Tag Archives: relocating to Dickinson North Dakota

Where Can You Buy A House For $5K In North Dakota?

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Update 2/3/2025:

At the Monday 2/3/2025 City of New England Council Meeting, it was stated that the sale of this House is now Pending.

In the Summer of 2023, I was trying to find a garage/shop to buy in New England, North Dakota. I was willing to buy a small house if it had a garage or shop.

Someone in New England alerted me to the fact that there was an old house in New England that was a few months away from being foreclosed on by Hettinger County for non-payment of property taxes. Its address was 745 1st Avenue East.

I went and looked at this house on the outside, and through the windows, to try to get an idea of its condition. I looked this house up on the Hetttinger County Tax Assessors website to find out who the owner was, and other details: https://hettinger.northdakotaassessors.com/parcel.php?gid=68916

Prior to the actual foreclosure, I tried to contact the daughter of the Deed Holder, who had died a few years earlier. I was going to offer to buy this house for about $5,000. The daughter of the deceased owner never got back to me, and I lost interest because of the amount of work that would be required. This house was foreclosed on by Hettinger County at the end of 2023, and a short time later it became owned by the City of New England.

In my opinion, from what I could see from the outside, the most immediate problem was the condition of the roof, there was at least one hole in it that had rotted through. This roof-leak appeared to have allowed water to land on the kitchen ceiling, and cause a 3-foot diameter area of plaster to collapse.

From what a few people in New England told me about this house, it appeared that the electric power, natural gas, and water had been shut-off for maybe as long as 10 years.

In my opinion, a Buyer could make a little bit of profit, or create equity in this house, by fixing it up performing at least 40% of the work themselves. In my opinion, if a Buyer tried to rely completely on a hired Contractor, there would be no end to the costs, the costs would go on forever, far beyond what this house would ever be worth.

Here are the break-down of costs, in My Opinion, with the Buyer performing 40% of the work where possible, to get this house into liveable/rentable condition:

  • Roof Repair, mostly done by Roofer…..$7,000
  • Ceiling & Wall Repair, 50/50 Buyer/Contractor….$6,000
  • Siding Repair, 50/50 Buyer/Contractor…..$3,000
  • Window & Door Repair, 50/50 Buyer/Contractor….$3,000
  • Electrical, mostly done by Electrician……$4,000
  • Plumbing, 50/50 Buyer/Contractor……$4,000
  • Possibly New Furnace, mostly Contractor…..$4,000
  • New Appliances, 50/50 Buyer/Contractor……$3,000
  • Flooring, 50/50 Buyer/Contractor……$3,000
  • Interior Painting, 100% Buyer……$1,500
  • Yard Cleanup, 100% Buyer……$1,500

Estimated Total From Above List: $40,000

In my opinion, if this house was purchased for $5,000 and the work listed above was completed for $40,000, this house would be worth about $55,000. Or rentable for about $600/month in New England.

The City of New England did receive a written offer to purchase this house for $6,000 in approximately November of 2024, but this offer was rejected because the City Commissioners were not convinced that this Buyer would complete the repairs in a timely manner.

The Sale of this house, is conditioned on the Buyer’s agreement to begin the necessary repairs immediately, and steadily complete these repairs to bring the house to liveable condition in a reasonable amount of time. The City of New England DOES NOT WANT THIS HOUSE TO SIT IN THIS CONDITION ANY LONGER.

Interested Buyers can contact Mayor Lyle Kovar at 701-290-6665 or City Manager Jason Jung at 701-579-4422.

I Recommend Getting An Optometrist Certification Before Getting Your North Dakota Driver’s License

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In this blog post I am going to explain why I recommend getting a North Dakota Optometrist to complete a vision certification letter to submit to the North Dakota DMV in lieu of taking their vision test when obtaining or renewing a North Dakota Driver’s License, because of what I experienced recently.

When I was in elementary school I began wearing eyeglasses. Later, in high school, I began wearing contact lenses. Though my eyesight was better with contact lenses, there were some problems. My peripheral vision and consistent spacial reference (lack of distortion) was better wearing contact lenses, but contact lenses become progressively less clear with age, or when becoming dry, or getting dirty with sweat and other contaminants. Due to the aforementioned reasons, when wearing contact lenses, I almost always had worse vision in one eye or the other because of the less-than-perfect condition of a contact lens.

Ever since I was 15 years old and I first got my learner’s permit to drive in Florida, I usually had difficulty with one eye or the other when trying to pass my DMV eyesight test, mostly due to a contact lens being in poor condition. This was back before inexpensive, disposable contact lenses were available, when contact lenses were expensive and you needed to try to make each contact lens last an entire year. I went through this same eye test difficulty every four years in Florida, then in Arizona, and then in Idaho when renewing or changing my Driver’s License.

When I was about 45 years old, renewing my Idaho Driver’s License in a small town that wasn’t busy, I was a little more familiar with the women working in this Idaho DMV office because I had also been there for a motorcycle driver’s license test & endorsement, commercial driver’s license test & instruction permit, and concealed weapons permit. I was talking to these women explaining that because I wear contact lenses, they become less clear for different reasons, that I was always having trouble with the DMV eyesight test. One of these DMV women said that she had this same problem. She told me that some people just get a certification letter from their Optometrist stating that they meet the eyesight requirements.

Finally, in my early fifties, due to the severe allergies that I was having while working in North Dakota that affected my eyes, I stopped wearing contact lenses, and I began wearing eyeglasses again. I went to an Optometrist in Dickinson in April of 2023, to get a new up-to-date prescription for eyeglasses. During this exam, I became a little aware, that my right eye was not capable of being corrected to 20/20 as easily as my left eye was. When I received my new prescription eyeglasses, I found that I could see very well in my left eye, but not as well in my right eye, but I could see pretty well overall.

In May of 2023, I went to renew my Idaho Driver’s License with my new, up-to-date prescription eyeglasses. The eyesight test at the Idaho DMV involved looking into an optic viewer, in order to read off a single line of six black letters, such as “E O F L T Z”, once for the right eye, and once for the left eye. For my left eye, I was able to read off each of these letters with ease. For my right eye, I had to pause for a second, blink, pause, then I could read these letters correctly.

Unexpectedly this past summer, I had to sell my house in Idaho, and become a full-time resident of North Dakota. When it became time for me to renew my automobile insurance, using North Dakota as my primary residence, I needed to change my Idaho Driver’s License to a North Dakota Driver’s License. I had to send away for a certified copy of my Birth Certificate from Florida, before I could apply for a North Dakota Driver’s License, this was needed in addition to my Social Security Card and two items proving North Dakota residency, such as a lease agreement and a utility bill.

In December I made an appointment to change my Idaho Driver’s License to a North Dakota Driver’s License at the Dickinson Driver’s License Office, which operates through appointments only. To transfer a current Driver’s License from another state, there is no driving test or written test required, just provide the necessary documents and take a vision test.

The eyesight optic viewer device at the North Dakota DMV on the outside did not look much different than anything I had used in Florida, Arizona, or Idaho when renewing or changing my Driver’s License. However, when I looked through the viewer, I soon found out that it was much, much different and more complicated. It looked something like this:

  1.  8987PXLE       7898XMNO       4789LXYO
  2.  2988YXLE       7798XMNY        6782PXYY
  3.  4984MXLE      8899LMNO       3489EXYO
  4.  3987DXLE       6898ZMNO       4782TXYO
  5.  8487YXLE       5898OMNO       3789YXYO

The problem I had, was that I could not see what was in the Center Column.  I could clearly see what was in the Left Column, and I could clearly see what was in the Right Column, but not the Center Column.  Did I automatically, immediately fail this eyesight test?  I didn’t know, I had no idea.  I could tell that something was supposed to be in the Center Column, maybe?

(After this ND DMV process was over.  I sat down outside and I tried to look up on the internet what this was.  Supposedly, the Left Column is just Left Eye, the Center Column is Both Eyes together, and the Right Column is just Right Eye.)

I was able to read what was in the Left Eye Column, and the Right Eye Column, but not the Center Column, it was like there was some kind of interference or obstruction in the way.  I didn’t know or understand what was going on.  I was confused.  Apparently, being able to read everything with the Left Eye only, and the Right Eye only, was good enough to prove that I could see out of both eyes with sufficient clarity.

Afterward, I spent 2-3 hours trying to understand what happened.  Why couldn’t I read the Center Column? On the websites Reddit and Quora, there were some people from around the United States who wrote about having a similar experience using the DMV eyesight optic test equipment.  One person could only see the first three out of four characters in the Left Column, Center Column, and Right Column.  Another person could only see the Left Column, the Center Column, but not the Right Column.  Both of these people said that they were frustrated, embarrassed, and humiliated, because they kept arguing with the DMV that they couldn’t see the fourth character in each column, or that they couldn’t see the third column at all.

Here are some links where people discuss this same thing happening to them with the DMV eyesight test optic viewer: https://www.reddit.com/r/optometry/comments/rlj2s1/couldnt_see_all_3_columns_simultaneously_during/  https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-read-the-DMV-eye-test-machine

From the written descriptions of what happened to other people, this indicated to me, that the way some people’s heads, faces, eyes are shaped or positioned, their line-of-sight does not line up correctly with the three fields-of-view in the optic viewer.  The optic dividers in the optic viewers that were meant to isolate the left eye and the right eye were blocking or interfering with people’s line-of-sight in different ways.  Another indication of this effect, was that some of these people wrote that shifting and repositioning their head in the device viewer allowed them to partly see or glimpse what they were missing when looking straight ahead like they were supposed to.

Note, some people wrote that they believed the DMV optic viewer lens may have been dirty, oily, or scratched.  This is a possibility.

After reading and re-reading experiences and input from many different people, trying to understand what was happening,  the best conclusion was given by one commenter, “These eyesight test devices at the DMV are so screwed up, that I realized a long time ago that I was better off going to my Optometrist a week before, and getting an Eyesight Certification Letter.”

In general, all 50 states allow a person to obtain a Driver’s License if they have at least 20/40 vision in one eye, with or without eyeglasses, regardless of how bad their second eye is, as tested by an Optometrist.  The State of North Dakota has a legal specification of eyesight requirements and restrictions to obtain a North Dakota Driver’s License:  https://www.ndlegis.gov/information/acdata/pdf/37-08-01.pdf

For me, my left eye corrects to about 20/20 and my right eye corrects to about 20/40 with eyeglasses.  So I asked myself why would I ever, ever want to go through the frustration, uncertainty, and embarrassment of struggling through my eyesight test using the optic viewer at the DMV, when I can just get an Eyesight Certification Letter from an Optometrist ahead of time?  Here is the North Dakota DMV Optometrist Certification Form:  https://www.dot.nd.gov/forms/sfn02342.pdf

***Note:  If you are the parent of a teenager who needs eyeglasses or contact lenses, who is about to get their first Driver’s License, don’t add to their anxiety and nervousness, and create an additional hurdle to passing their driving test by subjecting them to the DMV eyesight test device which may give them trouble.  If you are above 50 years of age and don’t adapt to new things easily and become frustrated, or if you are a person who absolutely can not afford to go without a Driver’s License, I strongly recommend getting the North Dakota DMV Optometrist Certification Form completed BEFORE your DMV Driver’s License appointment.  Most Optometrists in southwest North Dakota don’t have appointments available sooner than one month wait time.

How Anyone Can Unexpectedly Lose Their Right To Own Firearms

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Earlier this year in North Dakota, a person that I know, unexpectedly lost their right to own firearms. Hearing what happened to him was very troubling, as this could happen to anyone, and the vast majority of people do not know about this.

In am in my fifties now. Gradually over my lifetime, I have seen personal ownership of firearms become more and more important. At the same time, I have watched many different ways that the right to own firearms has been undermined and attacked, not just legislatively or by trying to sway public opinion, but by implementation of dozens of different tricks which most people won’t know about until it happens to them. This is one of them.

This person that I know was stopped while driving a motor vehicle, which led to a citation. This was not a moving-violation, it was more of what I would call administrative, because it would be hard to categorize it as either a criminal or a civil violation. It was not failure to provide insurance, it was not driving without a license, it was not driving on a suspended license, it was not DUI. But it was a Misdemeanor, which he was informed would require him to appear in court.

Appearing in court for this Misdemeanor, he received a fine, and probation for one-year, with NO OWNERSHIP OR POSSESSION OF FIREARMS for one year.

What does a non-violent Misdemeanor related to an administrative-law regarding a motor vehicle, have to do with OWNING AND POSSESSING FIREARMS? How can a person have their 2nd Amendment Right to Keep and Bear Arms, be stripped from them for a non-violent Misdemeanor?

Most people who own firearms are aware that a person can lose their right to own or purchase firearms upon conviction of a Felony or Domestic Violence. Lesser known, but still generally known reasons to lose one’s right to own firearms are drug-addiction, mental-illness, and dishonorable discharge from U.S. Military. Red-Flag laws are also something that firearm owners are aware of. But losing your right to own or possess firearms for a non-violent Misdemeanor?

