Nope. Sorry, but you're wrong. I'm fairly fit, if less fit than I was 20 or 30 years ago. I routinely perform "strenuous" labor. And, I've done so all my life. Arms simply aren't designed, or meant to be held out in an extended position for long periods of time. If I exert myself, I can lift a fifty pound sack of feed, and hold it out at arm's length. It isn't going to stay there very long, because the entire body is entirely off balance, and the arms are straining to hold it there.
Almost 40 years ago, a high school shop teacher challenged some of the jocks to hold a broom out at arm's length, and extended in a horizontal position. They held it there for only short periods of time, like 15 to 45 seconds. Big, strong boys, who were the epitomy of health. Most of the time, the wrist gave out first, sometimes it was the elbow.
I've tried this at work. Half a dozen guys standing around, nice examples of healthy human specimens, I challenge them to hold a broom out. Carpenters generally do better than others, but even though they have developed quite strong wrist muscles, I've never seen anyone hold that broom out, level and steady, for more than 90 seconds.
We simply aren't built to hold our arms out horizontally for long periods of time. That is why metro-type GUI's will never replace more traditional desktop environments. That is why the Linux world has forked Gnome2, and many of us simply abandoned Gnome3.
"Did you know there are no indigenous vegetarians? There may have been some, but they were probably eaten."
ROFLMAO
I have it on good authority that some omnivores eat other omnivores, too. I hear that long pig tastes just like pork! Way off topic, but I served with a guy whose grandfathers were headhunters. We asked him once if he ever ate another person. He said, "I don't know, I just ate whatever my mother gave me!"
It's unlikely that he did. In theory, at least, the last of the tribes in the Phillipines were "civilized" before he was born. But - stuff happens!
You may benefit from watching some nature videos. I think waiting for your dinner to be actually dead and unresponsive to stimuli is a rarity. As soon as the predator can bite a piece off, he's chowing down. Sometime during dinner, the prey actually dies. In the case of snakes, I'm not sure that the prey dies before it reaches the stomach. I found a king snake ingesting a copperhead several years ago. Because I was there, the king reversed the ingestion, the copper head lay there for a few seconds, then started slithering away. I crushed the copperhead's head, apologized to the king, and left.
Needlessly causing an animal to suffer is stupid and pointless, so some of your examples irritate me, but they don't irritate me as much as they bother you.
I can't speak for your ancestors, but mine were all omnivores. We all eat anything that moves unless it moves to fast for us to catch. To solve that, we invented snares, bows and arrows, and finally guns. Somewhere in between we invented fences and barns. We evolved to eat meat, vegetables, and anything else that didn't poison us.
Homegrown meat-like stuff from a culture? I don't think that's on our menu, because we've never encountered it in the wild, or on a farm. Before I try it, it had better be a damned convincing copy. I'll wait until a few generations of PETA fans have subsisted on the stuff, before I try it. Maybe around the year 2250, I'll be convinced! Oh - wait. I don't think my life expectancy is anywhere near 300 years . . . crap!
I understand what the "law" has said, at different times in our history. I completely reject the idea that the child of a female citizen of the United States of America might be denied citizenship based on the mother's age when she gives birth. Either she is an American, or she is not.
The very idea that the mother's or the baby's citizenship is dependent on age hearkens back to the day when women were nothing more than chattel, belonging to men. Such laws are still in existence in much of the Moslem world. The idea of women as chattel has fired off some massive demonstrations in India, in recent days.
WTF does a woman's age have to do with anything at all? A mother is a mother. I don't give a flying fuck if the mother was only 13 when she gave birth, or she was 113. Both cases are very unusual, but neither case makes the least bit of difference to the child's nationality or much of anything else. The ONLY thing mother's age affects, is the likely impact on her own health, and the health of her child.
"Barry" had an American mother, and a Kenyan father. He can claim either, both, or neither of those nationalities, as he chooses. Got that? AS HE CHOOSES.
People who feel the need to split hairs should just sit at home, and pull their own hairs to split. Anal retentiveness has no value in the world at large.
