Now it turns out that the major TV networks are NOT going to cover the parade on their normal broadcast channels. They may provide a video feed on their internet news outlets, but that's about it.

OCU

Does anyone remember Kent State?

#90 | Posted by TenMile at 2025-06-09 07:58 PM

I was a junior in college. In addition to going to classes, I worked as a freelance photographer and I covered what was a totally peaceful, yet serious protest on our campus (I sold several photos to the college and local newspapers as well as photos which appeared in that year's yearbook). Up until that point, there had been virtually no anti-war protests on our campus as we were a rather conservative engineering school, well off the beaten path (look on a map and find Houghton in Michigan's Upper Peninsula). But Kent State was a bridge too far. Classes, for the most part, were cancelled. People gathered in groups to express their horror over what happened. Speeches were given, signs were posted, but in the end the school's administrators understood that it was to their advantage to allow the students, and many of the faculty, to publicly express themselves, as long as it stayed peaceful, which it did. The one thing which resulted from this, was that by the end of the week it was decided that we needed a 'Peace Park' on campus, and over the next month or so (school let out in mid-June) many people worked on it, which some monetary assistance from the school (they also provide the site where it was built) and from several churches.

Trump has called for Newsome's arrest.

#16 | Posted by Corky at 2025-06-09 06:13 PM

And when asked what crime could Newsom be charged with, Trump response was that "Newsom's primary crime was running for governor..."

What do people in other parts of the world think when they hear stuff like that coming from the mouth of the President of the United States?

OCU

How is this not a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act?

The Posse Comitatus Act (PCA), enacted in 1878, generally prohibits the use of the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement purposes. It aims to prevent the military from being used to enforce laws unless explicitly authorized by Congress or the Constitution. The Act primarily applies to the Army and Air Force, with other military branches governed by separate legislation.

OCU

Before Trump was elected, the Pentagon and the Army had NO plans for any sort of 'military parade' anywhere in the country as part of their celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the establishment of the US Army. That's not the sort of thing that you expect to see in America.

OCU

The writing was on the wall...

OCU

This coming Saturday, June 14th, almost simultaneous with Trump's Army/Birthday parade in Washington DC, the Diocese of Chicago is going to be holding a celebration recognizing the election of Pope Leo the 14th. Now the Pope won't be there in person, but he'll speak over a live TV feed from Rome to the crowds at Rate Field, where his favorite team, the White Sox play. The event will be broadcast locally and on the internet. Tickets to attend the event live are being sold for $5 each (10,000 tickets were sold within 15 minutes of them going on sale).

It will be interesting to compare the number of empty seats a Rate Field in Chicago versus what I have to assume will be bleachers set-up along the parade route for the Washington DC event.

OCU

What are the Cantonese words for "How far does honorable Xi wish me to bend over, and does he wish it during a 'presser'?" I don't know why he would.

#5 | Posted by RightisTrite at 2025-06-08 04:57 PM

I suspect that Xi doesn't speak Cantonese, or at least he won't admit that he does, since the official language of China is Mandarin. Cantonese is still spoken in the Southern parts of China, but the Communist Party has been trying to discourage its use as much as possible without causing a cultural war with those parts of China where it's still spoken by the average person.

Several years ago, before I retired, I gave a presentation at an engineering conference in Zhuhai, China which is in the Guangdong Province, which was once called Canton. Now I've been all over the world and have often had to work with a translator when giving a presentation. However, this was the first time that I had TWO translators, one who translated what I was saying into Mandarin and one into Cantonese. Obviously, this wasn't a simultaneous translation. I had to break my presentation into 15-30 second segments and then wait for the Mandarin translation and then the Cantonese translation before I could continue. That was one of the hardest presentations that I've ever given. In other places like Russia, Ukraine, Japan or Mexico, we could get by with a simultaneous translation, which while I still had to speak slowly, at least I didn't have to stop and start all the time. Now when I was presenting in places like Germany, India, Singapore, Netherlands or any of the Scandinavian countries, English was just fine. Even in places like Brazil and Indonesia, I had no real problems with English, just that I had to be more careful about using idioms and slang.

OCU

Can you imagine the outrage if Joe Biden or Barack Obama had 'sold' a private tour of the White House to someone with links to the Chinese Communist Party.

OCU

Because those are 'woke' lives and 'green' money. He can't have that, as it's more important to pour taxpayer's money into subsidizing oil, gas and coal production. He's intent on getting rid of all subsides for solar and wind (if he could, he would ban solar and wind energy production outright), yet the irony is that during all of the recent Democratic administrations, not once did any of them seriously try to get rid of oil and gas subsidies, which have remained on the books for decades, costing the taxpayers billions each year.