When I began doing research to learn if what happened to this person was even legal, I found out that for any Misdemeanor conviction, even non-violent Misdemeanors, whenever probation was involved, it is usually a standard condition of probation, for no Ownership or Possession of Firearms for the duration of probation.

I need to also give a warning about what else I learned. As far as the Courts and Probation Officers are concerned, delivering your firearms to a trusted friend, neighbor, or family member does not satisfy the conditions of probation, because they believe “you still have access to them”. Your firearms must be delivered to someone/someplace where they are locked away from you in a safe, closet, or room which you do not have the key or lock combination. Also, no possession of ammunition either, though it doesn’t say no possession of ammunition.

I have some anger towards people who feel that this is something they don’t have to worry about, that this doesn’t concern them, this could never happen to them. Here is an example of how this could happen to anyone, even generally law-abiding people. Have you seen videos of parents speaking-out at public School Board meetings over such things as questionable books available in libraries, transgender students using girl’s bathrooms or locker rooms, bullying and assaults on children, and getting escorted out by Police for refusing to sit-down and shut-up? These parents are removed by Police under the Misdemeanor charges of Disorderly Conduct or Disturbing the Peace. Even normal law-abiding citizens can get charged with Misdemeanors.

Should non-violent Misdemeanors for things such as Disorderly Conduct or Disturbing the Peace allow a Court to take away a person’s ability to defend themselves, their family, their home, their farm, their livestock, or engage in hunting? Or cause them to have to give up a rifle or pistol that they inherited from their father, grandfather, or great-grandfather, over a Misdemeanor?

I hope that I have given enough information for people to begin thinking on their own about what the implications of this would be in their own lives. Banging on their door at 2:00 a.m. with the realization they have no firearm to defend themselves or their family from the person or persons outside. Their dog, horse, cattle being attacked by an animal and no firearm to shoot the predator. Car jacking at a stoplight in an unfamiliar city and no way to defend themselves or their family.

I recommend that anyone facing any type of charge in court hire an attorney and very clearly inform their attorney that if at all possible, you do not want any conviction that would interfere with your right to own firearms, and if there is a conviction or plea agreement, to modify probation to not prohibit the ownership of firearms.

The Strangeness Of The HUD/FHA Home Buyers

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In my previous blog post I explained that the Marmots had done so much damage to my house in Idaho, that I decided to sell it. The several new housing developments surrounding my house had driven the Marmots onto my property. Never in the past thirteen years of owning this house had the Marmots been so destructive. I believe that this change in their behavior was caused by the stress and pressure they were under from being chased out of their previous burrows.

I soon found out from my home insurer that they were not going to pay for any of the damage to my home or well-pump-house done by the Marmots. I was told that my home insurance did not cover, “damage caused by animals”, because it was the homeowner’s responsibility to detect and prevent this type of damage from happening. This made it even more clear to me that I should sell this house.

If I had wanted to sell this house, and had planned to sell this house, the Summer of 2022 would have been the time to do it. This was the peak of the Idaho real estate boom, that was caused by so many people leaving California. But I didn’t plan to sell, or want to sell my house. This just suddenly became necessary. Apparently there was still such a demand for houses in Idaho, that when I contacted a real estate agent that was referred to me, he was eager and enthusiastic to come over to my house the following morning to get started and take the real estate listing photographs.

One of the very first things that this real estate agent did, was show me thirteen real estate listings of comparable recent home sales near my home. The lowest of these recent comparable sales, was a home on less than one acre, for $250K. The remaining recent comparable sales, were all over $300K, going up to $550K. Based on these comparables, he said that he believed that my home was worth about $325K. This is what I believed as well, based on the number of acres of land that my house was on, and its location next to several new housing developments where the lot sizes were only 1/2 acre.

To clarify a little more, within a short distance from my house, there were one-acre lots for sale in the $80K-$110K price range. My house was on multiple acres, with a water-well, electric-service, and septic-system already installed. Just the amount of land alone, with existing utility services, and direct road access to each acre, was arguably worth more than $325K because of its potential for subdividing it into smaller lots.

But the beginning of the problems with my home sale, came on the second day of working with my real estate agent, when he said that he did not want to ask buyers who submitted an offer, to pay more than $1,000 earnest-money, because, “….it might cause them to be unable to make their down-payment.” I was wondering what the hell was he talking about, what kind of buyers was he talking about?

I explained to my real estate agent, that if an offer is submitted by a buyer, and it gets close to the closing date, I would have to travel from North Dakota back to Idaho in order to remove my personal property and vehicles before the closing. I am not going to make this trip, be absent from my job, risk losing my job, move a bunch of personal property, and have the buyer back out of the sale with no penalty, after causing me a great deal of expense.

An older friend of mine, who used to be a real estate agent, when discussing this with him, he said to me, “Hell yes you need to collect at least several thousand dollars earnest-money. That’s the only way that you are going to prevent people from tying-up your home with frivolous, nonsense offers that they know they can’t follow through with.”

When there was a second, much larger misunderstanding with my real estate agent over a different matter that caused me to contact the real estate broker of this real estate agency, the broker was in lock-step with my real estate agent about, “…Oh, no. We don’t want to collect more than $1,000 earnest-money from buyers who submit an offer, because that might interfere with their ability to make their down-payment.”

I quickly realized that both my real estate agent, and the real estate agency broker/owner were trying to steer my home sale towards local, first-time home buyers. I was beginning to question if this was not legally a conflict of interest, as they were not attempting to represent me and my best-interests, but instead trying to create a good-deal for their own friends, family, or someone else they had in mind. It was like they were trying to be “good guys”, “do the right thing”, “be charitable”, but with MY HOUSE, and at MY EXPENSE.

Within a few more days, a couple of realizations made the situation more clear. When I was browsing through all of the current real estate listings for that region of Idaho, from the lowest price going up, I found out that my house was currently the lowest-priced house for sale in that county. The reason why my real estate agent and the real estate agency broker/owner were trying to steer my house sale toward first-time home buyers, was because it was currently the lowest priced house for sale in that area of Idaho.

The second important realization that I made, was that first-time home buyers who lacked the necessary income or ability to make a down-payment, could qualify for a HUD/FHA loan guarantee, creating a bunch of potential buyers for every real estate agent in the area.

Within the first few weeks of my home being listed for sale, there were about fifteen home showings. I was advised by my real estate agent that it would be best for me to be absent during home showings, so I always planned to leave to go shopping or out to eat at least 1/2 hour before a house showing appointment. But in some cases I would drive to a neighbor’s house several hundred feet away, and watch from my vehicle without being seen.

From what I observed, the people who were being shown my home, they didn’t have very much money, or life experience. They sometimes acted kind of lost. The fact of the matter was, they didn’t want or need a house on acreage to keep their horses, cattle, chickens, goats, dogs, construction equipment, boat, motorhome, they were just there because this was the lowest-priced house for sale in the region, and they were going to try to get a HUD/FHA loan guarantee.

I looked up information about HUD, the U.S. Department Of Housing And Urban Development, and FHA, the Federal Housing Authority. These Federal Government Offices were created to assist low-income and possibly disadvantaged groups of people such as minorities, LGBT, people with AIDS, in obtaining housing through financial assistance and enforcement of non-discrimination in housing. For readers who don’t believe me, here is a quote from the HUD website, “HUD continues to play a major role in providing shelter for America’s most vulnerable populations: the working poor, minorities, Native Americans, people with disabilities, people with AIDS, the elderly, the homeless.”

HUD/FHA has applications for people with low-income, inability to make down-payment, and first-time home buyers, to receive loan guarantees, making them eligible for bank loans to buy a house, that they otherwise would not qualify for. These HUD/FHA applications are complex, time-consuming, and often get tied up in government bureaucracy during multiple stages.

Because of the HUD/FHA programs, every real estate agent in the area had a HUD/FHA first-time home buyer, low-income buyer on hand to bring to my house, because it was the currently the lowest-priced house in the area, even at $325K. But these first-time home buyers, low-income buyers didn’t want, or need a house on acreage in a rural area. For instance, how are these low-income people going to mow that many acres, it takes a tractor to do it, which costs as much as the house down-payment they can barely afford. And, it could easily cost $100 per week, $5K per year in fuel for their daily commute to and from work.

Though every real estate agent had their first-time home buyer, low-income buyer to bring to my house in order to create a possible sale and receive their portion of the roughly $18K real estate commission, there was/is a risk to me as a home seller in accepting an offer from a HUD/FHA participant. After accepting an offer, the wait time for the completion of their HUD/FHA loan guarantee application could take 3-5 months, with the possibility of not being approved at all for many different reasons.

In the case of my home sale, I am unwilling to make any improvements or changes to my property to complete the sale. Except for the Marmot damage, my home is O.K. the way it is as far as I’m concerned. I am aware that HUD/FHA would probably require me to remove some things from my property, in order for their participant’s loan guarantee application to be approved, but I’m not going to do it.

I sometimes look at the situation this way: I own a paid-for home that is worth about $325K. Someone who doesn’t have the income, or the down-payment to buy my home, doesn’t even own a home, is going to tell me, “Hey, you need to have that Dodge box van, other vehicles, that storage trailer removed from your property.” Why the fuck am I going to take orders from a low-income renter, with no property of their own, who has no legal ownership in my property yet, and has a 50% chance of being denied their HUD/FHA loan? How many times would I be willing to spend $5K for a property improvement request from a buyer, only to have the buyer fail to qualify for a loan, or just back out? Zero times would I do this.

A neighbor asked me the question, “How are these people who don’t have the income, or the down-payment to qualify for a Bank loan, who receive a HUD/FHA loan guarantee, how are these people going to make the $2K per month mortgage payments?” My thoughts, “Isn’t this how the 2008 housing-bubble-burst, nationwide home foreclosures, bank failures happened? The Federal Government pressuring banks to give mortgages to people who were not qualified in employment history, income level, down-payment?”

As I explained in my previous blog post, I left Idaho in 2011 to go to work in North Dakota because I couldn’t earn enough money in Idaho to survive. For the next ten years, I had to continue to travel to North Dakota for work, because I had not been able to earn enough money in Idaho. Keeping this in mind, the way I see it, if a person or a family doesn’t have the income or the down-payment for a $325K house, they probably shouldn’t be trying to buy a $325K house. Why are they even trying to stay in an area where they can’t afford the lowest-priced house on the market? Isn’t that a big indication that they need to leave and go live somewhere else?

I try not to tell EVERYBODY, because too many people knowing will ruin this, but there are many small towns in North Dakota currently, where the price of a single-family home, is roughly the same as a person’s annual income, not six times a person’s annual income like Idaho currently.

Here is a good example of a small-town North Dakota house currently for sale, $59,900 3BR/1.5BA 2,000 square feet, low-crime, four city-blocks to the K-12 school, three city-blocks from the grocery store https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1018-1st-Ave-W_New-England_ND_58647_M77231-31494

The Marmots Are Forcing Me To Sell My House

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For readers who are not familiar with my blog, I began writing articles in 2016 to describe what had happened during the 2007-2015 Oil Boom in North Dakota. It took me at least three years of writing to explain the cultural differences, hostility, unfriendliness, difficulty, unpleasantness, hardships, price-gouging, and out-of-state workers being taken advantage of.

I first came to work in North Dakota in 2011. My goal was to make enough money to pay-off all of my bills, and save-up enough money to return to my home in Idaho. Back in 2008, this was the beginning of the “housing-bubble burst”, followed by nation-wide housing foreclosures, the failure of financial securities called “mortgage-derivatives”, then Bank failures, then Federal Government Bank-bailouts. The economies in every U.S. state were damaged. By 2009, thousands of people from every state were travelling to North Dakota to try to work in the Oil Field, because there was high unemployment everywhere else.

It was a good thing that an Oil Boom had begun in North Dakota in 2007, primarily because a newer technology called hydraulic-fracturing was allowing previously hard-to-flow oil to be extracted. It allowed me and several hundred thousand out-of-state workers to pay for our houses, families, and debts back home for as long as we could stand working here.

There was an intentional over-hyping and over-selling of the idea that, “Everyone is making over $100,000 per year working in the oil field.” This was done to flood North Dakota with workers in order to keep wage-rates low, and to take advantage of out-of-state workers through price-gouging on everything, food, housing, services. This led to people paying $700 per month to rent a pup-tent in a local person’s backyard, or sleeping in a Walmart parking lot or park for months at a time.

I am not going to re-tell all of the very bad things that I went through in North Dakota, because it would take too long. From 20011-2019, I never got far enough ahead money-wise, to get out of travelling to North Dakota for work. At least I was able to earn enough money to keep my house in Idaho.

In 2020, my father died. He left me enough money to where I could have quit travelling to North Dakota for work, but I had a good job that I liked very much at that time, so I bought a very small house for $50K to stay in while I was working in North Dakota. At least I could finally enjoy owning a place of my own in North Dakota, and not have to be subject to landlords, room-mates, bad neighbors, rent-increases.

Meanwhile, in Idaho, due to people fleeing California, the price of real estate in Idaho was increasing steadily and rapidly. By 2018, there were frequently nation-wide newspaper articles about how local people in Boise, Idaho were being priced-out of housing. The average wage in Boise was something like $11-$12 per hour, but the average house price had gone from $250K to $350K in less than three years. (The data I looked up just now, $244K average house price in 2016, versus $345K in 2019 for Ada County Idaho.)

