Re: Low Quality People: The Proof

On 1/11/25 2:30 PM, Farley Flud wrote:

On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 13:44:22 -0600, Physfitfreak wrote:
 

>
American households are like military barracks for kids. And in France,
they are about 5 times more so.
>

 You are not joking.
 I often drive through the American suburbs, with their neatly groomed
streets and houses, and I will ask myself: "Where do these kids play?"
 I grew up in a working class area next to an industrial zone and the
railroad yards.  There were many empty fields and in the late afternoon,
after closing time, a kid could go wild with play opportunity.
 And we did.
 At one point we even attempted to dig a tunnel under the train
tracks but our adventure was discovered by the railroad employees
and we had to abandon it.
 We had so much much wild play it would take years to even describe
it all.
 But that's all in the past.  Now I am an adult and a scientist/
engineer.  I don't need stupid games nor fiction because I've done
it all already.
 I pity the readers of fiction.
 I pity the players of games.
 They are just frustrated children.
 

That's nothing compared with what we did around the age of 5 in Tehran. One was, making bombs :) I mean stuff strong enough to blow a 30 kg stone placed on top of it fly upward three stories high. So when I say bomb, I'm really not exaggerating.
The hardest ingredient to find in making them was the "kolorate potasiyom" (Potassium Chlorate). Everything else was easy to find. For sulfur, we used our little hand made slingshots to knock off the white porcelain insulators off of the top of utility poles. Inside them, you'd always find a large amount of sulfur. For powdered charcoal we just smashed charcoal to a fine powder. In those days, many people have not yet migrated to electric heaters. People used charcoal in their "Korsi"s for the winter period and for cooking in other periods of the year. It was always available, and was among the usual items that every house purchased from stores and bazars.
But for the damn potassium chlorate we had to walk to two neighborhoods away to a pharmacy that was owned and operated by Jews. Only that pharmacy sold us potassium chlorate, knowing full well why we were buying them. Other ones much closer to us, would not sell it to kids, considering them too dangerous.
That mixture created gun powder, and it was one of the ways for us to create bombs with. We had four or five different ways of making bombs, using even a certain brand of movie reels of film which were sold to kids for looking at the negative pictures against a source of light, but we also used them to make bombs with, cause they were extremely flammable.
And every now and then, some site would begin construction, and we'd get the material we needed for CO2 based bombs in there placed right on the grounds, easily taken during night. Often in same sites one could find empty sturdy strong bottles that held thinners and acetone, etc. These bottles were part of the bomb design :) And when they exploded, boy, the scene of everything around it was something to see and enjoy. Hehe :)
On rare occasions, some stupid kid would even throw one of them over the wall into the yard of a Baha'i neighbor at the instigation of some suckers much older than us... it was not good and we kids would not condone it at all because that would mean the end of our fun that day. We had to run. Within 15 minutes the alley would get filled with police.
I have said nothing of a myriad of other strange things we did. Climbing trees through the branches of which naked live power lines passed. Running on top of high walls along their whole stretch, sometimes a kid coming down to ground accompanied with half of the wall! And we had "kids' Jihad!".. the assyrian neighborhood (they were christian) was a short walking distance away. Oh, we were rough. Strange that any of us got passed that period unharmed.