(10-30-2026 10:42 PM)TripleA Wrote: (10-30-2026 10:29 PM)JRsec Wrote: (10-30-2026 10:14 PM)TripleA Wrote: (10-30-2026 09:37 PM)JRsec Wrote: (10-30-2026 09:22 PM)TripleA Wrote: OK, that was...well...weak, lol. But I'll be sure to look out for them, anyway.
You mentioned cribbage. My dad taught me that game when I was very young. One of the things he and I connected on. Played together a lot for many years.
Weak? Yes. But it was easier on kids 5 to 12 than coming out and saying, "Those bears will eat you!" When we left Sault Ste Marie for Florida, I never saw another cribbage board other than ours. I'm afraid it's largely a game lost to time. Maybe it could make a comeback if there was a video version.
I wouldn't have changed a thing about my formative years. I saw the nation and our Northern neighbors. It was just weird being in San Antonio watching President Kennedy's motorcade in Dallas the next day on TV. He had just visited one of the A.F. Bases, I don't think it was Lackland, maybe Randolph, in San Antonio the day before. Then he's killed in Dallas. Everyone was stunned!
That was pretty much the end of my age of innocence.
Ha, I missed the part where you were just a kid, lol.
Yeah, I vividly recall the day JFK was assassinated, too. I was in 11th grade English class. I even recall exactly where I was sitting. Very sad.
Maybe the saddest until 9/11.
Sad was an eventual response to 9/11. I was watching the report on the first plane when the second struck. I knew then it was an attack. I wasn't sad. I was pissed! I got sad when I saw the families who had lost loved ones, but I was still pissed. Big things start years after the smaller warnings fade. The world is in a mess. Frankly we all would be safer without the internet. We still need cutting edge technology and I'm for the military having their own closed system, but we know our neighbors less, we share way too much private information making our families vulnerable and through Facebook which I don't do, we endanger our friends. People believe more lies now than ever before in my life and all it takes is a cropped or photoshopped picture, key phrases and words edited out of a column, or report, or book. And one set that lies having a backup set to verify their lies as truth. Without going too far for this forum, we all know who the author of confusion happens to be. I'm sure Eric would affirm.
I was talking eventual outcome, not immediate reaction to 9/11. I was pissed, too. I'm not exactly a wallflower, lol.
And I wholeheartedly agree with the rest. As I age, I seem to long even more for my younger days. Not for me, we all have to die eventually, but just for the way our country was back then.
Exactly! We all die. I quit worrying about that when my children were grown. I started to think more about what to do with the life I had left than worrying about being mortal. Even the bad people in my past were better people than some of the so-called good people today. They still had priorities and standards and still looked out for their families. They didn't see everything that happened to others as being beyond their concern. The more insulated some communities become the more delusional they become about what life is for many of those they would deny in their safe space. Yet these are the ones who assuage their guilt by blaming the rest of us for the very segregation and privilege they enjoy.
As I see it, you have the privileged/very wealthy to super-wealthy and they tell themselves they are good by forcing the rest of us to make up for the transgressions they see as normal. The past I remember had good, bad, beautiful and ugly aspects, but everyone had enough sense to know what was real and who was to blame.
We live in a world now where delusions are not to be challenged, blame is assigned to the wrong people all of the time, and the poor while better off than most places in the world, still suffer from segregation, only now it is economic segregation. Do the super wealthy's kids go to public schools? Hell no! Do they go to State U? Not normally.
My kid brother spent his life before it ended too briefly flying them privately wherever they wanted to go. He got to enjoy their privileges so long as he knew his place, but he always preferred living in communities where the middle class and poor knew each other and where his neighbors came over for dinner.
Both parties are controlled by the first group I mentioned. They are the CEO's and high ranking officers in corporate multi-nationals and most are not nice people, at least according to the first hand look my brother had of them.
He started out flying some famous coaches and their families and he genuinely liked most of them. He was promoted up from there and the ritzier it got the more disgruntled and detached he became. He was included, but he wasn't raised to like who those people were when out of sight of the public.
Our looming war will be both internal and external. Only when those at the top need us to protect them are we playing on the same field. And if it gets bad enough for that, it's going to be hell everywhere until its over. Rinse wash and recycle in China, Europe, and in the country of any other power player on the world scene.
It wasn't lost upon me that when Japan was defeated that Nissan, Mitsubishi, Datsun all survived. The same things happened in Germany and Italy. The companies that supplied the war materials the planes, the tanks, the vehicles all thrived in the post war world. The dictators were the middleman, not the potentate. Nothing has changed. Topple a dictator and a new middleman will be found. We think wars are between nation states. Wars are for the collapsing and rebuilding of markets under new management. In that regard the realignment people see in football is merely a product of rights wars between FOX and ESPN along with other more focused players like NBC and CBS. It's not about greedy conferences and schools abandoning their long-held relationships, it's about markets and revenue.
Wars are no different. People are just suckered into them thinking they are doing what's right for their country. What they are dying for is the conglomerates raw materials access, or to destroy, capture and rebuild markets.
I doubt all will believe that but now it's out there and they will start looking at things askance when the picture doesn't fit the narrative, and from there they will start making some connections that ring true. That's our Brave New World, just a little different than what Huxley thought. After all we spent multimillion dollar Tomahawks against Iraq just to keep from accidentally hitting corporate assets held by American and European and other countries working with us. Our troops paid the price because when they went in they had to clear those buildings and facilities floor by floor and the casualties weren't light. Just something to think about.
