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Retirement Discussions / Retire Early Liberal Edition
|Subject: Re: Hey, Art. NASA picture of day for you.||Date: 12/18/2007 9:47 PM|
|Author: COJones100||Number: 10614 of 65980|
Lighten up on Art, ok?
Thanks, but no. There's nothing about left-of-center people retiring early that has anything to do with his belief, his faith, that he has stumbled upon The Truth.
It was barely tolerable on the atheist board, but at least there it had a tenuous link to the topic at hand.
I'm sorry you don't like my attitude, Vicki, but that doesn't change things. Art, or Arie, or whatever he wants to be known as puts a lot of stock in people with letters behind their names, and in people who can type. But he's stuck in a rut and only wants to keep going over the same material again and again and again. He can't explain why people don't see the signs and colors so he just ignores it and goes on, calling-up the ISBN of another book that tells the same story.
Pilots measure things in hours. There isn't an odometer in an airplane, there is an hour meter. They log the hours they fly, not the miles they flew. Some pilots go to the airport every weekend and shoot touch-and-go landings over and over. They get good at landing and taking off. Others fly to a town they've never been to and see if they can find it, then find their way home. They fly in places where the landscape is laid out in North-South, East-West section lines one mile apart, and they fly on vacation when they go to Hawaii or Colorado. They get a lot of experience, flying different places in different weather and different times of day, even. Empty airplane, full airplane. High altitude, low altitude.
It's rare that an airline hires a guy with 500 hours of touch and go landings, over someone who has been all over and done many different things in many different ways with an airplane. The saying is "Ted had five hundred hours, while Wally had the same hour, five hundred times".
That's Art's (let's call him Art) story. He's read a book. He's read another book just like it. Now, you or I would read the third book and start to get bored but Art reads that third book as confirmation of the first two. Toss in some hairbrained theory nobody takes seriously, add a dash of alphabet behind the names and he thinks he's getting the revealed Truth from experts. They must be experts—they've written books! And the books agree with every other book on the subject, so they must be right!
If someone comes back from one of these episodes and says "You know, it's the damnedest thing. When I was floating above myself and looking down, I noticed all of these disco lights on the tops of the cabinets!" I'll start to believe he's on the right track. Until then, I have a scientific explanation that works and I don't mind flinging it at him, yes, like a monkey, every time he comes in here and drops his "Holographic Universe" Near-Death Experience crap.
And you can keep your rec, thanks.
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