OCU

It's good to have fiends in high places...

OCU

Speaking of the behavior of Trump and Musk, particularly Trump, I can't help but recall during both of Trump's campaigns against Hillary in 2016 and Kamala in 2024, many people were making the argument that a women in the Oval Office would be a mistake because they wouldn't be able to control their emotions.

OCU

Speaking of DNA and Ancestry.com, while my wife had a purpose in mind, finding out who her father really was, I thought I knew everything on my side of the ledger. Boy was I wrong.

Anyone getting their DNA done needs to be aware that you may learn more about your 'family' than you bargained for. About six month after we had our DNA run by Ancestry, and my wife had pretty much confirmed what she had been told about the missing side of her family, I get a note from a FIRST cousin that I had never heard of before. We communicated for a couple of weeks where he explained that, like my wife, he had been lied to about who his parents were and it wasn't until he was in his late 50's before he finally learned that he was adopted, but no one would tell him anything, not even his 'mother'. When Ancestry.com finally came around he decided to take matters into his own hand. While his 'father' had died years before his 'mother' was still alive but in a nursing home and so he took a sample from both her and himself and sent it in, which proved that they were not related (his 'mother' passed away before he could confront her with the test results).

That's' when his DNA crossed mine and we got these notices about being first cousins. I sent a note out to all my first cousins on my father's side (that's what the DNA showed, a fraternal match) and all but one claimed to have no knowledge of anything. However, the one cousin called me and said that I was to never speak of this again to anyone. When I mentioned this to her younger half-sister she suddenly realized that this might explain a few things. Now their mother and their respective fathers were already gone, so there was no one to ask (only one aunt, by marriage was still alive, and I wanted to avoid asking her about it as she was quite old). Anyway, the younger sister of the cousin who warned me to drop the subject, decided to do something on her own and had her DNA checked and sure enough, it confirmed that this mystery man was her half-brother. Well, looking at their respective ages and that of her older half-sister, my cousins, the one I had known all my life and the new one, figured out that the only explanation that made any sense was that he was born out of wedlock between my aunt's first and second marriage. I all fit because he was born in a hospital in Chicago (my aunt lived in Michigan) which was known for caring for unwed mothers. Also, my new cousin's mother' had been a nurse at that hospital. Once all the chess pieces were on the board, it became pretty obvious what had happened.

At this point I dropped out of the conversation and just let my cousin handle it as she was really interested in meeting him. Her new sibling was retired, living in Florida and she lived in Virginia, so she drove down there to meet him face to face and they became close. Unfortunately, he had some serious medical conditions and died before we all got a chance to meet. But my cousin said he looked like the rest of us and that he was very nice, just that he had been living a lie all his life and it had played on his mind once it became clear what had probably happened. Note that to this day, the older half-sister, who we're still close to, has never accepted what me and her sister learned, or at least she refuses to talk about it and I've never brought it up as I respect her too much and would not want to ruin our relationship.

But this does act as a tale that if one does have their DNA run, be prepared for what you might learn. It may not always conform with what you thought was the history of your family.

OCU

What a truly American story! I have enjoyed your comments.

Thanks for sharing that with us!

She's since used Ancestry.com to verify that at least his name was real and that she was his daughter

Oops!

#9 | Posted by donnerboy at 2025-06-05 12:25 PM

Well, two of our sons have taken it a step further.

Our oldest son married a gal who's mother was Korean/Japanese and who's father was German-American. They have four daughters, the oldest of which is married to a guy from Central America who can trace HIS ancestry on his mother's side back to Eastern Europe, including a branch of Ashkenazi Jews, and they have two children, a girl and a boy.

Our middle son, he has a daughter who's mother is from Mexico.

Our youngest son had a daughter, but we lost her at eight-weeks from a rare but incurable genetic disorder (she would've been 14 years old this month). It destroyed his marriage and while he's remarried, they've agreed not to risk another throw of the genetic dice.

So you can see, our two oldest sons have thickened up our family's gene pool a bit.

OCU

... In the middle half of the nineteenth century, more than one-half of the population of Ireland emigrated to the United States. So did an equal number of Germans. Most of them came because of civil unrest, severe unemployment or almost inconceivable hardships at home. This wave of immigration affected almost every city and almost every person in America.

From 1820 to 1870, over seven and a half million immigrants came to the United States " more than the entire population of the country in 1810. Nearly all of them came from northern and western Europe " about a third from Ireland and almost a third from Germany.

