Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 25, 2024 7:11:49 GMT -8
Thanks for those passages, Brother Kung.
I also asked that guy, "Is there any particular reason that you pulled into my lot to work on your car?" And he told me that he was trying to avoid a ticket. So it seems likely that he had recently been pulled over, probably given a warning, and then the fellow went to the nearest auto parts store where they hooked him up with the correct bulb. Still, how he made his way here, only God perhaps knows. And that's assuming his story is good, that the car wasn't stolen, etc. But I didn't get that vibe from him. His mental retardation seemed to put him beyond artifice.
But I get artifice galore. There are a lot of shiftless people living in their cars as well. And barely a week goes by that I don't have to move someone along. They make all kinds of excuses. "Oh, I'm just trying to fix something." But these are well-practiced lies.
One guy came down to the lower lot the other day, immediately circled around and then out. But I had a suspicion. I followed him. Yep...he went to the upper lot and parked. And just as he's getting out of his car, I approach and tell him there is no parking here.
His car was clearly a traveling home of some kind. It was stuffed with junk. And he responds, "How does that work?" I don't take the bait. I never take the bait...well, almost never. I simply tell him, "There's no parking here. You need to leave now." We went back and forth about five time we me saying nothing more than "There is no parking here, you have to move on now." And he keeps responding with "How does that work?" Finally, I tell him that I pay the property tax, power, utilities, insurance, and what he wants to do is simply park here for free.
That at least did end the discussion, with me also pulling out my phone and telling him I was going to dial 9/11. He left.
Every story is different. But in every case I am dealing with a thief, or would-be thief. And they are full of excuses. I try to school my younger brother in how to deal with this. I told him you can't respond to what they are saying. They are tricksters. They try to intimidate you and lie. And I told him you need to stick to "There is no parking or hanging around here. You have to move on." Nothing more. Don't get wrapped in their baloney.
This is how I've come to know the very dark heart of "the homeless." Like I said, there are exceptions to this rule. But I'd say in 90% of the cases you are dealing with a really nasty sort of person.
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Post by kungfuzu on May 25, 2024 9:43:50 GMT -8
The mere fact that you had to go through the rigamarole with this guy says it all. Anyone with honest intentions would, immediately, have said OK and moved on. One must be careful with these characters. In England, bums had ways to communicate with other bums regarding their marks. If someone, in a home, was kind to a bum and gave him something to eat or drink, the bum would arrange rocks in a certain manner outside the gate of that home. The next bum who came along would then know to hit the owner for free food or drink.
Can you imagine how quickly your parking lot would fill up once word got out that you were a soft touch? It would resemble this in no time.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 25, 2024 16:43:10 GMT -8
I'm 100% sure you are right. And, frankly, this thinking is always the basis for me being hard-line regarding any trespass. It may make me seem like a big heel for refusing a fellow a glass of water. But what you said above is always in my mind. I don't give an inch.
And those bible passages are a great reminder of the necessity to separate oneself from evil (or the various Deadly Sins). Paul (presumably some of those were from Paul) understood that to normalize misconduct and bad morals was to de-moralize (surely this is where the word comes from) the good people trying to follow the Christian path.
There is right and wrong, desirable and undesirable. And if we blur those lines, we undermine those who are aiming for a better path. What we see happening all over the country is the normalizing of bad behavior. Everyone is making excuses for it. Everyone has been trained that to do the sensible thing (castigate evil-doers and call them out...that is, to correct them) is to be "judgmental."
That one bit there has let in a host of ills. We are surrounded by moral idiots and cowards. And this stuff has thoroughly infected the Christian and Jewish faiths. The Pope, for example, may be the biggest moral idiot of all.
By the way, I'm sure you're aware of the Sherlock Holmes story where transients leaving signs for others plays a part in the story. It may have been The Norwood Builder. I'm not sure.
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Post by kungfuzu on May 25, 2024 20:27:14 GMT -8
Yes I am. I have also run into this a couple of other places. In one book on British history I recall that it was mentioned that leaving marks was quite normal. This was particularly so in the days when England had a fair number of people who moved around from town to town because they had the wandering bug. Sleeping rough was not unusual.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 23, 2024 16:45:37 GMT -8
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 25, 2024 11:09:46 GMT -8
A short video by Fil, but he makes some interesting observations. My comment to his video is below.
