JamesP

Regarding Ted Bundy... From Ted Bundy's Wikipedia entry: "Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home For Unwed Mothers (now the Lund Family Center) in Burlington, Vermont on November 24, 1946 to Eleanor Louise Cowell (known for most of her life as Louise). The identity of his father has never been determined with certainty." This completely contradicts your assertion that he had a good childhood environment. Continuing to read that entry, it is astounding that you can call it "not perfect but a good one." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy This is some terrible treatment, so sorry to read this! I cannot tell you if you should ask your father that question, of course... have you been seeing a therapist at all? Are you planning to do this with the support of others or in isolation? It's been my experience that not having a competent therapist and/or not having adequate support when attempting to change historical patterns fails to work, at best, and can be pretty damaging by reinforcing those patterns. Were my comments helpful for you at all?

If he had any way of verifying his theory, he wouldn't just flatly say that there is no technology to detect this change. And it isn't necessary for change to be constant for it to be detected. Earthquakes can shift plate boundaries relative to each other by inches, feet, or yards. And that you had that impression when you first learned about it leads me to think that this guy's understanding of earth science hasn't progressed beyond the age you were when you learned about this. It's like when people say that evolution claims we evolved from monkeys. It's just not the case and demonstrates a lack of understanding and curiosity. *edit - But that said, I do appreciate the correction that he did not claim a constant rate of growth.

Also, photosensitive cells do not require brains to be useful. There is a significant lack of understanding of biology in this thread.

Scientists and philosophers concede to reason and evidence. The religious and political concede to propaganda and aggression.

"Senator Manchin does not yet own Bitcoin." Or "Senator Manchin owns a whole stack of Bitcoin and wants to make it illegal to drive up the price." Or "Senator Manchin is appealing to a bunch of backwaters who are afraid of computers."

I use LibreOffice. It's kind of a dog but it is free and allows me to do word processing et al on the relatively rare occasions I need to do so.

My friend, I do not doubt that there are companies owned and operated by sociopaths, nor do I doubt that some companies are run by sociopathic racists. But it is racist for you to declare that all whites are racist, especially without providing some kind of evidence. It is also not in keeping with the board rules to accuse others of bad intentions without any evidence. I have noticed that this is a pretty clear trend in your posting, and this is just not healthy for you. Either what you say is true, and you are spending your time with racists who hate you instead of doing something awesome with your life, or what you say is untrue and you are making unjust accusations instead of doing something awesome with your life.

There is also this comment, from this fellow himself, which demonstrates his appalling scientific ignorance: "NO, GPS cannot prove growth,. Nor is it designed to do so. There is NO TECHNOLOGY that can, or is designed to measure any such growth." GPS is so sensitive that relativistic effects have to be considered in order to ensure proper time-keeping. Perhaps the growth of earth's radius is so slow that this is not detectable in the short term, but it certainly could be one way of verifying, as an increasing radius would necessarily require changes in orbits over time. But aside from that, a very simple technology can be used. Shove some sticks into the ground and observe the sun's shadow. Measure precisely the angles. If this theory proposed a rate of inflation or growth, then over time, you would be able to detect this. The orientation of landmasses relative to each other would also change, as in his original animation. You could observe the Bering Strait, see if the real distances between the landmasses change in a way consistent with this theory or with plate tectonics. I can think of a technology, fella. Shove some sticks into the ground. This guy is a loony. I wasn't criticizing this guy's tone. I was criticizing his clear lack of scientific understanding.

Holy cow. 1:03 - "You are asked to believe that the continents swim or drift about willy-nilly, bumping and crashing as if they were on a greased skillet." I'm not an expert, but this is such a misrepresentation of plate tectonic theory that I cannot take this guy seriously. Did anyone who found this video compelling not notice this?

I'll have to watch the video for myself, but if he is actually defining depression as "much too much grief at far too slight a cause," then it's pretty clear he hasn't bothered to investigate it beyond its appearances. My experience of depression was that of emotional paralysis, which is the sort of thing that doesn't just appear out of nowhere.

