Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

But another conclusion could be that natural killers survive and spread their genes after the war and that's why killing never stops.

He had 13 kids. Ugh.

[Higgenbotham]

Speaking of what people refuse to talk about or don't want to believe, as mentioned recently, I was a landlord in a low income area during the 1980s and 1990s (Beloit, Wisconsin). When I moved 70 miles northeast from there to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it was like an entirely different world. Right away, in my neighborhood, I met a guy from Green Bay who had just started working for the phone company and, because he was new, was assigned to the worst area of Milwaukee. When we would get home from work, he would tell me about things he had seen that day and I, in turn, would tell him about things I had seen that were similar. One evening, he confided in me that I was the only person he could talk to about this because nobody else, not even his girlfriend or his family, wanted to hear about it. He didn't say they didn't believe it, just that they didn't want to hear it.

Having those discussions prompted me to repeat some of them to a friend at work who, like most white people in America, came from a sheltered background. His response was that he didn't believe any of it. I thought he was joking. He wanted to hear more, but he would always conclude that he didn't believe it. Finally, I came to the conclusion that he really didn't believe what I was telling him and stopped talking about it. With the advent of the Internet, however, some of it could finally be verified. The story that could be verified most conclusively was about a girl I had met in one of the neighborhoods where I had owned a house. She was homeless and bounced from house to house. One of the places she stayed at was owned by a retired teacher across the street from one of my rentals. Her parents had named her Marijuana Pepsi Jackson during the hazy lazy 1960s protests and, contrary to what her name might suggest, she had made high honor roll every time I looked through the list in the paper. The reason I looked at things like that in the paper was so that when prospective tenants came to one of my rentals, I would know what to ask. For example, if someone with the last name of Jackson came by, I might ask if they have a daughter named Marijuana Pepsi, or, if applicable, whether they were the person who had gotten caught shoplifting from K-Mart. When I showed him what was on the Internet he said, well, yeah, that might be true but I still don't believe all that other stuff.

[Higgenbotham]

A Dark Age (which the world is now irreversibly entering into)...

Michigan was already in a dark age when I was there in 1979. Wisconsin entered a dark age in the mid 1990s and most of the rest of the upper midwest probably did around that time. Oregon and Washington probably entered a dark age in 2020. California is in a dark age but it's harder to guess when it happened. I've lived in Texas since 2005. Texas still hasn't entered a dark age.

[Higgenbotham]

I'll discuss the aspects of day care that don't relate to this later.

Front and center to this day care company's stated philosophy was that bullying and misbehavior would not be tolerated. But as I related earlier, due to the "tripledemic" and earlier covid, the school was not filled, so that presented a problem and I think they were letting some of these goals slip so that they could at least break even. I'm sympathetic to that.

Parents were allowed to enter the building at any time and observe what was going on. The class my kid was in was 2 year olds. This was in northwest Austin, Texas in an area where there are some apartment complexes, which I live in, and the owner occupied homes in the area are pretty expensive. I think it would be reasonable to say with the exception of the apartments, this area is upper middle class and above. The cost was $1163 per month for 3 days per week. There were other plans available.

The first week or so my daughter was in this day care, I watched 3 of these kids attack another child. They would take turns running toward the child and yelling at him as they got close. Finally, one girl ran toward him and smashed a toy truck in his face. Most notable about this was as I was watching the staff did nothing and that even though the kids saw me watching them, this did not deter their behavior one iota. Another time I saw a boy grab another boy by the throat. He then let go and grabbed him by the throat a second time. Same thing. The staff did nothing and the kid was not deterred. I walked over to one of the staff and yelled, "HEY, DID YOU SEE THAT?" She just looked at me and went over and separated the bully from the rest of the kids. Since my kid was half a head taller than the largest of these runts, I wasn't worried about her in the short term but I didn't want her to think that any of this was normal. She didn't seem to, as luckily she didn't become aggressive and said she didn't like the school or any of the kids in it and that didn't change.

My general observation was that about half of these kids are savages and, if what I saw is representative, day care is socializing kids to engage in increased bullying in school and in the workplace after that.

[Higgenbotham]

New worry for parents: Study by Berkeley science institute finds toxic substances in preschool carpets

The director of Step One Preschool replaced rugs after a study by the Green Science Policy Institute found worrisome chemicals in the carpets of that school and 17 others.

By Brett Simpson
Nov. 21, 2019, 2:03 p.m.

Sue Britson, the executive director of Step One Preschool, has replaced the rugs that were found to have PFAS.

As director of Step One Preschool on Spruce Street in Berkeley, Sue Britson tries to track all the toxics and pollutants to which her three to five-year-old charges might be exposed.

She keeps close tabs on the cleaning products the school uses to scour tables, floors, and chairs and to wash dishes and pans. She looks for the least-toxic paints and glues. Pesticides? Not used in the garden. Snacks? Preferably organic.

For up to $2,800 a month, families with children at Step One expect the best.

But in recent months, Britson has become aware of a new unexpected danger — in carpets.

A study that examined 18 preschools in the Bay Area found traces of per- and poly-flouroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in almost all of the preschools’ carpets. While 18 preschools participated in the study, Step One was the only school willing to make its participation public.