In the area of Idaho where my house is located, when I was home in 2019, a couple of my neighbors boasted that you could easily find a $15/hr job now locally. That might not seem like a lot of money to many readers, but that was a livable wage in that area of Idaho at that time. However, even though I could have lived on $15/hr in Idaho, this was much less than what myself and the majority of people in working in western North Dakota were being paid.

2020-2023, I watched the real estate sites like Zillow, Trulia, and others increase the estimated value of my house back in Idaho up to as much as $380K. If I had wanted to sell my house, the Summer of 2022 seemed to be the peak of the Idaho housing frenzy. The 80-acre hay field across the street from my house had been recently and very quickly turned into a housing development with a dozen new $450K-$650K homes already completed.

But I didn’t want to sell my house, or need to sell my house. I didn’t like the new housing development across the street from me though. It was changing both the character and population density of this area. All of the houses on my side of the street, were on at least five acres, not 1/2-acre lots like the new development. And, most of the people on my side of the street, owned travel trailers, utility trailers, horse trailers, farm trucks, commercial tractor-trucks, dump-trucks, front-end-loaders, and other construction equipment that was kept on their property. I feared that it was only a matter of time before myself and my neighbors began receiving letters from the County ordering us to remove our “junk”, because of pressure from our new neighbors with $650K houses.

But in the end, as it turned out, it wasn’t becoming broke, or injured, or sick, or being forced out by complaints from new housing developments with affluent home owners, that caused me to sell my house that I had struggled to keep for the past ten years, ……..it was the Marmots.

Partly due to the recent and quick development of the 80 acres across the street, and a couple of other close-by developments to the north and northwest of my property, the Marmots in the area fled to my property because often no one was home at the time, they were being left alone for the time-being on my property.

This Spring, I saw that some Marmots had spent a great deal of time chewing at the siding on my house at the entry-way, beside the front door, trying to get inside the house. What stopped them, was the amount of extra framing studs at the entry-way. If the Marmots would have gotten through the exterior wall, I estimate that they would have done about $20K damage to the furniture, cabinets, drywall, plumbing, and electrical wiring.

At my well-pump-house, I could see that the Marmots had gotten into the upper-level above-ground portion of the well-house. I was shocked at the amount of damage that had been done. I saw that the Marmots had also pulled open the hatch to the basement, and down in the basement they had destroyed all of the electrical wiring, and had buried all of the well-piping, controls, and gauges, which I believed had also been destroyed.

Marmot damage to well-pump-house above ground.

Marmot damage to well-pump-house below ground.

I knew at that moment, that I needed to sell this house. I can’t be here all the time. Even if I fixed everything, once I left, the Marmots would be at it again. I was very lucky that the Marmots had not made it inside the house. Could I afford $20K-$30K damage every time I left? No.

I had a several long conversations with the owner of my current insurer agency. My homeowner’s insurance did not cover any kind of damage to my house or well-pump-house caused by animals. On four of my vehicles that I had parked at my house, I had “comprehensive coverage while being stored”. Three of these vehicles had some damage, probably less than my $500 insurance deductible. But a fourth vehicle that was insured, and a fifth vehicle that was not insured, were in the range of “total-loss” from Marmot damage. In the photo below, just about all of the electrical wiring, and most of the fuel, coolant, vacuum, and hydraulic hoses are gone:

Marmot damage to 1978 Jaguar.

I got a recommendation for a real estate agent from a retired local insurance company owner that I had known for more than ten years. The following day, this realtor came over to my house with a list of thirteen recent home sales in this area with the same type of house. The lowest recent sale was about $250K for a house on less than one acre. The remaining twelve recent comparable home sales were all over $300K, and went up to $550K.

In my initial discussion with this real estate agent, he seemed competent and intelligent, and he appeared to be thinking the same things that I was, as I explained the situation to him. The following day, when I asked this real estate agent about requiring 1%-3% earnest money from a potential buyer who wished to submit an offer, I was puzzled at his statement, “Oh no. We don’t want to prevent some buyers from being able to make the down payment.” I was thinking, “WTF, not being able to make the down payment??? What kind of people are you talking about?” This was the beginning of things going wrong with this house sale.

I will explain in my next blog post, my initial disbelief and bewilderment at this realtor and his real estate agency seemingly setting-aside my property for HUD/FHA buyers who were low-income and lacked the ability to make the required down-payment, on a $325K property. Why?

The Marmots in my yard.

Some Advanced Teachings Of Dolores Cannon

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I tried my very best to give people a careful introduction to Dolores Cannon in my previous two blog post articles, in hopes that her teachings would make sense and take root.

In reviewing what I covered so far, and considering what I am still trying to figure out myself, I stepped back a little to make some observations. I estimate that only 1 out of 100 adults in the United States know who Dolores Cannon is. This means that 10 out of 1,000 adults know who she is. Of these 10 people, how many believe what she teaches? Maybe 1. That’s 1 out of 1,000 people believing in what Dolores Cannon teaches.

In the state of North Dakota, where I live, there are fewer than 800,000 people in the entire state. Which means that there are probably only about 800 people in North Dakota who believe in what Dolores Cannon teaches.

From the comments to Dolores Cannon’s videos on her YouTube channel “The Metaphysical Hour”, and the people who attempt to discuss Dolores Cannon’s teachings elsewhere, it appears to me that 60% of her followers are women over 30 years of age who have experienced trauma in their lives, and have gone to great lengths to try to find some kind of alternate explanation for life, the World, the Universe, existence.

Unfortunately, sadly, most of these over-30 women with past trauma in their lives, are bitter, jaded, wounded, battered, inwardly-hateful, inwardly-angry people with very little patience, and a dislike for most people. These women may understand and believe Dolores Cannon’s teachings, but they are almost the exact opposite of Dolores Cannon, who was a gentle, cordial, caring, patient teacher.

So, considering that there are probably only 800 people in the entire state of North Dakota who believe in Dolores Cannon’s teachings, and about 60% of these believers tend to be hateful women, who is it that I think I am talking to? I don’t know. But it’s slightly amusing to me that I have found out the answers to just about everything, and no one else seems to care or have an interest.

From what I have read, and heard Dolores Cannon say, I believe that she personally hypnotically regressed at least several thousand people. I believe that she asked at least several hundred of these people to describe in as much detail as possible, their “Time-Between-Lives”. This Time-Between-Lives takes place in a different dimension, plane, or realm where Souls recuperate and undergo “Past-Life-Reviews” and “Future-Life-Planning” with their “Spirit-Guides”.

The people explaining their Time-Between-Lives and Future-Life-Planning, say that they are given the opportunity to incarnate at any time in the past or future on Earth according to what lessons they still need to learn and experiences they have not had yet. The implications of this, that a Soul could incarnate on Earth prior to the U.S. Revolutionary War, U.S. Civil War, World War I, World War II, is it possible that they might in fact alter events enough to change history? Yes, this is possible, especially because there are tens of thousands of Souls going back to various times in history on Earth, altering events, changing history.

As I wrote briefly in my previous blog post article, when a person on Earth makes a life-changing decision that they put a great deal of thought into, whether to get married, go to college, or join the military, one of themselves gets married and one doesn’t, one of themselves goes to college and one doesn’t, one of themselves joins the military and one doesn’t. One person could end up causing dozens of new “Time-Lines” on Earth.

(My understanding of this, is that an individual on Earth splits into two different Time-Lines when important decisions are made, because it allows the Soul to experience both choices.)

So to be clear, when Souls go through their Future-Life-Planning session, they can choose to go back to any point in history on Earth, which could, and probably will create a whole new Time-Line because of the impact of their actions on history. Since there are tens of thousands of Souls continuously incarnating at various points in history, there are tens of thousands of new Time-Lines being created. And, even a person already living on Earth, when they make a life-changing decision, they can split off into two new Time-Lines as well.

After the reader has spent some time thinking about the possibility of all these new Time-Lines, the reader might ask the question, who fills all of these positions of all these new people on Earth every time someone makes a life-changing decision and creates a new Time-Line? The answer is, many people on Earth are what Dolores Cannon called “back-drop-people”, they aren’t real.

When I first heard Dolores Cannon speak about the “back-drop-people” and the “back-fill-people”, I didn’t like this concept. I thought that this was a very dangerous thing to teach people. What a horrible thing, to give people the idea that other people aren’t real, don’t count, don’t matter. This is just going to give some people more justification to mistreat others.

If the reader thinks even further about Souls going back to various points in history and creating new Time-Lines and individuals already living on Earth making decisions and creating new Time-Lines, does the entire Earth get created all over again each time? No, the entire Earth does not get created all over again every time a Soul or a person’s decision creates a new Time-Line.

If I decide to get married, and one of me remains single in one Time-Line, and one of me is married in another Time-Line, do the continents of South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, Antarctica get created all over again too just because I created a new Time-Line with my decision? No, it would not be necessary to create the whole entire World and all of the people in it all over again.

When Dolores Cannon taught about this, she explained that in our own particular Time-Line, just enough of our surroundings are created, and just enough back-drop-people are created to populate our surroundings. She elaborated that buildings such as libraries, museums, schools, hospitals, stadiums, and other places are not even created in our particular Time-Line until we make the decision to go there.

So is this life a simulation? Yes, this is one way to explain this life, although it is real to us. Regarding the back-drop-people or back-fill-people that appear in the background when we go to a sporting event at a stadium or a busy airport, there is no reason for all of these people to be real or have a Soul, just because we go somewhere in our life simulation, if their role is just temporary. However, once we begin to interact more significantly with someone new that we meet in our lifetime, they are very likely going to be a real person with a Soul.

Regardless of what Dolores Cannon teaches, there is some evidence that life may be a simulation. From what I gather, roughly 1 in 5,000 people experience a “glitch in the matrix”. These stories have existed and been written about for at least the past several hundred years. Here are a few common examples:

A husband and wife are travelling away from home on an interstate or highway.  Mid-way through their drive, they stop to get fuel and eat at a restaurant.  Though sometimes the restaurant and people may seem unusual in their accent, manner of speaking, clothing that they wear, the only thing that may be memorable was that the prices were low or that the food was good.  On their return trip home, the husband and wife try to stop again at this same restaurant, but it is no longer there, and the gas station is no longer there.  They drive around the area searching, but when they find someone to ask where it is, it is explained to them that this restaurant and gas station have been closed for the past twenty years.

Though the above story may be familiar as a common “ghost story”, the reason why it is so common, is because this actually happens to roughly 1 in 5,000 people.  This has even happened and been documented by high-ranking military pilots who have landed at operating airports that have been closed for twenty years, or flying over battles that happened over a thousand years ago.

Other common “glitch in the matrix” stories are husbands & wives having a particular kind of fruit tree in their front yard for several years, then one day it’s not there.  They can both remember making pies from its fruit, and can find photographs of the tree in their front yard, but it’s gone now.  Another one, many people can remember former U.S. President Jimmy Carter dying in the 1990s, but have been very surprised when they heard later in the the 2000s or 2010s that he was not dead.  Many similar events that thousands of people remember seeing, but now appear very different.

Although the visiting of shops and restaurants that haven’t existed for many years is a more common story, or clearly remembering something happening but it isn’t that way anymore, or finding oneself witnessing long-ago places or events, other people have reported going outside of their home and everyone and everything is frozen in place, where time appears to have stopped.  These stories have been passed around as folklore, but if taken as real they offer some evidence of life being more like a simulation and different Time-Lines existing.  A Time-Line where a restaurant did not go out of business twenty years ago, a Time-Line where an airport did not close down twenty years ago, a Time-Line where Jimmy Carter died in the 1990s, or an error occurring in this Time-Line simulation.

Are DSU President Stephen Easton And Representative Mike Lefor Trying To Retaliate And Silence Professors?

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Near the beginning of year 2023, North Dakota State Representative Mike Lefor introduced two ND House Bills, that to myself and many other people, appeared to be aimed at preventing ND University Professors from making alleged acts of wrongdoing public:

HB 1198  Requiring an individual who requests an open record to provide the individual’s name and contact information. https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/68-2023/regular/bill-overview/bo1198.html?#1446

HB 1446  Pilot program for tenured faculty review at institutions of higher education.  https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/68-2023/regular/bill-overview/bo1446.html?#1446

In the past seven years, there have been three separate, important, significant, headline-grabbing audits at Dickinson State University: A determination that DSU awarded nearly 400 Diplomas to foreign students who did not complete their curriculum; The DSU Foundation being placed into Receivership by order of the ND Attorney General; A determination that DSU violated several policies and procedures in awarding a service contract.

To understand the extent of the findings in these three separate audits, please read the first of these https://www.foxnews.com/us/audit-north-dakota-university-awarded-unearned-degrees

An excerpt from this article reads:

“But as an audit made public Friday revealed, lax record keeping and oversight resulted in hundreds of degrees being awarded to students who didn’t finish their course work. Others enrolled who couldn’t speak English or hadn’t achieved the “C” average normally required for admission.

