JamesSavik

Redneck hurricane warning

With that bucks rack, I'm surprised that kid survived.

I haven't contributed to this thread but I probably should have all along. I guess I'm down because I have physical pain sometimes. Another part of it is frustration and feeling trapped. I hate where I live but I can't leave. My past is like a long bad road full of shit I'd like to forget. I quit drinking and smoking pot about 9 years ago. That helped for a while but when I get to feeling like I do now, I don't have anywhere to go with it. The feelings are all RIGHT THERE in my face with no escape. Not to mention that living in Mississippi is a never ending circus with candy and carnival rides. There's always the chance I might run into the wrong bunch of rednecks and get to see how many I can stab before I get murdered. I'm angry, frustrated, tired, hurting, afraid and before the day is over I am sure some asshole is going to tell me that Jesus loves me.

image retracted for copyright BS

Before we say there is no micro-organism causing this, remember how long it took to isolate and identify the HIV virus. It could be a variation on the HIV virus or something completely different. There is not enough information- at this point it could literally be anything. "AIDS-like disease" simply means a suppression of the immune system that allows for opportunistic infections that the immune system usually quashes. There could be a whole range of conditions that could cause this from genetics, infections that cause temporary suppression of the immune system to various sorts of failures at a systemic level that are rare and we don't know a whole lot about.

Plot twists are like any other tool in our box: when used carefully, they can make a story. Just like any other tool in our box: you can be entirely too cute with them for your own good. Use the but don't abuse them. A precious few will take you a long way. Dozens will leave your reader lost and confused.

Coming Soon in Operation Hammerhead ____________________________________________ Scorpius Sector Evergreen, Agricultural Colony Evergreen University Campus Student Union Jeff Mason looked across the chess board at his opponent. It was rare that anyone could give him a good game. This kid wasn’t it. Mason's genetically engineered intellect could see twenty moves ahead. His bishops and knights slashed into his opponent’s flanks, his rooks smashed straight ahead, and his queen powered her way deep into enemy territory. Checkmate. The freshman sighed and said, “I like to play against strong players. It makes me better but every time I play against you, I seem to get worse.” Jeff said, “That’s because you do.” The kid said, “What am I doing wrong?” Jeff said, “Most people fall into patterns of play. It’s perfectly natural to use the strategy and tactics that you’ve had success with. The problem is that pattern fails you when you play the pattern and not your opponent.” “How do I learn to do that?” Jeff replied, “You’ve got to play a lot and with many different players.” The freshman nodded and took his leave. Jeff remembered the only person that could consistently beat him and wondered what had happened to his old nemesis. So much had happened in just a few years. He picked up his tablet computer and headed back to his apartment. As he was walking across the quad, his computer chimed that he had an incoming message. He looked to see an unfamiliar email address with the subject line “heads up”. He stopped and read the message: Jeff- You will have two visitors late tonight. They are OK. Listen to what they have to say. The New People live! -Marion He stood looking at the message like he had seen a ghost. As far as he knew, when the Ministry of Justice thugs had arrested him and his friends, Marion was the only one that had gotten away free and clear. The New People was Jeff’s creation. A group of illegally genetically engineered kids, for a few short months they had made headlines all over the Alliance as they fought for their rights. They had used non-violent pranks and tricks to make a horrible nuisance of themselves to local system authorities on Mars that oppressed genetically engineered persons. The authorities hadn’t seen the humor in their pranks. Their group had been labeled terrorists and hunted down ruthlessly by the Ministry of Justice. Of the original six, only Marion had gotten away. They had all been split up and sent to the far corners of the Alliance forbidden ever contact each other as a condition of their parole. The authorities had sentenced him to probation, given him a fine he might be able to pay off before retirement and sent him away to a cow college on Evergreen to study Environmental Engineering. He would be sent further into the frontier to terraform new worlds. They wanted to safely stash him away from the core worlds to keep him and his cause out of sight and out of mind. Many illegals suffered no discrimination at all while others were hunted and murdered by religious fanatics. His native Mars had been a hell hole. On a horrible night almost a decade before, Jeff and his friends parents had been murdered protecting their children from an angry mob. They had never forgotten it. He continued walking to his apartment with his head spinning from the abrupt reminder of the life that he thought that he had left light years behind. * * * * Jeff was almost dozing when the knock came at his apartment door at a little before one in the morning. He knew that he was under surveillance by the Ministry of Justice. Why had Marion been so reckless to try to contact him this way? He opened the door to his apartment and found a set of identical twins waiting. They appeared to be about twenty and were tall, muscular and exceptionally fit. Their faces were tan and they had long straight jet black hair. Both were dressed and carrying backpacks like students but their bearing was completely different. Their eyes said something else that gave him pause. One was carrying a pizza box and the other had a six pack. The one with a six pack said, "I'm Sean and this is my brother Seth. Marion told you to expect us." Jeff said, "Come in and pull up a chair. How is she?" The two brothers entered the apartment and closed the door. Seth produced some kind of electronic device from his backpack and swept the room. He looked at his brother and shook his head. He then took out another gadget and turned it on. A red LED indicator light started pulsing on the device and he placed it on the coffee table. He said, "The jammer is active. We can talk." Sean said, "You've been out of touch for a long time. You got shipped off of Mars as soon as you got arrested. Marion sent us to fill you in." There had to be some way to authenticate these people. They made Jeff nervous. They looked like Ministry or maybe the military. He asked, "What is Marion's cats name?" Sean answered, "Pouncer." He opened the pizza box and handed Jeff a beer. Seth opened up a data crystal reader and a holographic image of Marion appeared: Jeff, you've been out of touch for a long time. The Alliance hid you away very well and we've only just been able to find you. You started something with the New People that shook the Alliance to its core. When I got away from Mars, I thought it was all over but nothing could be further from the truth. Illegals exist in vast numbers all over the Alliance. They live in fear and hiding. My two messengers were originally genetically engineered to be soldiers for a corporation in the Succession Wars of a little more than a decade ago. Things really have changed. We are no longer a group of kids playing pranks. There are thousands of us now with cells all over the core worlds and many of the colonies. We need you back. No one has the moral authority to lead us like you do. Sean and Seth can get you on a starship that we have waiting and off planet. Now is our time. We need you to lead us to freedom. As the message ended, Jeff realized that he had been holding his breath. His heart was racing. He stuttered, "Me? Why me?" Sean said, "It's your writings. They've been put together in a pamphlet. It has been banned by the Alliance but that only makes more people want to read it. When they do, they feel the same outrage that we do for being branded like cattle and tracked like criminals just because of the way we were born." As Seth put the data crystal reader back in its case, Jeff asked, "When do we leave?" Sean said, "After we eat. We are going to be busy and might not get another chance for a while."

