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Sunday, June 15, 2025

The Trump administration has abruptly shifted the focus of its mass deportation campaign, telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to largely pause raids and arrests in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants ... read more


Saturday, June 14, 2025

MSNBC host Chris Hayes couldn't contain his laughter on air Friday while reading a fundraising email from President Donald Trump. The email asked for donations for his Saturday military parade, which, as it turns out, most Americans aren't that eager to fund.

"Donald Trump is holding a North Korean-style military parade, Soviet-style military parade through the nation's capital, something that we just don't do as a country," said Hayes. "The last one we did was after the first Persian Gulf War, which was celebrating the end of a war."

He continued, "We don't have that here. It just so happens to fall on his 79th birthday. He's even fundraising from it, if you could believe it " well, you can, of course " sending out this email with the subject line, quote, Please help me before my military parade!'"


Thursday, June 05, 2025

Officers were also urged to increase apprehensions and think up tactics to "push the envelope" one email said, with staff encouraged to come up with new ways of increasing arrests and suggesting them to superiors. read more


Friday, May 23, 2025

Rep. Andrew Clyde, who owns Athens gun shop, takes credit for gun silencer tax break in Trump bill


Friday, May 02, 2025

President Donald Trump in a social media post Thursday announced plans to rename Veterans Day as "Victory Day for World War I" and establish May 8 as "Victory Day for World War II."

"We won both wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything," Trump wrote in the late night statement. "That's because we don't have leaders anymore, that know how to do so! We are going to start celebrating our victories again!"

The move to rename Veterans Day " established to coincide with the end date of World War II " would overwrite 87 years of precedent in recognizing Nov. 11 as a national holiday celebrating all veterans.


Comments

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

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

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