UpperWestside

I gotta say that he and Street Clothes really shouldn’t poke the bear like they did last summer saying they were hearing Denver talk about them. Boy did that go nowhere. Well deserved sweep coming for those two.

So disappointed in the Ref Cabal. They did not cheat at all tonight and that’s unacceptable. Apparently the cabal only exists in the minds of crazy people who think officials are working behind the scenes as part of a master plan to help the Lakers win. Who knew that the people saying these things on here and elsewhere are indeed off their rocker. I watched the equivalent of three minutes in the 1st half and that was enough. Denver will get a back-to-back and that’s cool. Most everyone predicted that before the season began. Jokic is pretty cool and the NBA is lucky to have him as the face of the NBA right now. Good luck to LeBron for whatever team he forces his way onto next.

I’m fully expecting the Lakers Ref Cabal to come through for the Purple and Gold tonight. Going to need 40 free throws, a couple of ejections and Jokic getting his 4th foul in the 1st quarter. If they can manage all of that I see a two point Laker win.

I don’t dispute how it sounds. My first interaction was as a teen and I had no idea what was going on. In college I saw it again, but not so much since then due to going to a Baptist church. I will likely never partake in doing it and I’m cool with that. I just leave things be with religious beliefs, practices and customs. What a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon or even the Baha’i faith (Rainn Wilson was raised in a house with these beliefs and he’s an incredibly nice person. Met him once and he was so accommodating to random fans coming off the street to take pictures with him.) thinks and does is okay by me so long as it does not hurt or infringe on others who do not believe as they do. It’s the infringing on others that irks me and in the US it feels like most of this behavior comes from the Trumpvangelicals.

I think we dismiss stuff out of hand because we do not personally believe it to be true. I attempt to not do this with any religion and treat all the same.

Thanks for the insight.

I don’t believe this to be true. I preface this also with having never done this myself when praying. I have mentioned this story before, but I remember a trainer we had on the football team in college. His name was Dwayne and he could barely get words out due to a severe stuttering speech impediment. When he wanted to work with us I had to help him ask our coach because he couldn’t finish the sentence. He had a rough childhood as best I remember. One thing about him that will forever stick with me is sitting in chapel with him. He would pray and his stuttering would go away when he spoke in tongues. He could not speak an entire sentence to save his life, but pray in tongues? That he could do.

If only Phoenix had an aging point guard that can make someone like Booker look valuable. Too bad they never had a guy like that.

Wonderful article about them. I sure wish the Lakers still had Hart on the roster. Thanks for sharing it. Not too often you get a good Knicks team with some fun backstories like that.

The Sixers did almost everything better last night except for the final minute. I get the frustration from Embiid, but just take the loss and move on. Complaining about officials swallowing their whistle in the final minute is not the way to go. Win the next two and make it a best-of-three. Also the Nova Knicks are ridiculously mentally tough. This is the first time in forever that the Knicks have that trait and it’s thanks to the Nova contingent.

You cannot fix this. I think we as humans, especially westerners, think we can fix everything. Sometimes you just cannot fix things. I also loathe the “Christians” who think war there means Jesus is on the way back. I never think along those lines. It’s offensive to me to think Jesus sanctions this stuff and just can’t wait to fly in from the clouds in the middle of a war. Those “Christians” are people I steer real far away from. I hope for the best each day for people and that suffering would cease. You can only control what is in front of you.

I look at history as an almost never ending struggle of humans to subdue other humans not included in their group. That phenomenon plays out all across the world. This one just has more documentation than others. I believe that it was George Carlin that commented on liking individual encounters with people as fun, but once people get in groups is where things inevitably go sideways. Both of these sides had control at various points in history and both were also subjected to foreign rule by more than one empire. Again humans gonna human at the expense of the less powerful. In this case the Palestinians get slaughtered because they do not have the weaponry or organized army ravaging them. It’s why I want them sent to the US to live and flourish. As long as Israel is allowed to murder the population they have no chance to have a normal existence. I’d also add that since the Israeli Jews overwhelmingly want them removed that the onus should be entirely upon them financially to facilitate that move. We all know this won’t happen, but it’s better to think of better days for Palestinians than to see them continually suffer endless war. I will attempt to read at least one of the two books, probably the first one. I read for at least an hour and a half a day so when I can work that book in I will do so because you can never know enough or ever stop learning more about the world you share with others.

More awesome stuff.

I remember going to a therapist during the first year of the pandemic. It was helpful I believe and I would recommend therapy to anyone seeking it out or in need of it. Sometimes though I think having close friends or family there for support can be of equal value. Absent that I would go to a therapist though. I wish we lived in a country, or world for that matter, that put greater emphasis on mental health.