Fil, perhaps the real question is whether or not people want to pay full price for artificiality. And my guess is, given how much stuff is faked and phony (even just including movie special effects), there will continue to be increasing tolerance for fake performances.
I think this means that music will be degraded. But, honestly, the state of pop music right now (most of it being unlistenable), I think the fakery of Auto-Tune and lip-sync are just a drop in the bucket. A symptom, not a cause.
Keep up the good work.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 25, 2024 18:00:30 GMT -8
You betcha! In a time when people seriously discuss men being women and vice versa, how could it be otherwise?
As Lily Thomlin once observed, "It's called Show Business, not Show Art." It has always been thus.
Image is a major part of the deal, so fakery is part of the package. It has simply become more pronounced due to technology. In the old days, it was harder to cover up lack of talent in music because the tech wasn't up to it. When one performed live before an audience, the audience was able to see the true artist exposed. The artist was taking the risk of giving a sub-par performance, but whatever the performance, it was genuine.
Not so today, or for many decades, when it comes down to it.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 27, 2024 7:51:33 GMT -8
I've watched a couple of this guy's videos. Here's one of them:
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 27, 2024 9:03:57 GMT -8
A brilliant video. I'm 15 minutes in and it's like the guy has been wandering around my brain. As I have mentioned before, no matter how cynical I am, it is not cynical enough. Nothing we see in media is by chance. What goes on in a grocery store is not by chance. We have been bred to believe lies and distortions.
This guy lays out exactly why I say that Hitler, Goebbels and Stalin would give their right arms for the propaganda power available to our betters today. It is a crying shame, but everyone needs to be a skeptic when purchasing anything or listening to any government functionary. Huge entities have enormous financial resources at their disposal and use these to herd the sheep.
By the way, the opening minutes of the video remind me of a marketing class which I had to take for my MBA. My team were given a case study on Fisher-Price. In the end, it was determined that in order to differentiate its products from the pack, Fisher-Price should charge a higher price than its competitors for basically the same item. This would give their customers the feeling that the Fisher-Price toy was better, not to mention the emotional stroke customers got from thinking they were superior/smarter than others, by laying out more for a "better" toy.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 27, 2024 10:11:24 GMT -8
LOL. I'm glad you liked it.
Agreed. One of my comments to his video was:
I could have stated things more plainly. I get this vision of everyone nodding their heads thinking, "How stupid other people are" while falling for every marketing scheme.
For the record, I am more than okay with burning Nike shoes. It do not think it's a pointless protest.
Here's a similar video from the same guy. It's covering much of the same ground, although not completely. I've set it to start playing at what I think is a fascinating point 4 minutes into it. I didn't actually know this about Ferrari.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 27, 2024 10:58:47 GMT -8
A whole conservative symposium could be wrapped around this video.
The guy isn't (although he should be) making any overt political statements. However, there are implicit ones...at least ones we know about such as Stupid Western Liberal Do-Gooders. I'd never heard of that merry-go-round water wheel. But this guy dashes it for all the right reasons.
"One Laptop Per Child Initiative." Really, including things such as windmills for electricity, you don't have to go to a third-world country to see stupid liberal ideas being imposed. In essence, the Liberal Elites are trying to impose their culture on all of us, and with a similar lack of care regarding results.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 27, 2024 12:06:11 GMT -8
As you might imagine, having lived in 7 countries outside the USA, this video speaks to my heart. It is not only liberal donors who have no understanding of the cultures to which they send money. I have been hammering away on this for decades. American's know F-all about the rest of the world and constantly refuse to see reality i.e the fact that everyone is not like us and many do not have the same, or even similar, aspirations that Americans have.
Trying to force our "values" on the rest of the work is immoral, but worse it is stupid and costly. The worst case of this mindset was on display in our failed attempts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 27, 2024 12:20:02 GMT -8
Fakes were common in Asia decades ago. I took a friend and his wife to Temple Street, a famous night market in Hongkong. There she picked up "fake" Chanel goods (purses/etc.) for one sixth of what they would have cost in Switzerland. The quality was excellent. I was never quite sure if they were 1) actual knockoffs or 2) "fakes" which left through the back door of the Chanel factory at night.
