27 here. I haven't lost anyone just lately after I lost all my grandparents back in 2003-4, lukily. BUt when t happens it comes in droves.
In reply to this comment by Matthu:
Donno how old you guys are, I'm 26 and people have been dropping like fucking flies lately. It sucks.

Luckily we'll all make it to the singularity and be able to live forever on the Internet!!

Be strong bare and keep your loved ones close.

>> ^gwiz665:

Just stumbled on this. I'm sorry for your losses and my heart breaks for your uncle.
In reply to this comment by bareboards2:
By the way, my Aunt Gene died on Friday. It's a blessing, really.
Now I worry about her husband. They had the heartache of burying all three of their childen -- my cousin Gaylan, age 57, died in his sleep last fall. And now my uncle has buried his wife. He does have grandkids, but he hasn't lived alone in over 50 years. I don't think he'll be with us by Christmas. He has a bad heart, and this is just too much, you know?
A generation is leaving us. My family has been lucky to keep so many for so long -- but now they are going, and going quick. We've lost five in the last two years. Plus Gaylan.
My dad is still here. In good shape mentally. He likes where he is, a VA Center in Oklahoma. It has a fishing pond out back. He is in charge of the fishing tackle closet, keeps everything in good order. When one of the guys has trouble with his reel, he goes to my dad. When some of the simple medical equipment jams, he fixes it for the nurses. He's 87. Amazing.

Besides the 1997/1998 the being the golden era for CRPGs, I'm really nostalgic for the Quake I days. The community seemed to be way into, not everyone and their grandparents were on the net yet and the mods that came out for a while were truly awesome for their time. Sometimes I play TF2 and I like it... but it is absolutely nothing compared to the original. I also don't think I've ever played any other CTF game as good as the Threewave CTF besides maybe Tribes CTF. That grappling hook [in 3wave] made it awesome - why the hell has it been forgotten about?

Liberals don't like this Dr. Cosby as much:


We Cannot Blame the White People any Longer

By Dr. William Henry 'Bill' Cosby, Jr., Ed.D.

They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English.

I can't even talk the way these people talk:

"Why you ain't,
Where you is,
What he drive,
Where he stay,
Where he work,
Who you be...".

And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.

And then I heard the father talk.

Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.

In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.

People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an Education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around.

The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.

These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids.

$500 sneakers for what?

And they won't spend $200 for "Hooked on Phonics."

I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.

Where were you when he was 2?

Where were you when he was 12?

Where were you when he was 18, and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol?

And where is the father? Or who is his father?

People putting their clothes on backward. Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong?

People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something?

Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up and got all type of needles (piercings) going through her body?

What part of Africa did this come from?

We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a thing about Africa.

I say this all of the time — it would be like white people saying they are European-American — that is totally stupid.

I was born here, and so were my parents and grand parents and, very likely my great grandparents. I don't have any connection to Africa, no more than white Americans have to Germany, Scotland, England, Ireland, or the Netherlands.

The same applies to 99 percent of all the black Americans as regards to Africa — so stop, already!

With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap...and all of them are in jail.

Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.

We have got to take the neighborhood back.

People used to be ashamed.

Today a woman has eight children with eight different 'husbands' — or men or whatever you call them now.

We have millionaire football players who cannot read.

We have million-dollar basketball players who can't write two paragraphs. We, as black folks, have to do a better job.

Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.

We have to start holding each other to a higher standard....

My grandparents have similar opinions... they're kind and generous, and feel that people should work hard and with integrity to succeed. 'Republican Conservative' was once a decent fit for their beliefs, but now they end up being staunch defenders of assholes who truly don't deserve their support.

... that said, I voted for Obama and Mitch Daniels (Republican Governor of IN).

I understand what you are saying, but it's not that they don't know what condoms are. There are millions of people in the world who know what condoms are and still don't use them (or use them properly); the key is in teaching why to use them.

