Ilunga

He is good and is going to be great. I know generational talents do not come around often however I would like a generational offensive D- man. Do you think Hughes can evolve into such a player ?

I am now reading Human Universe by Brian Cox. I love Brian and his 2 series Wonders of the universe and wonders of life. This book expounds on some ideas in those series.

Thanks Monty. My online friends are like my friends back home, the best people in the world. I have no enemies but I hope what happened to me never happens to anyone.

Thanks my friend. The support of my friends has been unbelievable. One tries to be a good person, be a positive influence in everyone's lives however one never gives to receive. So to get the respect back is humbling and I never take it for granted.

Thanks brother. I really did miss my friends on this place. I consider some people on this forum family and you are one of them. I will PM soon.

Thanks Squeak, that means a lot. I will keep you informed by PM.

Hey guys , this is Buddha's hand. I would like to apologise to all here especially The Minister and Canuck2extreme for disapearing with out a word. I will not bore you with my story except to say it started when my mum who I was extremely close to died, my relationship slowly started to die and now I have not seen the person I love the most, my son, in 9 months. My life is slowly coming good again. I regret that I did not keep in contact, however events kept me from doing so. I hope everyone is happy and healthy.

Hoping for big moments from this young man during the season, as we all are.

The student leaders of today are not the young men of yesterday either hippy. I will refer you to Mario Savio and quote , when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part when you can't even passively take part. You have to place your body on the gears, on levers and you have to make them stop. You have to indicate to the people who run it, to to the people who own it , the unless you are free the machine will be prevented from working at all. Today students seem more interested in money than ideals.

Mate check out the Oxfam global enequality report. At no point in our history has some much been going to so few, so little going to so many. The greed of those at the top is mind blowing. Here in Aus they have even made many of the average citisens tax collectors. If you work for yourself, sell a product and earn over 75k you have to collect GST and send it to the tax department.

This is among the best posts I have read on any forum I have been/am a member of. Your ability to think critically then verbalise your thoughts is impressive.

I am the same Elvis. A few of my friends joke I have a mild case of asbergers. If believe that if a species has devised a means to travel between the solar systems or even galaxies it must mean they have worked collectively to achieve this. Our species does not work collectively on anything. The only thing we seem to devote our efforts to is find new methods to destroy both ourselves and potentially the planet. The acronym for the military strategy that supposedly keeps us from destroying ourselves and our planet is MAD, mutual assured destruction. Imagine you were a rational, logical species cruising round the galaxy/galaxies, would you contact us. I certainly would not. We are destroying both ourselves and our planet. I would give us a wide birth.

Totally brother. I was watching a doco called ,The Human odessey which postulated that once we began eating seafood it provided our brains with the amino acids, tryptophan, tyrosine,histodine and arginine that are used by the brain for the synthesis of various neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. It might have been at this point we developed the ability to reason deductively. We know so little about ourselves. Our planet is 3.8 billions years old, it was " only" 640 million years ago that multicelled life appeared on the planet after an event called snowball earth, the only time our planet completely froze. We do not know what caused single cell life to multiply. We are starting to seriously use the MRI machine to study our brains. I believe this tool will give us great insight into what makes us what we essentially are.

To quote Monty Python " and pray that there is intelligent life somewhere out in space, cause there's bugger all down here on earth".

I have been reading quite a few books about critical thinking lately but one stands out , Weaponised Lies, by Daniel Levitin. I have read this book because it concerns events in my personal life, however in the current political climate I believe every person should at the very least peruse this book.