Sounds to me like absolute zero means absolute zero temperature. But objects at absolute zero still retain energy, other than kinetic energy. One you reach absolute zero, those objects dig deep to find energy to give away, somehow converting that energy into heat, or kinetic energy.
Maybe what we need here is a new form of measurement, something like "absolute energy" rather than "absolute temperature". If/when an object reaches absolute zero energy, what happens? I guess all the matter has been converted to energy, and the object no longer exists?
When any person screws up, in any fashion, he has the opportunity to recognize the fact that he has indeed screwed up. I did some things as a kid, that could have landed me in jail. For that matter, I did a few things a young adult that were pretty damned stupid, including drinking and driving.
I was never caught, never hauled before a judge, didn't even get in trouble with my parents. But, I KNEW that I had done wrong, and I DECIDED that if I continued doing those things, the odds would catch up to me.
Mind you, I was probably never "legally drunk" at the wheel, under the laws in effect at the time. Just the same, I knew that I had drunk to much. A near accident made that abundantly clear.
Today's drunk driving laws have edged a little to far the other way. You don't have to be anywhere near "drunk" to fail a sobriety test. At 140 pounds, I was perfectly safe with two drinks under my belt. In fact, the Department of Transportation allowed two drinks with lunch, back then, for truck drivers, boat pilots, etc. Today, sniffing a bottle of beer might make you "drunk" in transportation industries.
Alright - I'm reading your link, and googling around for more on the subject. Either I'm a victim of mythology and legend, or we see revisionist history here. I'm thinking.
Points for your side - I ran with a half-Apache for quite some time, who taught me an awful lot about life. This old guy never mentioned any small pox blankets, in all the time I knew him. Of course, I never asked him about the stories, either. If the old goat were still alive, I'd make it a point to drive up to his place, and ask him.
I'll concede that you have documentation for your side of this story, and I lack any. I'm still not convinced yet, though. When I have more time, I'll do some more research. Could be, all those stories really are bullshit.
Pretty much the same way I blame Islamic jihadists on Islam. Good Christian men and women took it upon themselves to send those blankets to the reservations, under the guise of "good will". The church taught these good boys and girls in Sunday School how they should conduct themselves, and how they should view the world. Generations of Christians grew up believing that black, brown, and red men were "differetn", that they probably didn't even possess souls, that it would be better for everyone if those "colored" people would just dry up and blow away, so that good, civilized, Christian people can have the land and resources.
You won't find that view in any history books - it's a gestalt of the many things I've read on the subject. It's how I see the prevailing beliefs of white European and American Christians. The beliefs that made it possible for them to march into Arabia, slaughtering any who opposed them. The beliefs that made it possible for good Christians to send small pox blankets to reservations.
Think about it - what could have motivated such acts? What, but a view similar to Nazi Germany's view toward Jews?
It happened. If there are other, more likely motivations, I wish you would share them with me.
The church killed merely thousands? I've heard that claim before. It doesn't seem substantial to me. Do those low numbers include young women all through the first two millenia who were victimized by circumstances like the Salem witch hangings? "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live among you."
I strongly suspect that more than mere thousands were put to death in the Church's name. The native populations in North America didn't fare to well, at the church's hands. Smallpox blankets sent to reservations, for instance. Good "Christian" men taking advantage of the "savages" in thousands of different ways, like selling grain alcohol to the "ignorant savages".
But, go ahead, whitewash the numbers. The winners do get to write history, from what I'm told.
Been there, done that. We run Van Dorn and Nissie machines mostly, with a couple Cincinnatis and three Engels thrown into the mix. I don't know how many ft/lbs we put on them, but I've bent three inch pipes into pretzels.
When I assemble them, I gob the copper flake antiseize liberally, I put the cap on with the bolts finger tight, screw the adapter in hand tight, put all the heaters on, then get everything hot. Then I do this magic thing that most of our guys have never figured out: I USE A TORQUE WRENCH, and tighten all my bolts to the specs in the book! Most of my co-workers think they need to put those bolts in with a thirty foot cheater bar, and that just kills me. The biggest machine we have can be torqued to spec with a 3/4" ratchet and an 18 to 24 inch cheater pipe. Smaller machines I can get to spec with just my 1/2" torque ratchet.
