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Brisketexan

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Everything posted by Brisketexan

  1. Bottom line, if you're looking for something NOT to hate about Buzbee . . . keep lookin'.
  2. Yeah....appreciate the insight on this some of y'all have shared. As mentioned a while back, we've worked with the refugee kiddo over who we have some partial guardianship (long story, only a partial legal relationship, mostly to help him out where his natural mother can't be helpful). He's something of a talented soccer player -- he ain't Messi, but he's good enough to get some college looks. It looks like he's down to Huston Tillotson, which has offered him a spot on the team, and a full ride, and UIW, which has offered him a "preferred walk-on" roll and....not a full ride. He's almost certainly not going to play pro soccer anywhere, but he likely does want to focus on training/kinesiology as a career. SO, we very much want him to get a degree. ANY degree, would be the first ever for his family. Challenge: he REALLY wants UIW, but there's a price tag. And while we are willing to help...we didn't plan to put a third kid through college. We will be talking to a friend of ours in admin at UIW to see if there's any path to defraying costs more, but....any thoughts on those paths, and soccer options? Academically and life-choice wise, we think UIW might be better too (it would be good for him to go to a new city, have a small bit of distance from his mom and brother, but on the other hand, not too far and not too much separation). But....a full ride to HT is nothing to sneeze at. And I have great respect for HT as an institution, they are sound and well-funded (just got a huge new gift). So, things to think about.
  3. See, great literature makes you THINK.
  4. I think this has pretty much got it summed up.
  5. Yeah....this. It's fucking baffling, yet, now that I've fully realized and accepted that humanity is irredeemably awful....it's not baffling at all. Congress is a fucking joke, and at this point, if we dissolved it, nobody could tell the difference other than the fact that we wouldn't be subjected to stupid social media posts by Ted Cruz and John Cornyn and nobody would know who Mike Johnson is except for his multiple Grindr hookups.
  6. For ease, go through the other carrier until they become troublesome, then turn it over to USAA if you have to. Sorry to hear it. My wife got smacked pretty good a couple of years ago, and there were some legit medical damages (nothing life-changing, but some time to recover, and a period of pain). Get a fair recovery for that, and don't close out the injury part of the claim till you know she's ok. And, hope that she's okay sooner rather than later.
  7. Other than pity sex, I don't think I've received any charity of any substance (not counting any number of small acts of kindness and generosity folks may show throughout your life). But I'm certainly the beneficiary of it - my mother and grandmother fled an abusive man in NOLA, and ended up in Kingsville. But for (1) gov't subsidized housing and food aid, (2) one of the leading families in the area setting my grandmother up with a bookkeeping job at a car dealer, and (3) that family also flat-out giving them things like some furniture, occasional money gifts, etc., there's no way they would have made it. It certainly helped me see that no matter how proud you might be, and how much you might want to think "I've earned everything I've got," you almost certainly didn't. Other people helped out with pure generosity along the way, and you quite often don't even realize it. And that's okay -- both the helping and the you not realizing it. Just understand that it's true, and that it's but one piece of evidence in the long line of truth that is "we all do better when we help each other." And I got to see it in action the other way numerous times, but one time in particular made a big impression on me as a kid. One of my cousins, a good bit older than me, but we were running buddies when we'd visit down in Mexico, had a store that failed. He was in a bit of debt, and at that time, Mexico had legit debtor's prison. I remember my folks sitting at the table crunching numbers, real concerned looks on their faces. I asked what was up, and my mother explained that cousin Julio was in jail, and his family couldn't get him out. He had a wife and a daughter on the outside who were just a wreck. I asked how much he needed to get out? $6k. My eyes got kinda big, because even at that young age, I knew that was a lot for our family -- maybe more than we had. I asked, anxious, if we were going to do it. My mother answered yes. I then asked if we were giving it, or was it just a loan. She explained that it was a loan, but we also knew that it wouldn't be paid back. She then explained that this is family, they need help, we can help, so that's what we're going to do. Even though it was a stretch for us. Even though it surely meant we went another year without a replacement car. Or we went another year without an actual vacation trip (not that we really took many of those). I'm sure things were tight for a while. But it made an impression on me. Can you help? Then help. I told that story at my father's memorial this year. And I learned that he had done similar things countless times. You need help? Here you go. He did that over and over. Maybe it was just giving $200. Another time it was him giving the company-paid first-class upgrades on a long intercontinental flight to his two subordinates who were flying with him from Buenos Aires to London for work. Or taking in my cousin and her (troubled and druggie) mother when they were on the edge of being on the streets. And goddamn, so many other things. And there's no shame in asking for or taking that help. It's why we're here. Fuck, if it's not why we're here, than what is the goddamned point of any of this? Goddammit. My dad wasn't soft, he was an engineer and a man of his generation. And he was a good man, and I fucking miss him and wish I'd done better by him.
  8. No, they thought he was Marjorie Taylor Greene.
  9. If the middle bullet is remotely true, we are never, ever, ever going to hear word one or see any evidence of same. Whereas, had he even had a single item in his possession indicating he once voted for a Democrat, we'd have already seen it, as well as a newly fabricated "pipe bomb" with "I did this in the name of antifa George Soros and my lord and master Joe Biden to save our stollen election" written on it in still-wet sharpie ink.
