Former Washington Middle School teacher Kerstin Westcott resigned in front of the school board after detailing incidents of violence, abuse, and fear for the safety of students and staff.

Westcott goes on to detail the following incidents that happened during the 2016-2017 school year:

-"Student set 3 fires in the bathrooms-we were never evacuated"
-"[Redacted] was kicked in the face during a fight and his glasses were broken"
-"Drugs and cigarettes have been both sold and used in and around the school"
-"So many fights that students have started arming themselves with weapons (including brass knuckles, knives, a large stick, and a lock) with which to fight"
-"Student jumped and beaten to the ground and kicked in the head and stomach repeatedly while she was down"
-"Student approached a teacher personally and said he had a gun and was going to shoot that teacher"
-"Student told staff, 'I am going to kill the teacher. I am going to get a shotgun and find out where he lives. Watch me. I am not kidding.'"

During a fight, Westcott recalls an administrator telling a teacher, "We're numb to fights around here. Is it a real fight?"

The letter says 11 percent of Washington Middle School students were in the "red zone" for behavior, meaning they had committed at least six major offenses during the school year.

And with that, nobody ever got near Gronk's end zone again.

The last comment about 'be a nice guy' is interesting.

I was listening to Joe Rogan Experience, and they mentioned something about how the genesis of the 'woman hater' is actually the forever-friend-zoned-nice-guy who gets so fed up with being 'taken for granted'/'shot down' that his niceness turns into hatred

It made sense to me. Essentially, the woman hater is what becomes of a boring nice guy who lacked the patience/endurance to wait for women his age to make their way through all the exciting unreliable men before being satiated (or just getting too old to fetch the interesting men's attention) and finally settling for the nice guy that was boringly always available.



And I get it. It plays into the human natural value system, where things that are scarce are more valuable.

The ahole is fleeting. You can't always have him, and if you do you can't hold him, so he has an element of scarcity, which creates value.

The nice guy will reliably stick around if you go with him, so he is less scarce, so he is less valuable. The lower value in turn makes him more likely to be single and always available, further reducing his scarcity, and further devaluing him, and further increasing his chances of being single. A feedback loop.

I suppose that there is also a 3rd path - the element of nice guys that just stop giving a crap before turning into haters, which makes them more scarce, which actually finally gets them attention, and they stop being single.

(And a 4th path - nice guy finds 'a girl who wants a nice guy from the start'. In my observation this isn't the typical case.)



Cases like this (forever alone nice guy, not specifically Mr Van Driver) are when I think 'arrangement' web sites create a good solution. The guys get to not be lonely anymore, and the women gets taken care of. Kind of plays into the nice guy natural instinct, too.

Amusingly, 'arrangement' may be a better fit for the forever-alone nice guys than 'waiting it out'.
In both cases (waiting vs arrangement) the women are mainly after stability/support.
The older women 'nice guy' matches with by 'waiting it out' would not have picked 'nice guy' if they still had the looks to keep pulling exciting men.
So, if you're gonna be with someone because they want you for support, why not just go with a younger woman and be up front about the situation. If it doesn't work out, either party can walk away. No messy divorce. Seems like a safer and more practical option.

(Not picking on older women, just observing that : as people get older, the single scene becomes more and more 'leftovers' that are 'left over for a good reason'. The odds of finding anyone worth while diminish with time, because the highest quality individuals get retained first. Wait long enough, and you're left with over the hill jaded pragmatists who once may have had looks but now have nothing left to offer. At which point, both 'arrangement' and 'being single' are legitimately better options.)



Regarding Mr. Van Guy specifically, I'm not sure if he had a chance. He had some social anxiety that made him unable to talk to people. So he was likely not gonna get a partner naturally, and was unlikely to succeed among professional peers well enough to get the financial security necessary to be some sugar daddy.

So, yeah, dude was likely a romantic dead end. Possibly even the same mental (brain developmental?) issues that made him unable to talk to people also made him susceptible to getting the sort of crazy tilted that allowed him to run people over. The dude could have actually been fated (circumstantially) to end up in tragedy. Just speculating, wouldn't shock me.

-scheherazade

jesus christ some people have to much time on there hands.

I pretty much dissected each zone. It is actually not any feat of programming, but simply utilizing good video effects many people have forgotten about. Under the core of the setup, the lights are mapped in 2d space in a program and then a bit map image or video playing over it can control what the lights look like every second. This is the same software video billboards use (Translating a video or image to lights mapped in a 2d space).

All the person had to do was setup his video files. A very efficent way of doing complex video effects to a pixel based light project. What was great is I saw a lot of old Demoscene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene) stuff like plasma and color cycling. Brings back memories.

zookeeper fail for putting so many in the feeding zone

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Female friend once complained to me that all the guys she dates turn out to be insecure jerks. I asked her what is it about insecure jerks she finds attractive? She immediately got sensitive and said she likes men who know what they want and take control of a situation. I said, the most insecure people are the ones who try to control everything around them. Secure people, by and large, don't care and seem aloof. They lead, they don't dominate.

I was walled into the friend zone by that point so, meh. Whatevs.

Total Twilight Zone in 1 minute.

Saw this earlier, I won't say there is some good logic here but the problem is we are a society of rules. We are a society of justice. And most of all we are a society of litigation. We need those signs and those lines in the road to tell you THIS is where you need to be, stay out of that area or ELSE! We need to make zones off limits so when accidents happen then someone is made responsible. This will not change.

References a Twilight Zone episode, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last .

Devil's advocate:

First up, If we're looking for "something we can't imagine", by definition we are unable to search for it.

Second, there's every possibility that aliens ARE very similar to us. There's a principle known as the Mediocrity Principle that states that if you pick a thing at random from a set, it's more likely to common than unusual. In this case, we are picking from the (hypothetical) set of life-sustaining planets, and using the only example we're aware of: Earth.

It's not unreasonable to assume that Earth is typical of life-sustaining planets. There doesn't appear to be anything particularly special about it.... it's a rocky planet in the "Goldilocks zone" where water is liquid. We've found plenty of those.

So there's actually a good possibility that life on other planets could face the same evolutionary pressures and arrive at the same solutions.

Aliens might not be that different at all.

It finds them. In Mercia.

I mean, I know the coconut's tropical and this is a temperate zone, but it holds them under its newsflare guiding feathers.

Wait...your take there is that Muslims are <1/4 as violent as Christians? Did you get whiplash turning around that fast?
What would I propose?
First, more assistance for the indigent, as economic status is far more important than race when determining a person's likelihood to use a gun on others. Remove the desperation, I expect you stop well over 1/2 of gun violence.
Second, recognizing that fighting the advanced military with semi auto rifles is futile, I would ban all full auto and mods, and extended mags with a buy back at market value (granted, a ban doesn't remove them, but stops more from being legally sold).
Don't pretend that, because that wouldn't stop all gun crime, it's useless. There is no silver bullet, that's no reason to take a moonlit walk on the moors during werewolf season. You can't stop all auto deaths, but we still stop people from jogging on the freeway

Edit: I agree with better mental health reporting/testing and better background checks (not necessarily longer, but remove the congressional roadblocks to making it near instant, nation wide, computerized, and more thorough)
Gun free zones are a failed experiment...ask DC. Unless you search everyone and everything entering the zone, it's worse than useless.