That is definitely tough work, but it's a rare event, I have people around to help, and when the cheater pipes start bending like that, we give up. When you're working with concrete, it's everyday, all day, and you can't change your mind once you've begun.
I have acres. I have timer to stoke the fire. I can even cut timber to build the forge and a building to house it. It would take a little ingenuity to come up with a bellows and an anvil cheap. But, you know what? THIS IS WORK!!! There's a lot of stuff that looks cool, if you can sit around and watch it being done. But, when it's your muscles, learning a new skill, man it's ROUGH!!
The physically hardest job I've ever done was pouring concrete. Following close behind was roughing out some prison buildings, in the mud, in the middle of winter with cold rain running down my back. Then, logging. By comparison, carpentry is easy, and that is real work.
What I'm saying is, I'm familiar enough with real work to recognize it when I see it. Forging iron is going to be about as hard as pouring and finishing at least a half mile of city street. If you want quality work, you'll do that half mile of city street after at least six months of hard work acquiring the skills to do it. You're not going to light a fire, and turn out a beautifully crafted sword on your first attempt!
Call me lazy, but if I decide that I want to craft my own knife or sword, I'll machine it on power equipment!!
I have zero respect for any two-weeks notice thing, unless an actual contract was signed. And, I do not mean a coerced "contract", either. "Well, Bob, I think you have the job. If you'll just sign all these forms, you're hired!" That is coercion.
The boss always has the right to fire you or lay you off without notice. Likewise, I always have the right to call in, and tell them that I've quit. Doesn't much matter what a million bosses have all agreed to, there is nothing binding on the worker.
That's pretty judgmental, really. No one can know what the woman was thinking, now. It's quite possible that those weapons WERE locked up. It's possible that she was in the process of removing them from the home because she feared her son. Yeah, it's possible that she was just stupid, and let her son have free access to them. No one will ever know now.
What we DO KNOW is, she had recognized that the boy wasn't right, and that she was making the first moves to get something done, when he murdered her.
I guess that we could make an argument that society failed her. How many of us are taught, at any stage in our lives, to recognize a nutcase when we see him?
Society carefully teaches us to not be judgmental, to accept people the way they are, to be caring and nurturing. There's no class that I'm aware of, that helps parents to recognize when Junior just can't be trusted anymore.
Does Disney "want" you to see their early Mickey Mouse works? If so - why aren't they out there?
I'm sorry, but you're way off target. Disney doesn't want you to enjoy their early works, because if you're watching the early corny cartoons, you're not buying their latest stupid cartoons.
Yeah, I'm a dad. Three boys, all grown now. Parenting isn't something that you are ever prepared for. The same parenting produced three entirely different people in my home. One, timid and - should I say "lazy", or should I find a nicer term? The next one not very bright, and always in trouble. The third one is out there doing something all the time, without a lazy bone in his body. There's no shortage of native intelligence, but each of them gets stupid in his own way.
I can't imagine raising kids differently, as you say. I guess some people do. But, all of mine had the same opportunities, the same encouragement, etc.
Every person is different, that's all there is to it. The elder Lanza kid seems to have his head on straight. The younger one is beyond description. He's totally fucked up.
Can't blame that on parenting, is all I'm saying. People are born damaged, sometimes. People are damaged as kids. Other people manage to damage themselves with drugs, and other crazy stuff.
From all I read about that Lanza boy, he was screwed at birth, or sometime in his early childhood. What can a parent do with a broken kid? If he's just batshit crazy, all the encouragement in the world isn't going to cure him. Mother had made her mind up to get professional help, apparently because she recognized that he was whacko beyond her means to deal with. Seems that her attempt to get help is what set him off.
My version of the story isn't exactly what has been published, of course, but that's what I piece together from all the little excerpts I've read in the news.
Mother definitely had been in contact with a court, to get the necessary documents to have him declared incompetent.
Actually, that statement is self contradictory. A Christian believes that the Christ is God. If he believes any differently, then he's not a "Christian". He might be Hindu, he might be Pagan, he might be atheist, but he's not "Christian".