  10. Well, it obviously takes her a long time for her to emerge from the fog of being drugged. We know this, because y'all are still married after all these years.
  11. In retrospect, operation "launch expired Taco Bell food into the sun" may have been unwise.
  12. Oh, I will survive next Tuesday's purge for sure. Love me a good meatball sandwich. Shit, I even like a mediocre meatball sandwich.
  13. Guys. Friends. Amigos. It's like you have forgotten the two immutable rules of this era. 1. It only gets worse. 2. There is no bottom. Things are going to get so, so, so much more pathetic. There will be shit like "The Donald Trump Honorable Award of Best Donald Trumping in the Americas," presented by Venezuela and Colombia as an easy way to get Trump off their back (well, that, and their "investment" of a few hundred million in Trump Coin). Imagine how absurdly pathetic and shitty things could get. Then quadruple that. Then quadruple it again. Then toss it in the trash, because it's still nowhere close to how absurdly pathetic and shitty things will ACTUALLY get.
  14. There's an Instant Pot recipe for hard-boiled eggs. I don't use the Instant Pot for much (I cook, I don't do lazy crockpot shit very often). But gotdamn, it cooks them perfectly and the shells peel right off. When it's deviled egg time, we pull out the Instant Pot. I need to try it for soft boiled eggs too, see if that works.
  15. ^^^^ This. The words mean whatever the Trump DOJ says they mean. They may well decree that "pending indictments" means that everyone must eat meatball sandwiches next Tuesday under penalty of death. Nothing. Actually. Matters anymore. Someday, everyone will get it. But that someday will be way, way, way too late.
  16. There's an argument to be made that he's already BEEN pardoned. "I further direct the Attorney General to pursue dismissal with prejudice to the government of all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021." This language has been used, BY THE TRUMP DOJ, to conclude that even J 6-adjacent crimes (such as separate firearms offenses found in searches of homes of J 6ers etc.) have been pardoned. If I was his attorney, I would absolutely argue that he's already been pardoned by Trump.
  17. Because when all you value is money and power -- and you have no independent self-worth, integrity, or dignity -- it costs you nothing. Would you or I do it? No, because fuck that guy, I have pride and honor. But for men with no honor.....if they are given the opportunity to multiply their wealth simply by handing over an engraved plaque they picked up yesterday from Bob's Trophies and Muffler Shop, and lavishing empty praise on a pathetic narcissist, they are gonna take that opportunity 100 out of 100 times.
  18. That's some bullshit. Great poetry comes from human authors, like James Joyce. Behold the tear-inducing beauty of this work: "At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also." Man. That fella could WRITE.
  19. Just more easy fellating of the most fragile ego narcissist in the history of our planet. Make up an award, give it to him, you are ingratiated and he'll let you do whatever you want. It's all childishly transactional.
  20. No disagreement there, but the way we GET there is by ensuring that none of those excessive risk takers are large enough to be a load-bearing pillar of the economy, such that their failure would cause larger collapse. Don't make YOUR risk so great that it would materially damage OUR economy. Kind of like we don't let people use their homes as bomb-making factory - because your failure would cause massive harm to surrounding structures. The underlying social contract involves such trade-offs. If we want to encourage people to take large risks in the pursuit of large reward and large "innovation" (and maybe we do, there's definitely a good case to be made), then we should also ensure that they - and they alone - bear the burden of that risk. Because, spoiler: they, and they alone SURE AS SHIT will reap all of the reward if it pays off.
  21. I mean, that's literally our national motto under this regime, so....yeah.
  22. The phenomenon emphasizes the wisdom and need for real anti-trust law and enforcement. Sure, let these fuckers go out there and leverage to the hilt, and crash and burn. Just none of this "too big to fail" shit (which, when you let one or two entity's become that dominant, is an actual thing -- their failure could lead to total economy disaster). It is bad policy to (1) allow an enterprise to get that big/economically dominant, (2) gamble with its own life, (3) lose, and then (4) say "nope, you can't let us crash, we're too big and too important, use the people's money to bail us out." The thing is, item (4) is not untrue in many such cases. So....don't let it become true. But, we have no interest in doing that. As a society, we live to serve monopolies and oligarchies, and you and I have no purpose other than to be a source of revenue for those things. That's fucking fucked. The economy should serve and benefit its citizens, not vice-versa.
  23. When the market is skewed by stupid debt financing that creates an unsustainable bubble, that's a problem. It's not like we haven't seen this umpteen times before. Loads of debt financing flows to asset X, inflating the price of asset X which is pretty harmful to ordinary consumers that actually need asset X. Then, the debt bubble inevitably pops, consumers are stuck with asset X that they overpaid for, and we all have to bail out the mega-players who got fucked to the tune of billions of dollars for their Vegas gambles on said debt financing. It's legal. It's just dumb, harmful, and destructive. Unfettered "capitalism" has its downsides. This is a known one, and not only have we done nothing to mitigate it, we've gone under the hood to remove all speed governors and soup up the engine, so when we hit the wall, we hit it at ludicrous speed. Lather, rinse, repeat.
  24. I'm just sticking around for the discussion of how Immamac is gonna keep this discussion board going in a post-electricity world. I presume we'll be leaving sketches of dickbutt on a cave wall somewhere?
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