“Read a list of top ten questions to ask a preschool, and you’ll never see ‘what’s in the carpets?’” said Britson. “It wasn’t on any of our radars.”

PFAS are a class of manmade chemical compounds first developed in the 1950s by DuPont as the non-stick in Teflon pans. Today, they’re used in countless industrial and consumer products for their stain-resistant, grease-resistant, and flame-retardant properties. But research shows that long-term exposure to high levels of PFAS can be toxic, and still-developing children are especially at risk. This year, the state of California is tightening restrictions on PFAS in drinking water and considering a measure to ban sales of PFAS-treated carpets. But absent state or federal regulation, the sources of PFAS exposure are difficult to track, and not widely understood.

“The health risks for PFAS exposure are clear,” said Tom Bruton, senior scientist at the non-profit Green Science Policy Institute, whose scientists conducted the study along with others at the University of Indiana. “We wanted to contribute to a broader understanding of one source in our homes.”

Hundreds of laboratory studies link PFAS exposure to adverse health outcomes. Laboratory animals exposed to several classes of PFAS are more likely to develop liver, thyroid and pancreatic diseases, as well as changes in hormone levels, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Multiple human epidemiological studies appear to corroborate those findings. The largest and most well-known of these followed a 2003 class-action lawsuit against the chemical manufacturer DuPont. After a West Virginia community faced decades of PFAS exposure in their drinking water from a DuPont plant, they received a multimillion-dollar settlement that they used to fund a health study on themselves.

The resulting 2013 C8 Study, carried out by researchers at Emory University, Brown University, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, collected blood samples from over 69,000 residents living in the area around the plant over the course of eight years. Their findings linked PFAS exposure to diseases like pregnancy-induced hypertension, high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, and testicular and kidney cancer.

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2019/11/21 ... ol-carpets


When we initially visited the day care, I noticed what appeared to be artificial grass in the play area in back. I asked the director if it was artificial grass and she said yes. I didn't say any more. That also typically contains PFAS. Like this Step One day care, they put a high priority on protecting the children. But it's hard for companies to make good and correct decisions with all the other pressing issues they are dealing with.

[Higgenbotham]

The FBI had warned of reports of threats to electricity infrastructure by people espousing racially or ethnically motivated extremist ideology “to create civil disorder and inspire further violence,” the agency said in a November 22 bulletin sent to private industry.

Anti-government groups in the past two years began using online forums to urge followers to attack critical infrastructure, including the power grid. They have posted documents and even instructions outlining vulnerabilities and suggesting the use of high-powered rifles.

One 14-page guide obtained by CNN cited as an example the 2013 sniper attack on a high voltage substation at the edge of Silicon Valley that destroyed 17 transformers and cost Pacific Gas and Electric $15 million in repairs.

The caliber of the bullets in that California incident is different from those used in North Carolina, a law enforcement source told CNN.

But whoever attacked the North Carolina substations “knew exactly what they were doing,” Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields has said.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/us/power ... index.html

[Higgenbotham]

Now as far as what I was able to check from this guy. He said he survived the Battle of Osan (Korea) where he was one of seven American troops who came out alive. Some years later, he opened up a locked trunk and took out a Certificate of Valor issued by the Army describing the facts as he had told me which of course my inclination was not to believe the story when I heard it.

Along with the rest of the outfit composed of 406 infantrymen of the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, Task Force Smith, he landed at Pusan, Korea on 1 July 1950 and they were joined by 134 artillerymen of the 52nd Field Battalion near Pyongtaek on 4 July. Their job? To delay the main body of the enemy driving into South Korea. They faced an estimated 20,000 enemy troops near Osan on 5 July. Before he was rotated out a year later he had been wounded 3 times and decorated many more. A special Certificate of Valor which was awarded in June 1952, to him and the few other survivors, best describes their success when it ways, With ammunition almost spent and its position in imminent danger of being completely surrounded, a hazardous but masterly withdrawal was effected. Rushed forward to effect this massive onslaught alone, the intrepidity and skill of these defenders of the ground can best be gauged by their outstanding success in stemming the enemy advance during this very critical period.

https://www.koreanwar.org/html/units/21 ... _Looking=4

[Cool Breeze]

When you say state X "entered a dark age in 19--" what do you mean?

[Higgenbotham]

When you say state X "entered a dark age in 19--" what do you mean?

Government at the state level is broken beyond repair and can't be fixed until it completely collapses and is replaced by something else.

[Higgenbotham]

It was my opinion that the US government was broken beyond repair in 2011 when they failed to control Bernanke. What that meant to me was Donald Trump would not be able to fix it. Ross Perot could have because his bid was prior to 2011. Of course, this is the opinion of one person only and the opinion of one person is not consequential. But that was why I believed that, although it would be good to have Trump in there because that took control away from the people who ran it into the ground, Trump would not be able to fix anything, just speed up or slow down the established downtrend in different areas from where the political establishment was heading. He did a good job of that in my opinion.

Given that there is no functional national government, someone can look to the lower levels and make their decisions based on that. If a functional state government is desired, based on my observation and experience, Texas has one. If a functional state government is not desired, someone can either look to having a functional local government or no functional government at all. I would like to live where there is a functional state government, for now, and have been in Texas for 17 years. Once things go completely to hell in a handbag, I think it would be better to be in a place that has as little government as possible at the state and local level.