For starters, no one in that picture is missing meals. Every one of them is overweight. Next, let’s talk about the facts involved here. The woman, Keaidy Bennett, is a so-called “freelance writer” which to me means “unemployed writer who occasionally sells a story.”
So I looked her up. She has an Amazon page. It turns out that she is a liar or a grifter. Here is the bio from that page:
Keaidy Bennett is a poet, publisher, ghostwriter, and advocate whose work sits at the intersection of storytelling and strategy. For more than thirteen years, she has run LexxiKhan Presents Publishing, a hybrid publishing house that has produced over 150 bestselling titles and partnered with clients ranging from first-time authors to Fortune 500 executives and professional athletes.
Her debut, Charge It to the Game, follows protagonist Tamia Santiago through an Afro-Latina coming-of-age story that traditional publishers passed on, so Keaidy published it herself. That decision became the foundation of everything she has built since, including her managed imprints, Moxey’s Way Publishing and 2 Crowns Publishing, along with her media ventures.
A former debate student, Keaidy brings the same discipline and clarity to her advocacy work as she does to her writing, with a long history of involvement in domestic violence advocacy and memoir work centered on transformation and reclaiming narrative. She writes under her own name because every story she tells, and every author she serves, deserves to be met with that same honesty.
She lives and works in Central Florida, where she continues to write, publish, and build platforms for authors who refuse to let a “no” be the end of their story.
There is more to the story. She was married and living in Fort Worth until she filed for divorce from her husband in 2020. She talks about how she wishes her and her husband had kept their home and lived in it together after the divorce.
I pay $1,598 for my townhome, and with extras like internet and the in-unit washer and dryer, it comes to almost $2,000 a month. It’s more than our previous mortgage of $1,738.
The number of stories written by and about this woman tells you her real career- she is a story teller for the media. She makes up sob stories. In this story, it wasn’t a marriage that just fell apart, but one in which she fled the marriage because he was abusing her.
In fact, her company (a publishing company) claims over $250,000 a year in sales.
But she needs your tax dollars to feed her and her fat kids.
Back in February, I had my semi-annual checkup. The doctor ordered some bloodwork. The lab that did it charged my insurance $2400 for the lab work, then the doctor hit them up for $499. The insurance company paid the lab $990, and the Dr $200, leaving me with $1410 for routine labs, and another $299 for the doctor. I paid the doctor, and I told the lab they could sue me, but I’m not paying that much for routine lab work.
I have a new doctor now. I am not paying $6000 a year for routine visits. This new one sent me to a different lab. What do you know, they lab work was completely covered by my insurance.
This is why I believe prices should be disclosed. Look, I get why you can’t say ahead of time what a visit will cost- there is no way to know ahead of time what will be needed. It’s like calling an auto mechanic, telling them your car is making an odd noise, and wanting to know what it will cost.
However, if I call that same mechanic and ask what it costs for a brake job or an oil change, they should know. Likewise, if I call a lab and say, “What’s the cost for a CBC, CMP, A1C and TSH panel?” You should be able to tell me. If you can’t, it’s because you are planning on scamming me depending on how deep you think my insurance company and my pockets are.
I have a story about the guy in the below Twitter story.
The head of America’s most infamous hate group, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), has told Al Jazeera that support is up ahead of the US midterm elections because of the current political climate.
Just after I got out of the Navy, my (soon to be ex-) wife and I moved to Arkansas. More specifically to the small town of Harrison, AR. I made some money there by repairing pumps and motors. Not enough money to continue living there, but enough. One of the ways I would make some cash was I would sell you a rebuilt pump for $80, as long as you gave me your old broken one. I would rebuild that motor and put it on the shelf for the next person. The rebuilt motor I sold you was warranteed for 12 months: if it broke, I would trade it for another, free of charge. It was a decent deal. Most pumps broke because the bearings, seal, capacitor, or start switch were bad. Occasionally, the electric motor would be bad and I would rewind it.
Anyhow, I was in the shop one day and this guy came in to trade in a pump. We talked for a bit while he explained how he moved to the area to escape the high crime of the big cities. After he left, he came back in and handed me a newspaper that said: The White Patriot: Voice of the Klu Klux Klan in America, Thomas Robb, National Director.
