Longest Thread Ever

[The Midnight]

Don;t know about the X Games, but what does stop is my coaching season. I'm a little depressed right now...not enough to call a hotline, but I had such a great time coaching and our season is now over (we finished 6-1-1). Seriously, if any of you are considering coaching ANY sport, whether it be for your own child, nephew, niece, whomever...just DO IT! There is nothing more rewarding than working with children.

Yeah I've recently started helping leading discussion/teaching bible to youth at our Church. It's been fun, and I've learnt a few lessons really quickly.

- First, don't treat them like they're children. Treat them as if they're one of the adults and respect them (I learnt that the hard way - too much joking around, if they don't find it funny you ended up looking like a real dick).

- Secondly, be consistent with them - you can't pretend to be nice to them one day, and think that's enough and shun them the next. You've got to build on that relationship.

- Thirdly, be honest, they can tell when you're lying and it's not a good look.

- Fourth - lead them - you have to build relationships, but at the end of the day you're there to set an example, lead them in the right direction.

It's a steep learning curve, but it's a challenge I'm looking forward to.

 

[Stifle Tower]

Good for you Hotttnickkk. Guess I'll have to change my mind about you - sounds like you're a nice guy after all.
And very good advice about working with children.

 

[babe]

Ah, so that's why this thread is so damn long...

It was ambitious, maybe grandiose, to call it the "Longest Thread Ever" before posting "I'm bored". And while I've mulled the clinical diagostic criteria of OCD a bit, and made jokes about it, you have to understand the nature of "inspiration". Someone caught the idea, and posted a pic of Babe Ruth pointing at the bleachers on the famous occasion of one of his more memorable home runs, and said "Babe called it". And now it is a moral committment to the concept. . . . lol.

 

[babe]

The night sky, it floats by
Like the world is standing still
I feel you, and fear you
All I have is time to kill

The darkness, it haunts us
Like voices from the dead
With no fear you stay here
Crashing thunder overhead

When the sky is falling down, will you still be around?

I tell my wife and kids that I will be.

whenever you need me, just call out my name, and I'll be there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnDm3qr1Knk

 

[babe]

Yeah he "intellectualize" everything. That's the problem I have with him. I don't think we can always "think through" everything. I do believe our mental capacity is limited in some sense.

Take for example a cat. Can it ever fully understand us? No. It lives in its own world, knows what it knows, (like there is food in the tray), but it doesn't know how that food came to be.

We as human knows about the Universe. But we don't know how it came to be. At least I'm open to the possibility that I don't know everything and that I do lack the mental capacity to think through things...

I think this is a very good analogy. . . . I've never heard this put this way before. . . . but it is a powerful idea.

Scientists have gone "religious" with their devotion to our present understanding of the Universe, with all the various branches of science sorta maintaining the illusion that we have progressed to a point where we can make a valid assertion of some kind of ultimate truth. . . . . even while they argue day in, day out, in their academic presentations of new results that there is something "new" being presented. . . . .

Some scientists will argue that some of today's beliefs within their discipline are absolutely "known" to be fact. . . . but we have had "scientists" like that in every age of our fantasies about what is "known". And all but the living ones have been supplanted in the process of further inquiry.

religions deal with this in at least two fundamentally different styles. Some will set some text. . . . say the Koran or Bible. . . . as an unquestioned set of "revelations" from a God who is supposed to be both absolute in knowledge and authority and entitled to lay down a law for Man and powerful enough to demand our reverence for what is given. . . . . Others may say God is some orders of magnitude advanced ahead of us enough that like our earthly "fathers" he is to be respected for His effort to lead us along a better way than we might invent for ourselves, if we are just willing to follow. . . . .

But both of these approaches have an inherent superiority over any assertions we as humans can make about the universe around us. Without positing the possible existence of God, or even worse like One Brow didactly excluding the possibility in absolute terms. . . . the attempt to say we "know" anything absolutely is an absurd elevation of the human comprehension beyond all human experience and logic. For ages we have "known" things within our experience, and for ages we have sometimes wondered about things beyond our observation and our experience with some sense of awe about the universe, and for ages this realization of our limitations as humans has been the foundation of our sanity.

The belief that we as a race have come to some understanding and comprehension that is beyond any reasonable question now is the insane fantasy of a hardened ignoramus, who having learned the alphabet believes words don't exist.

 

[babe]

^^^

It's like if you take "water". He'll describe it as H2O. He'll keep repeating it. He's not wrong. But that's not the whole story. He doesn't talk about how it gives life, how it flows, how it impacts our lives, etc.

I'll admit I'd never win an intellectual debate with him - that's why I've given up trying to debate with him. How can he be wrong, if he keeps shouting that water is H2O, he'll always be right.

There is more to the story than that, but if he is not open to that possibility, he'll never be able to see/experience it.

I call this an inherent deficit in "listening" skills. . . . or possibly the result of a Bill Ayers' type of ideological warrior on a mission to direct a discussion towards a political objective.

 

[babe]

what % of posts does babe account for in this thread?

doing some checking. . . . . On March 5 this year, on about the fourth post of this thread. . . . I said:

I'm #83 on the list of members according to number of posts.

