guys so Brian you got the white whale what's it feel like we're excited but now you know it's like the Adriana Grande it's the next you know thank you next and so the next would be how do we continue to look to maintain what we have on the field and with this roster or reinforce it in other ways that might present themselves via free agency or trade-over-time or waiver claims or minor league six-year free agent so it's a long time between now and August 31st but we're excited about the group we have assembled already I think something that resonated with a lot of people is the fact that he kept that sign for when he was 11 years old did you know that he had kept the sign were you impressed with the amount of Yankee history that he knew I had no idea he had to sign still in possession and the one thing I'm not sure if yes picked up or not but being up on the podium when he's putting on that uniform he started getting emotional and you know and so that was I mean I know how much this means to him even more so by watching you know that play out a little bit but then he maintained his poise and he was able to regroup himself but it's obviously it's a long dream coming for him since he was a little boy Brian over the last couple of years as you've built this team you've been very methodical you've stayed away from that big market purchase and free agency you've made smart trades this time you went all in why this guy well I mean we've we've I think we've gone on all in all in on various options and it's just opportunities that present themselves and and how we kind of value that individual at in that time and place so so you know we've we've constantly been around and you know the big game side of it we played on some big things last year but then you know we pivoted and did a lot of different other things you know which was La Mayhew and Britain and you know we traded for Paxton and and you know about a Vino and so so anyway I just I think we try to navigate the opportunities that present themselves and then try to strategic strategically make the best decisions we possibly can with the amount that we have available which our ownership has always been great at and certainly more than than most you know cities across the land but you know but in this case you know we felt like wow if you know this was a you know a rare opportunity I mean he's a very unique gifted individual that doesn't present themselves in free agency very often so so I would liken it to a CC or liken it to a Mike Messina you know so when they do present themselves yeah you do go all in if you can you mentioned the fact you signed Cole now it's all about what's next so what's next what do you see as though this roster still needs I don't know if it I'm not gonna say it needs anything per se like we're really excited by the group that we have and so it's more about being open-minded and listening to what's available via free agency and or trade what shows up on the waiver wire or the mind looks extra free agent side of it and you know you know we have a lot of depth and coverage in a lot of areas which will need and you saw how it paid dividends for us last season when we had all these injuries so we'll see I mean as you know I feel like we're ready if opening day was here to tomorrow we'd be comfortable with what we're doing and how we've positioned ourselves but you know it's not pencils down at any time until again August 31st so we'll just have to wait and see and navigate you know the opportunities as they come you're not going to show us your hand because that's not what you do and I wouldn't expect you to are you cool though with DD signing with the Phillies of having labor tours be your everyday shortstop or are you investigating other opportunities there yeah I mean certainly we we had to decide where to reinvest or invest our you know remaining flexibility and unfortunately you know in the case for DD we had more coverage on the infield side you obviously clearly with labor tours showing what he could do for us at at shortstop in April May and June and then obviously seeing how Estrada played and having Tyler Wade here available as well and we have a young guy named Kyle Holder pushing up in the mix to down below as a great defensive wizard so we had more coverage and reinforcement internally that we can turn to and obviously not even speaking to the rest Indian field with you know the coverage at third with with the guys we have their second and so then the outfield so obviously trying to finish off and we haven't officially done it yet with the with bringing back Brett Gardner but but obviously trying to reinforce the outfit issues with the injuries the Hicks and stuff that was more of an area of focus outfield front line of the rotation and that was gonna take up a lot more of our financial flexibility then then unfortunately trying to compete in the marketplace for someone as good and talented as DD Austin Romain also gone do you feel as though you've seen enough from Kyle Higashioka that he could be the everyday backup catcher and also what type of growth would you like to see from Gary Sanchez this year well I mean I think Gary Sanchez is one of the best catchers in the baseball I thought last year reinforced that so we're really excited that you know he continues to maintain the everyday status as our catcher and then and then we think Kyle Higashioka is ready we thought he was ready last year and beyond but he's gonna get the opportunities of right now the season starts tomorrow he'll be our backup catcher and and we have no qualms about