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I can imagine a time where people with autistic kids felt hopeless and helpless, and when they saw her, they could only ask...”How? How did you do it?”

Argh...damn autocorrect (auto-co-wrecked)

She wasn’t “totally fixated on the stairs themselves” she was “totally fixated on the CATTLE themselves”

I believe we have dominion over animals, and I have no illusions about where my meat comes from. There are a lot of people that probably believe meat is birthed in a Styrofoam tray and covered with cellophane. The same people who believe electricity comes from those things in walls with the funny holes in them.

I can also believe they are sentient creatures, but at the same time, feel that they serve a purpose to man and have no compunctions about using them for that purpose.

There is a remarkable woman named Temple Grandin that they made a movie about… She is an autistic woman (Not someone on the "Spectrum" as commonly said about people, she had Aspergers that was far closer to being fully autistic, though not incapacitated by it) who became famous not necessarily because she overcame her autism and was able to function in society, but because she pioneered changes in the slaughter house industry that made the process more humane to the animals, better for the quality of the meat, and more efficient for the slaughter houses.

It's a remarkable movie about a remarkable story, I have recommended it to many people, and without fail, they all say it is one of the best movies they never heard anything about.

Honestly, if my wife hadn't brought it home from the library one time, I would've never seen it. It's one of those movies that if you walked by it in one of the old movie rental stores, you wouldn't even give it a second glance.

In any case, it's relevant here because she had a great quote about slaughtering animals:

"Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be."

Because she was autistic, she had the ability to observe a slaughterhouse in action, and while everybody else was fixated on what the various hands were doing with cattle prods and ropes, she was totally fixated on the stairs themselves.

All the other people involved we're fixated on the process, and she was watching the way the cattle moved, the sounds that they were making, and realized that the process was inefficient and in the end inhumane because it ramped up the stress levels in the cattle because their natural behaviors and patterns were never even a consideration in the design of a slaughterhouse. That increased stress had a detrimental effect on the quality of the meat, and the cattle's natural resistance to being forced through a maze necessitated the employment of ropes, cattle prods, and lots of men to wield them.

And when those men prodded them, roped and pulled them, they were treating them as inanimate objects. It was dangerous work for the hands who were working there, and highly and efficient.

For example, in her observations of cattle, she figured out that they like to walk in certain patterns as a herd. She also found that they were greatly disturbed by contrasts in light (for example, sunlight that would be shining in through a slatted wooden chute or fence rendering bars of light and darkness) and she also observed that when the cattle were herded into a pit filled with liquid meant to remove parasites, due to the common design of the day, they were hesitant to go in and off and had to be dragged in with ropes and prodded in with cattle prods.

Occasionally, one of the cattle would end up drowning in the pool, and had to be dragged out by men.

What she did, as a total noob in the industry, was design a slaughterhouse that took all of these behaviors (and more) and incorporated them into a design with the shoots and sluices so that there was no light coming in from the sides which were curved to the natural patterns that cattle preferred to walk in, and she put special ramps into the dip so that the cattle walking into it could have a foothold as they walked in. I believe this is an image of the design she created as a proof-of-concept:

She was a total outsider to the industry (and autistic to boot) in addition to being a woman in a men's industry, so it isn't hard to imagine that her ideas were immediately embraced.

She did however find somebody who is interested in her observations and had her design a slaughterhouse to those specifications that could be built, and they built a test facility. On the day she was supposed to do her demonstration of the functionality of this new design, the foreman and the hands who we're going to run the demonstration completely developed a workflow to go around all of her innovations, and tore up much of it.

She had it reworked, and when she ran for demonstration, the onlookers from the industry and the magazines that service industry were astonished.

The cattle, with little to no human intervention, calmly walked into the maze that curved this way and that depending on what needed to be done, the cattle walked right down into the liquid dip with no problems without the ropes in the prods, and went all the way to the end where they were humanely slaughtered.

It is an extraordinary true story. Here she is with the actress that played her in the movie:

To this day she is an inspiration to families with autistic children, and speaks to those groups often to give them encouragement and show them that their children can function in society.

One would think this movie would've been focused on the feminist aspect, a woman going up against all the men… And there was a tiny bit of that because it was true. She was a complete outsider.

But it wasn't focused on feminism. (If it had been, I would have sniffed it out in the first few minutes, and likely would not have finished watching the movie.)

It was focused on the challenges of autism and how one woman so impressively overcame those challenges.

It is certainly true that our digestive tract is designed for an omnivore diet. It’s not nice to fool mother nature…

I completely enjoyed that… At the opening of the video, that engine looked rock solid. There did not appear to be even the slightest vibration!