The report depicts Dickinson State as a diploma mill for foreign students, most of whom were Chinese. Of 410 foreign students who have received four-year degrees since 2003 — most of them in the past four years — 400 did not fulfill all the graduation requirements, it said.”

Regarding this particular audit, which delved into other areas such as foreign students not meeting the English proficiency requirements, it’s about 95% certain that the whistle-blower who kicked this off, was a faculty member at DSU, because who else would have had access to these student records?

Moving on to the next audit, this one is a little harder to understand.  The DSU Foundation was a non-profit organization consisting of alumni and supporters of DSU, whose goal was to raise money for DSU.  However, in addition to receiving donations and fundraising activities, it decided to become involved in real estate development.

The DSU Foundation initiated the construction of an on-campus sports stadium called the Biesiot Activities Center, as well as an on-campus assisted living facility called Hawk’s Point, and a student housing building Blue Hawk Square.  After construction of these facilities was completed, there were parties involved in construction that were not paid, including several banks who had loaned money for these projects.

In the following referenced article, which is a good summary of the DSU Foundation audit, the former Dickinson Press Newspaper editor wrote that he was pressured by DSU supporters to shut-up about this https://dustinmonke.com/2015/09/06/editorial-dsu-foundation-paying-for-mess-it-created/

Here is an excerpt from this article:

“When rumors began to circulate about financial problems at the Dickinson State University Foundation, our reporting on the subject was unpopular with many university and foundation supporters. We were asked by readers why we didn’t support the university and were told to stop picking on the foundation.”

The last DSU audit that I will mention, the most recent one, supposedly resulted from a disgruntled student at DSU, who not only became a whistle-blower, but started a petition seeking signatures to support the removal of DSU President Stephen Easton, and Vice President Debora Dragseth.

What this student was angry about, was the recent departure of several key faculty members, whose absence would make many students pursuing certain degrees unable to graduate, as there was no one remaining who was qualified to teach their classes.  But the allegations brought forth by this student who sought the removal of the DSU President and Vice-President, were that they were both involved in an improper DSU business arrangement that profited and favored an associate of DSU President Stephen Easton.

Here is an article that describes the findings of this audit https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/ndus-investigation-finds-improper-procurement-in-dsu-contract

An excerpt from this article reads:

“A series of open record requests provided documents that were detailed in a series of complaints forwarded to the Eide Bailly Fraud Hotline, between Feb. 26 and May 4, 2021, prompting an investigation into the allegations of improper procurement. Their conclusions found that DSU’s procurement “was in violation of at least seven laws or procedures and did not use any common procurement templates” available NDUS-wide for shared bidding and award processes and that allegations of conflict of interest were unsupported by the investigation.”

These three audits, the improper awarding of DSU Diplomas, the insolvency of the DSU Foundation, the improper procurement of a DSU business contract, were the result of people in a position to know about these things making a whistle-blower complaint alleging wrongdoing.  From reading the details contained in the news articles that I have referenced in this blog post, and from other articles elsewhere, it is easy to see that the faculty at DSU were the “watchdogs” observing what was happening and making the decision to report it.

North Dakota State Representative Mike Lefor, who graduated from DSU in 1980, is a member of DSU’s strategic planning committee, and was probably a member of the former DSU Foundation, and its successor the DSU Heritage Foundation.

Dickinson State University President Stephen Easton, like Mike Lefor, also graduated from DSU in 1980.  Both Stephen Easton and Mike Lefor probably did not like the bad publicity, shame, and ramifications of the Diploma scandal at DSU, nor the nearly concurrent dissolution of the DSU Foundation in 2015.  However, the 2021 allegations of conflict-of-interest/favoritism in awarding a DSU business contract to a colleague of DSU President Stephen Easton was personally unpleasant to him in addition to being another embarrassment to DSU.

Here is a short excerpt from the previously referenced article:

“At some point, I reached out to … my former colleague at the University of Wyoming, Dr. Maggi Murdock, to see if she could identify someone who might provide this training or if she might be interested in doing so,” Easton said. “After Dr. Murdock’s indication that she planned to form a company to submit a proposal, I advised Dr. Debora Dragseth, our new Vice President of Academic Affairs and Provost, that I would have nothing further to do with the procurement process, as I did not want to suggest a preference for Dr. Murdock’s new firm.”

As a result of these three audits in the past seven years, the bad publicity for DSU, the tarnishing of DSU’s reputation, increased difficulty in attracting students and faculty to DSU while DSU is in the news in a negative way, I believe that ND State Representative Mike Lefor and DSU President Stephen Easton wanted to find a way to keep this from happening in the future.

The two ND House Bills put forward by ND Representative Mike Lefor, HB1198 and HB1446, would require people pursuing Open Record Requests to be identified, and give DSU President Stephen Easton the ability to terminate DSU faculty at his discretion, even tenured Professors.

The wording of HB1446 is vague and broad enough, that a DSU Professor could do something that DSU President Stephen Easton did not like, and immediately be subject to assessment by the DSU President, and found to be deficient or non-compliant in a number of different ways, including the following, WITHOUT ABILITY TO APPEAL OR REVIEW BY FACULTY:

    • “Further the best interests of the institution including providing advice and shared governance to campus leaders, and exercising mature judgment to avoid inadvertently harming the institution, especially in avoiding the use of social media or third-party internet platforms to disparage campus personnel or the
      institution.“
    • “Comply with the policies, procedures, and directives of the institution, the institution’s
      president and other administrators…”
    • “Help recruit and retain students for the institution.”
    • “When conducting a review under this section, the president of an institution may
      assess and review other factors relevant to the faculty member’s employment and the
      interests of the institution and the institution’s students.”
    • “A review under this section is not appealable or reviewable by a faculty member or faculty committee….”
    • The president and any administrators delegated to assist the president shall fulfill these duties without fear of reprisal or retaliation. No complaint, lawsuit, or other
      allegation is allowed against a president or other administrator for actions taken
      pursuant to these provisions.

Everybody pay attention, “…No complaint, lawsuit, or other allegation is allowed against a president or other administrator for actions taken pursuant to these provisions. ”  Has anyone, ever heard or read a piece of City, County, State, or Federal Legislation where it says that “no complaint, lawsuit, or allegation is allowed” ?  Can everyone understand that under the U.S. Constitution, every complaint and every allegation is always allowed?  Specifically, for instance, a complaint against Discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, veterans status, etc. would have to be heard.

Getting back to the point of this blog post, my opinion is that ND State Representative Mike Lefor and DSU President Stephen Easton are seeking to stifle DSU faculty members’ ability to report alleged wrongdoing that they observe, by way of HB1198 which has already been voted down, and HB1446 which has not been voted on yet.

I think that Mike Lefor’s and Stephen Easton’s focus should be on not doing illegal things in the first place, rather than trying to keep illegal things hidden.

Does ND District 37 Know Or Care How Inappropriate And Corrupt It Looks?

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On Saturday January 7, I saw a Facebook post made by former North Dakota Representative Luke Simons, explaining that the ND District 37 Republican Committee was having a District reorganization meeting this morning at 10:00 a.m. at the Blue 42 Sports Bar & Grille in Dickinson. Luke Simons’ complaint was that he had not seen or heard any notice beforehand that this meeting was taking place, as if there was an attempt at secrecy going on.

I read the Dickinson Press newspaper every day. Most articles, notices, and announcements are repeated in the Dickinson Press newspaper for several days, but I never saw an announcement for the ND District 37 Republican Committee meeting. Nor did I see any announcement on Facebook, or anywhere else. I have to agree with Luke Simons, this does look like there was no notification published where ordinary citizens would see it, as if they didn’t want ordinary citizens to know.

This lack of notification, may in itself not seem so bad, but if you become aware of a few more elements involved here, it gets worse. Back on September 20, 2022 former ND Representative Luke Simons obtained a copy of the ND District 37 Republican Party by-laws. In reading these by-laws, Luke Simons discovered several elements which appear to be inappropriately exclusionary:

    • In order to become a member of ND District 37 Republicans, and vote at District 37 Republican Committee Meetings, for such things as election of officers, you must first present yourself in-person at a meeting.  But how can you present yourself at a District 37 Republican meeting in-person, if there is no Public Notice beforehand when and where these meetings will be held?
    • When you present yourself at a ND District 37 Republican meeting, and pay your $60 dues, you can’t vote at that meeting, not until your application has been reviewed and approved at a later date after the meeting is over.
    • A person’s ND District 37 Republican Party membership application can be rejected, at the discretion of the ND District 37 Committee.
    • A person’s ND District 37 Republican Party membership can be revoked, for such reasons as “putting the Republican Party in a bad light”, at the discretion of the ND District 37 Republican Committee.

In my opinion, the absence of a clear Public Notice ahead of time when & where the ND District 37 Republican Committee meeting will take place, combined with the necessity of going to this meeting to be able to join the ND District 37 Republicans, not being allowed to vote at the ND District 37 Republican Committee meeting until the next meeting, if your application is approved at the discretion of the Committee, if your membership isn’t revoked at the discretion of the Committee, are barriers that attempt to block, control, and limit who participates in Dickinson politics.

Further, this ND District 37 Republican Committee meeting held at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, was held at a Bar & Grille owned by the District 37 Republican Committee Chairperson, Mike Lefor.  Chairperson Mike Lefor and the other Committee members might have felt comfortable at the Blue 42 Sports Bar & Grille, it may have been convenient for them, but I question the appropriateness of this location for several reasons:

What if a group of Republicans in Dickinson, say for example Evangelical Christians, did find out where the ND District 37 Republicans were having a meeting, arrived on time, completed their application for membership, paid their membership dues, were approved for membership, weren’t revoked, and had the intention of challenging Mike Lefor in voting for a new chairperson, or bringing opposition to a position Mike Lefor supported.  Is opposition to Mike Lefor or his positions possible in Mike Lefor’s restaurant, with his customers, supporters, bar staff, wait staff, cooks?

It’s probably convenient and comfortable for the ND District 37 Republicans to have their Committee meeting at Blue 42 Sports Bar & Grille, owned by their Chairperson, in part because it’s just one more additional barrier to the Committee members being opposed.  But in my opinion, this shouldn’t be, there can’t be such a strangle-hold on participation in politics in Dickinson.

Why am I reporting this, why am I pointing this out, why am I explaining this?  Maybe because the Dickinson Press newspaper office in Dickinson is owned by the ND District 37 Republican Committee Chairperson Mike Lefor, and you aren’t going to hear about this anywhere else.

There is much, much more to the story about politics in Dickinson.  This is just the tip of the iceberg.  With the help of either the ineptitude or blind-eye of the Dickinson Press newspaper, there is so much going on in Dickinson that has crossed the line of small-town politics into what should be half a dozen different investigations by the North Dakota Attorney General or the U.S. Justice Department into legal impropriety.

A tangled web, but not so tangled that its strings can’t be seen for where they start, where they meet, where they end:  Federal funding, State funding, County funding; Federal legislation, State legislation, County legislation; Advance planning, scheming, support, politicking, alliances, collusion, strong-arming, manipulation, quid-pro-quo, payoffs; individuals, businesses, organizations, associations, non-profits, committees, commissions, directors, employers, employees; all part of and involved in transactions that cross the line of legality, into illegal, improper, unethical activity.

Reader Comment About The History Of Earth

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Today when I was looking at comments that I received from readers of my blog, I read a very long comment that took a lot of thought and attention to write, so I decided to share this comment in a blog post article.

For the past year, I have been learning so much, that it has been difficult for me to write many blog post articles. It is the right time for me to receive this information, but I think that the majority of people could not care less if I tried to explain it to them. So I haven’t attempted it, but this reader who contacted me, has given it a try, so I will share what they wrote.

For me personally, thirty years ago I saw Pastor Arnold Murray of Gravette, Arkansas pull out a fossilized “modern” artifact from his desk drawer, something that shouldn’t have existed thousands of years ago, and proclaim, “There have been several ‘Earth Ages’….”

For forty years, Steven Quayle of Bozeman, Montana has been researching and writing books about “Giants”. Many of the Native American tribes have both a verbal passed-down history and petroglyphs depicting giants. Many of the early Spanish Conquistadors chronicled their encounters with giants. But more importantly, there have been hundreds, maybe even thousands of burial mounds uncovered in North America with skeletal remains of giants.

Lately there has been very frequent discussion of the 1909 G.E. Kincaid discovery of a very large, elaborate cave system built into the side of the Grand Canyon that contained exclusively Egyptian and Tibetan type artifacts. This discovery was reported in the Arizona Gazette newspaper at the time.

Within this past year, I have become almost completely convinced that the entire World has participated in the cover-up and erasure from history, the existence of the “Tartarian Empire” that included all of Russia, Austria, Germany, Hungary, and most of Asia. Antique maps from the 1500s and 1600s show “Tartaria” or “Tartary” occupying this area.

Due to World-wide sharing of information, “modern technology” in fossils; “modern technology” in ancient artifacts; antique maps depicting civilizations in Antarctica, Atlantis, Lemuria, and the Tartarian Empire; burial mounds with giants up to 30ft in height; Biblical accounts of giants; Egyptian, Native American, South American, Tibetan, Indian glyphs and writings depicting aliens and alien spacecraft, all point to the History, Religion, Science, and Medicine we are taught being inaccurate and incomplete.