that pitchers love throwing to him he's a lethal bat against left-handed pitching he can really you know pop pop one pretty deep you know so he's a nice threat against left-handers so so very comfortable with his receiving skills and especially the bat against left-handers and so he's during the right to be our backup doesn't mean that we're not open minded to other options and other opportunities but more likely than not you know I think the catching tandem the focus is gonna be more about what's the insurance policies waiting at triple I do you have any desire to still be involved with Dillon Patances who's still out there it's a great he's been a great Yankee and so I've stayed in contact with Jim Murray and you know we'll see if that that you know opportunity you know presents itself for us or not over the course of time so I you know I can't say we're out on anything but I know that we loved everything that Dillon's provided you know from his signing out of the amateur world local kid coming up and being an amazing talented impactful elite reliever and then to now free agency so so we'll see we'll stay in touch it doesn't you know we love our bullpen as is we don't feel like there's anything we have to do further but that doesn't mean that going an extra mile to try to further reinforce isn't gonna be into our benefit at the same time it just it's a competitive market then you don't know where that's gonna lead and and so we'll stay engaged final thing now you find out that Garrett did have that sign it's been in his closet he loves the Yankees you think I could have gotten from minimum wage yeah I mean there's a very expensive sign right the first thing I thought when he started showing the sign I was like it's a very expensive sign so you know you're smart to keep that that quiet in the closet for until the press conference so you know obviously we stepped up the Steinbrenner stepped up and we're looking for it to pay off for our fans in the big way Merry Christmas Brian YouTube all right that's Brian Cashman Yankee GM so


Fyddwn y troffi tvir yw'r math reaction. Everton-1, Manchester City 3 ac Godderson Park tonight, excuse to do, just being drenched, walking back in a storm, thunder and lightning on December 27th, cwm ond. Why did you have to wait till I just come out the stadium? Everton just lost away in the second half really, that's the story of tonight. We began the game with Jordan Pickford in goal, Nathan Patterson, and Michael Encore of Fullback, Tarkovsky, Branthwaite in the middle. The manager went with Ghana, Oana and Andrei Gomez in the role he occupied after coming on as a subatotnum. Jack Addison on the right, Dwight McNeill on the left and Beto replaced Dominic Hall at Lewin up front. I've got to admit this is the one game of the season at Godderson where I'm just not convinced you can involve them in the kind of ding dong battle where they can be carried away with the emotion. It just doesn't, we don't seem to be able to generate that atmosphere at Godderson, that happens to them so therefore they're always a very cold and clinical team to watch. The brilliant at what they do, they've got well-class footballers and that's why I think Everton have found it so difficult. Our quality has reduced over the years and theirs has increased massively and we have to go back to 2017, January 2017 for the last time we beat them at home and we comprehensively beat them, we beat them 4-0 but we did have people like Ross Barclay, Romelu Rukach, who played in that day, Kevin Morales, all good attacking players and we just don't have that talent anymore. And that's why too many times now that you've come to Godderson and being able to get past whatever we've done, whether we've sat in and defended, whether they've had a bit of luck. Like they had a couple of years ago when Frank Llandfarr was the manager, they beat us 1-0 late on or whether they just outclassed us like they did back in May when they beat us 3-0. But as good as they are at knocking it about, evidence shape and discipline I thought in the first half was brilliant tonight. But we worked really hard. You could see what the game plan was. We had Beto trying to get such tight to a Cangie and muscle him off the ball and he did that well on a few occasions. We need a job in Pickford in the first half, made a couple of really good saves to keep it at 0-0. And then when we broke, we broke with a bit of purpose and we scored a really good goal to be fair in terms of pressurising Manchester City, putting them under pressure. On the edge of their box Dwight McNeill got to the bar and cut it across and Jack Harrison ran in inside for to pass the club he was at to give us the lead. And then Harrison almost doubled evidence lead just a few minutes later, shot with the outside of the foot which made a brilliant save. Ultimately for me it was a match winning save because I think had that gone in and evidently gone 2-0 up I think that would have been a long way back for Manchester City. Although City had a lot of the ball in the first half like I said Pickford was called upon a couple of times but he didn't cut us open too many times. So a half time but winning 1-0 people around me saying if we carries on and ends like this or we the best team in the world you could have claimed that given that we were beating the world champions 1-0.  We just couldn't we just couldn't get near them and it wasn't they did step it up there's no doubt about it listen they've got fabulous footballs. Rodri is brilliant to what's on the ball he's just strong his passing range is brilliant he sees the danger he got plays like Fovon and I couldn't really tell you where Phil Fovon was playing tonight because he was everywhere from Manchester City.  