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[RTH10260]

[RTH10260]

Billionaire Larry Ellison got a speeding ticket on an island he owns while driving a Corvette and told the cop there's 'no excuse'

Britney Nguyen
Fri, January 13, 2023 at 4:48 PM GMT+1

Larry Ellison got a speeding ticket in October while driving on Lanai, the Hawaiian island he owns.Oracle
Larry Ellison got a speeding ticket last year while driving on his Hawaiian island, Lanai.

He told the officer that he was on his way to dinner with his kids but that "there's no excuse."

The Oracle cofounder bought nearly 98% of the island in 2012 for $300 million.

The billionaire Larry Ellison was caught last year running a stop sign and speeding on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, of which he owns nearly 98%.

The Oracle cofounder was stopped while driving his orange Corvette last October, Hawaii News Now reported this week, citing police body-camera footage. The officer told Ellison that he was pulled over for running through a stop sign and that he was "kind of speeding."

Ellison apologized and told the officer he was trying to get home to have dinner with his kids.

"But there's no excuse," Ellison said. "There's no good excuse."

The officer asked for his license, registration, and insurance, and Ellison told the officer he didn't have his license, Hawaii News Now reported.

The billionaire's company on the island, Pulama Lanai, declined to comment for the story. Oracle representatives did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on the traffic incident.

Ellison bought nearly 98% of the 141-square-mile island in June 2012 for an estimated $300 million. Ellison, who Forbes estimates is worth about $110 billion, said he wanted to turn the island into a tourist destination and "the first economically viable, 100% green community."



https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/bill ... 08620.html

(original: Business Insider)

[RTH10260]

article not good for quoting, read at link

Student loan servicer at the center of debt cancelation case hasn’t paid on one of its own debts in years

Published: Jan. 12, 2023 at 8:34 a.m. ET
By Jillian BermanFollow

Legal experts wrote in briefs filed with the Supreme Court that the lapse in payments calls into question whether Missouri has standing to sue over the policy

The board of the state-affiliated Higher Education Loan Authority of Missouri, or MOHELA, had already decided once, a couple of months earlier, to sell $2.4 billion worth of student loans to generate about $450 million for state coffers. The idea, originally pitched by then-governor Matt Blunt and scaled down, was to use the proceeds generated from the sale to fund Blunt’s higher education priorities. The notion was controversial given that MOHELA was founded by state lawmakers to ensure Missourians could attend college affordably through low-cost loans and the organization’s assets theoretically were earmarked for that purpose.





https://www.marketwatch.com/story/stude ... eid=yhoof2

[pipistrelle]

Billionaire Larry Ellison got a speeding ticket on an island he owns while driving a Corvette and told the cop there's 'no excuse'
Ellison bought nearly 98% of the 141-square-mile island in June 2012 for an estimated $300 million. Ellison, who Forbes estimates is worth about $110 billion, said he wanted to turn the island into a tourist destination and "the first economically viable, 100% green community."

(original: Business Insider)

This is how I would think a billionaire would act-buying a tropical paradise island, zipping around in a sports car, traveling, etc. Not stuck at a crappy golf course. Just saying.

[RTH10260]

Teacher demands mom invites 30 students to daughter’s birthday party: ‘This is ridiculous’

Emerald Pellot
Fri, January 13, 2023 at 6:24 PM GMT+1

A mom is feeling pressured to invite her daughter’s entire class over for a party.

She explained the situation Reddit’s “Am I the A******? (AITA)” forum. Her daughter is 8 years old and doesn’t have very many friends. Instead of a big birthday party, she wanted four of her close friends to come over for a fun gathering. But when her teacher found out, the teacher demanded the mom invite the whole class.

“I got an email from her teacher where she essentially called me out for my ‘lack of inclusivity,'” the mom wrote.

The teacher alleged her daughter was bullying kids who weren’t invited, but the mom can’t afford to host a party with 30 kids. Moreover, she was scared her daughter would be bullied at her own party.

