Samson's Wig

This.

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.

Wasn't his an episode of the Big Bang Theory?

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

Agreed.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lol. Least shocking thing ever.

Shit like this makes me wish hell was actually a thing so people like Samantha D and this Alabama fucknut judge could rot in it.

The only thing that gives me any hope here is that too many people have friends, loved ones, and family who have gone through IVF and have a more direct understanding of all it involves for this to gain too much traction. Those fuckwads on Texags are prime examples of people who have no clue what they're talking about and have never been exposed to these issues before. My hope is that enough lawmakers, even the ones proudly wearing their pro-life stripes, will have either gone through this themselves, have friends who have, have an IVF grandchild, etc. That's my hope.

Apologies for misspelling homunculi. I may have been a bit angry when I typed that.

I'd love to have a chat in a dark alley with every single one of these pieces of shit. These aren't humans, they're shit stains left behind when God last wiped his ass. Overgrown fecal humonculi.

I hear you, and it pisses me off too. This was always going to be the next move following Roe v. Wade being overturned, as it's an easier sell for the mouthbreathers. Contraception will be next. I go back and forth between being rallied to fight harder and getting despondent that the nutbags have already managed to take control of the country, and there's no turning back anymore.

Holy shit that's perfect. Thank you for the laugh.

I'm also the parent of two IVF children, and the issue of how to handle frozen embryos is definitely a complicated one, with no historical precedent for the legal and moral questions it raises. I'll share our journey regarding what happened with our frozen embryos someday if anyone is interested, but for now I'll just say this is truly one of the few new things under the sun in a long time when it comes to large moral/ethical questions. Alabama can eat a big bag of southern fried dicks for jumping on this opportunity to simplify it down to something that will appease the unwashed and ignorant masses.

Fuck that inbred piece of shit state, Tommy Tubberville, and anyone else associated with it. The fact Texas is desperately fast-tracking to become Alabama 2.0 is disheartening.

Bound to happen any day now.

Why does every nutbag of this ilk involve the Jews in their addle-brained ramblings? I don't intend to be crude about it, as this is clearly schizophrenia or some similar psychotic condition if it's not a gag, but I do find it interesting how often Mossad and/or the Jewish people are invoked as some type of tormentor in the minds of people who go off the deep end. Where does this shit come from, reading neonazi websites or something? It's extra strange in this case as Stang is a Jewish name.

We've got one in our house too.