I grew up middle class but my parents were a “mixed” marriage, class wise, so I’ve always been kind of unsure which were my real roots. My mother was the child of European working class immigrants who had settled in the North, and my father's family were professionals and landowners in the South.  They were introduced by a mutual acquaintance who thought they were a good match because both were devout Catholics (my father was a convert).

Actually they didn't have much in common beyond their religion, but both wanted to marry and have a family. That, they did quickly; I came along 10 months after the wedding, and was the first of 5. My mother was a smart woman, but she thought she was dumb, due to contrast with my Dad who was closer to brilliant. Mom loved old country peasant food; Dad liked steak and wine.  Mom liked polka, Dad liked classical music. Mom was outgoing and had lots of friends, Dad was introverted and a nerd, with few friends but the ones he had were close. (I take after him in that respect.)

So I grew up sensing what turned out to be a permanent tension between the backgrounds of these two people. Visiting mom’s relatives was always like a party, with much joking and belly laughs and free flowing beer. This small immigrant community formed a club, which was basically just a bar with an upstairs community room, and it was on a barstool at the age of five, I had my first taste of beer given to me by my grandfather.

Visiting my father’s relatives on the other hand, had the air of formality at all times. They were all college educated, stoic Protestants, with impeccable manners. They were just as loving as my mother's family, but it was under the surface, hidden below their reserved sophistication.

So I was a half-breed in these settings, never quite fitting in with either one.  What I see now is that both these sets of people were good, honest people, and hard workers. And despite my parents’ emotional distance from each other, they too had that work ethic in common, and dedicated themselves to providing the best life they could for their children.

But my father was a bit of a black sheep, having forsaken his family’s Protestantism to become a Papist, and then being a “mere” university professor earning an adequate but not more, salary for his family of seven. Likewise my mother, upon graduating high school and seeking to escape a lower working class future, had finagled a ride to Washington DC, took the Civil Service Exam, and ended up working for the Federal Government, a job she quit when they married. So they both had sort of rebelled against their backgrounds, and were regarded as somewhat outsiders by their respective families, although those families still accepted and loved them and were very accepting of us kids. Like I said, they were all good people.

But Mom never got over the fear of being on the edge of poverty.  The Great Depression, during her childhood, had hit her community hard, and I was influenced by this chronic sense of insecurity, like financial catastrophe was always just around the corner, not to mention the threat of nuclear war hanging over us Duck and Cover children.  Ironically, these fears are again coming to the forefront of my mind - gee, I wonder why?

I was, like Mom, just a “dumb” girl.  I was a weirdo at school, and didn’t fit in there either. There were some years I had not a single friend in my class.  I had two obsessions: 1.) Science, especially space travel, and 2.) Babies.  All I wanted was to get married and have babies.  And I wanted to be an astronaut or maybe a mad scientist in a laboratory.  I guess I was an amalgam of my parents' backgrounds.  All the women in mom's family just had babies, and focused on the home.  From Dad I got the brains and drive for some sort of nerdy career.  My whole life ended up being a tense standoff between these two halves of myself.

As a young adult I realized that astronaut was never going to happen. I was very nearsighted for one thing, and by that time I knew I didn’t have “the right stuff” anyway, so I settled for flying a little Cessna 152 instead. However, I ran out of money before I could complete my training.

Being just a dumb girl, I majored in worthless shit until a guy made fun of me for carrying around a calculator (one of the first portable scientific ones).  “Haha! She thinks she’s an engineer!” he said.  That pissed me off, but I’m grateful to him, because that smacked me upside the head and woke me up. Why can’t I be an engineer? I realized maybe I wasn’t actually stupid after all.  I went back for a BS in physics, but changed to engineering after discovering it had better starting salaries.

I was almost 27 before I got my first real engineering job and there I met my husband, also an engineer and also had taken flying lessons but couldn't finish because of being a poor college student.  He also claimed he wanted babies, except he phrased it differently: "Progeny to carry on the family name", or some such.  Yeah I'll help you with that.  It was a match made in heaven. Still is.