There are two verses in Numbers which link death to priesthood, but it's not entirely clear to me what the verses mean. I think it's basically, don't let strangers near your priests, or they die. There's a lot of that in the Bible... http://www.openbible.info/topics/priests

Who gets to define "abundance"? And if somebody refuses to share their "abundance," are they evil and thus can be forced to share? This, of course, entirely deflates the meaning of "share," which is always talked about as a voluntary action.

I initially opened an account with Mt.Gox but stopped dealing with them with their Dwolla account was suspended.

That's a really good question. There are costs and benefits to making infrastructure more dense and centralized, just as there are to making infrastructure more sparse and spread out. One thing we can be certain of is that there is an awful lot of development that goes on that is driven by the state. I don't know about whether cities will decay and collapse without the government, mostly because cities are decaying and collapsing with the government. It's kind of hard to make the case that things will be worse, especially when cities get worse as you increase coercive government within them.

Forgiveness is like hunger. You cannot will yourself to not be hungry–you must consume food. Likewise, you cannot will forgiveness. It occurs when the person who wronged you feeds you their responsibility, their empathy, and their restitution. Whereas avoiding your hunger will result in death, the offender avoiding seeking forgiveness will result in the death of that relationship.

That's a fine suggestion. Shouldn't be too hard to do. You can turn signatures on/off by going to your settings, clicking "'Ignore' Preferences," and making sure "Ignore all signatures when reading topics and personal messages" is turned on.

I would suggest giving Chrome/Chromium a try. It's not quite as heavy as Firefox and the chat seems to work well in it. I don't mean to put the kibosh on this as a project, but I would request that anyone who wants to do this as a project have a chat with Mike or myself so that we don't lose features, or at least have good reasons for not maintaining them.

Two NT verses referencing murders here: http://www.evilbible.com/Murder.htm

Victor, I sympathize with your experience... it can be pretty lonely in the desert if you don't know where to turn. There are FDR meetup groups out there, so you can check them out to see if people are in your area: http://www.meetup.com/Freedomain-Radio/ You can also reach out to people online, people on the boards or through the Facebook feeds that make good or interesting posts, and connect with them directly. Was this helpful?

I was referring specifically to the use of the board. For what you're describing, dsayers, I would recommend keeping a journal of some sort. The board is for meeting people and sharing information. A journal doesn't quite fit into those categories. Also, a journal allows you to reflect on what you've written without having to worry about communicating to others.

I am so very sorry to read about your experience. Regarding the use of this forum, here are a couple of things I think are good to keep in mind: This is a great place to get feedback from others, but it is easy to lose emotional context when all you have to work with is text. It is better to find people you can talk to over the phone or Skype, if not face-to-face. A therapist is an essential piece of this part of the puzzle. The other thing is that these forums are globally accessible. Once something is posted to the Internet, you can reasonably expect that it will never go away. This doesn't mean "don't post personal stuff," of course, and if you take a few measures to remain anonymous, this is much less of a problem. I hope this was helpful!

Just savor that for a few minutes... just let that sink in...

Because you don't keep secrets like that from people that you care about. You especially don't toss out information you've been withholding like a bad salad. And finally, if they did eventually act in LP's self-interest on this matter, he wouldn't be here, asking for help. There are ways to communicate to a young child about death, and there are plenty of resources out there to help, ranging from books to counselors. They avoided all of those things, and prevented LP from being able to grieve for his grandfather. Even if we accept that intent matters, I don't think there's a lot of room here for good intentions.

My original thoughts were more along the lines of The Truth About X series where X is some revered figure... but in reality, they're total scumbags. The "historically accurate" bit comes in when they brag about how terrible they are, like gangsta rappers who brag about their criminal activities. We had some of that in the early podcast series where Stef role played a cop and a sergeant.

So… god is a black hole? I suppose there will always be gaps for gods.