reminds me of what me and my sisters learned as wee children.  Early on we learned to never tell our mom about a splinter, we just didn't enjoy Mom using a needle to remove the splinter.  We loved our Mom, and she wasn't mean or cruel about it, but we really didn't like it.

Yep.  Needle and tweezers.  Needle heated up over a match to sterilize it.  Then when the splinter is dug out she added a healthy smear of Mercurochrome.  Stung like crazy.  I'm not sure how we survived childhood.

My wife says that I will never have a tattoo or anything pierced.  I'm OK with that.  Well... except for that pencil lead I have stuck in my palm from grade school.

Here, yellow cone season is just about over. Time for ice season.

depends on what your investments are. I'm down 10%+

Friday wiped out my gains from the previous week, and then some.  On the other hand, my silver is up 50% from three years ago.

Correct, however, the real (unspoken) goal is to enrich and impower themselves.

THIS!!!

sigh.

I suspect you are right.

I suspect so, too.  See all the screaming on the MSM from the usual suspects that this is a political vendetta against Trump's enemies.  "Never before in history has the DOJ been used to go after political opponents."  What a short memory they have.  They should go fuck themselves.  And not in a good way.

just playing devil's adovate (sorry lucifer), some claim that there can be a "desert" of grocery stores in certain "poor," "disadvantaged", whatever, areas.  So I'm not sure what stores would be forced out.

It's not a total desert.  There are little mom and pop corner bodegas that sell mostly packaged and chemically preserved "food".  They have very little fresh healthy food.  This is an attempt to get actual food into those areas which isn't a bad goal.  But making it government run and cheaper than existing mom and pop stores will force them out.  Maybe making sure that the existing stores have real food is a better way to go.

  Yep.  But then we have our government funding these scam institutions while they sit on enormous endowments.

  And then look at some of the people that were paid huge salaries to "teach" at these places.  Yet another joke.  Seriously, could you imagine sitting through a class with something like Elizabeth Warren teaching?  Or Paul Krugman?

Totally agree with idiot celebrities being paid to "teach".  It's nothing but payback.  Like paying hundreds of thousands for a Clinton to speak for 15 minutes at a conference.  That pay comes from donors, laundered through the university. 

The endowments shed interest that is used to pay chaired professors.  That's one way to attract the best researchers and teachers.  Generally the endowment base is locked up and cannot be touched.  The government funding is usually research grants like NSF grants for specific projects.  Much of the research is silly feel good sociological research.  But there is cancer research, space research, and other research in the hard sciences that's pretty real.  It makes sense to have top academics getting grants to do the hard research.  So yeah, let's screen the research and see what's actually going to benefit humanity and get rid of the stupid stuff.