To the other guy in the shop, I said, “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“Look at the check he just gave you,” was his reply.
The check said Thomas Robb.
The story, as interesting as it is, would have ended there, except Robb called me a few days later and asked if I could come out and install the pump. I agreed, and went out there. The place was guarded by at least two rifle toting guys who cleared me through the gate and watched me the entire time I was working.
He looks like I remember, although quite a bit older. I’m sure I look older as well, but that’s the story of how I met the head of the Klan.
The NYPD thinks citizens with cameras are a concern, as they worry citizens with smart glasses could film their operations. One thing police need is the ability to perform their duties in secret. (/sarc)
This from the organization that maintains over 25,000 surveillance cameras with automated facial and license plate readding capabilities.
Although we have already had our first cool front to bring Autumn into Florida, summer isn’t ready to give up just yet. The humidity today is brutal. When you go outside and take a breath, the air seems to have a thick consistency:
Look at that dew point! Of course it’s cloudy, and the sweat runs off you with nowhere to go. Cooler weather is supposed to arrive this week, and I for one will be happy to see it return.
I’ve been asked why I don’t just use Cat6 cable in my network upgrade. Here is why:
Thirty years ago, I still had dialup Internet. My first internet was a 9.6 kbps connection around 1992 or so. I remember thinking how fast my 56 kbps connection was when I got that just a few years later. I’m sure you all remember it taking hours to download a single picture. Then Time Warner started offering their “Road Runner” high speed broadband service in 1999, boasting speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps. Now here we are, 26 years later, and I have available Internet speeds of up to 1.2 gbps, nearly 22 THOUSAND times faster than it was just 30 years ago. Now word comes that we are about to get fiber Internet within the next year, and they are offering speeds of up 8 Gbps.
When I was a kid, my Dad, who you may remember was an engineer for Hewlett Packard, told me that no one needed a hard drive larger than 10mb. Why, he told me, 10mb could hold the text of every book within the Library of Congress. The computer (the HP computer he brought home was an early DOS machine built into a suitcase) had all the storage anyone could need, he predicted.
He was wrong. A corollary to Moore’s law, Internet speeds have historically doubled about every 2 years or so. With that in mind, I set out to build a home network that would anticipate these advances. Sure, I have 1GB speed now, but in a year it will likely be 2 GB. Within a decade, I would be looking at 32 or even more Gbps.
The network traffic between devices in a home can be even higher than that. In 2015, 1 Gbps was the usual home switch speed. Today, 1 Gbps remains the mainstream baseline, with 2.5 Gbps becoming a common upgrade. Sure, my computer may only be capable of 1 gbps, but what happens when there are multiple computers, streaming televisions, and IoT devices? All that traffic adds up, and you can soon overload a network.
The maximum speed we will ever get out of Cat 6 is 10gb. A couple of years, and a home wired with CAT6 will be obsolete. I’m not getting any younger, and I wanted to have a system that wouldn’t require a ton of work when I eventually get too old to climb up in the attic.
So with that in mind, I designed my home network. There were some initial observations:
Internet enters my home via coaxial RG-6 cable.
It travels through the walls and attic to the utility room, where the modem is located
The modem has a maximum of 1 gbps
from that utility room, there are 5 CAT6 cables that travel to various parts of the house
My old system was a WiFi mesh and wasn’t capable of speeds I wanted
I noticed that I was paying for gigabit Internet, but speed testing showed I was only getting 300mbps or so, sometimes less. I plugged my computer directly into the modem, and was getting over 800 mbps. My network was the bottleneck. I was also having Internet connection issues. At first, I was just trying to clean up my WiFi, then I decided to redesign the entire network. I envisioned using CAT6 Ethernet cables to haul up to 2.5 gbps from clients to switches, and 10gbps connections from one switch to another, and to the server I was using. That would allow all of those 2.5 gbps connections to come together and not bottleneck at the switches.
