Samson's Wig

For what it's worth, from someone who lived there, has family there, and visits multiple times per year, gang crime in Toronto and surrounding areas if fucking awful. Austin is a much safer city. I don't need statistics to know we have no police in Austin. You never see any like you used to. I kind of like it that way, personally, except for the demolition derby our streets have become. If we could bring back only traffic cops with a limited scope of responsibilities, I might get behind that.

I remember sometime around 15 years ago some Southern Baptists knocked on my door trying to recruit fresh blood to their church. I remember thinking then that they weren't long for existence if they were already begging door to door. Yet somehow, they still dominate politics in places like Alabama and Texas. That particular religion can't dry up and die fast enough. They've driven more people away from Christianity than booze and cheap women (although those are what did it for me).

I agree with your sentiment 100%, but that reads a lot like the fully stretched interpretations of the bible that fundamentalists come up with. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy your interpretation, but I don't think any Christians' heads are exploding over what amounts to heavy inference. They're busy with their own.

I took away that the cemeteries were not connected to his church as well. Nothing else in that story indicates his church wouldn't have been happy to bury him if they had a cemetery. For Southern Baptists, his church was definitely an outlier.

I've got no issue with community colleges, and I acknowledge their benefit to the community (although it's a stretch in Austin that community college grads are sticking around to contribute, based on the cost of living alone). I got my foreign language credit knocked out at ACC many moons ago. However, ACC is drastically overfunded to the point of comical bloat when we can't even provide grade schools with functioning HVAC systems or potable water for the children here. We're talking about free tuition for high school grads when we're not even educating our high schoolers adequately. We've got this all backward. I understand the funding works differently for each, but that doesn't change the underlying reality and our lack of motivation to do anything about it. I pay a similar amount of property taxes as you do each year, and it's tiring knowing how little we get back for the trouble. ACC is just one of many problems, but this latest move for free tuition feels like blatantly laughing in taxpayers' faces. When this group of blowhards is sitting around talking about free tuition, that's a sign that ACC already has too much money, not that it needs more (which will be the end result of this policy). Further, the ACC board and admin have been running wild for a long, long time. It's a huge money grab and the benefit does not align with the cost, IMO. If either middle school kids or community college students have to go to classrooms infested with rats, I know which one I would choose. Austin has chosen differently.

Some folks just can't help themselves from spending other people's money. I'm all for community college and agree with the general notion that an educated populace is a benefit to everyone, but Austin property owners are already being robbed blind to fund white suburban jesus districts across the state at the expense of our own public school children. When is enough, enough? I'm not convinced we're really getting a return on our investment with ACC. Maybe the new nursing degree program will provide some community benefit, but free tuition for all from a city school with a 100 fucking percent acceptance rate is pointless unless we're firing 90% of the administrative roles. If they can manage to truly limit this to local high school graduates who don't really attend UT and use ACC for free basic requirements, it might not be too expensive. I'd like to see a serious tuition hike for nonresidents who come here just to attend ACC (yes that happens and we'll be flooded with them if they can find a loophole to get the free tuition), as well as non-full time students, i.e. UT and Texas State kids getting cheap credits. tl/dr The Austin community would be better served shuttering ACC completely and finding a way to funnel those funds into AISD.

Nothing yet for us in Travis. I hate looking at it, mostly because every time I see how much goes to ACC I want to murder someone.

We don't have food delivered often, but when we do we always note that the delivery should be left on the porch with no interaction. Same with any other delivery that doesn't involve a signature. Started doing it during the pandemic and then realized that it made sense to continue. We have a dog that is mostly well-behaved but was trained in a house with young children, so there are definitely gaps. He will jump on people when excited. It pisses me off but my daughter is hell bent on encouraging the behavior when I'm not looking. Why potentially subject someone to that when so many are afraid of dogs? And why risk a ridiculous interaction like the one in the OP?

Taking my son to the Rangers/Astros game on Saturday the 6th. Is it reasonable to assume I35 from DFW to Austin on Sunday is going to be an absolute trainwreck (more than it always is)? Thinking I might shift gears and just fly up for the game.

That he was delivering under someone else's name will be the most interesting angle of this story. If delivery companies crack down on that practice, I don't think they'll survive. I don't really understand the reasoning for it, but I don't recall the last time a food delivery driver matched the description in the app. I've always assumed it was a single household using one account and working 24 hours a day or something like that. Maybe it's a way for ex-cons who can't find work to make a buck. I'm sure someone here knows.

Exactly what we were missing!

Not sure I could keep from hunting every one of those fuckers down if that had been my wife and child. We don't do football players any favors in this country by raising them up to think they can do whatever the fuck they want and then letting them do whatever the fuck they want until they stop playing, and then, of course, we don't give a shit anymore. Handing 22-year-old (oh wait, now it's 18-year-old) fucktards with mush brains, no education, and no sense of responsibility to the community millions of dollars just means they can cause even more damage than they would otherwise. You've got to have a sub-80 IQ and a complete lack of humanity to street race. I don't really care that most who do this shit are under 25 and working with juvenile brains, if you get caught doing this shit you should be removed from society. Perhaps it's time we start restricting access to driving for boys until they turn twenty five or thirty. At the very least, it should be a one-strike policy of some kind. Taking the bus builds some humility.

Fuck it. I was too late.

I spent my entire childhood and about half of my twenties working cattle when I wasn't working a cotton patch. I've gone soft since those days. Firearms absolutely have their place when out working, but anything sitting on your hip is going to be useless against an angry bull unless you're extremely lucky. Handy for rattlebugs, though.

Right? I mean, what could go wrong?

Of all of the dumb fucking nonsense arguments used by gun nuts, this might be the dumbest one I've heard.

I hope everyone is taking notes while watching Dune.

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.

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.

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.

What I'm suggesting is that maybe they should be.

So long as they're locked up and getting treatment, who cares?

I'll bet that guy ended up on the Rascal due to a cycling injury.

FIFY