“I politely told the teacher this and explained that it wasn’t even a party but a get together for her closest friends,” she explained. “Now I’m getting loads of angry emails from parents of kids who weren’t invited asking me why not and pressuring me to invite their kids.”




https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/teacher ... 57111.html

[tek]

“I politely told the teacher this and explained that it wasn’t even a party but a get together for her closest friends,” she explained. “Now I’m getting loads of angry emails from parents of kids who weren’t invited asking me why not and pressuring me to invite their kids.”

We're doomed.
Sticking one's nose in other people's business is hitting exponential growth.

[Lani]

“I politely told the teacher this and explained that it wasn’t even a party but a get together for her closest friends,” she explained. “Now I’m getting loads of angry emails from parents of kids who weren’t invited asking me why not and pressuring me to invite their kids.”

We're doomed.
Sticking one's nose in other people's business is hitting exponential growth.

What a shitty thing to do.

A gazillion years ago, when someone in my classes had a birthday, the moms would come to the classroom with cookies or cupcakes. Everyone would sing Happy Birthday. Except when I was living inside the beltway, so I had classmates who had parents working for embassies for in Pakistan, Israel, Mexico, Britain, Venezuela, and some others. Their parents taught us about their culture and their birthday. It was great.

[Foggy]

I would make a list of what supplies I needed, and which companies I was going to hire to provide security and cleaning services, and the cost of renting a tent and other associated equipment, the cost of the caterer, and I would add up all the projected expenses for producing a terrific experience for all 30 members of her daughter's class ...

And then I would send it to the teacher, with a note thanking her for volunteering to pay for a very inclusive party for her daughter, and promising to get started with the preparations, as soon as the teacher's check clears.

Then I'd be horrified to learn that the teacher wasn't planning to pay for the party SHE demanded, tsk, tsk.

[Foggy]

Ol' Wifehorn has arose, and she insists that this is the way things have been done for about 20 years. It's not that expensive to buy a couple birthday cakes so each kid gets a slice. Not every kid even comes. But in the schools our kids attended, if you had a birthday party, you had to invite the whole class.

Learn sumpin' every day around here ...

[pipistrelle]

Ol' Wifehorn has arose, and she insists that this is the way things have been done for about 20 years. It's not that expensive to buy a couple birthday cakes so each kid gets a slice. Not every kid even comes. But in the schools our kids attended, if you had a birthday party, you had to invite the whole class.

Learn sumpin' every day around here ...

I suspect you're talking about in school birthday parties. This woman wants to have a gathering at her house for just a few of the kid's closest pals. Teacher doesn't have any say in that.

Me, I'd have hated having 30 kids over.

[Foggy]

No, she thinks this is normal for a birthday party at a home.

But maybe that's a factor of the schools. Until high school, our kids went to a Montessori school that was a wildly diverse population, and it wouldn't shock me if it was school policy. They did a lot of stuff I didn't really agree with. My blood pressure still goes up when I remember them teaching my kids about Kwanzaa.

Whatevs.

[Kriselda Gray]

Removed pointless pity party

[pipistrelle]

No, she thinks this is normal for a birthday party at a home.

But maybe that's a factor of the schools. Until high school, our kids went to a Montessori school that was a wildly diverse population, and it wouldn't shock me if it was school policy. They did a lot of stuff I didn't really agree with. My blood pressure still goes up when I remember them teaching my kids about Kwanzaa.

Whatevs.

School policy is to force you to have people at your house you don't want at your house?

[Foggy]

The only birthday party I remember from my wayward youth is not mine - I don't remember a single birthday party on my birthday, though I know I had them. All I remember is a time when one of the kids in my class invited me to the ice skating rink for his birthday, and I don't remember if he had the whole class there, but probably not. Anyway, they told me I was "most improved" after we skated, but since I started at zero that wasn't a big improvement.