So after over 7 months of work, this project is coming to a completion. The holdup has been the cost of buying the equipment. The server and its hard drives were the most expensive segment at a cost of about $3200, and the rest of the project cost about $4700, but that includes the Home assistant stuff and the cameras. All told, this project came in at just under $8,000 for everything.
I decided to use LC fiber optic cable, because those cables are capable of up to 40 gbps, even if the switches I have aren’t capable of that. Yet.
So my network looks like this:
There are a couple of single gigabit switches, but they supply a television or some Internet speakers, and those don’t need any more bandwidth than that. One of the switches is a 10gbps SFP switch, and the others are 2.5 gbps with 10gbps uplink connections. The only remaining choke point is my ISP, the 1 gigbit modem, and the gigabit router. Once fiber comes in, I can replace the router and connect to the fiber ONT, and I will have a fully capable 2.5gbps network that can easily be reconfigured to 10gbps. The wires will already be there if I want to transition even higher at some point.
When my kids were little, they wanted to eat chocolate cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for climbing onto the roof of the house and jumping off. My parents stopped me because they knew something that, as a child, I didn’t. I stopped my kids for the same reason. I could foresee the likely results of their actions, and used my own wisdom and experience to stop and discipline them. Had I simply said, “Don’t do that,” and walked away, I guarantee you my children would have eaten the cake anyhow. I would have jumped from the roof again as soon as my parents weren’t watching. Punishment is required to drive that point home.
It’s the same thing as a society. As adults, we have a responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves- children, for example. For that reason, we have laws preventing children from engaging in sexual intercourse with adults. The excuse pedophiles frequently give: “the child was a willing participant” is immaterial. There are consequences to the actions the child is engaging in, and they don’t yet have the maturity to fully understand those consequences, and therefore are incapable of making a fully informed decision of risk versus benefit.
Robert Heinlein stated this principle rather eloquently in his novel Starship Troopers:
duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail
How many times have we seen a story about a female (usually a teacher) who had sexual intercourse with a 15 or 16 year old boy, a child? If the teacher happens to be physically attractive, there is always some moron who will come around and say “There was no victim here. Had this woman wanted to sex me up, I would gladly have done so. Therefore, no harm, no foul. There was no victim here.”
However, let that exact situation occur and let the adult teacher be a fat, unattractive woman or a male PE teacher, and those cries disappear, replaced by calls to prosecute. Why? Those people are substituting their own desires to have sex with that teacher for adult responsibility and common sense.
Again, I will regale you with a story from my past. I was once part of a case where a woman was selling her children to adults for the purposes of sexual relations. So, are there victims here? Were the kids harmed? They split the money with their mother, so they probably wanted to, right? Of course not. That woman deserved to lose those kids, and the cops rightfully arrested that woman and her kids. Sometimes, parents don’t make wise decisions in raising their kids.
Our societal responsibility towards children is the reason why we don’t have children working in coal mines any longer. The child doesn’t know any better, so we as a society have put rules in place to protect them until they are old enough to assume that duty we all have as adults. If an adult wants to do any of the above: jump from the roof, have cake for dinner, work in a coal mine, or have sex with attractive teachers, they can do so, because they have the ability to understand the consequences of their choices and will have to live with the consequences.
So let’s apply that principle to the idea of children riding motorcycles. My post from the other day had me being told I sound like a “boomer.” First, I don’t see why so-called boomers and their ideas are automatically bad, except for the immature notion that because they are old, they are somehow out of touch. That is a poor argument and just makes you sound like a spoiled child who is never allowed to do anything because mom and dad just don’t understand that things are different nowadays, and your outdated ideas are stupid. That’s why you don’t believe in the Constitution because it was written by out of touch old men who owned slaves, and …
I was told how wrong I was because there was no victim to a child riding a motorcycle on a road. After all, he was just going down the street to fish. The story of “I ride my lawnmower 4 miles down the road all the time.” Does that mower go 50 miles per hour? Are you 11 years old, or are you an adult who is capable of deciding for yourself?
Then there are those who claim the kid was on the easement or the ditch next to the road. Here is a screengrab from the officer’s bodycam. Where is the ditch or easement?
