Fantasy: Robama Rebuilds America

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Romney organizes his donors and creates Massive Charity to Rebuild New York 

and while they're at it, New Orleans 

creating millions of jobs. 

Obama and Romney head this project together as co-presidents. 

Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes go on unemployment.

(FANTASY: First posted on Facebook)

Kay Ebeling

Bailout of Romney corp sends jobs to China: Ring of Fire 10.27.2012

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After getting millions in the auto industry bailout and using that money to send jobs overseas, Delphi, a global electronics corp owned partly by Mitt Romney, is now running ads in Michigan blaming Barack Obama for the lost jobs.

RFJ Jr. 4 days ago from FB

Below is rough transcript of Robert Kennedy Junior interviewing Greg Palast author of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits on Ring of Fire Radio yesterday about jobs sent to China using auto bailout money and Romney is part owner of the company

Millions made on auto bailout by Romney and donors

Romney company used auto bailout to send jobs to China- Ring of Fire 10.27.2012

ROBERT KENNEDY:  The story is so sleazy, the transactions between Bain Capital and Delphi Auto Parts, a firm that Romney owned a piece of.  They used the money from the auto bailout and transferred thousands of workers off shore, the workers left in the U.S. were stripped of unions and pensions. 

[Transcript below, but first, I've got to say this:]

The shakiness is why I love to listen to Robert Kennedy Junior’s voice.  The damage in his throat from Spasmodic laryngeal dysphonia  evokes in me a sense of shared trauma. 

Everyone in my generation remembers the year 1968 when first Martin Luther King then Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated within weeks of each other, the dread that permeated the nation, and face it, the global corporate takeover that's happening in the USA today probably started with the assassinations of the 1960s.

Bobby Kennedy Junior’s damaged voice may not be a direct result of the trauma he experienced as a child when first his uncle the President then his father about to become president were assassinated.  But as he shakes over words and then is about to spill them out, describing the injustice happening daily in the USA today, I feel myself just as shaky as his voice as I sit in my apartment in a slum.  Not just RFK Junior’s words but the tone of his damaged vocal cords speaks to me deeply.

So I tune in to Ring of Fire radio almost every Saturday and if it's an interesting interview, I’ll also take notes and produce a City of Angels Winging It Transcript.  

A few weeks back we ran this story at Chill Hippie Blog about a Kennedy interview on Ring of Fire Radio concerning Wind Energy. 

Today, it's his interview with Palast, about 

“this extraordinary disclosure, which Greg learned through top rank investigative reporting in The Nation Magazine”

[ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:] 

KENNEDY:  [It makes you cringe] when you see Romney in debates saying he’d have saved Detroit, when [if you pay attention] you can see exactly what he did.

PALAST:  Sad punch line, I just got a phone call from Michael Moore.  Mitt Romney’s syndicate, the auto parts division of General Motors and a vulture fund led by s silent partner of Mitt Romney, used [SOUNDS LIKE] Slim Plants to buy up entire auto parts company at low price.  Then told U.S. Treasury and G-M, said we will shut you down unless you give us money.

12.9 billion dollars from the U.S. government, once they got that money their shares went from 22 and shot up. 

They got the government to take over pensions

KENNEDY:  They stiffed their workers for seven billion dollars in pensions and we the taxpayers had to pay for it. 

PALAST:  All the 25,200 jobs left and they created 25,800 new jobs in China.  Closed 25 plants Delphi, Michigan and Ohio.  Today every part is made in China.  Because they got rid of the United Auto Workers contract, now also don't have to pay for health insurance.  All of it for profit for Paul the Vulture Singer and the Romneys. 

A hundred million in profit for the Romneys and they've emailed us saying our numbers are not inaccurate.

KENNEDY:  Robbing the American people of billions of dollars during the auto bailout, sending jobs overseas, now in ads blaming Barack Obama for that loss in pensions. 