I have always felt that 1973-1974 cars were the beginning of the end of good American cars for many decades. There were still some good cars being produced, as that Bonneville shows, but egad, they went downhill fast after that.

Damn… That must’ve been hard. That’s a sweet car…

I fully believe the same can be said of nuclear power implementations today.

Hahahahaha!

When I was 17, I was in a CYO band, and our band leader handed my buddy in the drum line the keys to his Cutlass 442 to go pick up some fried clams for him and the staff.

As we were walking away, I heard the admonition “I don’t want to hear any tires squealing or laying of rubber…”

All five of us Drumline reprobates piled into the car, and we weren’t even out of the parking lot before rubber was being laid! And as you said, that thing could chirp the tires in just about every year!

That one memorable voyage in that car was also significant, because I was in the backseat with no shirt on, and one of the kids in the front seat smoking a cigarette threw it out the window and it came back and landed behind my bare back… When I leaned back you can imagine the screech I let out!

Navy Patriot, you are exactly right. Our country was built on the back of our exploitation of our natural resources. Mining is essential to our national security and prosperity, and our modern aversion to mining is akin to national suicide.

Sigh. I miss driving older cars. I would buy an extra one and fix it up, but have no place to store it.

My dad had a 1973 Delta 88, and THAT was not a "Land Yacht", it was a "Land Dreadnaught"!!!!

I loved driving that huge car! When you drove on the highway, the car would gently float up and down.

Heh-thank you very much! I need to do some research on that, because I wondered where that picture came from!

Yes. And in a Blue State, your fate is pretty much sealed.

There was a guy (Scott Hayes) up here who was standing on a corner in Newton, MA with an Israeli flag and some Leftist jackass ran across the road and tackled him. Straight up. Captured on video by people.

Yet Scott Hayes was arrested and charged. The charges were eventually dropped, and I donated to his defense fund, but it is criminal that he was charged.

Interestingly, my wife and I had been walking through Cambridge, MA (one of the four national points of MoonBattery, Cambridge, Ithaca, Madison, and Berkeley) some months before, and came across an entire section of muslims fence in by the police for protection, and this guy had been standing there with an Israeli flag. He was a veteran, so I shook his hand in thanks, and when I saw this news item some months later, remembered that was the same guy I talked to.

Yep. Damn the Left.

Hahahahah...love it!

I so envy your Freep Name!

LOL. But I am curious as to what was being said.

I think what got me is the Dreadlock Guy saying it was wholly unprovoked. Well.

One can take the stance that no matter what Dreadlock Guy said to the other guy who attacked him, he shoudn’t have, for his own good.

But it wasn’t unprovoked. And Dreadlock Guy just lied outright. And the cops took his word. That is the risk of being the initiator or physical contact. The pussy with the big mouth always seems to skate free in those things, but...Mr. Attacker should have had better self control.

Not saying I would, but...he should have. It isn’t right, but...that’s the way it is.

I went to a rally back in 2012 in Boston to listen to Sarah Palin, and I was being provoked by a guy who got in front of me, his face six inches from my own, as he tried to pick a fight with me.

I saw ten or fifteen of his “friends” all recording the “interaction”, and I resolved that until the guy actually made physical contact with me, I was going to ignore him.

Eventually, the people around me (who I didn’t know) began to say to the guy “Just leave him alone. He said he wasn’t interested in talking to you.”

Thankfully. I was legally carrying at the time, and I didn’t want my “fifteen minutes of fame” to involve rolling around on the ground and discharging my firearm in self defense in front of a dozen cameras.

Of course, being on a plane is different. It is harder to just walk away.

I had to take a flight on Frontier this past February, and by the time I was done, had promised myself I was never going to fly again unless circumstances forced me to.

If I have to drive 24 hours, I’ll do it instead of flying. That was the effect Frontier Airlines had on me.

Agreed. And if true, I wonder what the guy with the dreadlocks was saying.

Did I interpret that correctly? The two girls sounded like the guy with the dreadlocks was being verbally abusive, non-stop, and the guy who did the attacking went to the head, and when he came back, decided he had enough and attacked the guy with the dreadlocks?

Not excusing the guy who attacked. He should have either asked to change his seat, or asked to get the airline staff involved to stop the verbal abuse. Or he should have just taken it or ignored it. (not that I would. be able to)

But for myself, no matter how justified I might feel, I don’t want that to be my “fifteen minutes of fame”.

Just to be sure, what did you think of the video if you watched it? Did I interpret that correctly?