u/Grebnaws

Fwiw my wife is a teacher and in a union, she loathed closing the schools for COVID and hates teaching remotely. She has a good opinion of her representation but my union (SEIU) spends less than 2% of their budget on representation. They were horrible and ineffective. I separated from them shortly after the Janus ruling.

We watched it happen live on TV in 1st period English in my senior year of highschool. I had just talked to recruiters that week about joining the Navy. My mind was changed immediately.

It didn't prepare me for the changes we'd see over the next 25 years. That brief pulse of patriotism wasn't enough to keep the sworn enemies of our country from being elected within the same generation. I was a bright eyed ultra liberal Democrat, same as I'd been raised, until I began to wake up.

Sounds like one less semester worth paying for.

My wife teaches and she hates them but the schools have made them necessary. Now that everyone has a device they've turned snow days into "E-learning days" and given everyone an excuse to call for the next pandemic. School was supposed to be one of the few places I didn't have to police my children's screen time.

My in-laws have a TV over their mantle which is tuned to CNN all day long. I've only seen them change it for the Superbowl. If they actually want to watch something individually they use a laptop or a bedroom TV but CNN never goes off.

25 years ago I took a zero on my final because I copied the bibliography that my sibling used in the same course, from the same professor, a few years earlier. The essay was genuine and the course materials were unchanged so I just copied the final page over from the family computer to save time.

That final was worth 40% of my grade and I failed the course as a result.

Chat gpt and AI are in such common use today that these academic frauds must be legion. Combine that with DEI and here we are. It's all so vacuous.

My daughter was born in 8/21 and I was in the room with my wife during a well baby visit when her doctor told us that she would absolutely not take the vaccine or any boosters while pregnant.

It's probably easier to go far in Europe without a personal vehicle than in America. If they are better traveled that's a fair reason. I don't know, I've never been, but am well traveled in the lower 48.

Funny story. I made friends with an Austrian exchange student. They heard about legal weed in Colorado and wanted to take a long weekend away from university, rent a car, drive there with some friends, get high and enjoy the Rockies.

They gave themselves 3 days for a round trip of over 2,000 miles. They were a little late getting back to class. Crazy kids but they made it!

Our bi-monthly no kings rally all seem to be childless millennials, retired women, and uni students skipping class.

The funny part is how much of the no kings protests are co-opted by other fringe progressive movements that probably have nothing to do with the organizers intent. Every opportunity turns into a pride festival for some reason and I'm actually curious how they feel about it because it turns the entire thing into a bit of a clown show.

I also live in a university town. The two largest land owners are the university and giant medical campuses which don't pay any property tax. As a result the rest of us pay far too much and something like 55-60% goes to our public schools, which seem designed to operate in ways that best serve everyone except us.

I was class of 2002 but graduated early in 2001. We had one openly gay female art teacher. She was definitely all about the lifestyle but I don't think she interjected any of it into her lessons. She clearly made herself a safe figure for her students and became a bit of an icon for being open and in a gay marriage, although not exactly legal in our state at the time.

However, I also had an openly Marxist social studies teacher. He literally told the class that Marxism is the best form of government and his ideas were shoehorned into everything. Knowing what I do now it was completely inappropriate and no one should have allowed all of the propaganda in their classroom.

This was at a time when I was sent home from school and suspended for dying my hair an unnatural color. This was a public school and I wasn't allowed back until I dyed my hair back to a natural color because, as they told me, blue hair was a distraction from everyone else's education. They treated it no differently than misbehaving in class.

Now some of the students in my children's pre-school and elementary have blue hair. No one bats an eye.

Working in a kitchen they spent 10 years shoving it down our throats and shoehorning it into every dish that didn't need it. It's fine. I have no issues with quinoa and the fad seems to have passed, along with the kale craze thankfully.

My wife and I signed up for a Valentine's Day machine gun rental. It was expensive but a ton of fun. My wife is a competent shooter and when the machine gun owners saw her targets they brought out a special firearm that wasn't on the sign up list, a suppressed mp5, and gave her a free magazine to try out.

Met at 18, married at 34, currently 42.

I have an autistic 8 year old that still refuses to eat with utensils. Every meal looked like this for years and it's still just as gross and messy as this video shows.

The Doot Anomaly

I work for a land grant institution that begins every meeting with a statement acknowledging that they exist on stolen indigenous land, followed by an ever changing list of dozens of tribes that still dispute ownership of the land before it was stolen. Most of the tribes only exist in a historical context and only one is a federally recognized tribe. There is an official statement but many people add their own spin and every speaker will repeat some version of it multiple times a day.

As you said, no one offered to give the land back or leave their jobs because of it. Imagine they did decide to raze their institutions and give it back, who do they give it to? They fought over it then and would still be fighting for it in perpetuity, the same as we will when the next group of people decided to take it from us. It's a tiresome argument that falls on its face the second you question it.

I had one new and it was a piece of shit. It never went through a single magazine of any ammunition without a malfunction and their customer service told me to send it in, at my cost, and then try another 300 rounds to break it before contacting them again. Customer service and the Kahr forum were all jerks about it.

Too many better options out there.

I spoke with Charlie Kirk at a TPUSA event at a liberal college campus event almost 8 years ago. Even then I had to shove my way through protestors who were filming and threatening to dox everyone going inside. You would never find me anywhere near such an event today. Now I'm married with children and I'm not going to risk catching a stray bullet or getting run over by a maniac just to be in attendance. I appreciate those who show support by showing up but it isn't going to be me. Every single TPUSA event hosted on this campus that I attended was disrupted by people crashing the presentation or pulling a fire alarm.

You'll find your people. I have only met a few young adults that made the leap but they are out there, and they seem much less toxic in their personal lives and relationships. Politics are not their first identity.

My university recently sent an email regarding how they changed the names, office locations, and leadership of their open DEI agenda to better fit with the new standards. It's clearly a disguise and they have no intention of giving any ground whatsoever. This is after numerous mass mails regarding the new political climate and offering all sorts of social services to help students and employees cope with the changes. It has all been rather pathetic. This is a deep blue state however.

My Chinese coworkers use a pot to rinse their rice and they save the starchy water to toss on their lawn and garden. I don't know exactly how useful that is but they do have a very nice garden.

8 minutes from 911 to neutralized. Good response time, but we all know a lot of bad things can happen in 8 minutes.

Don't do this. Politics are already stupid, please don't make a dumb effort to memorialize someone that won't work. That is a game of identity politics that no one needs to play.

Normally I would say this is a bad take that should be left alone, but I also recognize that these people have been full time political and personal assassins against him.Trump is usually his own worst enemy and this is a pretty good example. Quiet victory just isn't his style. He should let things run their course without a spotlight. I don't watch any of them much but Fallon might seem out of place. Was he as partisan as the others? Politics aside I've simply never found Kimmel or Colbert to be entertaining. They've always presented themselves as people who say something that is "supposed" to be funny and then react garishly if the scheduled laugh didn't arrive on time.