K: I'm Robert F. Kennedy Junior and we will be right back. 

((((((((((

K:  We're speaking with Greg Palast author of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, of which I wrote one chapter.

Today we are talking about the last chapter of the book which has this extraordinary disclosure, which Greg learned through top rank investigation reporting and the story is in The Nation Magazine this week.

Romney acting as silent partner to Paul Singer vulture capitalist, got billions of dollars from Obama’s TARP [by purchasing a] small company critical to getting parts for General Motors.  The company then threatened the entire operation of GM, unless they got these dollars, [in other publications they are] called The Barbary Pirates.

Then took all the jobs, stripped them of pensions, sent three quarters of the jobs to China, stripped the remaining of unions.

Now ads by Romney’s associate super PACs [are running] showing workers from those companies blaming Obama for stripping them of their pensions, when it was Romney and Singer who stripped their jobs.

PALAST:  It's Romney and Singer vulture capitalist who said “we don't have pension obligation anymore.”  Delphi was in bankruptcy court so they could.  Federal government now pays the pensions for Delphi workers, taxpayers pay it.  Republicans put limit on how much workers can get if pensions fail. 

Except in the case of General Motors who has no obligations to pay pensions still said ‘we will pay because of our contract with the unions.’  UAW had an agreement.

By the way, that's a good reason to join a union. 

KENNEDY:  And then they used some of those profits to buy a bunch of foreign parts companies from Bain Capital.

PALAST:  Yeah [LAUGHS] to move 25 thousand jobs to China, you need parts plants, so Delphi bought them from Bain.

Bain left America a long time ago. 

Romney in last debate said I would do nothing to harm. 

Obama brought it up obliquely about moving jobs to China

Romney said, I'm a son of Detroit.  His daddy is looking down on him with disdain.

All over the country there are billionaires making more billions and donating millions to the Romney campaign. 

Delphi has moved their headquarters from Detroit, from Michigan, to the Isle of Jersey off England coastline, so they don't have to pay taxes.

KENNEDY:  So there’s two more insults to the injuries.  One is the advertisements for Romney in Michigan where workers have been hoodwinked, do not understand the nature of the transactions, it's Romney who screwed them.  They're on TV saying Obama stole my pension.

In addition, Delphi has moved their headquarters from Detroit, from Michigan, to the Isle of Jersey off England coastline, so they don't have to pay taxes.  This is the level of Mitt Romney’s patriotism.

Delphi has moved their headquarters from Detroit, from Michigan, to the Isle of Jersey off England coastline, so they don't have to pay taxes. 

He’s moved the money to the Isle of Jersey, a notorious tax haven, where no profits get taxed. 

INTERESTING TWIST:

PALAST:  [Because he has not released his taxes] We don’t know how much Romney has made, but we've guessed a hundred fifteen million. 

PALAST:  If Romney is elected, he’ll be able to take profits from his auto profits company in China, and bring them back to USA tax free.  I have to tell you, I've done some weird investigations, Bobby, this is truly one of the weirdest. 

And Romney didn't deny it. 

He blamed it [conditions that allowed Romney to profit] on Obama, said if it were not for Obama and the bailouts, he wouldn't have made the money. 

That's what Romney told us responding to our inquiries. 

KENNEDY:  One of the top investigative journalists in the country today, Greg Palast, thank you for lifting up the rock over the Mitt Romney money pile. 

Reference:

Billionaires & Ballot Bandits - Greg Palast 

www.gregpalast.com/ballotbandits/

Palast's new elections guide book which includes a 48 page comic by Ted Rall exposing the attempt to Steal 2012 by a combination of billionaires' hidden cash ...

Greg Palast: Mitt Romney Made Millions From the Auto ... - The Nation 

www.thenation.com/.../greg-palast-mitt-romney-made-millions-auto-...