As I recall, I had about 1479 total posts when I started this thread. . . so today with this thread at around 3479, I could at most have done only 2000 of the posts in here. . . .2000/3479. . . . without any calculator but my little brain on hand. . . . is less than 60%. 60% would be 6 X 350 approximately. . . . 2100. But I can vouch for having done a few hundred in other threads in the meantime, so it's actually probably less than 50%. Amazing what a few other people can do for this thread on the occasions of having fun of their own. . . .

 

[babe]

Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: "Mankind". Basically, it's made up of two separate words - "mank" and "ind". What do these words mean ? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.

I find this particular insight quite illuminating. I've studied languages in the general for many years. . . and have found there are astounding inferences that can be made on the basis of minimal data. The word "mank" has in fact ancient roots in old Sanskrit, where it was the word for "poop" of a certain kind. . . . elephant poop to be precise. . . . The suffix "ind" in the same language was a modifier that had the sense of "progressing" in the directional sense of "from", and so the combined term carries the sense of the ancient origins of Darwin's plagiarism from the common scientific knowledge of around ten thousand years ago that life spontaneously emerged from piles of poop of various kinds. As you know, poop does have some DNA present from various bacterial, viral, foodsource, and host remnants, and when allowed to fester in the warm sunlight, new species can emerge, as from say a primordial "soup".

 

[babe]

Speaking of longest ever......do the X-games just never stop now? It used to be like the Olympics of "extreme" sports, but now there are multiple X-games a year and it seems like one big never-ending watered down turd. I'm into skateboarding and like watching some of the motorcycle stuff, but not 50 times a year. Even Dennis Schroeder hates it.

well, unlike the X-games, which will actually stop someday, this thread can go one forever in an endless iteration of passers-by and their contributions. The more the merrier. Thanks for visiting.

 

[babe]

Only pervs want 3 houses in the Philippines. I'm kind in a gritty mood right now. If I could live anywhere in the world at the moment I think slumming it in Salford(England's Detroit) would be fun. I would be over it in a month probably, but it seems appealing right now.

I wasn't going to respond to this at first. . . . but hey, I know why you would think so. Art Bell might not agree that this is universally the case, though.

When I was a youngster missionary lad, I was curious about the women standing in the doors of the "shops" on Pasang Tamo street. It was the "wild west' then for missionaries, some of whom went the way of the world. I didn't know if I had truly fallen into the darkest pit of hell, being a Mormon missionary completely at the "mercy" of Satan's servants the LDS mission staff and gung-ho tyrant missionaries who had absurd rules for judging everyone/everything, and I concluded it might be interesting to actually read the LDS scriptures to see if Satan really had written them or not. But just when I thought I had hit rock bottom in the whole world, my second senior companion began taking me with him to the massage parlors. I had an epiphany one day at a particular massage parlor in Manila's swankiest section near Luneta Park when I was starting to read the Doctrine and Covenants while sitting on the veranda overlooking the street while my companion was getting his massage. . . .

Something about the whole world, including the Church, being inclined to go to destruction unless people will begin to take heed to their ways, and repent.

I remember one girl named Yolanda who was arguing with the manager at the front desk about something. . . . . and then a few weeks later I saw her at another place, and she remembered me, and begged me to help her escape her slavery. Apparently, a lot of girls from the rural areas of the Philippines went to Manila looking for work to help their starving families back home, and a lot of them got jobs serving tables at restaurants run by the Philippine's versions of Mafia gangs, where they were steered progressively and in one way or another compromised into becoming "recruits" in the sex trade.

I don't think things have gotten any better, what with all the UN officials needing the services of young women and all.

But I assure you, I'm not in that "market".

 

[babe]

Don;t know about the X Games, but what does stop is my coaching season. I'm a little depressed right now...not enough to call a hotline, but I had such a great time coaching and our season is now over (we finished 6-1-1). Seriously, if any of you are considering coaching ANY sport, whether it be for your own child, nephew, niece, whomever...just DO IT! There is nothing more rewarding than working with children.

Sorry about this lull in the coaching opportunities. Isn't it time for Little League to start up??????

 

[babe]

- Moral values when there is nothing in it for us to further our species/cause? If I travel to India, and I see a poor beggar on the street, why should I give him money? I was never going to see him again - so it doesn't benefit me to help him.

One Brow would say, that we do it out of "empathy". But that answer alone isn't good enough. I can have empathy (defined as capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another person), but how does it benefit me to act upon that empathy from an "animal" stand point? Let's say a lion develops "empathy" - would it stop eating other animals? No it won't. Its survival instinct would still kick in. But as humans, we're willing to do the opposite - we're willing to sacrifice our own life for others.

I would argue that we don't help others simply out of empathy - having empathy helps, but it's not the only reason. We help others because we have "love" built within us to "do the right thing". It is written in our "hearts". It's what's in every human's "hearts" if we're honest with ourselves.

It's a shame for us to be always talking about One Brow without his further interest in this thread. I wonder how we can draw him back in???

There was one dark day in my life when I lost control of my rage about a cat that pooped on a carpet.

In that time frame, I had a cat and a dog who both slept in my bed, at my feet, and the cat would securely snuggle up to the dog like she was her mama, and purr.

When I undertook to administer a "righteous" indignation upon the cat, the dog intervened and gave me a look that was worth a thousand pictures. . . . . reproving me for my inhumanity.

I have never been quite sure since that humans are actually superior beings. . . . .