That is her first survival story, but now she is all alone in a jungle. She is seventeen years old, and she needs to focus on the next step. A second survival. Luckily for her, Juliane has lived in the jungle for several years, in a research station where both of her parents were working at the time.

She looks for her mom first, but doesn’t find her. Then, she decides to look for a stream, because streams often lead to villages, and she will soon need water. And when she finally finds a creek, she also finds dead people:

“When I turned a corner in the creek, I found a bench with three passengers rammed head first into the earth. I was paralysed by panic. It was the first time I had seen a dead body.”

[Image of plain wreckage of LANSA Flight 508, which had boarded in Peru. (Coral Brunner/Shutterstock.)]

As days go by, a wound on her upper right arm gets infested with maggots about one centimeter long each. She remembered that their dog once had the same infection and that her father had put kerosene in it, so when she finds a small hut with a palm leaf roof, and outboard motor and one liter of kerosine, she sucks the gasoline out and puts it into the wound.

The next day she hears human voices, and she is saved for the second time around.

Later, Juliane found out that her mom also survived the crash, but was badly wounded and died a couple of days later in the rainforest, all alone, and desperately hoping that a miracle had saved her daughter.

And I guess it did.

SOURCES: the footnoted site and Google images.