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Samson's Wig

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Everything posted by Samson's Wig

  1. Right? I mean, what could go wrong?
  2. Of all of the dumb fucking nonsense arguments used by gun nuts, this might be the dumbest one I've heard.
  3. I hope everyone is taking notes while watching Dune.
  4. We once had a cat who utilized this move anytime he had to go to the vet. He was a big Maine Coon and would shit on the vet's table and roll around in it as fast as he could the second they tried to take a look at him. His pupils would dilate to full black and he would stumble about like a late-life Hemingway, mumbling and snarling and drunken looking and ready to fuck up anyone who crossed him. "You wanna examine me now, bitch?" was written all over his face. We had two different vets ask us not to bring him back in, and finally found one that would drug him before every visit to avoid staff getting injured. Never got another cat after he died and never will. I loved that evil little bastard, but I was also terrified of him.
  5. I know you know much more about all this than I do, as my perspective is that of a parent and not an educator. The inclusive classroom movement has done more damage to public education than almost any other factor, in my opinion. It has turned teachers into caretakers, and nothing is getting done academically. Kids are stuck in an already overcrowded room with 20-30 kids in it, and no one can learn anything because one single kid is incapable of controlling his behavior and he has a litigious parent. We have a system that has been headed down the wrong road since the 90s on this issue. It was well-intentioned, but it absolutely did not work at all. We know this objectively now, but it's really difficult to change feel-good policies because no one wants to be seen as the bad guy. Politics ruining everything as usual. In elementary school, I think we had only one year that one or both of my kids weren't stuck in a classroom with a kid bouncing off the walls and completely derailing every day. These were not poorly disciplined children but kids with genuine diagnoses who were not capable of typical classroom functions. My son's second-grade teacher would cry after school every day thanks to one kid and his asshole mother, who had already filed lawsuits against his kindergarten and first-grade school districts before moving to AISD. They moved after second grade and, for all I know, have sued many more districts in the passing years. Certain kids need to be outside of regular classrooms, at least for the academic portions of the day, but we've decided we'd rather support feel-good bullshit and not educate anyone. We pretend it's for the good of the kids, and their parents often believe this to be true, but it's really because we can't afford to do anything else but stick them in a normal classroom and hope for the best. It's maddening, and it's not helping the special needs kids or the other kids at all. My son is autistic. I'm not coming at this from an insensitive or ignorant place. The lack of resources for kids with genuine special needs is insane. AISD has been in violation of federal law for years now, but it's hamstrung by state politics, which has led to a lack of funding. I don't know what more they can reasonably do. The bigger issue is no one really gives a shit who has the power to do anything about it. And in Texas, those with the power actively work to make sure things don't get fixed for their own messed up agendas. This is a national problem, but Texas is handling it about as badly as any state can. This is just one of many factors contributing to the brain drain we're experiencing. Texas will be a wild and wooly place in another 20-30 years when no one will have an education equivalent to or better than a sixth grader in 1965. Anyway, thank you for the work you do to stem the dismal tide. I, for one, very much appreciate it.
  6. I was being facetious. Obviously, we can't lock up people for being stupid and/or gullible, or there would be very few people left running free. Depending on where we draw the line, I might not even make the cut. And I hear you. I can't recall the last time my vote or voice lined up with anything the Texas lege has done. I'm sure there's an outlier or two out there that I'm forgetting or unaware of.
  7. What I'm suggesting is that maybe they should be.
  8. So long as they're locked up and getting treatment, who cares?
  9. I'll bet that guy ended up on the Rascal due to a cycling injury.
  10. This.
  11. Fuck this shit and anyone who supports it. If we ever move to permanent DST (because the idiots have won), I'll have to figure out the best place to live that's along the far eastern edge of a timezone.
  12. Wasn't his an episode of the Big Bang Theory?
  13. People suck. Damn. If you're going to opt out of a proven and harmless measure to protect yourself, at least have the decency to wander off into the woods and die with a shred of dignity. Wandering aimlessly around medical facilities looking for help while putting others at risk when you rejected the most clear cut method of preventing the problem in the first place should be criminal. FAFO
  14. Agreed.
  15. They just moved into Lubbock a couple of years back, with plans to grow from there. I believe they already own land in Amarillo. Once the Snell's sold United to Albertsons, the old gentlemen's agreement between the Snell's and the Butt's to stay out of each other's territory was over.
  16. Chicago winters can be brutal, for sure. I lived through my share of them. I'd still take them over Austin summers. Colorado does seem to be the sweet spot in many regards, but their influx of transplants isn't that far off the pace set by Texas, so overcrowding is a concern. Seeing how things shake out there over the next 0decade will be interesting. I suspect they'll end up in a better spot than Texas, mostly due to the brain drain here.
  17. I think I may be out. The kids are going to squawk, but they'll make new friends. Or not, I don't care. I just have no desire to spend another summer in this hellhole. No one should develop seasonal affective disorder in the summertime, but it's becoming common in these parts. Summer in Austin is not discernably different than winter in Chicago. Hide inside and ride it out for six or seven months until the weather finally changes. The difference is Chicago summers are fucking amazing while Austin winters are nothing but allergen hell, so you end up mostly trapped inside for ten months of the year here. At least up north you've got a solid 3-4 month window of goodness. Having to get up at five just to go for a jog without getting heat stroke is for the birds (and in our neighborhood it involves lots of copperhead and rattlenake dodging). I don't understand why anyone lives here.