The true test of speculative fiction is can you see it? The answer is yes... and it's chilling.

Amelia Earhart mystery: New evidence, right spot, searchers say http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-amelia-earhart-discovery-20120820 By Amy Hubbard August 20, 2012, 11:21 a.m. In July, a team searching for the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's plane was wrapping up an expedition and feeling downhearted. They had come away with apparently little to show for their $2.2 million worth of efforts. But now those searchers says high-definition video from that trip shows promising evidence. "We have man-made objects in a debris field," Ric Gillespie told the Los Angeles Times in an interview Monday morning. And those objects are "in a location where we had previously reasoned where airplane wreckage should be." Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were lost on their July 2, 1937, flight from New Guinea to Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean. Earhart was trying to become the first woman to fly around the planet. "We don't want to oversell this," Gillespie cautioned. "We have lots of clues. ... It looks like it might be the right stuff, but we need a lot more work done, and ultimately we're going to have to go back and recover it." Gillespie is the executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. TIGHAR has an exclusive agreement with the island nation of Kiribati to search for and recover any artifacts from the plane wreck -- which Gillespie and his wife and search partner, Pat Thrasher, are sure occurred there. The debris field that was captured in the underwater high-definition footage jibes with the location shown in a blurry 1937 photo that is said to show a plane's landing gear, Gillespie said. The team made its most recent journey to the remote location in July. Technical difficulties marred the trip, Gillespie said. Twice they had to rescue their searcher -- a torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle. "You program it, put it over the side, it collects its sonar data and comes back," Gillespie said. "But it didn't always come back. On two occasions, it got stuck underwater. Then we had to go and rescue it" with another piece of equipment. Due to technical problems, their planned 10-day trip was trimmed back, with only five spent searching the waters. Although the team collected high-definition video, he said, what they saw as they were searching was in standard definition. "We were not seeing anything of interest and were pretty bummed," Gillespie said. Among those on board was a donor, Tim Mellon. The railroad magnate had donated $1 million to the voyage and accompanied the crew. Also providing backing, according to Gillespie: Lockheed Martin and the Discovery Channel -- which bought the rights to make a documentary about the expedition (it aired Sunday). Then there was FedEx, which moved 30,000 pounds of various cargo over 17,000 miles -- for free. The US State Department had even encouraged the privately funded voyage. Pressure? Yes, and Gillespie was feeling it. And then came the technical problems and shortened search. When the July expedition ended, TIGHAR said in a statement that it had seen no objects recognized as aircraft debris, "but we have volumes of sonar data and many hours of high-definition video to review before we’ll know the results of this expedition definitively.” After returning home, that video went to a forensic imaging specialist, Gillespie said, who pored through 5 1/2 hours of footage and highlighted two spots, saying, "We have man-made stuff here." Using the time code from the footage, Gillespie pinpointed the location of the man-made objects, which coincided with sites where the team had expected to find the debris of a plane -- "off the edge of the reef seen in the 1937 photo." Gillespie's hope is to raise more money and return to recover what was found. He'd like to make use of two submersibles, each with three-person crews. "You start putting people down there," he said, "and it's a whole different ballgame." Another expedition would mean raising as much as $1 million. So the next search will be for funding. Eventually, Gillespie's dream is to recover "whatever remains of the aircraft," providing evidence that earlier objects found on the island belonged to Earhart and Noonan. Those objects, he said, show "their attempts to boil water ... to make a spear, the evidence of a castaway trying to survive." All those relics he'd eventually like to see in a traveling museum exhibit, with some of its profits going to Kirabati. The island nation is desperately poor, he said, and literally losing ground as climate change causes sea levels to rise. After that, he'd like to see those artifacts at the Smithsonian-- "exhibited right there next to Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Vega. This is the final chapter in her life and it needs to be discovered and documented and shared." ____________________________________ Nikumaroro is located at 4.68°S 174.517°W which is north of Fiji. This is Thousands of miles west of islands held by the Japanese during the thirties. The old theory was that she discovered illegal Japanese military activity and was murdered.

Magee, Mississippi

Ellisville Grenada, Mississippi

If British teachers are anything like American teachers, the only learning that gets accomplished is in spite of the damned school- not because of it. The teachers I had were almost without exception were scum-buckets that I wouldn't have hired to bag groceries. But- this is Mississippi. Any government jobs are considered welfare for the useless inbred relatives of politicians.

I'm going to miss her.

Three Rivers, Mississippi

Taylorsville, Mississippi

Arcola, Mississippi

Wait... what?

Avon, Mississippi.

Ackerman, Mississippi (where would you ever hear of these tiny little country towns if I didn't tell you?)

Scooba, Mississippi

Union Church, Mississippi