laripu

Light she was and like a fairy And her shoes were number nine Herring boxes, without topses Sandals were for Clementine Sounds to me like humor. A joke. A fanciful funny. But I dunno. Maybe herring boxes without topses were the bees knees way back when.

Goo goo goo joob.

There was no chance this woman was threatening the officer. Americans as a whole need to travel a bit to other countries, be exposed to other cultures, and learn at least one other language reasonably well. Then they might not assume that a harmless little old lady speaking a foreign language is a threat. I really really really hope her one of her grandchildren is a cutthroat lawyer experienced in civil litigation. I'm thinking $5 million, grossed up for taxes.

Then I am the opposite of a leader (a fact understood by all my various bosses). There is one kind of fearlessness I have: I have no problem telling bosses when something stinks, or is being organized wrongly. They rarely appreciate the forcefulness of the delivery, but they know they'll get truth even if it's ugly truth. I'm immune to that fear because that should be part of my job and their job. In everything else in the opposite. I think I like it like that.

The are rules of civility here because of vulgar louts like you. Those aren't Nazi rules, those are the rules your parents should have taught you about what is and isn't refined, gracious human behavior.

ExPDXer - You're a cartoon prodigy! You posted great ones! I particularly like the one with hooded Trump in the Oval Orifice. (sic) I've only got one.

To identify them, see how they treat their families. Ask their mothers, especially. See how they treat their wives or husbands and children. See what their school chums think of them. (Someone with whom I went to elementary school, call him MG, ended up as an investment and pension lawyer. When another friend's mother died, MG tried to sell him investments based on sale of his house. He did this at the funeral. But we all knew way before that.) Pretty much everyone knew it about DJT well in advance. The stupid didn't care about it and voted for him. They're easy prey for a wolf in sheep's clothing, and especially for a wolf with a terrible comb-over. Others calculated that they could keep him in check and get what they wanted. They were caught by greed. Between the greedy and the stupid, there you have his coalition.

I've scanned it, and will return to it to read again in detail. In the mean time: Sociopaths have intelligence distributed the same way everybody else does. Half are pretty dim. A little more than half get caught at something vicious quickly and end up in jail or dead. They get to reproduce. If they manage to, they either use their children cruelly, hurt them or kill them. Most of the remaining aren't smart enough to rise to positions of great power. The ones that can are the top 0.1%. There are exceptions, like a certain DJT of our nightmares, but not many. Moreover, the really smart sociopaths see people like DJT as a dangerous threat to their positions of power. They will remove him in time, if the rest of the legal system is to slow at it. All that to say, the percentage of really dangerous high level sociopaths is so low, and their lack of desire to do anything for their offspring, makes me unworried about them evolutionarily. But I do really worry about the damage they do here and now.

No more than I believe in Odin, Vishnu, or Gitche-Manitou. Except for an accident of the time and place of your birth, you might believe in any of those. To me they all seem like folk tales that primitive cultures used to try (ineffectually) to make sense of their world and their lives. We're only a tiny bit better at that. Mostly we can tell what isn't the case, rather than what is.

I wish you the birthday of your dreams, young 'un.

Since society needs more cooperators than greedy, cruel, self-seeking people by a huge majority, societies that have better chances of survival (without outside pressure) are those in which cooperators form the huge majority. By outside pressure I mean horrible dictatorships waging war against peaceful societies. With outside pressure, people can be misled into believing they need a strongman. Nearly every Arab country has been misled into believing Jews/Israel are a boogieman that justifies dictatorships. For example. WWII Germany was an obvious example of that too. It's a pretty easy choice since Jews are such a small minority everywhere. Jews/Gypsies/blacks/Muslims/Latinos are the boogiemen again in various places around the earth, in varying quantity, including in the US. It sucks.

By Elijah and Elias you mean, using the proper Hebrew version of the name, Eliyahu. In the Jewish tradition, He never died, but rather entered heaven bodily, alive. Since the Jewish tradition is what Jesus would have believed, what the text shows is not reincarnation but rather the bodily return of a person who has never died. Indeed, at Passover, there's a Jewish tradition of leaving a glass of wine on the table overnight: just in case Eliyahu shows up, he'll have a drink. You never know... Let's examine the assumptions. You're assuming: 1. What is reported about what Jesus said is indeed what he he said. 2. Jesus had special knowledge about such things. There's no evidence that either of those is true. Twenty centuries is a long time during which words can be twisted, modified or slanted according to the needs of the moment. Even if it's all true, Jesus wasn't saying that John the Baptist had lived a previous life as Eliyahu, but that he actually was Eliyahu returned - but not from the death, just from heaven, where he went without dying. I don't believe that. I know it's all just nonsense for the gullible who want transcendent meaning in their lives, which unfortunately cannot exist.

Can you explain how reincarnation fits in Christian belief?

Self-seeking has survival benefit. So does cooperation and mutual trust within a tribe. So both of those characteristics are available in greater or lesser degree in different individuals. I think that as society gets more complex (which is a consequence of population pressure), cooperation and trust will become more important in the long run for the majority. There will still be a place for greed, cruelty and self-seeking, but it will diminish. Providing for billions takes organization, cooperation, government and intelligence. That's less important if you live in a rural area where your nearest neighbor is 20 miles away.

No, there isn't and never was Tree of Knowledge. The story of Eve eating fruit from it is a myth. All of Genesis is a myth. We didn't bring suffering in ourselves. We weren't created by a god. The biosphere evolved through natural processes. Pain and suffering are evolved traits that make us avoid things that would tend to make us less fit to reproduce.