That dude in Connecticut has a brother who isn't totally fucked up. Somehow, I don't think the parenting skills, or lack thereof, led to the shootings in Newtown.
Browse the intartubez, and see what classmates and acquaintances had to say about Lanza. He was weird. He was antisocial. He was reclusive. He didn't connect with anyone, male, female, old, young, no one. I've read of one person who really went the extra mile to be a friend to Lanza, and he still failed to connect.
Lanza was mentally and emotionally deficient, and he broke when he discovered that his mother was considering professional help for him. He didn't WANT help.
You clean the malware from your children's computer?
I solved that problem. I burnt an installation disk for my kids. I told them that their infestations were beyond repair, and I didn't have time to get their machines running again. Sat my tired old arse at my own computer, and fielded questions about "It wants me to press F8 to continue, what should I do?" "Press F8 and do whatever it says to do next, Son."
Each of my sons has progressed in his own way, since then. Eldest is expert in reinstalling Windows, because he trashes his system regularly with malware. Youngest has both learned Linux, and learned how to properly protect his Windows system from malware. The middle son? Doesn't even have his own computer, he just has an account on a dozen other people's computers.
If a kid is old enough to browse the internet unsupervised, then he can learn to deal with malware.
"I'm not sure how the relative values of gold and oil matter, and I don't think gold prices are stable at all, given the annual fluctuations in price of up to 180%. That's more volatile than the US dollar."
No, the gold is stable. The gold has been stable for decades. The oil is stable, relative to gold. It is the DOLLAR which loses value, then sometimes gains some value back, then loses value again.
Unluckily, laws are NOT determined by society as a whole.
WTF is the deal with ACTA and all those other treaties? A bunch of corporate bigwigs sit down, and determine how they can most profit, and our congress attempts to enact that corporate agreement into law and treaty? How in hell is that democracy? Rich bastards hire people to represent their interests, with no elections, no accountability, and they get to dictate to the rest of the world how things are going to be?
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Nope. Sorry, but you're wrong. I'm fairly fit, if less fit than I was 20 or 30 years ago. I routinely perform "strenuous" labor. And, I've done so all my life. Arms simply aren't designed, or meant to be held out in an extended position for long periods of time. If I exert myself, I can lift a fifty pound sack of feed, and hold it out at arm's length. It isn't going to stay there very long, because the entire body is entirely off balance, and the arms are straining to hold it there.
Almost 40 years ago, a high school shop teacher challenged some of the jocks to hold a broom out at arm's length, and extended in a horizontal position. They held it there for only short periods of time, like 15 to 45 seconds. Big, strong boys, who were the epitomy of health. Most of the time, the wrist gave out first, sometimes it was the elbow.
I've tried this at work. Half a dozen guys standing around, nice examples of healthy human specimens, I challenge them to hold a broom out. Carpenters generally do better than others, but even though they have developed quite strong wrist muscles, I've never seen anyone hold that broom out, level and steady, for more than 90 seconds.
We simply aren't built to hold our arms out horizontally for long periods of time. That is why metro-type GUI's will never replace more traditional desktop environments. That is why the Linux world has forked Gnome2, and many of us simply abandoned Gnome3.
"Did you know there are no indigenous vegetarians? There may have been some, but they were probably eaten."
ROFLMAO
I have it on good authority that some omnivores eat other omnivores, too. I hear that long pig tastes just like pork! Way off topic, but I served with a guy whose grandfathers were headhunters. We asked him once if he ever ate another person. He said, "I don't know, I just ate whatever my mother gave me!"
It's unlikely that he did. In theory, at least, the last of the tribes in the Phillipines were "civilized" before he was born. But - stuff happens!
You may benefit from watching some nature videos. I think waiting for your dinner to be actually dead and unresponsive to stimuli is a rarity. As soon as the predator can bite a piece off, he's chowing down. Sometime during dinner, the prey actually dies. In the case of snakes, I'm not sure that the prey dies before it reaches the stomach. I found a king snake ingesting a copperhead several years ago. Because I was there, the king reversed the ingestion, the copper head lay there for a few seconds, then started slithering away. I crushed the copperhead's head, apologized to the king, and left.