[Foggy]

School policy is to force you to have people at your house you don't want at your house?

If you ask ol' Wifehorn (and I did), she thinks this is a community standard, not school policy, and why does the lady want to create a clique of 5 privileged children, the ones who really count, within the class? You don't do that sort of thing anymore.

Hay, I'm out of this one. Why am I defending a thing with which I disagree (I have no idea if it's a school policy or not)? I'd invite the four people my kid likes, and if teacher doesn't like it she can flunk me. I finished third grade a few years ago. I might move my kid to a different school anyway. But stay connected to the four good kids.

Ol' Wifehorn is not here to argue with y'all. I am not going to convey your arguments and hers back and forth.

I am OUT.

Edit: and also have Musical Asskicking in an hour, so AFK

[qbawl]

The only birthday party I remember from my wayward youth is not mine - I don't remember a single birthday party on my birthday, though I know I had them. All I remember is a time when one of the kids in my class invited me to the ice skating rink for his birthday, and I don't remember if he had the whole class there, but probably not. Anyway, they told me I was "most improved" after we skated, but since I started at zero that wasn't a big improvement.

Foggy, I have a similar story.
Some of you (Tuesday virtual meetup clan) know I played and coached Ice Hockey for many years (semi adequate player depending on who you ask, very good skater, fair to middling coach). This then is the origin story:

Like you it was not my party. It was ~1957 I was in the 6th grade and the party was for this cute little girl I had a huge crush on. It too was an ice skating party held at my cities only (back then) major indoor sports and entertainment venue (11,000 + for hockey). But for some reason (chicken pox / measles?) I didn't go. After that party our class got weekly discount tickets and most of the class took advantage of that. Not me though. Here I should note that my school had kids from all over the metro area including the next state. I on the other hand lived less than ½ mile from the building. Finally a couple of my buddies drug me to one of the weekly skates. Things did not go well. Unlike foggy. I was not a natural in fact even holding on to the boards I would make it about 10 feet and crash to the ice. But my buddies who by this time could skate helped me a lot. NOT! With about 2 mins left in the session one grabbed each arm and propelled me to center ice then left me there when the Public Address system blared "Every one Please clear the ice. Please clear the ice". I crawled back to the side much to the amusement of everyone, especially my Buds and the cute little girl from my class. But that summer I started hanging around at the rink with my cousin and my next-door neighbor. Then thankfully I fell in with the 'Wrong Crowd' became a rink-rat, then I started playing hockey after the night sessions, next I got a job in the skate shop as an instructor and ice patrol and eventually a job on the building staff for setup and teardown in the main arena. The place kept me in gas, grub, and girlz all through HS and yeah I made my buddies regret ever 'teaching' me to skate.

[Chilidog]

ok i’ve no vested interest i the ravens/ Bengals game

it’s late, i’m tired

but it’s actually a good game …..

[RTH10260]

How Montana Took a Hard Right Turn Toward Christian Nationalism
What happened to a state known for its political independence?

By Abe Streep
Jan. 11, 2023

“If you want to live here,” a chapter president of the Montana Federation of Republican Women said, “be a Christian.”

The fifth season of the hit show “Yellowstone” premiered on the Sunday after the midterm elections, with Kevin Costner’s character, the rancher John Dutton, assuming Montana’s governorship. “This was never my plan,” he says, wearing a cowboy hat outside the State Capitol building in Helena. Dutton has reluctantly entered politics in part to stop an influx of rich outsiders he believes are transforming his home. In the last three years, Montana has become the second-fastest-growing state in the nation, largely because of the arrival of wealthy transplants. Unlike Dutton, many influential figures in the state’s real Republican Party have welcomed them, sometimes calling them “political refugees” fleeing blue states. Montana’s actual governor, the Republican Greg Gianforte, is himself a multimillionaire who was raised in Pennsylvania. Since assuming office in 2021, Gianforte has presided over this period of demographic change and economic growth, which has coincided with a hard shift to the right in state politics.