Here is the comment from a reader StargateSG7:

What the heck! Since it’s December 30, 2022, I might as well pontificate some more findings since some of my earlier posts sound kind of insane, deranged and/or out-of-this world.

Steve’s HowToHunt channel is getting larger and larger because SOMETHING is going on with various Cryptids showing up sometimes literally on peoples’ doorsteps for whatever reason. Too many people are coming forth with their own stories and he is one of the FEW internet celebrities able to provide a non-judgemental platform for people of all creeds and cultures to showcase what was seen and/or happening TO THEM! Steve is a platform. Nothing More! You either ACCEPT the stories or you DON’T! Some are fake! Many are Real and some are even out-of-thsi world! Like he says: Take It Or Leave It As You Will!

I personally come from a Science-oriented background that DESIRES practical real-world EVIDENCE of any given claim. I also like REPEATABILITY where if someone says If you do X then Y happens, I would like to REPLICATE what someone previously has done or said, so that I might obtain FURTHER PROOF of a given single event or set of experiments/phenomena!

There is REAL WORLD EVIDENCE of modern Cryptids including Sasquatch/Bigfoot/SABE/Yowee/Yeti AND ALSO of ghosts, aliens, dogmen, skinwalkers, demons, ephemerals and other non-traditional entities.

We humans actually ARE getting smarter by the year mostly due to the rapid advancements of Computer Technology which lets us examine at a closer level whatever real-world evidence pops into play.

We can simulate, emulate, reformulate and even dis-assemble events, materials and structures to such an extent that we can either REFUTE or CONFIRM what was original told and/or postulated.

What is Sasquatch? We have EVIDENCE that they are multi-faceted beings where some have ancient origins, some have near-modern-human qualities IN ADDITION to there being entities that are non-corporeal and/or even micro-machine-based (MEMS) artificial lifeforms!

SOME such beings have non-traditional paranormal abilities that are EITHER natural in origin or are technologically enhanced. This means we humans LIKELY have the same abilities which were naturally devolved due to climate/environmental/social pressures OR were purposefully REMOVED from us by other beings of a high-technology ability.

There is ALSO concrete evidence that we humans are NOT the native intelligent lifeform on this Earth! Our Circadian Rythm (aka Body Clock) is oriented towards a 25 hour planetary spin while Earth in its ancient past had a 22 to 23 hour rotational period. Ergo, we are ORIGINALLY from a planet that had a 25 hour spin!

There is also CONCRETE evidence (literally concrete!) of ancient space-faring technological civilizations from multiple periods such as 280 to 220 million years ago, 180 to 160 million years ago and 100 to 70 million years ago that SEEM to indicate reptilian-like bipedal beings ARE the actual evolved natives of Earth but abandoned it once they became space-faring!

During specially-operated mining and survey acivities, multiple persons/groups have found fibre-reinforced concrete megastructures and large-scale technological system that WERE NOT CRUSHED under tectonic activity located within deep underground regions in today’s western South America and Southwest Africa that were once part of ancient continents and low-land areas that WOULD HAVE BEEN protected via large mountain ranges and/or oceans/lakes which would have kept away the major Dinosaurs and other Carnivores of those eras, allowing the Saurians/Reptoids enough time and space to evolve and become technological and then spacefaring!

Other deep underground found evidence indicates within the last one-million years, a very large humanoid species that is a close relative of modern humans had built multiple lakeside cities about TWICE the size of modern day Tokyo (tokyo is 60 million people today so ancient cities of 120 million people) to be present near todays India/Kashmir border region and what is now southwest of Calgary, Canada.

These beings created massive fibre-reinforced concrete dams to create artificial lakes that then had built massive lakeside cities with buildings ten times the size of todays largest buildings with massive transportation/rail networks that were basically the size of modern day cargo ships traverse the ancient pre-glacial-era lands that are now the Canadian Prairies and a major Asian mountainous region!

We SUSPECT that we modern humans are the product of a genetic engineering program to create self-replicating (i.e. disposable!) biological robots that were designed to mine precious or technologically-important metals and minerals that COULD NOT be otherwise obtained easily from local gas giants or other rocky planets.

Probably, it was the usual technologically-important Gold, Silver, Platinum-group, Aluminum, Titanium and other metals and probably radioactive materials were what was mined during the interstadial periods around 600,000+ years ago.

There is ALSO EVIDENCE of nuclear explosions due to the finding of common long-lived radionucleotides in uniform layers of sub-surface strata that only now have subsided to just above background levels which are by-products of nuclear warefare.

We suspect, based upon OTHER technology found, that the large-stature humanoids that created modern humanity had a long-term war with another alien species and eventually abandoned Earth and left our modern-era human ancestors to their own devices! It looks like they INTENTIONALLY blew up their own cities and left quickly after a long period of space and terrestrial warfare that was initially non-nuclear in nature.

We also have “Concrete Evidence” that these ancient cities were built and present upon Earth for at least 75,000 years BEFORE the final warfare with the other species. And that final warfare was long-term for at least 100 to 1000 years in duration before the final abandonment/self-destruction of those cities and the artificially created lakes!

This evidence was predicated upon the obtainment of out-of-place artifacts being discovered and retrieved during 1950’s to 1990’s-era Oil & Gas drilling operations, deep mining operations and seismic surveys within the Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada which then eventually led to similar exploration/archeology activities in the Kashmir/India border regions which indicated large megastructures located underground in both places which led to further technological artifacts being found which finally led to well-funded explorations and scientific analysis by groups funded by mostly petro-and-mining-related wealthy patrons, which is ONLY JUST NOW getting to be publicly disclosed within the 2020’s-era.

We humans are NOT the native species on Earth! At least THREE other civilizations BEFORE US became technological and spacefaring! Today, we humans live with OTHER CRYPTIDS that are both native to Earth and are part of the genetically-engineered biology created by non-modern-human alien entities who did NOT evolve here but came from somewhere else in this Galaxy or elsewhere in the local universe!

It’s a pretty scary thought as to WHAT ELSE has been found or researched by those in Government agencies, various militaries and private groups which has NOT YET been disclosed publicly!

V

A Few Videos Of December Storm In New England North Dakota

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For readers who don’t know, North Dakota is very sparsely populated. The entire state has less than 800,000 people. In the southwest corner of North Dakota, the largest city is Dickinson, with 25,000 people. Surrounding Dickinson are more than a dozen towns with populations ranging from 30 to 1,000 people: South Heart, Belfield, New Hradec, Manning, Killdeer, Gladstone, Richardton, Taylor, Lefor, Regent, Mott, Hettinger, Reeder, Scranton, Amidon, New England.

Taking New England, North Dakota for example, with a population of 500 people, I think that the vast majority of people in the United States can’t imagine how quiet, uneventful, slow-paced life is. What makes it even more quiet, is when a winter storm causes people to stay home. Traffic goes from a normal daytime rate of one vehicle driving past a house every ten minutes, to one vehicle per hour.

At night during a winter snow storm, once it gets past about 8:00 p.m., everyone in New England is home for good. No traffic at all after that, maybe not even until 10:00 a.m. the following day.

On Monday evening December 12, there began a winter snow storm in southwest North Dakota, that was expected to be just short of a blizzard. The winds would be just below 35 mph, and visibility would be slightly above 1/2 mile. On Tuesday there was about 12″ of snow fall. After staying inside all day Tuesday, out of boredom I got up at 3:00 a.m. Wednesday morning to make some videos showing how still it was outside. Here are some of these videos:

New England North Dakota 1st Avenue 12/14/22

New England North Dakota McKenzie Avenue 12/14/22

New England North Dakota Main Street 12/14/22

New England North Dakota driving to Main Avenue 12/14/22

Driving south from Dickinson on Hwy 22 toward New England 12/14/22

My Thoughts On The November 2022 North Dakota Election Results

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I was disappointed in the November 2022 North Dakota election results for three main reasons. I wanted Dr. Rick Becker of Bismarck to replace U.S. Senator John Hoeven, and I wanted Thea Lee of Sentinel Butte to be elected as a District 39 State Representative. Both of these candidates were underdogs, highly Conservative grass-roots Republicans who were forced to run as Independents. And I didn’t want recent college graduate and former Miss America Cara Mund to run at all, especially not for U.S. Representative.

I deliberately did not write any blog articles about Dr. Rick Becker, Thea Lee, and Cara Mund because I didn’t want to unintentionally harm Becker and Lee, and help Cara Mund. In other words, my endorsement of Becker and Lee might have hurt them, and my criticism of Cara Mund might have helped her.

I felt grateful about my decision not to write anything prior to the election, when I soon saw that one of Cara Mund’s primary campaign talking points was that she was being picked on because she was a woman, after supposedly receiving many mean, sexist emails and tweets. In my opinion, this might have had more to do with people not liking Cara Mund, because people around here love female South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.

The reason why I did not want Cara Mund to run for any political office, especially not U.S. Representative, is because she just graduated from college, and in my opinion she doesn’t know anything yet. I think that she doesn’t even know, that she doesn’t know, and this is a very dangerous thing. Ask anybody who has worked anywhere, you have to watch the new-hire so that they don’t hurt themselves or somebody else, because they don’t know that they don’t know.

Cara Mund graduated from Brown University in 2016 with a degree in business, served as Miss America in 2018, and graduated from Harvard Law School in May of 2022. Two months later she announced her candidacy for U.S. House Of Representatives. Though Cara served on boards, committees, associations, and internships, this experience appears to me to be mostly academic. ( In general, I am tired of seeing recent college graduates, especially in politics, trying to suggest that they have what appears to be 20 years of work experience on their resume, eight years in management, eight years in sales, four years in marketing. This doesn’t compute. Did they start working when they were 8 years old, or is this shit made-up? )

The original purpose of elected representatives in the United States, was to represent constituents regarding their concerns and endeavors, to speak and act on their behalf. North Dakota is primarily a blue-collar, low education level, agricultural, oil, natural gas, and coal producing state. In my opinion, Cara Mund is about the furthest thing from these North Dakota constituents. She has not personally experienced first-hand the concerns, problems, difficulties, and struggles of farmers, laborers, trades people, oil field workers, low-skilled, and under-educated working-class people.

Maybe after working at a job in the private sector for a while, starting a family, experiencing many of the same problems as everyone else with employment, pay, bosses, co-workers, housing, mortgage, property taxes, bills, spouse, children, public school, health care, court system, law enforcement, she will be a better candidate to represent North Dakotans. Cara Mund did not win the U.S. Representative election, she lost to incumbent Republican Kelly Armstrong.

On the other hand, in contrast to Cara Mund, first-time political candidate Thea Lee from Sentinel Butte, was very reasonable, appropriate, logical, sensible, solid in her approach and campaign for District 39 North Dakota Representative. Thea’s candidacy made sense, because of what she represents. She is a wife, a mother with five children, former foster parent, and judicial advocate who homeschools her kids. She lives on a ranch in a very rural, remote, sparsely populated area, where she and her husband currently tend 400 goats. Each of these things is very relatable to North Dakotans living in District 39.

Why I was also in favor of Thea Lee, was because like Dr. Rick Becker, she had to temporarily step outside of the Republican Party election system, when the endorsed Republican Party candidate was not who many Conservatives wanted. In my opinion, I did not like the situation where motorhomes and for-hire “party-buses” delivered voters to the District 39 Republican Party nomination meeting, this was very suspicious to me, and I hoped that Thea Lee being elected would undo what I perceived as being wrong. Thea Lee running as an Independent, lost the District 39 Representative election to the endorsed Republican candidate.

The most important election this November of 2022 in North Dakota, was the race for U.S. Senator. The incumbent, Senator John Hoeven, was Governor of North Dakota from 2000-2010, and U.S. Senator from 2011- present. At 65 years of age, ten years as Governor, eleven years as U.S. Senator, net worth $45 million, not always voting very Republican or Conservative, I think that Senator John Hoeven is out-of-touch with the majority of North Dakotans, ordinary North Dakotans, and it’s time for better representation. In my opinion, Senator John Hoeven is like North Dakota’s version of Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell, been there too long and you can see it in the way they act, like they’re Royalty.

Dr. Rick Becker, a plastic surgeon in Bismarck and former State Legislator, is very intelligent, knowledgeable, competent, well-spoken, vocal, confident, and better than energetic, he has a consistent alert temperament. Dr. Rick Becker is very much like U.S. Senator Dr. Rand Paul. Just like U.S. Senator Dr. Rand Paul, Dr. Rick Becker could have had more wealth, a much easier life, and an early retirement if he would have chosen not to become involved in politics. In other words, Dr. Rick Becker is actually giving up much more than he is personally gaining from these campaigns, elections, and serving in public office.

