The Dude Laying Down Wisdom

[bigdano711]

Jeff Bridges narrates "Living In The Future's Past", a documentary that is free and is worth the hour and 20 minutes of your time.


At 1:19:35 he shares a quote that you might recognize. ;-)

[bigdano711]

What, no deep thinkers around here? We live in such a precarious moment, we need to talk about this shit. I see reason for great hope. At the same time these evil forces are at their strongest, we have a candidate like RFK Jr. show up. THEE candidate we've been looking for our whole lives. A SOLID third choice. This is it, guys.

Meanwhile, energy prices soar and at the same time, we have documented proof of accessing the zero point energy field. We have a guy who built an ICE engine that runs on hydrogen gas and makes the wonderful WHOMPEM sound, shooting water vapor out of the exhaust.

I should mention the quote. I found it roughly 15 to 20 years ago. It rocked me. I had it in my original FB account as my favorite quote. Now, I love The Dude, especially in the remake of True Grit. I was clean and sober when I watched The Big Lebowski with some clean and sober friends. Actually, we were a bowling team as well, so the movie was poignant. It wasn't much longer after finding the quote that I found myself divorced, wrecked, a shell of a man. Then I was walking to work one day and I saw what had become of us. I got off BART at the Montgomery Street station in downtown San Francisco and headed topside like I did every day of the week. The usual throng collected on the street corner, waiting for the light to change. Because I've never liked crowds, I jay-walked across a one-way street, walked up a bit, then jay-walked across the other. I had the timing of the traffic lights down. As I was crossing that 2nd street, I happened to look down at the throng, right at the moment the light changed, and watched that throng surge into the street like some kind of ant colony. I was shook, all the way to the core. I remember stopping mid-stride and standing there, watching it happen, jaw hanging down to my 2nd chin. I suddenly realized that I was part of it and by being part of it, I was condoning it. The next realization was that I had to quit, right now, walk away and NEVER come back.

Now, all these years later, ol' Jeff makes a documentary and features that VERY quote at the end. I was/am/will forever be ROCKED by that. Miracles abound.

[bigdano711]

"I just came in...
To see what condition my condition was in."

[Thumper]

Energy is cheap in the US. We pay less for energy than almost anywhere on the planet! Food too. My wife is from Spain, grandma from France, brother in Australia. They spend more than twice as much for fuel in those places, food too. Of course, they spend a lot less on military, so we pay for it ! Just in different ways.

[bigdano711]

Ask your wife if she knows a coastal town called Ayala. That's my last name. I can't prove it, yet, but I believe I am a descendant of Juan Manuel de Ayala, the man responsible for discovering San Francisco Bay. Yeah, SF belongs to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Ayala

Oh man, the food in this country is so bad. 90% processed crap. If you listen to RFK Jr. talk about it, you can see he's telling the truth. He spent his whole career going after huge corporations and WINNING.

It IS possible to find SOME decent stuff, mostly at farmer's markets. It's time to start growing my own. I want to get a chicken coop going, too.

[Sport Rider]

there's ALWAYS precarious moments. It's not any different. people just find something different to alarm us about. I distinctly remember back in the 70s, when I came of age, thinking that I wasn't sure I wanted to have kids because the world may well end for them before their lifetime was over. Here we are 45 years later and my oldest grandkid is coming of age. Everyone really needs to stop worrying about the doomsdayers and enjoy life instead. Just my 2 cents....

[Thumper]

Excellent documentary.

The people that dismiss anthropomorphic global warming don't recognize the extreme speed of the change THIS time. The meteor that hit the earth killed the dinosaurs, changed the earth's atmosphere instantly. But that was rare. Usually it is a slow process, geological time in 10s of thousands of years.. But NOT this time. It is taking a few hundred years. Some fools blame "science" for promoting it, ostracizing nay-sayings (boo-hoo)... After humans cut down all the forests in Europe we kept doing it, and still are, but at a slower pace (deforestation is ongoing). Trees fix Carbon and create cool place. We need them. We need to replant them.

The extraction of fossil fuels (reduced Carbon) that followed in the industrial revolution is absolutely MASSIVE on a global scale. Cheap energy was/is there for the taking by us crafty humans. Yeah, we figured out how to efficiently extract oil, coal, natural gas, all the while spilling and burning excess unused Carbon (massive chemical fires, burning train wrecks, etc). We are the meteor this time, and it has taken just a few hundred years!

So we have a rapidly warming planet. Don't think we did this? Well, I guess the majority of sensible humans observing the process, and scientists could be wrong, but very few idiots disagree

Our songbirds have suffered drought and ultra high heat wiping out their numbers. This is really sad. We feed, and it's all we can do. Every year, some of our neighbors buy fireworks that are illegal, much higher explosive content (ash cans, quarter stick, or whatever), and burn thousands of dollars worth of rockets that they aim into the canopy where those birds live. We have observed our bird populations fall in just a few years in our neighborhood.
The same people own 45hp zero turn mowers and big lawn tractors to mow their little postage stamp lawns, getting a good cross cut-cutting it twice or three times when they do it, and they have to run gas powered weedeaters, and finally, bring out the blowers. Do they really not know what they are doing? Wealth and cheap energy in the hands of fools.

OK. I'm done. But I think the documentary speaks for itself. We all make choices that affect what we do as a culture, as a species. I just hope that people listen.

Thanks Dano

[bigdano711]

Originally Posted by Sport Rider

there's ALWAYS precarious moments. It's not any different. people just find something different to alarm us about. I distinctly remember back in the 70s, when I came of age, thinking that I wasn't sure I wanted to have kids because the world may well end for them before their lifetime was over. Here we are 45 years later and my oldest grandkid is coming of age. Everyone really needs to stop worrying about the doomsdayers and enjoy life instead. Just my 2 cents....

I remember yelling at my "spiritual guide", Rob, "THE WORLD HANGS IN THE BALANCE!!" He yelled back, "THE WORLD HAS ALWAYS HUNG IN THE BALANCE!!!"


We've all heard the quote: "All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." Doomsday folk have been around forever, typically in the form of some kinda tyrannical government convincing their people that the other guy is about to attack at any moment. That only lasts for so long. I believe the best things about the Constitution of the United States are the AMENDMENTS. It's like they realized and accepted the fact that this document is NOT perfect and will need constant amending. When is the last time we passed an amendment? When is the last time someone was found guilty of treason and put to death? We all know treason is happening. There is a provision in the Constitution to deal with treasonous bastards, yet we have never exercised it, not at a level that matters. IT IS TIME.


Excellent start to the discussion. We all have feelings about it. Let 'em rip!