Oct 18, 2012 – The Romneys invested millions in a hedge fund that bought GM's autoparts division, and it paid off big time.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2012

Wind Power: Bobby Kennedy Jr Segment on Ring of Fire RadioToday

Bobby Kennedy Junior’s damaged voice represents the condition of most Americans.  We share a sense of astonishment, what happened to us that a president whose politics would once have been called moderate republican is labeled a socialist.  What happened to our determination to fight a war on poverty?  Even Kennedy’s career seems to have been damaged by circumstances beyond his control, yet he shines.  His intelligence pours out of each sentence, always complex thought, always a grasp of issues that almost no national politician demonstrates. 

The audacity of presidential candidate Mitt Romney to profit from the auto bailout while making speeches maligning the rescue of the auto industry.

3rd World USA, tent cities an institution now

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after 30 years of a top down economy that only works in theory.  First, a Southern California "experiment" for dealing with homeless uploaded 2008:
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This video is from Feb 2011: .
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From December 2011 . USA tent 'cities' on rise as US economy crumbles (23Dec11), they have become institutions. 
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Tent "cities" are springing up and enlarging across the USA 

Video below is five months ago in Seattle:

 


This economic collapse did not start with Obama's presidency

posted by Kay Ebeling
enjoying a day off in the rain, with a roof over my head thank God
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Repub Misinformation Machine Evident on Internet

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From a recent Facebook thread: 

I think some of those anonymous billions going from PACs to Republican machines are being spent to hire people who post on Facebook. Then these PR flacks join groups and post one right-wing lie after another. They can as they're full time paid professionals. Tricky Dick's dirty tricks have come a long way since Nixon's time.

Like ·  · Share · Promote · 9 minutes ago near Chicago 

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  Kay Ebeling The amount the PACs raised this election, it's more than what they need for TV ads.

  2 minutes ago · Like
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  Kay Ebeling These paid hacks are showing up in comments too, in national media stories. No way the actual population is as heavy extreme right wing as most comments in stories at NY Times, etc.

  2 minutes ago · Like
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  Kay Ebeling Hmm, maybe this should be a Chill Hippie blog post

  2 minutes ago · Like
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  Kay Ebeling A lot of work for a lady on her day off...

  about a minute ago · Like
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Wooden Ships: How Much Things Change

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A Little Nostalgia
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So much has changed
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I Want to be a Barfly but...

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Visions of F. Scott Fitzgerald and wife Zelda frolic in my brain as I say, “Yes” with enthusiasm.  My new friends at the senior housing project where I live now ask me to join them at a neighborhood bar.  Don Draper makes it look so elegant on Mad Men, and I remember myself as rather worldly as I sat in Sunset Strip bistros sipping drinks, plural, in the 1980s. 

So, me Mitch and Serenity go drinking in a bar.  I've marveled since meeting Mitch at how well he can hold his liquor.  From the time he gets up in the AM until he passes out at night, he drinks, Mitch admits to it with zeal.  All day long he pours cheap whiskey into cans of ginger ale, or if he’s in bars, drinks beer (surreptitiously amplifying the effect with long island ice teas downed at the side where no one is looking). 

In fact there’s a couple people in this HUD subsidized building I moved into last June whose capacity for consumption of alcohol is astounding to me, especially since my aging cells can’t handle more than three ounces and I pay for it for days.

My new drinking friends are around my age and still able to drink a lot, in fact when I was introduced to Mitch when I first moved in, they told me he was “Drunk Mitch” because there’s another Mitch in the building who drinks but not as often as Mitch. He doesn't mind being called Drunk Mitch as, “that's who I am,” he announces, and for that I give him credit.  Where most drunks get mean after long periods on the bottle, Drunk Mitch just keeps smiling and is very soft spoken, helpful even.  Forgets what he just said to you, but always ready to be helpful.  When his girlfriend goes home after weekends, he shows up at my door late at night, but I just don't let him in.  He’s usually too drunk to remember it next day so I forget it too.