Good stuff.

Your understanding that not always fighting means they are cool with each other is off the mark. Nowhere have I said they have always fought. I stated plainly that the origins of this go back three millennia. You look at everything through your western lens and not the lens of the people that have historically had control of their ancestral homeland. The Palestinians want their home back and the heavily armed Israelis are not giving them anything. We’ll both be long gone and this conflict between these two ancient peoples will still be ongoing.

There’s no attempt to stifle any debate. You can go back and forth into perpetuity if you want to. The evidence shown says that we will not see these two groups of people sit down and come to an agreement that stops the violence. The big brother right now is unloading almost everything in the arsenal and the little brother in this scenario will look to get revenge at some point and the violence starts all over again. It is not going to stop and we as westerners think we can just ride in and save the day. We cannot and will not. Mentioning that both of these two peoples share common ancestry is nothing new. That a large part of it went to Egypt and came back to take it several centuries later because “God told them it was their promised land of milk and honey” meant they came back and either slaughtered, ejected or enslaved the locals who were there in the centuries that the Jews were gone. I would imagine that should the US still be here in 3000 years (I know, I know) that there will still be Indigenous people’s ancestors who want their original land back. That’s humans being humans. Palestinians deserve to have their ancestral lands back intact, but there is a greater chance of the Lakers asking me to be their new shooting guard than that happening. I abhor violence and hate to see it in any form against anyone, but here we are. I would rather just take every Palestinian and move them here to have a better life. Human beings as a whole hold bitter grudges and will never stop trying to kill one another as long as at least two of us exist.

Okay, cool.

This was a fun movie start to finish. Good pacing and a nice soundtrack. I would and probably will watch this again.

The animosity is something we cannot fix. This goes back to Old Testament times for each of them. That level of dislike, hatred, distrust is something that is out of any of our hands. Again that sucks, but sometimes there are things that will not change. If I could take the hardliners on each side that continue to prod and provoke anger to an island and leave them all there to fight it out to the death I’d readily do it if it meant cooler and more sensible people could come together from each side. If I could take the Palestinians that want to come here I would do it and I would get the ones capable of working into a career field they are either already in or qualified to be in as well as getting them started with housing. Perhaps an apartment relative to the size of their family. Again this would require a society that doesn’t have millions that hate brown people to make it work. You want to see the settlement expansion stop? You stop giving leeway to the leadership in Israel to be pricks. You stop handing them weapons and weapon systems that kill people by the bushel. Israel keeps doing what they do because there is no one stopping them. Again this whole settlement thing also goes back to the Jews believing all this land to be theirs since God gave it to them. This ignores the parts where God sent them away from the land for being ungrateful idol worshipping clowns. That part always seems to be overlooked. He giveth and He taketh away. I do like that the IDF is an integrated unit with Arabs serving in it. The military here was ahead of the civilian population as well on integration as you well know. Overall I think you have to have two sides who want compromise. This is not that situation. The best case would be to tell the Palestinians to pack their bags for America and a life where they can not have to live like prisoners. That would be my course of action. We can never be diverse enough in my opinion.

This situation obviously sucks for the Palestinians. We all should have the freedom to exist and be able to do so without a threat of lead falling from the sky that could kill us at any moment. I do not believe that any of us will live long enough to see a two state solution implemented nor will the bickering that leads to outright violence ever stop. If I was the president of a country of people who embraced different cultures and didn’t have 40 percent or so of it that hates brown people I would offer every single Palestinian full citizenship that would want to take it. They are entitled to have the ability to live life without the fear of death hanging over them. We get one life and so much of theirs is wasted by their neighbor being a schoolyard bully while the teachers and administration (Us and the rest of Israel’s enablers) lets this continue on.

Perhaps don’t employ these people or send them to the press conferences of high profile female athletes. That exchange is just so absolutely ridiculous. Good on Clark for being disgusted with it.

I would have guessed that was wrong pretty quickly as well because the amount of time it took from enlistment to entering the war in the Pacific was lengthy due to training. These details do not bother me because I doubt Biden spends much time reading about such details from that war. I enjoy reading about them, but I have much more free time than the leader of the free world does.

New Guinea had some horribly awful things happen there before, during and after the conclusion of WWII. The mountains and jungles of the Owen Stanley Range are some of the harshest places on earth to survive. I want to traverse the Kokoda Track at some point.

Told a Lakers fan I work with that we’d win. They obviously want a shot a Denver because pro athletes don’t think like fans do. This series goes 5 at most unless Jokic decides to leave early to go into horse racing full-time. Should be fun watching our two best players eat their own words all series about wanting to see Denver again.