  18. I'm not sure how old you are, but kids made a massive shift toward pills over other drugs about twenty-five years ago. It has been waning in the last few years. Use of narcotics other than heroin (e.g. Percocet, Vicodin, Oxy, etc.) was around 10% of high school seniors in 2004, and now it's down to around 1%. If you graduated high school in the last decade or prior to the turn of the century, your experience aligns somewhat with the numbers. If you're a millinial then you either didn't realize just how bad the pill popping was or Austin High was an outlier. My experience was much closer to yours, with most teens smoking weed and a handful of burnouts messing with slightly harder stuff - but I'm old. Pills weren't even considered an option back then. It was mostly just shitty weed. Eventually, pills became the first thing sought after, with everything else an afterthought. This peaked around fifteen years ago but started in the late 90s/early 2000s. And yes, that includes Xanax and Percocet. Teen drug use of any kind is not "normal" now, if it ever was, depending on how you define normal. I agree with your sentiment there. Around 62% of 12th graders today don't use any drugs, including alcohol or nicotine. This is significantly better than the 35% of abstainers in the mid-nineties, for example (smoking and drinking were WAY higher at that time, which drives the numbers up, but illicit drug use was also significantly higher. The use of opiates other than heroin at that time was almost non-existent, especially compared to the era of 2000-2012. My pop psychology take is that millennials were too addled by anxiety to enjoy certain drugs, so weed, alcohol, etc. waned while anti-anxiety meds and narcotics exploded. This era also coincided with the explosion of pain pills and meds like Xanax floating around in parents' medicine cabinets. Access was easy, and the appeal of these types of drugs was peaking. Use of things like Delta 8 is currently growing among current teens, while pills have taken a nose dive. I assume access has a lot to do with that shift, as well. In any event, the use of any type of drugs has fluctuated between ~30% and ~50% for decades, with the trend significantly down at the moment. Most kids are not doing any drugs these days, but the number of kids popping hard pills was significant from around 2000-2015. The only era in the last fifty years with lower drug use among teens than right now was the late eighties and early nineties, when scare tactics were in full force and seemingly working to a degree (the AIDS crisis having a ton to do with it). The peak of adolescent drug use was the late 70's and early 80's, followed by a huge drop off and another significant spike in the mid nineties. It's been slowly petering out since then. The big difference is the types of substances being used. From 2000- to about 2012, pills like percocet and xanax were the drug of choice for many teens. After 2012 it started dwindling down to very little usage anymore, which is a good thing. From the NIH (this survey has been conducted for almost fifty years). You can find data from every year, but the 2020 report is a good one if you want to avoid pandemic skewing. "The percentage of adolescents reporting they used any illicit substances in 2023 continued to hold steady below the pre-pandemic levels reported in 2020, with 10.9% of eighth graders, 19.8% of 10th graders, and 31.2% of 12th graders reporting any illicit drug use in the past year, according to the latest results from the Monitoring the Future survey"
  19. C'mon. that stings. Cut me a bit of slack there. I acknowledged in my post that it was speculation based on their past open and obvious attempts to manipulate election results. I find it interesting that anyone would assume they wouldn't do something even shadier when there is a clear pattern of deceit and foul play. My political ire generally runs the other direction, but the City of Austin has decades of crooked, faulty, or just plain bad leadership that can't be ignored.
  20. Sure, yep. However, if the countless examples of the city working its ass off to rig votes in every way they possibly can that are plain on their face (purposefully muddled language on ballots, polling location shenanigans, etc.) don't make you question things a little bit, you may be a bit too trusting.
  21. This is assuming that the city will even legally count the ballots. In a place where leadership has made it abundantly clear that they don't care what the majority of people want and are willing to pull shenanigans like this one with the polling location across town, write ballot language in a manner to deliberately confuse voters (on what seems like every single controversial bond or referendum), why are we supposed to trust that they even acknowledge the true vote count if it doesn't turn out the way they've already engineered it to turn out? Although I hope they never have stooped that low, we've got plenty of reason to be suspicious given their willingness to play ridiculous games in every other aspect of local elections. More often than not they can rely on the abundance of useful idiots (young voters) to pass whatever they put before them so long as it is couched in the right language, but for those moments when they don't believe they can count on the vote to go their way we've seen the blatant attempts at rigging the outcome they're willing to pull. It's not a far cry to think they may pull even dirtier moves behind the scenes.
  22. I can't recall if this has been mentioned yet, but around the same time was the revision to the bankruptcy code that, among other things, made it nearly impossible to discharge student loans. That alone accounts for the largest part of the shitfest, in my opinion. Student loans became some of the most attractive lending available overnight. Can you imagine the smiles on the faces of lenders knowing that no one can run away from their loans? The feds literally unleashed a bunch of sharks on poor and middle-class families, and teenagers in particular.
  23. Lol. Least shocking thing ever.
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