With Mitch most the time sits a woman eight years older than Mitch, and the two are bonded like old husband and wife though they insist there’s nothing physical going on between them.  They've both lived in the building less than a year yet their bonding is deep and visceral.

They say about each other:

He’s my memory.

She’s my conscience.

Or it can be the other way around. 

He’s my conscience.

She’s my memory.

Mitch and Serenity in her seventies go every Tuesday to the suburban restaurant bar a couple miles from here to drink and smoke cigarettes for hours on end.

Then Mitch always drives home afterwards. 

Mitch has never gotten a DUI. 

The ladies in Thursday night bingo here in the senior building gossip about Mitch and Serenity but no one really knows for sure how far their relationship goes.  I wonder too.

But Mitch and Serenity are definitely drinking buddies.  Often on a Saturday night and any given weeknight, they sit in the garden, Mitch pours whisky into ginger ale Serenity mixes generic kahlua into vodka with milk, the two tilt cups and talk for hours on end.  

There is much laughter and tinkling glasses in their lives.

I wish I could join them.  I want to be a barfly but my body won’t let me.  Two sips into a third drink and I can’t even swallow any more.  My body just rejects the stuff.

Well it is poison, as in in-toxic-ated.

Still I feel like I'm missing out on a big party.

Last Saturday evening soon after I returned home there was a knock on my door and I peered out. 

There stood Mitch.

Well actually there wavered Mitch.  Like he was in an earthquake proof building during -a six-point-oh Mitch wavered back and forth on his bony legs in front of my door. 

In his hand was as always his can of ginger ale laced with whatever whiskey was on sale at the discount liquor store, and as always you could smell whiskey within a few feet of him. 

As always Mitch had a grin on his face, his girlfriend had gone home, now his eyes were blue and twinkling outside my door, a façade that likely opens doors of women all over the senior building where we live.

But not mine.  He wavered there at my door with a grin on his face saying, “hey you wanna” and not finishing his sentence.  He wavered there, sort of stumbling, until he got the message I didn't wanna and his grin widened into a little embarrassed wiggle as he stumbled down the hall.

Thank god my body rejects it. 

Booze really ain't that glamorous. 

*************

Their lives have more tinkling glasses than mine

Mitch and Serenity handle it so well and make drinking look so good that I tried to join them for a while when I first moved in.  I started putting vodka in my lemonade and hanging around the garden with them on Saturday nights.  I went to the bar with them a couple weekday afternoons.  I got brave and let Mitch drive me home after he’d downed at least eight ounces in two hours one day last week. 

I gripped the seat.

Mitch cruised his Malibu through the suburbs leaning back, a cigarette flat between his teeth, one arm sunning in the car window.  At a stoplight he grinned at me said, “Now you've had a taste of Mitch’s world,” then maneuvered in traffic, switching between lanes and kids walking home from school with aplomb. 

Mitch looked like a Doonesbury drawing. 

He makes the whole drunk lifestyle look good. 

Visions of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski may dance through my brain but after a few weeks of following Mitch and Serenity through the garden of the senior housing project and around the neighborhood bars I could not button my jeans, so I took all my booze over to Mitch’s apartment and stocked up his cabinet. 

I ain't going to try anymore to be a barfly. 

Besides I bet Fitzgerald would have written a lot more a lot better if he'd gotten sober.  

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Body Parts Falling Off. Auto Immune Part 3

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For some reason even though I have a disease where my immune system works overtime, part of it is you're prone to chronic infections and rashes.  I've researched online and concluded that modern American treatment, with more and more stronger antibiotics and steroids, is not the direction I want to go in living with this as long as I can.  So instead I let the infections play out, let my immune system carry out the battle, make my own immune system fight right there in front of anyone who encounters me. 

At any given time, there could be something oozing from any number of places around my body.   

Makes me a lot of fun on an outing.  