Rolex and Cartier watches were also very popular knockoffs. I believe I had a "Cartier" and bought a "Rolex" for some guy in Europe.
My boss knew the head of Cartier in Tokyo and once told him that Cartier's marketing philosophy was aimed at insecure people whom needed some way to try to be special. The Cartier man agreed and asked my boss not the tell others.
My mentor and good friend, the same one I took to Temple Street, had a Ferrari 308 which looked just like this.
When he sold that, he bought a Porsche 911 Carrera which looked something like this. His was a metallic purple.
Although Ferraris were exclusive, my friend owned his before the insanity described in you video came about.
He got rid of the Porsche when he took it in for some repairs and it cost him SFr 25,000 which was something around $20,000 at the time.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 27, 2024 12:38:19 GMT -8
Heretic!!! Do you not believe in the purple thumb? Do you not believe that we can transfer Kansas to Iraq with merely a vote?
One fellow on that thread was criticized for basically saying, hey, if they want laptops (or power stations, or whatever), then they've got to take responsibility for them. I quoted the original poster and added my reply:
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 27, 2024 12:48:25 GMT -8
Generally speaking, people do not much care about something they have not worked for, own or created. Think of all the public housing around the world which does not belong to the people living in it. It is too often trashed. I recall one place up north where the government decided to sell the apartments to the occupants and voila the people started taking better care of the facilities.
I once told you that I try to get into the mind of others in order to understand them. This is very difficult, but if one wishes to understand things, it is necessary try and understand how others think. For example, the dumb ass Repukelicans have never tried to understand minority voters, much less the Demonrats. They seem to believe everyone thinks like they do. Massive fail. I am convinced this is one reason Trump is successful. He tries to get into the minds of people who don't look or think like him.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 27, 2024 12:50:04 GMT -8
Now, if I had said that, it would just be assumed that I was part of the envious rabble. But it's nice to hear those in-the-know pretty much vindicate what we all were probably thinking all along.
That one guy in the video was quipping that a Toyota Camry is cranked out every few minutes and they'll sell to anyone. One of the commenters said something like, "I'll take the Camry." I'm not sure if the Camry would be the exact model. But I really wouldn't want an overt luxury car. There are so many downsides, quite aside from the cost. They make you a target. The downtime on repairs is probably significant (you can't just walk into NAPA and get Ferrari brake pads, etc.). And they're just not practical for carrying people or cargo.
I'll bet you plenty of well-off people opt for the Camry or some top-of-the-line production car. They're just going to be more practical and almost certainty far more reliable.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 27, 2024 12:54:20 GMT -8
One guy in to comments noted how they built some hi-tech roads in some third-world country with the latest machinery. They were not maintained. And he concluded (correctly) it was because they had no sense of ownership in them. Second try, they took a low-tech method and formed groups to pick-and-shovel the roads with each local chief and his tribe given responsibility for a stretch of the road. Apparently this worked much better in terms of maintaining the road.
Funny thing about Establishment Republicans. Their mantra for years has been that we need to "reach out" to minority voters, etc. But, yeah, I just don't think they were capable of it, thus they remained empty words. And as we learned, normal fly-over country Republican/conservative voters were just as foreign to them as any Democrat minority constituency.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 27, 2024 13:11:56 GMT -8
Close to 40 years ago, I was listening to some radio program on the BBC. (I believe) During the discussion, someone gave a perfect analogy on governance in America. He pointed out that India was the most religious country in the world and that Sweden was the least religious country in the world. He then said that when one looked at America, it was as if India was being ruled by a bunch of Swedes. I thought that very apt.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 27, 2024 14:45:20 GMT -8
There's no sense watching this. Long story short, Taylor Swift is faking her singing.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 27, 2024 18:10:43 GMT -8
Frankly, one would have to be naive' to think otherwise. Taylor Swift is nothing more than a blowup doll or hologram. Branding is what she is about, not talent. The shrinks analyzed the small minds of pre-pubescent girls, and their slightly older sisters, then shaped Taylor Swift's image accordingly.
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