So our married life was a sequencing of me working full time, staying home with babies, working again, staying home again and homeschooling one of the kids, and finally now working part time as an independent contractor.  We both went back for flying lessons. Hubby got certified, got IR, ME, and we ended up owning three planes in succession of ever greater range. I had to quit flying shortly before the check ride because of medical problems and ended up not bothering with the medical certification after it got too complicated, as I could always fly with hubby anyway. We integrated GA into everything we did as a family.

Unfortunately we had to sell our last plane with a job change and mandatory move across the country, which resulted in a loss of mission, but we are both nearing 70 and had a long and happy flying life, so are refocusing on other things now.  Hubby is big in the RC community now, and restoring antique cars, and I'm just doing my contract business.

In early adolescence I hung around kids that we now call "hippies", or "freaks", but it was not their leftist ideology I embraced, just social and cultural trappings.  I had read Alexander Solzhenitsyn and I was already firmly innoculated against communism or any kind of economic collectivism.  Later, I met a man who introduced me to libertarianism. He became my best friend for life, he happened to be gay, so it was not in any way a romantic relationship. His libertarianism made complete sense with what I'd already started to figure out on my own, for one thing, like Jim, I was reading Heinlein. Then Ayn Rand. I'm now a right-leaning libertarian, not an absolute anarcho-libertarian. I believe in border control for example, and I disagree with the LA Libertarians that recently showed support for allowing illegals to own guns.  That's a hard NO.  On the practical front I support MAGA populism for the most part.

I suppose the biggest reason I could never be a leftist parasite is my original bifurcated roots: both of which believed in hard work. The immigrants started with nothing and had no choice but to work. They never expected free handouts and didn't get them, unlike the illegals pouring over our border right now. My father's family were successful because they too worked, and instilled responsibility and self sufficiency in their children. And I myself have been working since I was 12 years old when I started babysitting for the neighbors, I worked all through college mostly paying my way, and except for the times in my marriage that I was "just a housewife", continue working to this day.  I'm not going to stop until I'm forced to by old age inability.

Well if this is the “not a joke” thread, I’ve got one.

Hilarious holding a mirror up to the left.

What do you expect when you overrun an island and then import African slaves to the point they outnumber you 10 to 1, eventually revolt, secure independence but at an impossible cost (crippling debt to France), proceed to genocide all whites on that half of the island, and set up a mafia style government and a system of slavery in their turn that continues to this day.

No amount of money thrown at that shit show will fix it.  They have no system in place to organize infrastructure building projects which requires a stable hierarchy of leadership, technical talent and worker skills, and a armed authority with legitimate legal power to enforce a safe and secure environment to carry out these projects.  Not to mention an absence of corruption which Haiti has never seen in all its incarnations.

Fuck Haiti.  And fuck the Europeans that thought it was a good idea to transplant Africans into the new world to the point where they act like an invasive species destroying everything on their little chunk of land, after you “freed” them but made it impossible for them to function by demanding repayment in amounts exceeding any possible GDP that they could produce even if they could create a stable society with a European/New World style economy, which was too much to expect from a people ground down by slavery for three centuries in an environment that couldn’t be more foreign to that in which they evolved, and subject to regular natural disasters to boot.

Europeans took over the new world because they were technologically, politically and militarily advanced.  That’s just fact. Too bad they weren’t also morally advanced (still having slavery just like all humans ever.)  They had city-states and empires, and cooperative global trade, and now that’s the context in which you must live. Adapt to it and live in comfort, or try to maintain your old tribal strong man rule and see how far that gets you.

Yes, half a millennia ago your ancestors were ripped from their homeland and that wasn’t fair. But here you are. It’s the 21st century. If I were a Haitian man, I would find a way to get into the U.S., assimilate into the productive culture - that means get a job - and fully embrace becoming American in every sense of the word, including legal citizenship. That’s a pathway to, if not happiness, at least having a full belly of something that isn’t long pig.