Montana has a tradition of ticket-splitting and has long been one of the most politically independent states in the union, resisting the kind of single-party rule that has flourished in the neighboring states of Idaho and Wyoming. But in recent years, Republicans have managed to secure an ironclad grasp over state government, and the religious right is ascendant. “We’re a country founded on Christian ideals,” Austin Knudsen, the attorney general, told me. “That’s what’s made us the country that we are.” In 2021, the Montana Legislature passed a bill banning transgender athletes on sports teams at public schools and universities, an increased tax credit benefiting private Christian schools and numerous anti-abortion laws. “They’re trying to convert the state,” said Whitney Williams, who ran for governor as a Democrat in 2020. When the state G.O.P. gathered in Billings last July to formalize its platform, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, told those assembled that Montana was “a symbol for the nation.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/maga ... alism.html

gift link https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/maga ... =share-url

[pipistrelle]

Yeah, Montana was supposedly lightly purple at one point, but I'm not sure I believed that.

[RTH10260]

The election year 2020 came and went, except ...

Driven by Election Deniers, This County Recounted 2020 Votes Last Week
Lycoming County, Pa., officials were persuaded to conduct a 2020 recount, a three-day undertaking that showed almost no change, but left skeptics just as skeptical.

By Trip Gabriel
Jan. 15, 2023

WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — On the 797th day after the defeat of former President Donald J. Trump, a rural Pennsylvania county on Monday began a recount of ballots from Election Day 2020.

Under pressure from conspiracy theorists and election deniers, 28 employees of Lycoming County counted — by hand — nearly 60,000 ballots. It took three days and an estimated 560 work hours, as the vote-counters ticked through paper ballots at long rows of tables in the county elections department in Williamsport, a place used to a different sort of nail-biter as the home of the Little League World Series.

The results of Lycoming County’s hand recount — like earlier recounts of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — revealed no evidence of fraud. The numbers reported more than two years ago were nearly identical to the numbers reported on Thursday.




https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/15/us/p ... ounty.html

[RTH10260]

California city council decides it won't declare heritage months because they 'exclude people'

Michelle De Pacina
Thu, January 12, 2023 at 8:44 PM GMT+1

Temecula City Council in California has decided not to declare federally recognized heritage months, including Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Month.

In the city council's meeting on Tuesday, Councilmembers Jessica Alexander, James Stewart and Brenden Kalfus voted against declaring citywide proclamations that celebrate cultural diversity, arguing that the “inclusionary” decrees actually “exclude people,” reported The Press-Enterprise.

The declarations of commemorative months, including Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Hispanic Heritage Month and Native American Heritage Month, will now be determined by Temecula’s diversity commission.

“When we bring one group up above the entire city, we basically exclude everyone else,” Stewart said, according to The Press-Enterprise. “I have a problem with that. I don’t have a problem with any of those proclamations that are inclusionary. I do have a problem at this level of government using this platform to promote another group over another.”




https://www.yahoo.com/news/california-c ... 40076.html

(originalNextShark)

[RTH10260]

The hidden story of when two Black college students were tarred and feathered

Karen Sieber, Humanities Officer, Minnesota Humanities Center, University of Maine
Sun, January 15, 2023 at 4:05 PM GMT+1

One cold April night in 1919, at around 2 a.m., a mob of 60 rowdy white students at the University of Maine surrounded the dorm room of Samuel and Roger Courtney in Hannibal Hamlin Hall. The mob planned to attack the two Black brothers from Boston in retaliation for what a newspaper article described at the time as their “domineering manner and ill temper.” The brothers were just two among what yearbooks show could not have been more than a dozen Black University of Maine students at the time.

While no first-person accounts or university records of the incident are known to remain, newspaper clippings and photographs from a former student’s scrapbook help fill in the details.