The girl does say that there should be classes that teach the girls about protection and about not getting pregnant so I imagine it is a bit of both.

@Reefie As for the comment about the 1 child per family as per China, I don't even know where to start. First there's the massive problems associated with the policy in China; ie. the 4-2-1 problem (one child not able to help support 2 parents and 4 grandparents), the increase in infanticide, the huge gender disparity, etc. Then there's the fact that its results have been exaggerated; better economic status and better healthcare are more effective at controlling birthrates than the one-child policy, plus China's most dramatic decreases in birth-rate occurred before the policy under the voluntary "late, long, few" policy. And finally there is the fact that most "Western" countries are facing a population decline already - with so few people being born to the Baby Boomers that there will not be enough people to support their pensions. I'm not sure what the suggestion had to do with this video, but it doesn't really have a place in any realistic discussion about population.


>> ^bareboards2:

I'm not sure that this is the reason. You think these kids don't know what a condom is? This isn't a rural isolated school.
There have been anecdotal reports of young women getting pregnant so that they will have someone who will love them. To me, this epidemic of pregnancies is a reflection of low self-esteem and poverty, of young women seeking to feel relevant and empowered.
Teachings about condoms isn't going to fix that.

>> ^Skeeve:

In all seriousness though, I'd be willing to be this has something to do with abstinence-only sexual education and a lack of education about, and availability of, protection.
When are people going to realize that teenagers have sex whether you want them to or not? Providing education and protection is the only real solution.
>> <

He seems pretty lucky, himself. I'm betting his parents and grandparents worked their whole lives to leave him that house and land..

>> ^hpqp:

I hope this man's grandchildren realise how lucky they are.

As a kid, I was in between two sets of grandparents. Unfortunately the ones my brothers and I ended up with were the ones that hit us with belts and flyswatters, and even threw my oldest brother down the stairs at 8 (luckly he ended up with the other grandparents or he might have ended up murdering them in their sleep). My other grandparents on my dad's side never hit us and didn't yell.

The difference?...With the bad grandparents there was no trust. If we did something wrong we would hide it and lie though our teeth. I mean if you are going to get beat up for every little thing it eventually dulls you down. If you are going to fuck up then fuck up big. With the good grandparents, whenever they got disappointed in me (and this still happens) I really felt bad. They didn't even have to do much with punishment because I love and trusted them so much I didn't want to let them down. If that's how that mother acts all the time I doubt there will be much love and trust in that relationship.

I think the average life expectancy in the world is around 67 years and for America I think its around 80 could be wrong looked it up on wiki. Lot of people make it past the 80's but its still a good average to expect your last years in that timespan. Hell I'll be lucky to make it even close to to 84.

On a side note.
I had a great grandmother who lived to be 99 and only stopped living her life the way she wanted when she fell off a ladder trying to repair her roof. She use to make dinner for my family and I when we would travel to visit her on Thanksgiving even though she could barley walk and had hard time seeing. I only hope I have half her strength when I reach my golden years.
>> ^EMPIRE:

84 isn't THAT old anymore. Hell, I'm 31 and all my grandparents are still alive. I guess my perspective could be a little distorted by that. (one of my great grandmother died at 102 and simply because she was bedridden after falling down some stairs. none of my great grandparents died younger than 80, and most over 90).

84 isn't THAT old anymore. Hell, I'm 31 and all my grandparents are still alive. I guess my perspective could be a little distorted by that. (one of my great grandmother died at 102 and simply because she was bedridden after falling down some stairs. none of my great grandparents died younger than 80, and most over 90).

>> ^Fusionaut:

She's 90 years old. People lose some of their inhibitions at that age. All four of my grandparents say random racist things every now and then and even when you call them on it they don't care because they think they're old enough to say what they want. They don't even think it's wrong! When they were young that was just how people talked. It really is the strangest thing. They all grew up in post World War II where everyone's goal in life was to have lots of babies with someone that looked like you, smoke cigarettes, instill the fear of god in your children, and be afraid of the Japanese and Germans. Ahh, the good ol' days.