This is a Uniparty tyrannical grab for control over social media.  It’s unconstitutional, violates the First.  How did it get this far?

First, the Republicans pushed the idea that it’s nothing but Chinese spyware, sending all our info back to the CCP and turning our young into zombies. They’re not wrong but:

1.  Google, Apple, etc. are already giving our data to anyone willing to pay, Chinese included, and also using algorithms that suppress anything that goes against the “approved” messaging.  The CCP doesn’t need Tik Tok to brainwash our kids or get all of our personal profiles.

2.  Banning any program or “app” as they call them these days, is useless because technology is at a point where we can get around any ban.  There are VPNs, or a company can simply rebrand the thing.  It’s whack a mole, you will never stop the rise of new computer platforms.  Rather than try to control them from the top down, the field needs to remain free and open, allowing the rise and fall of platforms of all types, and allow the market to decide what it wants. Centralized government should not control this just like it should not control what books are published and sold.

And like it or not, east Asia is heavily involved in computer technology. We opened up trade with a communist dictatorship to the point our own manufacturing is largely shut down while we now let them make all our shit and now we’re salty because they made an app that took off in popularity in the west?  Just like all their other shit is shipped over here?  What did we expect?

The Democrat elite were happy to allow this “right -wing” propaganda to sink into Mom and Pop America.  They already had the pro-censorship conservatives on board.  They don’t need the Tik Tok-loving woke kids. But old school Democrats also bought it, because a.) they are fence sitters on the Bill of Rights and b.) older Democrats lived during the Cold War and still have remnants of “The communists are coming! The communists are coming!”  programming from childhood.

Indeed they are coming, but a stupid phone app is not the danger. The danger is that Marxism has soaked into the West by osmosis after the universities and primary schools were taken over by the left and China is literally buying up farmland, inserting spies into the highest levels of government, and outright paying our corrupt current resident in chief to make him their bitch.

This is the Uniparty taking the opportunity to pass a law opening the door to Federal outright, open, “legal” censorship of all social media, as opposed to the Feds covertly censoring Twitter, Facebook, etc.  They were angered when Elon caught them red handed, outed them to us all, and told them to fuck off. (Elon is now a target, just watch.)

Notice the pattern: When the tyranny is defeated in a battle, they learn from the mistake and correct it, smoothing the way for easier wins in the future. They got caught illegally censoring social media and so are now passing a law that will grant them to power to do it openly.  Another example: When they realized Mike Pence had the power to refuse to certify the 2020 election (even though he didn’t exercise it), they were spooked by the close call so preemptively took steps to ensure it can never happen by passing a law turning the certification into an empty rubber stamp.

These people are insidious, evil psychopaths.  They will stop at nothing to stay in power, including dismantling the Bill of Rights piece by piece.

If you’re not a surgeon currently in the OR, or an immunocompromised cancer patient, you have no business wearing a mask.  Well okay maybe if you’re mowing the grass and have allergies.

for those of us without twitter accounts, how about a summary?

The first was an airline commercial advertising its commitment to diversity and inclusion.  Passengers are being seated while it’s announced that the captain is a “three foot transgender pansexual Native American man who identifies as a six foot tall Korean woman” whose epilepsy is triggered by the flashing cockpit lights. The flight ends predictably.

The second is Tyler Fischer (a comedian) stranded in San Francisco for real, but he’s walking through the terminal bitching about how they had to deplane because the engine wouldn’t start and now he’s going to miss his performances and he’s giving information about rescheduling them, but then says as he was exiting he peeked in the cockpit and saw the pilot was a woman, so wondered if there was a surgeon on board that could quick do a sexual transition and turn her into a man so they can take off.

Then he ranted about wheels flying off airplanes and doors popping out and fat people getting two seats. So he says they need to put fat people in a row with a door so when it pops off the fat person plugs it so the plane can still fly.

https://twitter.com/JebraFaushay/status/1766800385816080623