#2 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-06-05 01:16 AM

On my father's side, the first immigrants arrived in the US from Germany in 1850. They were tailors by trade and eventually opened two stores, one in Toledo and one in Cleveland, specializing in men's & boy's fine clothing. The company was sold to the Botany Brands in 1961. During the Franco-Prussian War, in the early 1870's, they were forced to change the family name as it was hurting their business due to all of the anti-German propaganda (German soldiers bayoneting babies and raping Nuns). So they Anglo-Saxonized it, changing it from Becker to Baker. However, when I was a kid, we used to go to my uncle Frank's farm (actually my great uncle) in Maumee, Ohio for family reunions every 10-years to celebrate Uncle Frank's birthday (he lived to be 98-year old) and everyone was still speaking German, when the family got together (we never learned German at home, so we were fish out of water). Frank was the last Baker to work at the B R Baker Company, retiring as Chief Operating Officer shortly before the sale to Botany. My grandfather, and two his brothers, worked for the railroad.

On my mother's side, her family came from Belgium, her maternal grandparents arriving first in the late 19th century, and then her father, a few years prior to WWI.

The first immigrant ancestor of my wife's, at least on her mother's side, was here almost before anyone else, arriving from Wales in 1654. Her father's side is a bit more complicated since she didn't even know her father's name until she was 17 years old (her mother never told her that her 'father' wasn't and claimed that she had lost her birth certificate). She's since used Ancestry.com to verify that at least his name was real and that she was his daughter, but she's never tried to contact any relatives on her father's side, but it did show that his family was mostly Polish, and had been in the country for at least two or three generations.

OCU

And Richardson has stated that he considers his position as the head of FEMA as being only a part time job as he intends to continue in his role as assistant secretary at DHS' office for countering weapons of mass destruction, which he has implied that he's more qualified for.

OCU

And while Elon Musk and his DOGE minions were failing to find any significant fraud in Medicare, Trump was already plotting to reward the perpetrator of one of the largest cases of Medicare fraud in history.

OCU

What could possibly go wrong...

Now might be the time to heed the warnings of philosopher George Santayana...

OCU

A sign of things to come...

OCU

As someone said on TV tonight, Richard Nixon's worst day in office was better than Donald Trump's best day.

OCU

That's because it was written using AI.

They are literally doing the jobs Americans don't want to do.
Not many American want to go to college.
Even fewer want to go to graduate school.

#4 | Posted by snoofy at 2025-05-29 10:24 AM

Our #4 granddaughter is not only going to college, she's already nearly a senior after finishing only two years of school. She's attending my alma mater and although she's not studying engineering, I'll give her a break as she's going for a double major in Chemistry and Physics, with a minor in Math. She was awarded a full, four-year tuition scholarship and has already started to take graduate level classes in Chemistry. Her GPA is 3.96 and she was awarded a summer undergraduate research fellowship. She also tutors chemistry students during the regular semester, which includes doing a weekly review for undergrads, which technically she is, despite the fact that this job is usually only offered to grad students.

In addition to her academic work, she runs every day, weather permitting (the school is in the UP of Michigan, and considering that she was born in Dallas and raised in Houston, she adapted very quickly). Last fall she ran her first half-marathon and intends on doing it again this fall. She reads the Bible every morning and hardly ever misses church on Sunday (my brother and his wife live just 30 miles from the campus and she attends church with them, again when weather permitting). She also plays the piano (self taught) and has found at least four pianos on campus where she can play anytime she wishes. And speaking of self-teaching, she's learning Japanese in her spare time. She also draws very complex doodle art using pen & ink on small, 5 1/2 x 4 1/4 card stock. She's drawn several especially for me. She's also been elected to chair a women's group on campus.

Anyway, there are kids who are smart and then there are kids who are scary smart. Our granddaughter is scary smart.

And Oh, one other thing, maybe this Asian thing has something to it. Her mother is half Asian (her maternal grandmother was Korean and Japanese and her maternal grandfather was German American). On her father's side, we're Welsh/Polish on my wife's side and Flemish/German on my side. And while she doesn't look all that much Asian, and her mother never really did anything to promote that part of her heritage at home, she did join the Asian student organization, but had to show them a picture of her mother before they would believe her.

Anyway, we're very proud of our granddaughter, as we are of our other five, but because she decided to go to my alma mater, she's kind of special, at least for me.

OCU

Yes, and he bragged about it in front of the Gold Star families at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, saying that it was God's will that he was serving non-consecutive terms so that he would president these next four years when so many great things were going be happening in America, telling the families who had lost sons and daughters defending America that "I've got everything".

OCU

This is becoming SOP with Trump and his people, make a claim and then try and back it up with evidence that has nothing to do with the subject at hand. This happened dozens of times during his presidential campaigns.

OCU

I guess this is going to be the new norm...

OCU