Needlessly causing an animal to suffer is stupid and pointless, so some of your examples irritate me, but they don't irritate me as much as they bother you.
I can't speak for your ancestors, but mine were all omnivores. We all eat anything that moves unless it moves to fast for us to catch. To solve that, we invented snares, bows and arrows, and finally guns. Somewhere in between we invented fences and barns. We evolved to eat meat, vegetables, and anything else that didn't poison us.
Homegrown meat-like stuff from a culture? I don't think that's on our menu, because we've never encountered it in the wild, or on a farm. Before I try it, it had better be a damned convincing copy. I'll wait until a few generations of PETA fans have subsisted on the stuff, before I try it. Maybe around the year 2250, I'll be convinced! Oh - wait. I don't think my life expectancy is anywhere near 300 years . . . crap!
I understand what the "law" has said, at different times in our history. I completely reject the idea that the child of a female citizen of the United States of America might be denied citizenship based on the mother's age when she gives birth. Either she is an American, or she is not.
The very idea that the mother's or the baby's citizenship is dependent on age hearkens back to the day when women were nothing more than chattel, belonging to men. Such laws are still in existence in much of the Moslem world. The idea of women as chattel has fired off some massive demonstrations in India, in recent days.
WTF does a woman's age have to do with anything at all? A mother is a mother. I don't give a flying fuck if the mother was only 13 when she gave birth, or she was 113. Both cases are very unusual, but neither case makes the least bit of difference to the child's nationality or much of anything else. The ONLY thing mother's age affects, is the likely impact on her own health, and the health of her child.
"Barry" had an American mother, and a Kenyan father. He can claim either, both, or neither of those nationalities, as he chooses. Got that? AS HE CHOOSES.
People who feel the need to split hairs should just sit at home, and pull their own hairs to split. Anal retentiveness has no value in the world at large.
Sounds to me like absolute zero means absolute zero temperature. But objects at absolute zero still retain energy, other than kinetic energy. One you reach absolute zero, those objects dig deep to find energy to give away, somehow converting that energy into heat, or kinetic energy.
Maybe what we need here is a new form of measurement, something like "absolute energy" rather than "absolute temperature". If/when an object reaches absolute zero energy, what happens? I guess all the matter has been converted to energy, and the object no longer exists?
When any person screws up, in any fashion, he has the opportunity to recognize the fact that he has indeed screwed up. I did some things as a kid, that could have landed me in jail. For that matter, I did a few things a young adult that were pretty damned stupid, including drinking and driving.
I was never caught, never hauled before a judge, didn't even get in trouble with my parents. But, I KNEW that I had done wrong, and I DECIDED that if I continued doing those things, the odds would catch up to me.
Mind you, I was probably never "legally drunk" at the wheel, under the laws in effect at the time. Just the same, I knew that I had drunk to much. A near accident made that abundantly clear.
Today's drunk driving laws have edged a little to far the other way. You don't have to be anywhere near "drunk" to fail a sobriety test. At 140 pounds, I was perfectly safe with two drinks under my belt. In fact, the Department of Transportation allowed two drinks with lunch, back then, for truck drivers, boat pilots, etc. Today, sniffing a bottle of beer might make you "drunk" in transportation industries.
Alright - I'm reading your link, and googling around for more on the subject. Either I'm a victim of mythology and legend, or we see revisionist history here. I'm thinking.
Points for your side - I ran with a half-Apache for quite some time, who taught me an awful lot about life. This old guy never mentioned any small pox blankets, in all the time I knew him. Of course, I never asked him about the stories, either. If the old goat were still alive, I'd make it a point to drive up to his place, and ask him.
I'll concede that you have documentation for your side of this story, and I lack any. I'm still not convinced yet, though. When I have more time, I'll do some more research. Could be, all those stories really are bullshit.
Pretty much the same way I blame Islamic jihadists on Islam. Good Christian men and women took it upon themselves to send those blankets to the reservations, under the guise of "good will". The church taught these good boys and girls in Sunday School how they should conduct themselves, and how they should view the world. Generations of Christians grew up believing that black, brown, and red men were "differetn", that they probably didn't even possess souls, that it would be better for everyone if those "colored" people would just dry up and blow away, so that good, civilized, Christian people can have the land and resources.