The terms left and right when applied to politics originated in France during the revolutionary period, the aristocrats sat on the right of the king and the commoners sat on the left. The Aristos wanted to keep their power and wealth,the commoners wanted change. You talk about fiscal responibility,I believe this is not spending more than you earn, both as a government or person. The systems that are in place encourage people to spend money they do not have. I cannot find the link but I have read somewhere that it was in the late 60's,early 70's that Citibank wanted to create more debt, in a fractional reserve banking system that is how wealth is created,their mortgage market was growing however they wanted more so they took an existing idea the diners club credit card and for want of a better term weaponised it to create personal debt in a way that had not been seen previously. Today in my country this has resulted in personal debt levels that are unstastainable.Between 1995 and 2015 the ratio of household debt to income has doubled 104 percent to 212 percent. Even more important than this is the distribution of wealth, in 2017 82 percent of the wealth went to the wealthiest 1 percent. According to Oxfam at no point point in our history has the division of wealth been so one sided,so much going to do few,so little going to so many. Since 1950 the ratio of CEO to worker pay has increased by a thousand percent. Since the GFC their has been not only a stagnation in wages for the average worker but also a dramatic increase in the number of people who are working multiple jobs and are still struggling to pay their bills. I was thinking about how the middle class was created and it seems to me the beginnings of this was when Henry Ford first mass produced cars,he had a goal of making a affordable car for everyman. On January the 5th in 1914 Ford doubled his workers pay. There have many debates as to why he did this but what is certain is that other car manufacturers did this as well as the manufacturers of other goods. Ford noted that this created more purchasers of his cars. Quoting from a Matt Anderson article,"better wages combined with affordable goods created by the assembly line are cornerstones of the prosperity that has characterised American life for so many of the past 100 years". Fast forward to today Amazon, one of the largest companies in the world today, their business model compared to to existing retail is to hire only one third of the workers,their biggest acquisition last year was a robotics company, was that that tell you. This is happening in most economic sectors. When the teller at my bank encourages me to do my banking online I tell her if everyone did this you would not have a job. What has this to do with the left or right of politics you might ask, well I believe that both sides of politics have been bought and paid for by the people who own these corporations. Left, right, it does not matter, those with wealth have always wanted more, they used to just shear the sheep now they are slaughtering it.

Left ? Right ? Those are 2 labels that seem to be thrown around by people who have no idea about human nature. How do you define a left leaning person as opposed to a right leaning person ? Not their political views but rather how they treat others first in their own communities and then their attitude to others in the greater community and the planet itself.

Great point. For nearly 3 decades I have questioned what is right and what is wrong. I hesitate to use the word subjective,but out of 171,476 words currently in use of the English language it seems to be the best word to describe what right and wrong are. I was reading an article by June Marshall about this, to quote from this, "there are no universal laws of right or wrong.Each different society reaches an agreement about what is right.Murder,for example, is one of the most world wide agreed upon wrongs.Yet in most societies murder,in wartime conditions, is approved or promoted. Right and wrong are subjective in how they relate to suffering.It feels bad to suffer.If we have empathy,we do not want to impose suffering on others,including animals.We don't want to have the memory of making someone suffer.It feels wrong,therefore is wrong.It feels bad to do wrong things and these feelings,how strong they are depend on the individual.Pyschopaths do not have these feeling of right or wrong.They do not feel empathy for the beings they harm.They also have no feeling of love or compassion for themselves,in that sense,too,right and wrong are entirely subjective.Feeling bad when we do wrong things is what keeps people in line,even more than being punished by the society that makes the rules". I used to believe that it was a mix of nature and nurture that made each person what they essentially are, my views about the mix of this were really shaken when I learnt about the sort of people my biological relatives were. After watching a doco about this guy who used an MRI machine to study the brains of 250 pyschopaths,then 250 kind altruistic people my views on this were shattered.Even a person like myself could see the brains were "wired" differently. The area of the brain that is responsible for compassion and empathy, the supramarginal gyrus is not as "connected" to the parietal,temporal and frontal lobes as the people who are considered altruistic. I have always struggled with how our societies define right and wrong. As that article pointed out in one situation society defines murder as wrong but in another situation it is considered right and is promoted.

I was having a political/ historical discussion a few days ago with members of a lodge I was staying in.The person I was having the discussion with was calm and reasonable, we had different ideas about defence spending and immigration,but I could feel the fury building in a guy standing on the other side of the room. He eventually exploded, shouting his opinion)abuse.I stayed calm and reasonable but he kept on getting more angry, eventually I went and offered him my hand and said we are all brothers and have to live together but he abused me and stormed off. After I left the room the guy who I had the discussion with stated to my friend that he really respected the fact that I did not raise my voice and that I did not react in a negative manner to being abused. When I got home I was discussing this with my girl who has is a linguist,she has a masters degree in languages and teaching. She made the point that the most effective, rational, reasonable arguments contain not many adjectives especially "colouful" adjectives. It has gotten virtually impossible to have a reasonable, logical, rational conversation without getting abused either by words or memes. This I believe is the real sign of the breaking down of the societies we live in. It's not that far of a leap from hurling insults to actually physically hurting others,especially now where the ideological divides seem so deep.