All sorts of excuses. Let’s just stop enforcing any rules for children. After all, they can and should be permitted to have sex with adults if they want, have chocolate cake of they want, transition sexes if they want, well, you know, DO whatever they want. After all, children aren’t immature, they are just little adults.
Or you could just think to yourself what it would feel like to hold a dead child, or tell a parent that their child was killed when he got in an accident when he hit a car while riding that electric motorcycle at 50 mph.
Then we pass laws that say a child can’t ride vehicles that are designed for roadway use. In order to be considered off road only, it has to meet certain criteria. Some of those are the vehicle can’t be capable of speeds over 28 mph, and in the case of mopeds or electric bikes, they have to have pedals and a few other criteria:
Riders under 16 must have adult supervision
an approved safety-course certificate
wear an approved helmet, eye protection, and over-the-ankle boots.
In order for Cade’s vehicle to be considered legal for him to operate, Florida requires fully operable pedals, a motor of less than 750 watts, and compliance with one of the three e-bike classifications. The reported bike failed both the pedal and power requirements, so it did not receive the e-bike exemption from licensing and registration laws. §§316.003(23), 316.20655(2).
He was riding what the law considers to be a motorcycle on a public roadway. You might as well let him drive a Camaro. However, when that kid makes a driving error and smears himself all over the hood of someone’s F150, I imagine no one here will be saying, “Welp, shit happens. FAFO.”
The police, had they just “given him a warning” would have been wasting their breath. The kid would have rolled his eyes, waited until the cop was out of sight, and gone right back out on that motorcycle. Perhaps this was the case this time. Maybe a cop DID already warn him. Maybe not.
I will die on this hill: There are certain things that we cannot allow children to do. Driving on a motorcycle at 11 years old is one of them. I would even go a step further and say the parents should be arrested as well, for letting him buy and drive a motorcycle on a public roadway.
People on Social Media are up in arms because an 11 year old kid has been arrested and charged for riding an electric motorcycle (he called it an ‘electric bike’) to the pond down the street to go fishing.
🚨#BREAKING: The 11-YEAR-OLD BOY who was stopped by police, FINGERPRINTED, and ordered to court for riding his dirt bike to go FISHING 300 FEET FROM HIS OWN HOUSE…
After the hearing, Cade’s father, Chris Kirchner, commented on the court appearance.
“How ridiculous that he had to miss school for that,” Chris Kirchner said.
I have a different take from my own personal experience: Jacob was just 12 years old when he was struck by a car while riding his bike on a dark country road 30 years ago. When I found him unconscious and covered in his own blood on the side of the road, I ran my hands down his back to check for injuries and the fingers of my right hand sunk into his lower back. His entire back was ripped open by that hit and run driver. He died right there on the side of the road, not 40 feet from the bike he had been riding.
As a paramedic who has seen this play out time and time again, I think this child has no business riding a motorcycle on the road, whether it is 300 feet or 300 miles. The roads are a dangerous place, and an 11 year old child doesn’t belong there. Not only should he be charged for riding it, the parents should be charged for letting him buy and ride a motorcycle.
everyone should be allowed to drive around with no tags dl or insurance. unless there’s a valid reason to stop them. I don’t view cars and motorcycles any differently than I view bicycles or horses, neither of which need those things (in most places).
Completely ignoring the fact that this is an 11 year old child.
The left is rediscovering the Tenth Amendment. Judge David Leibowitz in Miami tossed a case against a Jamaican national accused of voting in our elections for years with a fake birth certificate. He ruled that the 1996 law making noncitizen voting a federal crime is unconstitutional because only the states get to set voter qualifications.
These are Federal elections for President and Congress, and a Federal judge just said the Federal government can’t punish a foreigner for voting in them. Reports say about 45 more of these cases are pending around the country, and we’re 33 days from the midterms.
What does this mean? It means when the left says there is no evidence illegal immigrants are voting in our elections, they are lying.
There is no way we can vote our way out of this. First, even if we could, it wouldn’t be allowed. Second, the two parties are virtually indistinguishable in practice. One party openly claims to be socialist, while the other says they are different, but votes like the socialist party.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again- just because Democrats are your enemy doesn’t mean the Republicans are your friends.