Dr. Rick Becker is more Conservative and committed to Republican Party principles than Senator John Hoeven, as you can see for yourself in these two political rating comparisons http://ratings.conservative.org/people/02d00f0b-b88e-444f-ab65-adb352d5ae69 versus http://ratings.conservative.org/people/H001061 (Source: The Center for Legislative Accountability CLA, an initiative of the Conservative Political Action Coalition CPAC )

Some specific examples of things that Dr. Rick Becker has done to personally “stick his neck out” for Conservative & Republican principles, rather than just try to get along and not rock the boat in the North Dakota Legislature:

  • After first being elected to the ND Legislature in 2013, Dr. Rick Becker formed the Bastiat Caucus, named after the limited government political philosopher Frédéric Bastiat, which gathered several dozen members of the North Dakota House, to organize a unified, conservative front on key votes.
  • In 2015 Dr. Rick Becker supported a Bill to reduce State Income Tax to 0%.
  • In 2015 Dr. Rick Becker introduced a Bill to ban DUI checkpoints. (Unconstitutional)
  • In 2017 Dr. Rick Becker introduced a “Constitutional Carry” Bill for firearms, which later passed.
  • Dr. Rick Becker worked to achieve Confidential Informant reform, Civil Asset Forfeiture reform, Unmanned Drone Surveillance reform.
  • Dr. Rick Becker worked to prohibit teaching Critical Race Theory in ND public schools.
  • Dr. Rick Becker worked on legislation during the Covid-19 pandemic stating that North Dakota would only comply with Federal Laws and Executive Orders that North Dakota deemed Constitutional.

I was sorry to see that Dr. Rick Becker did not win the election for U.S. Senator.  I thought that he had a very good chance of doing so.  I don’t know why Forum Communications reporter and columnist Rob Port chose to mock Dr. Rick Becker both prior to and after the election, making statements that Dr. Rick Becker was not as popular or influential as he thought he was.  North Dakotans very much needed someone like Dr. Rick Becker to represent and advocate for average ordinary people.

The Nicest Vehicle For Sale In Dickinson North Dakota

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On Tuesday evening I drove my 1994 Toyota Land Cruiser to the Upin Thai restaurant in Dickinson to pick up a Red Curry Chicken that I had ordered. I bought this vehicle in 2014 in Bismarck from the owner of Bearscat Bakery for $4,500. Since then, after driving and learning more about it, I have been in love with Land Cruisers.

From time-to-time I look on BisMan Classifieds for Toyota Land Cruisers for sale, and I bought two more 1992 models that were located in Bismarck, one in 2016 and the other in 2020. I even used to look for them on nationwide salvage vehicle auction websites, because they can withstand substantial front end or rear end damage and still run & drive fine.

For readers who are not familiar with Toyota Land Cruisers, the Toyota Motor Company intentionally and knowingly over-built Land Cruisers in comparison to its other vehicles which were already good quality, so that they would be trouble-free in very remote harsh environments such as Vietnam, Thailand, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Phillipines, Africa, Australia, South America, and the Middle East.

In almost every country on Earth, male children and adults know what Toyota Land Cruisers are, not necessarily as a status symbol, but as a way to get to or from some place that is very difficult to reach. The U.S. is likely the only country where most people do not know what a Land Cruiser is, because U.S. roads are modern and in good condition.

I was very surprised on Tuesday night, to see a 2001 Toyota Land Cruiser for sale, across the street from the Upin Thai restaurant in Dickinson, North Dakota:

The empty lot where this Toyota Land Cruiser was parked, which actually turned out to be the Lexus/Luxury version, is owned by Ray’s Auto Electric. At the end of this video, the contact phone number shown on the passenger-side window is for Ray’s Auto Electric. In 2018 I bought a 2000 Toyota 4Runner on this lot from Ray’s Auto Electric, that has been a good vehicle for me. This 4Runner had come from an auto auction needing some repair that was done by Ray’s before I got it.

The reason why I am saying that this is the nicest vehicle for sale in Dickinson right now, is because it is. Though it currently has 207K miles on it, and an asking price of $13,500, over the next ten years and 200K miles, it should only need normal maintenance like oil changes, brakes, and maybe a fuel pump. Upon further research, this 4.7 liter V8 engine does have a timing belt, not a timing chain, and it is strongly recommended that the timing belt be replaced every 90K miles.

At the end of ten years and another 200K miles, it should be worth about $5K-$10K because its body & chassis will still be solid, and its engine & transmission serviceable. ( Some 1990s Land Cruisers with over 200K miles currently sell for 60% of their original price. )

Altogether you would get a very safe, reliable, comfortable, good looking vehicle with only $8K total depreciation over ten years and 200K miles.

In comparison, a new Jeep Wrangler, Jeep Cherokee, Chevy Suburban, Ford Explorer, Ford Bronco, or a new Dodge truck would experience about $30K-$40K depreciation over ten years and 200K miles. And be more likely to require an expensive repair along the way.

Please read this much better article by someone else:. “Why I Chose A Used Lexus LX470 Versus A Brand New Ford Bronco” https://www.insidehook.com/article/vehicles/used-lexus-lx-470-review

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRqrr1cq/

Unwanted Sexualization!

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When YouTube creator Isabel Paige uploads videos of herself bathing nude in a river, and if you are male and look at these videos, you are probably guilty of Unwanted Sexualization.

If a young woman wears tights and a sports bras at a public gym or fitness center, and if you are male and look at her, you are probably guilty of Unwanted Sexualization.

If a young woman wears a Bikini to a beach, a lake, a swimming pool, or park, and if you are male and look at her, you are probably guilty of Unwanted Sexualization.

Women will explain to you, that when women bathe nude and upload videos of them bathing nude, wear tights & sports bras to a gym, wear a Bikini to a beach, pool, or park, the last thing that women want is some man looking at them. This is Unwanted Sexualization!

Below I have included a few videos to further illustrate and clarify Unwanted Sexualization:

Here we have a young lady who has just finished swimming, she is now trying to dry herself off, and has someone videoing her drying off. Clearly, she doesn’t want any man looking at her, because if he did, he would likely be guilty of Unwanted Sexualization:

@

♬ –

The young lady shown in the video below, who was just minding her own business at the pool while being videoed, and was asked to leave, shows us an example of Unwanted Sexualization by the property manager, the camera man, and her 1.9 million followers on TikTok!

https://www.tiktok.com/@thealexiaskye/video/7101432492577672494?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=6947746048560809477

Even older women like Mary Burke, are the victims of Unwanted Sexualization. Why can’t you just leave Mary alone! She doesn’t want you looking at her in the videos that she made and posted on TikTok, you perverts!

https://www.tiktok.com/@themaryburke/video/7104254941291760938?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=6947746048560809477

If you think that women wear tights and yoga pants in order to get the attention of men, as if they want men looking at them, you’d be wrong. Women wear tights and yoga pants for utility and practicality, as shown in this video below:

@rachelfoster512

Re creating my first ever viral video😂 lets hope this one stays up 😅

♬ original sound – Rachel Foster

How Western North Dakotans Should Dress When Visiting The State Capitol In Bismarck

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Western North Dakota is very sparsely populated, with very small towns separated from each other by long distances. Most of these towns have fewer than 2,000 people, with a single grocery store, if they are lucky.

Because the people are so isolated, it is hard for them to know what is going on in the rest of the World. Here are some examples of how Western North Dakotans should dress, if they should visit the State Capitol in Bismarck:

@dirkthecrook

Let’s get dressed circa 1940’s. #fyp #vintage #mensfashion #1940

♬ Forever Young – Alphaville

@dirkthecrook

German 1940’s suit. #fyp #mensfashion

♬ The Love Me Or Die – C.W. Stoneking

https://www.tiktok.com/@dirkthecrook/video/7117738545946578178?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=6947746048560809477

Videos Showing Women Staying Home, Cooking, Covering Themselves, And Behaving Correctly

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Especially since the 1970s in the United States, women have sought to abandon their traditional roles that they have had for at least the past 5,000 years. Instead of being a homemaker, staying home, keeping house, cooking, taking care of children, and being a helpmate to their husbands, women have tried to do anything and everything besides these things.

Here are a few of my favorite videos of women cooking, covering themselves, and behaving correctly:

@abir.sag

🍗🍚🔥#roastedchicken #rice #abirzkitchen

♬ Jungle – Emma Louise

@abir.sag

Reply to @amjad.bb3 لي حزر الطبخة يتفضل معزوم😋 #كبسة_سعودية #كبسة_دجاج #كبسة #سعودية #saudiarabia #fyp #abirzkitchen

♬ Arabic Music – TimTaj

@abir.sag

شو اكثر حلو برمضان بتحبو؟ #ramadan #middleeastern #abirzkitchen #dessert

♬ Konvoy – Orheyn

The Lovely Queen Marlene On TikTok

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Where I have been living for the past nine years in western North Dakota, it is very sparsely populated. The town where I bought a house two years ago, has a population of 600. The other nearby towns within 10-30 miles, Havelock, Daglum, De Sart, Pierce, Whetstone Butte, Schefield, have been abandoned. But then there’s Amidon and Lefor, each with a population of about 50 people.

Some of the main reasons why western North Dakota has very few people, is because it gets so cold here in the winter, as low as -50 degrees Fahrenheit, with many days each year of 40-50 mph winds, and the landscape is mostly flat treeless prairie.

For the past nine years I have had time to consider why there is a shortage of women in western North Dakota, and a scarcity of attractive women. My belief, is that when the German and Ukrainian immigrant farmers arrived by ship in the east coast cities of the U.S. in the early 1900s, and then began the journey by wagon heading west, the attractive German and Ukrainian women escaped by sneaking off along the way, or pleading for rescue from passersby. The attractive women didn’t want to begin again living in 10’x12′ stacked grass sod huts, in freezing weather, with high winds for most of the year, all alone on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

Western North Dakota is a good place for me to live, because I don’t like people, or being around people most of the time. However, because I grew up in a sunny, warm, picturesque town on the Atlantic Ocean in Florida, the kind of place where beautiful women from all over the World wanted to visit or live, I just took it for granted that this is what life would be like. Attractive, healthy, happy, fun women who wanted to date, go places, do things, was what I was accustomed to being around.

Women who grew up taking ballet class, piano lessons, riding lessons, and knew that they were going to college whether they wanted to or not. A job, profession, or occupation was just something for them to do while young, dating, and waiting to become married. They had no worries. I never had a reason to believe or expect that there would be a shortage of women like this in my future.

Which brings me to Queen Marlene on TikTok. Marlene De Lima was born and raised in sunny South Africa. If you were White and born in South Africa, you were middle-class, upper-middle-class, or very wealthy. Girls took dance lessons, music lessons, riding lessons, played tennis, went to the beach, sun bathed by their swimming pool, frequently had barbeques, family vacations, whether they lived in a city or on a farm.

The middle-class, upper-middle-class childhood that Marlene De Lima had growing up in South Africa was probably slightly more privileged than mine was growing up in a small coastal town in Florida, but was still very similar. And Marlene has all of the qualities and characteristics of the women that I was around growing up, things that I miss: showering, getting ready, getting dressed in the morning in clothes, jewelry, and hair that looks nice; caring about their appearance, behavior, things that they say and do, to maintain and leave a good impression.

I recognize something different in Marlene that is particular to South Africa. In the mid 1600s, the Dutch East India Company began to establish a ship re-supply operation in Cape Town, South Africa. Many former employees of the Dutch East India Company remained in South Africa to become settlers. These Dutch settlers sometimes married indigenous people, and created a new South African ethnic group who spoke Dutch, called the Cape Coloureds. Because of the appearance of Marlene’s eyes, hair, complexion, callipygous ass, and impetuousness, I believe that at least one of her ancestors was a Cape Coloured.

I like Marlene, I think that she is attractive and very spirited. It does not surprise me that she works as a sales representative.

https://www.tiktok.com/@queen_marlene_/video/7109124973217844485?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=6947746048560809477
https://www.tiktok.com/@queen_marlene_/video/7110245754093997317?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=6947746048560809477

Many Of The Issues This Spring Are Too Tangled For Me To Write About

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This winter and early spring of 2022, I have spent a great deal of time following many different news items, but most of them are too complicated and unclear to make sense of and write about.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, in my opinion, in many people’s opinion, is not what it appears to be, or what we are told. Yes, Vladimir Putin would like to have Ukraine, its resources, its seaports back under Russian control. Yes, Vladimir Putin does not want NATO forces in Ukraine. But, there is evidence that the Ukrainian government is so corrupt, that Vladimir Putin might be doing the Ukrainian people a favor by taking control of its government.

In the United States, President Joe Biden has shown signs of dementia both before and during his Presidency. There has been substantial evidence of immense vote fraud during the 2020 Presidential Election. The U.S. Supreme Court, Vice President Mike Pence, Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, State Courts, U.S. News, all appear to be in collusion to allow a fraudulent U.S. Presidential Election and a visibly incompetent mentally-ill person to serve as President.

In North Dakota, which is a very conservative state, there is widespread evidence that many politicians with Democratic beliefs at heart, claim to be Republican and run as a Republican in elections, but once elected, they behave like a Democrat. This happens with City Commissioners, County Commissioners, State Representatives, State Senators, U.S. Representatives, U.S. Senators, and even the Governor of North Dakota. North Dakotans don’t seem to notice until the damage is already done.