Last night I went to a group therapy sort of place and something in the room got my left eye reacting.  Soon the skin was red and raw, the eye was running and swollen, the salt from the runny eye irritated the raw skin around the eye.  Even water made it burn. 

Just as the meeting started my eye started running and running.  Soon I could feel, as I've felt before, a little formation like a pimple formed under the bottom eyelid and as I sat in the room, I would occasionally touch the pimple-like growth.  Of course it started draining.  So I kept touching my eye with a wet tissue while the puss drained out, and just continued taking part in the group session with everybody, as if nothing was unusual at all. 

I feel like I'm falling apart.  Like parts of me are rotting and falling off, like a skeleton losing its cover, but I'm still alive.  So what if my elements are starting to fall off while I stand in front of people talking.

Truth is, this condition does make it hard for me to get outside my home too much. . .

Who knew, growing old would come with these amazing new challenges to your physical being, like ones you never imagined at all. 

This post started earlier today:

Part 1:

Me and My Auto Immune Syndrome

Part 2

I feel like a Tim Burton character, Auto Immune Syndrome part 2

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I feel like a Tim Burton character, Auto Immune Syndrome part 2

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A lot of my parts are makeshift right now.  My teeth, my hair, my infections that are causing huge whitehead like bumps in various places. (Continuation of Me and My Immune Syndrome posted this AM. Part 3 Body Parts Falling Off posted this PM) 

The top front four teeth I got capped in 1983.  In my mouth today are those same four caps, discolored and chipped as they are.  Back in 2004, when Lizzie and I lived at The Lighthouse shelter on Sunset Boulevard, the first of the front caps came loose.  I sneezed one day and it flew across the kitchen, making a roomful of homeless women laugh.  Since then I've been poly-gripping that cap back in.  A few years ago the second of the four front tooth caps came loose in the same way.  So now I have two caps that I have to stop everything several times a day and apply denture adhesive to so I can place them back on the stubs. 

You can be sitting with me sharing an order of French fries in a restaurant and all of a sudden I will pull out my front tooth apply some glue, and stick it back into my mouth onto what's left of the stub…

Actually there are almost no stubs left at all from those four front teeth.  They've rotted away, that's why the caps are loose to begin with.  So I have to glue the caps to the gum, which is why I have to re-glue the caps into my mouth so often, the glue on the gum only lasts maybe two hours, hence I have poly-grip stuff everywhere around the house, extra tubes in every purse.  It's a calamity if I'm out and about and the caps start falling out.  When that happens, with every word I say, I whistle.  

So all day long whatever I'm doing I have to stop, take my loose cap off one of my front teeth, apply denture fixative, and replace it in my mouth. 

In addition:

I've been cutting my hair myself for about five years as I get totally panicked at the idea of letting anyone get as close to me as a hairdresser gets.  Oh, I forgot to mention, as a pedophile priest victim, I'm already full of obsessions and compulsions that make little sense. 

In my reality TV job, I once had to watch hours of video showing closeups of a makeover hairstylist cutting women’s hair and I  learned how to snip and layer, sort of.

So I imitate what the reality TV hairstylist did, with my hands just feeling their way around the back of my head.  I really have no idea how uneven and out of balance the cut is in back of my head, I don't have a mirror that lets me see the back of my head while I'm trimming it.  So I just throw my fingers into the strands of hair back there and clip where it feels right. 

In addition:

I'm supposed to be using lots of mouthwash for the rotting teeth and gums, but I keep forgetting, so there are a lot of rotting teeth in my mouth.  I'm trying to save up to have all my teeth pulled and then get dentures.  I think once I get on Medicare next August they'll pay for the tooth pulling, then I just have to pay for the dentures, so it's probably best to wait. 

I get health insurance next August, this is October.  So the teeth and gums will just keep on rotting until then. 