You won't find that view in any history books - it's a gestalt of the many things I've read on the subject. It's how I see the prevailing beliefs of white European and American Christians. The beliefs that made it possible for them to march into Arabia, slaughtering any who opposed them. The beliefs that made it possible for good Christians to send small pox blankets to reservations.
Think about it - what could have motivated such acts? What, but a view similar to Nazi Germany's view toward Jews?
It happened. If there are other, more likely motivations, I wish you would share them with me.
The church killed merely thousands? I've heard that claim before. It doesn't seem substantial to me. Do those low numbers include young women all through the first two millenia who were victimized by circumstances like the Salem witch hangings? "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live among you."
I strongly suspect that more than mere thousands were put to death in the Church's name. The native populations in North America didn't fare to well, at the church's hands. Smallpox blankets sent to reservations, for instance. Good "Christian" men taking advantage of the "savages" in thousands of different ways, like selling grain alcohol to the "ignorant savages".
But, go ahead, whitewash the numbers. The winners do get to write history, from what I'm told.
Been there, done that. We run Van Dorn and Nissie machines mostly, with a couple Cincinnatis and three Engels thrown into the mix. I don't know how many ft/lbs we put on them, but I've bent three inch pipes into pretzels.
When I assemble them, I gob the copper flake antiseize liberally, I put the cap on with the bolts finger tight, screw the adapter in hand tight, put all the heaters on, then get everything hot. Then I do this magic thing that most of our guys have never figured out: I USE A TORQUE WRENCH, and tighten all my bolts to the specs in the book! Most of my co-workers think they need to put those bolts in with a thirty foot cheater bar, and that just kills me. The biggest machine we have can be torqued to spec with a 3/4" ratchet and an 18 to 24 inch cheater pipe. Smaller machines I can get to spec with just my 1/2" torque ratchet.
That is definitely tough work, but it's a rare event, I have people around to help, and when the cheater pipes start bending like that, we give up. When you're working with concrete, it's everyday, all day, and you can't change your mind once you've begun.
Free minds and free markets? The latter, we've not experienced in our lifetimes. The former is the sign of a terrorist.
I have acres. I have timer to stoke the fire. I can even cut timber to build the forge and a building to house it. It would take a little ingenuity to come up with a bellows and an anvil cheap. But, you know what? THIS IS WORK!!! There's a lot of stuff that looks cool, if you can sit around and watch it being done. But, when it's your muscles, learning a new skill, man it's ROUGH!!
The physically hardest job I've ever done was pouring concrete. Following close behind was roughing out some prison buildings, in the mud, in the middle of winter with cold rain running down my back. Then, logging. By comparison, carpentry is easy, and that is real work.
What I'm saying is, I'm familiar enough with real work to recognize it when I see it. Forging iron is going to be about as hard as pouring and finishing at least a half mile of city street. If you want quality work, you'll do that half mile of city street after at least six months of hard work acquiring the skills to do it. You're not going to light a fire, and turn out a beautifully crafted sword on your first attempt!
Call me lazy, but if I decide that I want to craft my own knife or sword, I'll machine it on power equipment!!
Hey now! I'm not retarded!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TprfUdSAHgM
I have zero respect for any two-weeks notice thing, unless an actual contract was signed. And, I do not mean a coerced "contract", either. "Well, Bob, I think you have the job. If you'll just sign all these forms, you're hired!" That is coercion.
The boss always has the right to fire you or lay you off without notice. Likewise, I always have the right to call in, and tell them that I've quit. Doesn't much matter what a million bosses have all agreed to, there is nothing binding on the worker.
That's pretty judgmental, really. No one can know what the woman was thinking, now. It's quite possible that those weapons WERE locked up. It's possible that she was in the process of removing them from the home because she feared her son. Yeah, it's possible that she was just stupid, and let her son have free access to them. No one will ever know now.
What we DO KNOW is, she had recognized that the boy wasn't right, and that she was making the first moves to get something done, when he murdered her.