I think that North Dakota State Representative Rick Becker would have made a better U.S. Senator than Senator John Hoeven. John Hoeven was Governor of North Dakota from 2000-2010, and U.S. Senator from 2011-2022. That’s twenty-two years in politics, and his net worth is about $45million. This is the exact same thing as Senators Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham, they become life-long politicians, are super-wealthy, are so far out-of-touch with normal life, they are like royalty. The U.S. was never supposed to have a permanent ruling-class royalty like the Czars of Russia, ordinary everyday citizens were supposed to participate in government for a brief time, hence avoiding corruption.

In my local District 39, there are multiple people running for State Senator and State Representative. Leading up to this race, there was a recent change in the North Dakota voting district map, which both the timing and configuration appeared to me, in my opinion to involve “gerrymandering”, changing the boundaries to disadvantage certain local politicians and candidates, and give an advantage to others. The first evidence of this, in my opinion, appeared at the District 39 Republican Party Officer election held in Amidon.

At the District 39 Republican Party Officer election in Amidon, from this point on, in my view, there began a division into two factions, one group aligned with business, and the other aligned with conservative principles. In making decisions, the first group asks themselves, what do the wealthy people who backed them expect them to do, and the second group asks themselves what does the Constitution say, how does this affect people’s rights, impact families?

The North Dakota Highway Patrol, in my opinion became the victim of the “Me Too” movement. What most people don’t know, is that there are probably only a total of fifty Highway Patrol a.k.a. State Police in North Dakota. On any given night, there are only about twelve Highway Patrol on duty across the entire state. The next closest HP Officer available for backup, is usually at least eighty miles away. In order for HP Officers to be able to handle potentially dangerous or deadly vehicle stops by themselves at night, the NDHP usually only hire experienced military combat veterans, typically U.S. Marines who have recently gotten out of the military or are already working in another Law Enforcement agency.

The NDHP Officers are usually more no-nonsense when they make a traffic stop. This is because of who the NDHP hires, the NDHP training, and because they want these HP Officers to continue operating in a military-like fashion. Very recently, a woman was stopped for speeding in the Fargo area by a HP Officer, and afterward she made a formal complaint alleging that the HP Officer got too personal with her because he asked her about going to college, what were her career plans, and he later tried to “follow” her on Instagram.

Over the preceding year there had been a couple of allegations by two women against two NDHP Officers for what was alleged to have occurred during a night of partying amongst a handful of off-duty HP Officers. Supposedly, at an HP Officer’s house, alcohol was consumed and so-and-so touched so-and-so.

In my opinion, NDHP Officers have suffered through their own physical abuse, brutality, horrible conditions, dangerous combat deployments, and mental trauma while serving in the U.S. Military. Now in their late 20s to early 40s, they continue to deal with life & death situations almost every day at work. Society is now so stupid, backwards, and dysfunctional, that we tolerate and seem to encourage women complaining that a NDHP Officer was “creepy” at a traffic stop, or touched her in a hot tub at a party. The stupid bitches that want to complain about what I just said, are too stupid to have any idea what the NDHP Officers have been through. Our society is probably not worth protecting or saving, mostly because we have allowed women to destroy it.

A couple of months ago, not far from where I live, a Hettinger County Sheriff Deputy was called to the Mott-Regent K-12 School, for what was described to him as something like a child-custody dispute. When the Sheriff Deputy arrived, he approached and talked to the suspect, who was the father of a child at this school. The father refused to exit the school, he became more adamant, then combative, then began to physically struggle with the Sheriff Deputy.

The witness statements, school security video, and Sheriff Deputy statements, all indicate that the Sheriff Deputy was choked to the point of unconsciousness twice during his physical struggle with the father, who was also trying to remove a knife from the Sheriff Deputy’s belt. It seems miraculous to me, that the Sheriff Deputy was able reach his firearm, fire once, and kill the father, just before he was choked to death and stabbed to death by the father.

For the entirety of the news coverage of this Law Enforcement Officer shooting at the Mott-Regent K-12 School, the name of the Sheriff Deputy was lawfully withheld at the request of the Sheriff’s Office. Just a few days ago, the name of the Sheriff Deputy was revealed in a news article, because it was contained within North Dakota BCI documents. I have met this Sheriff Deputy several times, and he is probably the nicest, least combative of the Hettinger County Sheriff Deputies. I think that it will be very difficult for him to ever get over this traumatic experience of both almost having been killed, and killing someone else, all happening so quickly, unexpectedly in a normal uneventful routine day.

The recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas by an 18 year old, is very suspicious to me. The Uvalde Police Department is going to forever face criticism for waiting between 40 to 90 minutes to confront the 18 year old barricaded within an elementary school classroom where he killed two teachers and seventeen children. Were the Uvalde Police Officers following orders to not attempt to enter the classroom, were they waiting for S.W.A.T. to arrive, or were they just too scared of getting shot?

There are several things that make me wonder what actually happened at the school in Uvalde, Texas: 1) The News Media and Law Enforcement have ceased mentioning what happened to the armed Uvalde Police School Resource Officer who was supposed to be on duty at the school, but was absent from the school at that moment for some reason.

2) It was school policy and procedure for all building doors to remain closed & locked on the outside. Why was one school door that normally remains closed & locked, left visibly propped open at that moment? Who unlocked and propped this door open? Undergoing a Police pursuit, how did this 18 year old shooter know to run to the exact school door that was left unlocked and propped open?

3) Several different firearm experts have added up the cost of the 18 year old shooter’s two rifles, one pistol, many rifle magazines, very large amount of ammo, expensive rifle laser sight, and body armor, and calculated that this is about $9,000 worth of equipment. A) This 18 year old had not worked at his job at Wendy’s for a year, he had been mocked in high school for being poor, how did he get $9,000 worth of equipment? B) He did not have a driver’s license, how did he provide ID to purchase his two rifles and one pistol? C) Most experienced long-time shooters have had difficulty obtaining even small amounts of ammo due to supply shortages, how did this 18 year old manage to get 1600 rounds of ammo?

4) Carrying two rifles, one pistol, and the amount of rifle magazines that this 18 year old had, would be extremely difficult, especially while being the subject of a Police pursuit. Military veterans say that these things would be a difficult heavy load to carry, even with practice while on duty in the military.

5) How was this untrained? 18 year old able to successfully flee from a Police shootout with multiple trained Police Officers, get in a vehicle, drive to the school area, and run on foot and enter the school carrying two rifles, one pistol, and many loaded magazines, a difficult heavy load?

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTd3N5744/?k=1

I Hate Ashley Timm’s Tattoos

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This evening I saw for the very first time, a video from the TikTok account MsAshleyTimm. In this video, Ashley Timm was excitedly explaining that she was unexpectedly asked to interview for the operations manager position where she worked.

I thought that Ashley was very nice looking, attractive, well-spoken, intelligent, and likeable. However, I was horrified to see that both of her forearms were almost completely covered in awkward tattoos. I was so angry at her for doing this to herself.

Even though I knew it was mean, my anger was greater than my concern for Ashley’s feelings, and I wrote, “You could have been so beautiful without those tattoos, you diminished your potential so much, shows lack of good sense.”

In response, Ashley made a TikTok reaction video, as if I was telling her that she would never accomplish or amount to anything. That’s not what I meant at all.

I commented back to Ashley that she had come to the attention of higher management. I said that she would probably eventually meet the actual business owner or CEO, who might invite her to a dinner party or country club. If not for her tattoos, she could have socialized with the upper class, but those people worked too hard clawing their way to the top, to hang with street people.

Ashley replied back that she had already met the business owners, they liked her tattoos, so what I was saying wasn’t true.

I then did some research on Ashley, where she was working, where she was from, what was her background. She was an unusually interesting person.

Briefly, Ashley was from Corona, California. After graduating from high school in 2003, she worked for five years in human resources for a large retail store. Ashley then joined the Navy where she worked in operations for 12 years, receiving several commendations for competency. She was stationed in Japan, Bahrain, and the U.S.

When Ashley’s second enlistment was completed, she began attending college full-time, I believe studying Criminal Justice. At this same time, Ashley is working full-time at her job, and she has just completed writing a “Lesbian Romance Novel”. Ashley is quite vocal about being a lesbian.

In doing my research on Ashley, I watched approximately half of her TikTok videos. More than once she elaborates that she would rather be immersed in hot lava with piranhas and run through a wood chipper than date a man. She is adamant that she is absolutely not attracted to men.

The more I watched Ashley, the more I liked her. Even being as mean as she can be, Ashley comes across as nicer and friendlier than most women. Just about everyone comments that she looks and acts exactly like the actress Amy Adams.

I do like Ashley, her looks, her personality, her mannerisms, her humor, her competency. Even though she’ll deny it a thousand times, I believe that she likes some men, but will not accept these feelings because they go against everything she wants to believe.

My opinion, is that some of the things that Ashley does, staying excessively busy, the tattoos, engaging in minimalism, and some depravation, is to not allow or block out some feelings that she doesn’t want.

Of course, she blocked me. I don’t blame her, she shouldn’t waste her time and energy arguing with me. Thinking of her, even porcupines like to be picked up, held, and petted sometimes.

Here is the first video that I saw of Ashley:

@msashleytimm

nothing is final but… i’ve only been working here for like a month 😂😂 #fyp #movingonup #hotelbusiness #GameTok

♬ original sound – Ashley Timm

Southwest North Dakota’s Strange Way Of Handling The April 2022 Blizzard

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On Saturday, April 9th, a co-worker said something to me about heavy snowfall forecasted for this coming Tuesday. Recently I had been looking at the weather reports for a few days ahead, but I hadn’t noticed that snow was expected. Temperatures for the past week had been in the 50s, and I thought that winter was over.

I had planned on driving my 1982 diesel Mercedes on the long drive to work for the remainder of the spring, summer, and fall because it gets about 25 mpg. This vehicle is not good at all in the snow, because it only has six inches of ground clearance, it’s rear-wheel-drive, and the front end is very heavy. I am glad that someone said something to me about snow, I fear that I might not have realized what was going to happen in time to know that I needed to drive a different vehicle. I thought about what could have happened, having to drive one hour to work, not being able to make it home after work, becoming stuck, inconveniencing other people, and looking like an idiot.

On Monday I put a full tank of gas in my 1997 Dodge 1500 4×4. I bought this truck for $2,000 a couple years ago after seeing it on Facebook Marketplace. I believed that this was a good deal, even though I recognized that this truck either already had or showed symptoms of everything that had gone wrong with my 1996 Dodge 1500 4×4, including a variety of transmission peculiarities, headlight malfunctions, intermittent starter problems, and more. But, I had already learned several work-arounds for what was wrong, and I had faith in this truck, though it was far from trouble-free. I am emphasizing that there is nothing special about this truck.

At the grocery store on Monday, I noticed that the parking lot was much fuller than normal. Inside the store, almost all of the bread was gone. People were stocking up on groceries in preparation for this winter storm. When I looked at Facebook, TikTok, weather reports, and news services on Monday evening, there were notices and discussions about the blizzard that was supposed to begin at 6:00 a.m. Tuesday morning and continue through 6:00 p.m. Thursday evening.

On Tuesday morning at 3:00 a.m., it began to snow. When I began driving to work at 5:00 a.m., the streets and highways had not been plowed at all, not once. The blizzard wasn’t supposed to start until 6:00 a.m., so I hadn’t expected there to be so much snow accumulation right away. The depth of snow, amount of blowing snow, and greatly reduced visibility, made driving difficult. I was glad that there was no one else on the roads at that time in the early morning.

My initial impression, was that the snowplows in the several counties that I drove through on my way to work, hadn’t started plowing yet, because the blizzard had just started. As Tuesday went on, I spoke to co-workers, checked the news, weather forecasts, and Facebook, and I noticed that citizens, the North Dakota DOT, and Law Enforcement were advising everyone to stay home for the duration of the blizzard, if they did not have to be out.

Readers may be wondering, why was I at work? I have been working at this particular 100-acre industrial site for the past five years, which is manned 24 hours per day, every day of the year, including every holiday. If someone from the company that I work for wasn’t on site performing hourly reporting/documentation, we would all lose our jobs, not just the people who didn’t show up.

On Tuesday evening, I was able to drive home. There were some snowdrifts on Hwy 22, and visibility was reduced at times, but conditions were nearly the same as what a driver would encounter during a typical North Dakota winter snowfall with high winds. Wednesday morning was when some of my co-workers began calling in saying that they could not get out of their driveway because the city streets had not been plowed, or they made it out to the highway, but the highway had not been plowed.

I realized on Wednesday morning that I was possibly going to have to stay at the industrial site where I work for a day or two, to fill-in for co-workers who could not get there. I stopped at a rural small-town gas station to fuel up my truck again. At this gas station, 9 times out of 10 the card reader on the gas pump will not process my debit card, and I have to go inside to pay. But this gas station was closed now, because of the blizzard. Luckily, my newest credit card worked at the pump. However, there was large diesel Chevy 3500 truck towing a large equipment trailer that was parked at an adjacent pump, not pumping diesel, not running, that looked to be stuck there because the fuel pump card reader wouldn’t work.

