totally impresses with your ‘neuron alignment’!! It is great to read the product of an intelligence such as yours and I am one of those who think the Biblical emphasis on perseverance is keeping my hope alive in these times of un and anti USA types in Washington D.C.
Thanks!
Purely as a practical matter, I just find it’s nearly impossible to have single-topic discussions with people on...just about anything. Many things we discuss here on FR contribute to that: The dumbing down of our edu system; the rapid pace of life; the need of allegedly informative media to incorporate an MTV-style flash-flash “bitrate”; the ever-increasing phantasm of feature-films. And there’s also the need for the drug addict to get a stronger and stronger dose as time goes on to get the same “bump”. We have more and more outrageous comics walking ever closer to and in many cases stepping over existing bounds of decency. I’ll confess that some of them are funny (to me), but (almost) NEVER have these comics/actors been brought out as spokespeople for anything of seriousness. Yes, they have sold (or decried) cigarets, they have spoken out for animal rights, gun rights, children in Africa, and blah blah, but they have NEVER been considered qualified discussers of national security. And I haven’t even mentioned this propensity of the left to constantly redefine words; which flips me out and I consider very insidious. It’s done by ridiculing fixed word definitions: If you think “marriage” is between a man and a woman, you’re a bigoted relic of the past. If you think “investment” is a form of educated gamble where you’re supposed to get a gain on AND RECEIVE BACK your investment; you’re just not a forward thinking individual.
Point being, it’s difficult to have discussions with folks these days without a preliminary session where you agree on word definitions. Many, many times, people ask me what appear to be serious questions about what I know about = investing & stocks, and before I answer them, I ask them if they will agree to at least 45 seconds of uninterrupted speaking time before they interrupt and jump in with irrelevancies like “what about Madoff” or “except for Citigroup”. And I can tell, some consider that arrogant. But I know to lower my transmission success expectations drastically if they’re unwilling. I won’t care if they “get it”.
And when you combine the type of bursting-at-the-seams ignorance of some of the folks seen street-interviewed on Leno, Hannity et al, with the cursed inability to have topic coherency and word-definition coherency and greater-then-11-second attention span, the cause seems utterly hopeless. To me. Consider: is this not the modern version of the Tower of Babel story? Our so-called common purpose of getting along is being defeated not by having the obviously different languages of German, English, Swahili, Urdu, etc;? We don’t need that any more. We now have sufficient confusion of meaning entirely within the English language to guarantee that people will misunderstand and unconsciously offend each other.
I can’t believe I ended up with a Biblical reference/context for you!! Trust me, I didn’t start this post with that intention at all.