I guess that we could make an argument that society failed her. How many of us are taught, at any stage in our lives, to recognize a nutcase when we see him?
Society carefully teaches us to not be judgmental, to accept people the way they are, to be caring and nurturing. There's no class that I'm aware of, that helps parents to recognize when Junior just can't be trusted anymore.
Does Disney "want" you to see their early Mickey Mouse works? If so - why aren't they out there?
I'm sorry, but you're way off target. Disney doesn't want you to enjoy their early works, because if you're watching the early corny cartoons, you're not buying their latest stupid cartoons.
Yeah, I'm a dad. Three boys, all grown now. Parenting isn't something that you are ever prepared for. The same parenting produced three entirely different people in my home. One, timid and - should I say "lazy", or should I find a nicer term? The next one not very bright, and always in trouble. The third one is out there doing something all the time, without a lazy bone in his body. There's no shortage of native intelligence, but each of them gets stupid in his own way.
I can't imagine raising kids differently, as you say. I guess some people do. But, all of mine had the same opportunities, the same encouragement, etc.
Every person is different, that's all there is to it. The elder Lanza kid seems to have his head on straight. The younger one is beyond description. He's totally fucked up.
Can't blame that on parenting, is all I'm saying. People are born damaged, sometimes. People are damaged as kids. Other people manage to damage themselves with drugs, and other crazy stuff.
From all I read about that Lanza boy, he was screwed at birth, or sometime in his early childhood. What can a parent do with a broken kid? If he's just batshit crazy, all the encouragement in the world isn't going to cure him. Mother had made her mind up to get professional help, apparently because she recognized that he was whacko beyond her means to deal with. Seems that her attempt to get help is what set him off.
My version of the story isn't exactly what has been published, of course, but that's what I piece together from all the little excerpts I've read in the news.
Mother definitely had been in contact with a court, to get the necessary documents to have him declared incompetent.
Actually, that statement is self contradictory. A Christian believes that the Christ is God. If he believes any differently, then he's not a "Christian". He might be Hindu, he might be Pagan, he might be atheist, but he's not "Christian".
Alright - that was worth a laugh. I mean, you're not really serious are you!?!?!
I'll echo what philip paradis said.
That dude in Connecticut has a brother who isn't totally fucked up. Somehow, I don't think the parenting skills, or lack thereof, led to the shootings in Newtown.
Browse the intartubez, and see what classmates and acquaintances had to say about Lanza. He was weird. He was antisocial. He was reclusive. He didn't connect with anyone, male, female, old, young, no one. I've read of one person who really went the extra mile to be a friend to Lanza, and he still failed to connect.
Lanza was mentally and emotionally deficient, and he broke when he discovered that his mother was considering professional help for him. He didn't WANT help.
You clean the malware from your children's computer?
I solved that problem. I burnt an installation disk for my kids. I told them that their infestations were beyond repair, and I didn't have time to get their machines running again. Sat my tired old arse at my own computer, and fielded questions about "It wants me to press F8 to continue, what should I do?" "Press F8 and do whatever it says to do next, Son."
Each of my sons has progressed in his own way, since then. Eldest is expert in reinstalling Windows, because he trashes his system regularly with malware. Youngest has both learned Linux, and learned how to properly protect his Windows system from malware. The middle son? Doesn't even have his own computer, he just has an account on a dozen other people's computers.
If a kid is old enough to browse the internet unsupervised, then he can learn to deal with malware.
"I'm not sure how the relative values of gold and oil matter, and I don't think gold prices are stable at all, given the annual fluctuations in price of up to 180%. That's more volatile than the US dollar."
No, the gold is stable. The gold has been stable for decades. The oil is stable, relative to gold. It is the DOLLAR which loses value, then sometimes gains some value back, then loses value again.
Unluckily, laws are NOT determined by society as a whole.
WTF is the deal with ACTA and all those other treaties? A bunch of corporate bigwigs sit down, and determine how they can most profit, and our congress attempts to enact that corporate agreement into law and treaty? How in hell is that democracy? Rich bastards hire people to represent their interests, with no elections, no accountability, and they get to dictate to the rest of the world how things are going to be?
Wake up and smell the roses.