Later on Wednesday, an older co-worker of mine called and said that he could not come to work, not because the roads weren’t plowed, but because he could not get fuel for his large Chevy 3500 dually, because his local small-town gas station was closed. He and his wife did not have a credit card or debit card. ( Some readers will know and understand why some people don’t have a credit card or debit card, while other readers will not know or understand.)

Between Wednesday and Thursday, three of my co-workers were unable to make it to work, one because city streets were not plowed, one because highway was not plowed, and one because he could not get fuel, the gas station was closed. A fourth co-worker got stuck going home, because the city streets were not plowed. I had to stay at work to cover two shifts for other people, in addition to my own work shift.

When I was able to leave work to go home on Thursday evening, at the same time that the blizzard was supposed to have ended at 6:00 p.m., the roads that I took for the first 30 miles were icy, but not covered in deep snow. Unexpectedly, when I got to within 20 miles of my house, Hwy 22 was closed by a Sheriff and Highway Patrol. There was a tractor-truck & trailer, and two small Kia cars behind it, bumper-to-bumper at a complete stop on Hwy 22, without their hazard flashers on, waiting to be rear-ended, just sitting there about 300 feet from what looked like an accident.

I drove up to the where the Sheriff was standing, and then I could see that something like a Chrysler 300 sedan was stuck or stopped at a snowdrift in the road. There were no emergency vehicles, tow truck, or snowplow anywhere. All the Sheriff had to say was, “Hwy 22 is closed.” I turned around, and while driving back, I stopped and told the male driver of the first Kia car, “There’s a snowdrift, the road is closed, going to be closed for a while.” As I started driving away, I heard this man in the Kia yelling at me out his open car window, “Fuck you, you mother fucking cocksucker.”

I think that the man in the Kia was yelling and cursing at me, because he was wanting to ask me when the road would be clear, and how to get where he was going, but I had no answer for him, I wasn’t in charge of this, and there was no alternate route that I could tell him. Shortly after this, I saw that my Dodge truck transmission overheat warning light was on, so I had to pull off the road at a turn-out and stop. With the slightly bad transmission in this Dodge truck, I can’t drive the whole way home in 4wd-high, or with the overdrive enabled.

I went back to the industrial site where I worked. I looked on the internet, and I could not find any clear answers on what highways were open, what highways were closed, and when closed highways would be open. I hated to even try, but I was tired of still being at work, so I set out attempting to go a different way which I knew would be much, much worse.

I drove 20-35 miles west on a small highway that was icy and had bad snowdrifts, to get to Hwy 85 that had flashing signs saying it was closed, drove 45 miles on closed Hwy 85 that was very icy, with very bad snowdrifts, to get to another very icy, worst snowdrifts-of-all highway for 20-35 miles. Along the way, I saw a couple of 4-wheel-drive vehicles that had gone off the road and became stuck, but no one was still inside them.

I was thinking and realizing, that just because that Chrysler 300 on Hwy 22 couldn’t make it past that one snowdrift when I was 20 miles from my home, I had to turn around and drive 90 miles the other way, and go through at least a dozen snow drifts that were as bad as that one on Hwy 22, but in the dark. If that tractor-truck & trailer behind the Chrysler 300 would have been in front of it instead, that snowdrift would have been obliterated enough for everyone behind the tractor-truck & trailer to get through.

Being upset and dissatisfied with what had happened over the past three days, I was puzzled at how southwest North Dakota had handled this blizzard. It can snow in North Dakota from October through April, often times for days and weeks in a row throughout the winter. Starting out with completely clear & dry roads on Monday April 11, why was it such a big deal and difficult job that snow plows couldn’t run on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday?

To put it a different way, North Dakota has to cope with snowfall from October through April, it can snow for days and weeks in the winter, how could the snowplows in North Dakota be overwhelmed from just three days of snow in April? The highways in rural areas did not have an accumulation of deep snow due to the high winds, the problem on the rural highways was snowdrifts in certain places. It appeared to me that one single county snowplow making one pass per every 1-2 hours would have adequately dealt with the snowdrifts.

The other thing that was very upsetting to me, and handled wrong in my opinion, was that every small-town gas station and rural emergency services building was closed. If I would have had to pick up a stranded motorist on Hwy 22 or Hwy 85, where would I take them? What would I do with them? I couldn’t have taken them very far, Hwy 22 and Hwy 85 were closed, remember?

It appeared to me, that for some reason, the snow plows were held back from going anywhere, or prevented from doing very much on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in certain counties. I don’t know what political fight was going on, or if some type of statement was trying to be made, by making sure that roads would be closed, instead of open.

Here are a couple of Facebook comments from Friday, from people wondering the same things that I was wondering:

Connie O. H.,  “Are the county plows out on the county roads?”

Thomas J. S., “It was a big snowstorm, and certainly a serious challenge to life and limb, but IT WAS NOT a “blizzard” by the definition used by the National Weather Service…The people of North Dakota know what a blizzard is, and this storm lacked 2 of 5 required parameters.”

The more I thought, “What would I have to do with a stranded motorist? Take them back to my house, feed them, find them a place to sleep?” Then I realized, that’s why all of the small-town gas stations were closed, the owner/managers/workers didn’t want people being dropped off, having no place to go, and having to stay inside a gas station & convenience store that normally closes at 6:00 p.m. Like Daytona Beach during Black Spring Break, all of the businesses in North Dakota close during a blizzard.

In order to understand how much North Dakotans really do not want to help other people, here are some quotations that I copied and pasted from Facebook:

Ryan B., “They should have let them sit there. There is no reason official’s should risk their lives for stupidity.! Before anyone says you don’t know their reasons let me help you I don’t care!”

Lisa K. to Ryan B., “EXACTLY!! It was all about THEM! Now they have put other peoples live in danger because they were a-holes!”

David H., “Lots of warning should of just let them sit.”

Jason B., “Its like camping….for morons.”

Pam S. A., “stop defending these fools”

Joyce S. P., “…our first responders should NOT be expected to risk their lives because of someone elses stupidity and gross neglect of common sense…there needs to be a huge fine AND jail time for any and all that require a rescue like this UNLESS it was truly a matter of life or death that caused them to be out on the roads.”

Elizabeth K., “Shame on those people that put others at risk!”

Bob B.K., “And Why were they out on the roads???? GOOD GRIEF!! People must think that it will never happen to them.”

Mavis T. B., “Some people have absolutely NO common sense.”

Dana S., “Had to travel during a no travel warning didn’t they.”

Rock T., “You know the old saying. There’s a blizzard coming, let’s drive around and get stuck so people can risk their lives saving us!”

Do North Dakotans even know that there are heavier snowfall areas than North Dakota?  Alaska, the mountains of Colorado, Utah, Washington, and Oregon have much heavier and more frequent snowfall than North Dakota.  Do people in AK, CO, UT, WA, and OR want to deny drivers who get stuck in snow assistance?  Probably not, because it is a common occurrence for drivers to get stuck in the snow in winter.  And these states make an effort to keep the roads clear, even when it is snowing and the wind is blowing.

Rising Fuel Prices Makes Me Even More Proud Of My 1982 Mercedes 300D Turbodiesel

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When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s in Florida, my family was very car-conscious. My parents had a love of cars, that had to do with their appearance, performance, style, and as a status symbol. My father was an attorney in a small town, he didn’t make enough money to buy what would have been his first pick of new cars, but by looking in the newsprint Auto-Trader Classifieds and used car lots, he was able to buy a Lotus Europa, an Austin-Healey, a Porsche 914, an Audi 5000, and a couple of Jaguar XJ6s.

All of these used cars that my father bought needed never-ending repairs. Especially bad, by far the worst, were the XJ6s, so he bought two of these. The 1978 XJ6 became abandoned in the side yard, because it wouldn’t start. I needed to go somewhere one day, and I took the keys to it, it started, and I drove it. I thought that I was going to get in trouble for taking it, I was a sophomore in high school, but I didn’t, so I just kept driving it.

At my high school, in several of my classes, was a tall, pretty girl, whose parents owned five car dealerships. Through high school, she sent me a subscription each year of the duPont Registry car magazine. The duPont Registry at that time was a thick, gloss print magazine of exotic cars for sale: Porsche, Ferrari, Aston-Martin, Mercedes, Maserati, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Pantera, BMW. Here is a link in case you want to see what this magazine looks like these days https://www.dupontregistry.com/autos/

( The tall, pretty girl in my high school classes, the closest resemblance in appearance, demeanor, and speaking, is this girl Jane from Vero Beach, Florida https://www.tiktok.com/@nachoslicker/video/7074611747117714731?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id6947746048560809477 )

Looking at and reading about all of the exotic cars for sale in the duPont Registry, and trying to work on the broken cars that my family owned, was probably the main reason why I wanted to go to college to become a Mechanical Engineer. I wanted to understand, design, develop, and work on cars, and be able to afford the cars that I wanted to own.

When I finally graduated from college with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, one of the first jobs that I had was working at a bridge construction company in Florida. At this company, there was an engineer in his 50s named John who had worked all across the U.S. and South Africa. He considered himself to be an expert on Mercedes, especially diesel Mercedes. Nearly every day for the time that I worked there, we talked about Mercedes, especially because he was always going to look at cars that were for sale. Back then, you always wanted to see its “Book”, it had to have its “Book” if it was going to be considered an “honest” car.

As it was becoming the later half of the 1990s, from the automobiles that Mercedes began introducing, it appeared that the prominence of Mercedes was over. The peak of Mercedes design, style, sophistication, engineering, and distinction had been reached with the mid 1980s-early 1990s “S-Class”, designated within Mercedes as W126 (You don’t have to watch the entire 26-minute video below, this is just to get the general idea.)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0HU9H7aABGM%3Fstart%3D32
The Pinnacle Of Mercedes, the W126

The 1990 300SE shown in the video above was roughly an $50K-$60K car when new. Though this car was well-made, from new it required regular scheduled maintenance at the Mercedes dealer, which was expensive compared to a Ford or Toyota. Once this vehicle became 5-6 years old, repairs on something like the air-conditioner could be several thousand dollars at a Mercedes dealer.

These mid 1980s-early 1990s S-Class W126 Mercedes were intricately complicated in electrical, fuel injection, and transmission. Once these cars became 10 years old, their used resale price was down to $8K-$20K, compared to their original sales price of $50K-$60K. One reason being, if the transmission needed an overhaul, the engine & transmission had to be removed from the vehicle as one unit, the transmission alone could not be removed by itself.

In my opinion, which is probably the truth, Mercedes began to be so electrically over-complicated because it was in competition with Lexus. Prior to the Mercedes W126, Mercedes owners had been satisfied with a more spartan vehicle: sturdy seats, plain dash & door trim, straight-forward analog gauges, simple controls, durable transmissions, reliable engines, and very high build-quality. These were the Mercedes W116 and W123:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ojLJK0JxowE%3Fstart%3D32
Mercedes W116, 300SD shown above

In the video above, this shows an S-Class W116, which was a luxury vehicle. However, the Mercedes W123 consists of 240D, 300D, and 300TD which were used in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, and South America as personal vehicles and taxis:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L1b1JF6X55E%3Fstart%3D32
Mercedes W123, 300D Turbodiesel shown above

In the 1970s-1980s there were three different World events that caused gas shortages and periods of high gas prices in the U.S. In 1973 there was an Oil Embargo by OPEC. In 1979 there was the Iranian Revolution. In 1980 there was the Iran-Iraq War. At that time, diesel was less expensive per gallon than gasoline. And diesel vehicles got higher mpg than gasoline vehicles. In the U.S., the vehicles available that used diesel, got good mpg, and were reliable were Volkswagen Rabbit, Isuzu Pup, Audi 4000/5000, Mercedes 240D/300D/300TD.

The origin of my 1982 Mercedes 300D Turbodiesel is as follows. A farmer named Don Zimbleman of Fullerton, North Dakota bought this Mercedes new at a dealership in 1982. On November 17, 2020 there was a Don Zimbleman Farm Retirement Auction where this Mercedes was sold as lot #50. Don Zimbleman died four days later at the age of 85. Here is his very interesting obituary https://www.dahlstromfuneralhome.com/obituary/donald-zimbleman

The person who bought this Mercedes at auction for about $2,600, was a Missile Systems Crew Chief at Minot Air Force Base. He removed the exhaust, fuel pressure limiter, turbo boost limiter, and installed a larger turbo. A little more than a year later, in 2021 an oil field worker from Watford City bought this Mercedes, with the intention of putting its engine into a Toyota truck, and scrapping the car. In the Fall of 2021 I bought this car for $3,000, and saved it from being destroyed.

My 1982 Mercedes 300D Turbodiesel

When I bought this 1982 Mercedes 300D Turbodiesel, no one was impressed. I take that back, one of my co-workers who is in his early 60s, he recognized the car before he recognized that it was me driving it. He told me that he had always wanted one, his employer let him drive his in about 1990, it was very fast he said, it would go about 120 mph. How fast does this one go? About 125 mph, it has a larger turbo, and no exhaust on it.

But the important thing now, is that it gets about 30 mpg, because most of the driving that I do is not in stop-and-go-traffic, I mostly drive on highways in rural areas.