The brilliant Alvarez Carl Walker's amazing you know you go through the team they've got brilliant footballers everywhere but in that second half we stopped doing what we were doing well in the first half and it looked like we retreated even further. I don't know whether that was the game plan a half time from the manager what we have we protect but it wasn't the same energy whether we were tired maybe I don't know but they do use the ball really well which means when you get the ball you can't give it away cheaply and we did do that. And eventually we give them too much space on the edge of the penalty area and Phil Fovon rifles are shot in. I haven't seen it back my first thought is could the keeper have done better I've had a few text messages from different people saying the goalkeeper should have saved it I've not seen it back at the time of recording this I've come straight from the ground I've not seen it back I don't know whether he should have or he shouldn't have done but he was far out Fovon we should have got out and blocked it we didn't. So I'll have to look at it back and then discuss where the people could have saved it but it was in the back of the net and what we had to do then was step up we had to step up and get back in their faces and not let them dictate the play.  You get one block on it and it breaks they have another shot and I'm going to do one on it hits his hand and the referee gives a corner and then because City have five men round and jumping in his face he awards a penalty the lines and they can give it the referee give it which is weird because he just gave a corner quite adamantly and I don't understand it because there was then a Varche and now don't get me wrong I thought the minute it hit him it was a penalty but I just didn't get the referee. Changing his mind so easily because players are in his face if that's the case I would suggest Everton get seven men in the referee's face for every contentious decision. Maybe in penalty area given that we are now the only club in the Premier League not to have a penalty which doesn't surprise anybody of course especially with the director from the Premier League this season about Everton. But yeah it was a weird one the penalty was looked at I thought it was a penalty at the time it was Alvarez it's a pick for the went through my had no faith he'd save it to be honest at the moment it's just his penalty shoots out against Fulham last week he should have saved three of them in my opinion and this one went through his legs and in the net we were two on down it was a long way to come back and I thought the players did respond a little bit. The manager went again done that thing of he took better off and just put Dom on instead of going with Dom on better he had keen and done straight and said he scored 11 while he was straight put Michael keen on and went to three at the back so why didn't he just leave better he could have took Harrison off he could have took Dwight McNeill off neither of them were having any kind of impact in the game in the second half. I just didn't I just didn't get why he took better off he should have tried him and Dom for a bit but Everton did then have a glorious opportunity to make it 2-2 I think it might have been Jack Harrison who put the ball across the 6 yard box for Dom to tap in and he put it wide he was under pressure but you've got to take these chances against Manchester City the ball went wide and that was probably Everton's one and only opportunity to get back on level terms. He did well which was knocked the ball around but any hope we had of putting them under pressure for I don't know the last 89 minutes plus what was six minutes of injury time the way we were forcing them into silly mistakes was gone when the ball got played back to Jordan pick for the only atta clearly straight away with a smash that down the line with a being on the attack and who knows we might have made them play that game of jeopardy but he didn't he took a poor touch he allowed them to close and think it was Alvarez closed him down he hit a terrible clearance and it was knocked back in the net for 3-1 and that was it it was game over Phil Fodden smashed one against the post nearly for 4-1 Yn ymwneud yr unrhywn, mae'r gweithio'r perthdr시�dd yn credu'r i'r cyhoeddiad yn eich ddefnydd i ni, ond mae'n ddysgu'r unrhyw sy'n ei ddim yn ymwneud, yna fe gweld cyhoeddiad yn eich gweithio gyda'r eu bod dyma'r lyfr. Mae'r eich bod yn diweddio'rертag , felly mae'n gofio'i bwysig yn y siaradau. Ond mae'n gofio i'r positoriwn, nad ymwneud rydym i牙io gwaith ymlaen o'r ni, ac yn ffwrdd yn edrych o'r cyd-dyn nhw'n dychydig i ddechrau. Felly nid yw ni'n gwneud sydd yn ddechrau, oherwydd mae'r statil yn ei gwybod, ond oes ydych chi'n gwneud y tîm wedi'u gweld yn ei gael. Mae'r ddechrau yn y ffordd yn ddaod yn gwneud, ac mae'n ffordd yn ddechrau i ddweud. Mae'n ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud, yw'r ysgol. We've got another very, very tough game at the weekend at Wolves nice, you've gone on 14 on a Brentford tonight so that's gonna be a really tough game now so. Got to dust thar sales down and go again. Man o dyma'r clom. Jarra plan tweter, I thought he was probably the pick of Everton's players tonight, that is it from me, Jave. I hope you're all having a lovely Christmas. A, ge, ddi o, ffmdson. Subscribe if you haven't. Thanks for watching, see you later.