Although outnumbered, the Courtney brothers escaped. They knocked three freshmen attackers out cold in the process. Soon a mob of hundreds of students and community members formed to finish what the freshmen had started. The mob captured the brothers and led them about four miles back to campus with horse halters around their necks.

Before a growing crowd at the livestock-viewing pavilion, members of the mob held down Samuel and Roger as their heads were shaved and their bodies stripped naked in the near-freezing weather. They were forced to slop each other with hot molasses. The mob then covered them with feathers from their dorm room pillows. The victims and bystanders cried out for the mob to stop but to no avail. Local police, alerted hours earlier, arrived only after the incident ended. No arrests were made.

Incidents of tarring and feathering as a form of public torture can be found throughout American history, from colonial times onward. In nearby Ellsworth, Maine, a Know Nothing mob, seen by some as a forerunner to the KKK, tarred and feathered Jesuit priest Father John Bapst in 1851. Especially leading into World War I, this method of vigilantism continued to be used by the KKK and other groups against Black Americans, immigrants and labor organizers, especially in the South and West. As with the Courtney brothers incident, substitutions like molasses or milkweed were made based on what was readily available. Although rarely fatal, victims of tarring and feathering attacks were not only humiliated by being held down, shaved, stripped naked and covered in a boiled sticky substance and feathers, but their skin often became burned and blistered or peeled off when solvents were used to remove the remnants.




https://www.yahoo.com/news/hidden-story ... 38891.html

<<<<<<<8original: The Conversation)

[qbawl]

ok i’ve no vested interest i the ravens/ Bengals game

it’s late, i’m tired

but it’s actually a good game …..

WHO DEY!

[Kriselda Gray]

I'm having a real weird problem with Android 13 and I thought I'd see if any of the smart techie-type people here had any ideas.

First, to be clear, this problem happens on BOTH my Android Tablet and Android Phone. It also happens regardless of whether I'm using the on-screen keyboard or a physical bluetooth keyboard. And it happens regardless of what program, app or whatever I'm using. It is a GLOBAL problem for me.

Ok. whenever I try to write, the space I have to write in - whether it's a text box, like here on Fogbow, or the full page like in a Notebook-type app - will consistantly scroll to the bottom of the space. The cursor remains where I was typing - it doesn't move - just the view of the space changed. For example, I'm typing this message into a text box right now. As long as I'm typing at the bottom of the space, I'm ok. If, however, I spot a typo up several lines and move my cursor up there, I'll have about 2 seconds to start typing after placing the cursor before the text in the box will scroll up and I'm looking at the last line again. If I'm trying to edit something that has scrolled off the top of the screen, after the text has scrolled back down, I won't be able to see where I'm trying to type. I can manually scroll back to where I need to be, and as long as I keep typing it'll stay in place, but if I pause in my typing for more than a couple seconds, down to the bottom it goes again.

Now, y'all know I'm not great at writing things short. I'm a long-winded, wordy writer. I was working on a blog post earlier this evening that was especially long, and trying to edit it with this problem was horrible. Problem is, I suspect it'll be easier to fix the problem with the text boxes than it would be to fix my writing style..

Oh, another nasty quirk - If I'm using certain types of editors (it's hard to describe what makes this batch different, but usually they have more fancy features to supposedly make it easier to style your text) EACH TIME it scrolls down to the bottom it adds a carriage return space, so that I end up with a huge amount of blank space at the end of my typing, and trying to delete those usually just causes more scrolls, creating more blank lines.

Also, on some editors, the text will all appear selected for a split-second and then go back to normal. This always happens on the editors that add the blank spaces and occasionally on the ones that don't.

So, if any of that made sense and/or you have any idea what to do about it, please let me know!!

[MN-Skeptic]

I did a quick look to see if I could see if anyone else had your problem. It's hard to know exactly what to query on. I did find someone with a similar problem caused by a program called Grammarly which I guess is installed when you set up a Sony keyboard to work with your Android device. See what stromther has to say on this page - https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Delete- ... d-p/589554.