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...

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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

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, during her testimony this morning before the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, was asked if she knew what Habeas Corpus was, and it became obvious very quickly that she had no idea whatsoever, claiming that it was a Constitutional 'right' given to the president which allowed him to suspend the rights of individuals and remove them from the country, she went on to claim that Lincoln used this 'right' during the civil war. When it was pointed out to her that she had gotten it totally backwards, that the right of Habeas Corpus was a Constitutional right protecting a person from being arrested without the government providing them with a reason for their arrest and allowing them to make a defense, she then claimed that the Constitution allowed the president to suspend that right anytime that he wanted to. She was again told that NO, that that was wrong, that the president would first need the approval of Congress.

Noem has a BA in Political Science, but perhaps the class covering the US Constitution was one that she got 'college intern credits' for while she was serving as a member of Congress in 2012.

OCU

I can see Trump going after organizations like the ACLU or the SPLC, to say nothing of private universities and perhaps even religious organizations, like a Mosque or a Temple.

OCU

I suspect that WalMart's executive team will focus on shareholder value, rather than appeasing a bully. Willingly cutting profits is a great way for a CEO to lose his/her job...

#6 | Posted by catdog at 2025-05-19 01:12 PM

Walmart's CFO said that they might hold off on raising the prices of some products so as to gain more market share as the smaller retailers won't be able to absorb the price increases as well as they can. And yet people still wonder why so many despise Walmart and have sworn to never shop there (I can count on one hand the number of times that I've been inside a Walmart store).

OCU

Thank you...

OCU

I can sympathize with the former president as MY prostate cancer has metastasized to the upper lobe of my right lung and at least one lymph node in my chest.

I was diagnosed nearly four years ago and underwent nine-weeks of radiation treatments, which at the time we thought we had it beat, but this past October my PSA spiked back up to nearly 8.0 and the scans showed that the cancer had moved, but the prostate was clear so the radiation worked, just that some cancer cells 'escaped' before they were killed. The diagnosis is that it's stage-four, incurable and inoperative, but it is treatable, if you can afford it. Thank God for Medicare Part 'D'.

Last year the out-of-pocket cap for prescription drugs was $3,200. This year it's $2,000. The medication that they have me on is $17,296/MONTH. I hit my cap the first month of this year. I also have to have an injection of a hormone suppressant every six-months, which costs close to $7,000, but my Medicare Part 'B' pays for that. This drug regimen has been around for about 10-years now and has been shown to be very effective for at least three to five-years, and perhaps longer if we've caught it soon enough. So far, all of my tests (blood draws every three-months) appears to show that I'm responding well. The real test will come in October when they do another set of scans and then we'll know if the drugs are doing what they're intended to do, keeping it from spreading. If it stays contained, I can live with it for at least the foreseeable future. The goal is to get it to where it's simply a chronic condition, sort of like diabetes, incurable but treatable.

Anyway, I hope that there are treatment options for the former president which would offer him the same sort of prognosis as I've been given. Now there's an age difference, Biden is 82 and I'll be 78 in August, so that might complicate things, so we'll have to see.

OCU

AG Pam Bondi went so far as to claim that allowing this 'device' to be sold, will actually "enhance public safety". I'm not sure how she came to that conclusion, but we'll see what happens the first time one of these 'devices' are found in a weapon used during a mass shooting.

OCU

JPL - up the road from me. If you ever get an opportunity, do a tour

#2 | Posted by LegallyYourDead at 2025-05-17 03:50 AM

Yes, JPL was a customer of ours (for engineering software used to design, test and manufacture their spacecrafts), and I had several opportunities to visit their facilities. In fact, our CEO was invited to JPL to be there during the landing of the 'Curiosity' Mars rover in August 2012.

OCU

After all, Trump's got to get everyone out of Gaza so that Jared and his investors can go ahead with thier plans to turn Gaza into a world-class Mediterranean luxury resort.

OCU

Comer will regret it.

I'm waiting anyday now to hear, "My account was hacked".

#13 | Posted by BillJohnson at 2025-05-16 10:39 AM

His name is James Comey. James Comer is some wacko Republican Congressman from Kentucky.

OCU

OK looks like May 25-29 is a "State work period" when Legislators return to their home districts and states to hold Town Meetings with their constituents.

#4 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-05-16 06:50 PM

Fat chance of many Republicans holding town halls, at least not anything open to all of their constituents. They'll be calling them 'private gatherings' and checking voter ID cards at the door and only allowing registered Republicans to attend, which may not actually protect them much from the ire of the voters.

OCU

The irony is that the name of this group includes the word 'weaponization', which was exactly what Trump and his people accused the last couple of Democratic administrations of, yet the description of what their charter is going to be, it sure sounds like an attempt to 'weaponize' the DOJ.

That being said, using the vocabulary of one Donald J Trump, this has all the markings of a "witch hut" (I'll leave it to Trump to use all-caps).

OCU