Happy Times in Third World America

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Me and My Auto Immune Syndrome

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My own immune system is eating me alive and I'm somehow proud of it.  Now even though I can give the veneer of embracing life, subconsciously I'm apparently killing myself.  I don't know how to stop it, I can just feel the cellular destruction taking place.  And even if I had health insurance there’s a good chance I wouldn't beat this disease.  The only medication they have for things like lupus are steroids and antibiotics, both of which create side effects after a while that can be worse than the original symptom.  My goal is to just keep alive in spite of my immune system attacking me, over the months I’m watching things happen like my eyebrows falling off, swelling of infection all over me in unexpected places, running sores that appear for no apparent reason. 

Pain, lately it's leg pain.  I'm thinking auto immune disease is subconscious suicide, I'm watching the only part of me I wasn’t able to keep from going crazy go crazy. 

I've had this condition a long time, maybe all my life. 

I used to be so proud of my overactive immune system. 

A measles epidemic swept through our Pasadena California school district, when I was around nine years old.   I ended up being the only kid in class or one of a very few kids who didn't have the measles.  Everyone got a few days off for measles except me.  I even went to a friend’s house, snuck into her room, and drank from the water glass next to her bed where she was lying going through her case of measles.  Then went home and didn't feel any sickness at all.  Everybody got to have days off from school for measles except me.  I had to keep going to school, while they all stayed home eating pudding and watching the newly emerging daytime TV shows. 

Later in life the amped immune system got me through tough times.  Often a flu epidemic would fly through America in the eighties, nineties, I never got affected.  Watched other people puke and exude from other places, it never got to me.  Once I had the flu, in 2001 or so, one time.  It lasted a few days, nothing remarkable.  Other than that I've just ridden through all the flu epidemics without getting sick since flu epidemics started back in the 1960s?  Since I started paying attention, anyway. 

So now at age 64 plus I find myself with an immune system that still works overtime.  These chronic infections I have, I can feel the old girl battling it out inside.  That's where that pride comes in, the way I see my own body still at my age continuing to work so hard to fight the infections that are resulting from the insane part of the body, the lupus or whatever, the autoimmune mystery complex, a condition god knows how long I've had. 

So.  I have no health insurance and can’t take time off work to make my way through the maze of jammed clinics for those without health insurance where I live.  I know pretty much what I have from reading the internet and that research also shows there isn't really a good treatment for it, except rest and treating yourself really good, and trying to slow down the progress. 

I wouldn't be surprised though if some day they find out that auto immune diseases are subconscious suicide.  Suicide for the naturalist who can’t disrupt the Tao, the flow of life, by taking my own life, no matter how miserable I am. . . .

I just keep plodding on.
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Story continues here:

I feel like a Tim Burton character, Auto Immune Syndrome part 2

And Here:

Body Parts Falling Off. Auto Immune Part 3

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Republicans like Catholic Priests in Hypocrisy

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Republicans are like Catholic priests who claim to be celibate while screwing whenever they can.  Today's Republicans take all the government money they can while claiming to be self reliant.  

Read Paul Ryan Stimulus Fund Requests on Huffington Post today. 

"For Ryan -- who has taken a hard line against both the stimulus and government spending in general -- the requests have opened him up to charges of hypocrisy and insincerity.

"I love that," VP Joe Biden said. "This was such a bad program, and he writes the Department of Energy a letter saying, `The reason we need this stimulus, it will create growth and jobs.' His words." (From last night's debate)

The Associated Press reported on some of the letters on Friday morning. It did not post copies of the letters, which The Huffington Post has done below.

Paul Ryan Letters

Both modern Republicans and Catholic priests are looking out only for themselves, screw whoever they are screwing. 

Posted by Kay Ebeling on a Friday afternoon

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Smoking Weed at NASA continued

We would pull on the pipe, suck in the smoke, then hold our breath.  Hold it hold it, then exhale... and nothing.  I kept wanting it to work on me, as it seemed to be working on Mad Scientist.  

See:  Smoking Grass with a NASA Scientist
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