Doesn't sound too different from today...

She's 90 years old. People lose some of their inhibitions at that age. All four of my grandparents say random racist things every now and then and even when you call them on it they don't care because they think they're old enough to say what they want. They don't even think it's wrong! When they were young that was just how people talked. It really is the strangest thing. They all grew up in post World War II where everyone's goal in life was to have lots of babies with someone that looked like you, smoke cigarettes, instill the fear of god in your children, and be afraid of the Japanese and Germans. Ahh, the good ol' days.

Oh yes, the La Rouchebags. When Bush was in office, Bush had a Hitler stash and they were all anti-war. Now that it's Obama, Obama has a Hitler stash and health care reform is secretly about killing your grandparents. When I was much younger (and dumber) I asked one about their organization. I was given some pamphlets about how La Rouche is all knowing, and invited to a "spiritual" retreat on an island....Something seems 'off' to me

There's a fine line between free speech and screaming at people/flipping out when being asked to leave private property. Sorry, but that guy had a better case for his freedom of speech being violated before he started screaming in people's faces, and yelling insults at anyone that wanted him to quiet down.

The whole chubby cop pinning down a man with crutches was pretty cringe worthy though....

Those are pretty pansy charges BTW. Basically yelling insults at people, refusing to leave private property, and screaming about something violent. The video could work against him, at least as far as the Assault 4, and trespass goes.

Go far enough back and we all have the same ancestors. After that, there were a bunch of people and some of them preyed on others. At the same time, there were any number of disasters and windfalls, any amount of luck, good and bad, death, disease, theft, charity, feuds and reconciliations, new ideas and paradigms; all of which affected the society in which we find ourselves and the advantages our parents could pass onto us, what our grandparents could pass on to our parents, our great-grandparents to our grandparents and on. Historical inequality exists, racially driven and, crucially, otherwise, but all of it completely beyond our control so it may as well have been random. Do we consider every bounce of the die in its course, or do we just say it came up six?

Say a millionaire discovered he would have been twice as rich if only his maid's ancestors hadn't ripped his family off 500 years ago, does the maid write him a cheque? History may make for amusing speculation, but it's not a serious study and can never be applied to anything meaningful. For example, I like the idea that black and white were getting along fine until the 1600s when some scheming rich folk invented racism.

>> ^peggedbea:

I may be misunderstanding your point. So, sure, any anthropology class will teach you that race doesn't really exist and is only a cultural construct, like gender (not sex, gender).
But to say that inequality based on who your ancestors were doesn't exist and that how you may be subconsciously perceived by societal institutions is just a "roll of the dice" is a bit of a stretch.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with that last line. But American society was indeed set up to intentionally draw lines based on "race" and to both create and exploit racial tensions. And it worked fantastically well. Poor whites and white indentured servants were intentionally pitted against black slaves to be a buffer against revolts. The same concept is still being used to day with extravagant success, pit the lower classes against each other on the basis of some arbitrary tribe identification and they won't look too closely at how actively you're fucking them all over.

What does he want to do, go back to the grandfather clause where you can't be a citizen unless your grandparents were citizens? Fucking xenophobic rednecks.

>> ^chilaxe:

Recreational genealogy seems have a strong pull, but it seems almost as meaningless as astrology.
You only share 12.5% of your genes with each of your 8 great-grandparents, and genes can have very different effects depending on which other genes are present. If you want to know who you are, look at yourself, not your great-grandparents or anybody else.


That is true, but you should also consider possible effects from epigenetics.

Read the wiki entry, it's quite fascinating.

Excerpt from wiki:
In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is the study of inherited changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence, hence the name epi- (Greek: επί- over, above) -genetics. These changes may remain through cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life and may also last for multiple generations. However, there is no change in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;[1] instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.