103.9 FM, WZO Radio, Knoxville. Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, July 5th, 2020. I'm Larry Rhodes, our Doubter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat on the phone with us. Hello, Wombat. Everyone stand for our special July 4th representation. Ready? That was yesterday. God bless America, our home, sweet home. That's a nice Obama face there. Our guests today are Dreadpired Higgs, our leader, and George Wachmall. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in Knoxville while you're just not, there are several atheist, freethinking, rationalist groups that exist right here in Knoxville and we'll be telling you how you can connect with them right after the mid-show break. And I also want to interject that some of us are not in Knoxville. Oh, that's true. You know, like we got me, who's halfway to Chattanooga, and we've got Dreadpired Higgs, who's with us all the way from British Columbia. Very good. This is a radio show going out on the Knoxville airway, so I always want to hit that note, that if they listen to this on the car radio, home radio, whatever, then their groups here are available, but they can join and have a community of freethinkers. Also, did you know that there was a streaming atheist calling video show, like a TV show, and then broadcasting here in Knoxville for over 10 years? Listen, I'll check it out. I know it's got good ratings. I know it's got good actors, and people have been talking about it, and it was great, but like, I'll get the fleabag on Amazon Prime when I'm ready for it. Right now, I'm just waiting to like get through Boy Season 2. There's like a new season of Harley Quinn, hopefully coming out. I'll get the fleabag. I'll watch it. Trust me, I'll get to it. But like, if I was going to watch a bunch of comedians pretend, or actors pretend to be comedians, I'd rather just watch comedians. In fact, if you really want to watch them comedians, check out Amazon Last One Laughing.  And Rubble, I don't know if you're going to stop me anytime soon. I'll just keep going. No, I was just going to let you go. See where it went down the road. It goes nowhere. Every single time. No, it's broadcasting at least on streaming here in Knoxville now. It used to be on TV. We switched to an internet format. We can have a little more leeway in what we say. So check out it. We'll tell you more about how to find it on YouTube right after the show breaks or stick around. If you'd like to interact with us during the show, go to Facebook and search for our digital Freethought Radio Hour page and use the messaging function to set up questions for us or comments and we'll try to get to them on the show. Wambat, what do you have for us today? I think we should open up with a really cool talk on congratulating Dred Pirate on becoming a professor. We're going to talk about that more. Before we get into that, let's open up with our weekly invocation by our own Dred Pirate Higgs. An atheist's outlook is sunny because so much of life can be funny. Without a hereafter, we cherish the laughter and savor each moment like honey. Oh, Rahman. Rahman. Alright, so we are going to work on that because I am totally about high-energy gaze a little bit. Dred, why don't you open this up? What happened to you recently? Well, yeah, I was just talking to a college administrator for our local college, Selkirk College. It's a small community college that has a number of campuses around southern interior here and I spoke to them about the possibility of teaching a critical thinking course. And so after we kind of went back and forth a little bit, there's a huge amount of interest from their point of view and I'm looking at developing some curriculum and getting this thing out there coming up in probably October. So what exactly are you teaching? Well, so the course would be called Skepticism 1.0, Adventures in Critical Thinking. So it would really just be around developing critical thinking skills, learning methodology for examining evidence and for discriminating between what is justified in terms of belief and what isn't and how you discern the two and how to engage in SE, Street Epistemology. So I thought that would be an interesting element so that students each could at some point during the course be the interviewer and the interlocutor. So again, teaching them a real world skill to examine beliefs. I think that's really cool. And feel free to use my media or anyone else's to help exemplify good and bad. I can even give you some special bad views I never published. This will show you how this doesn't work sometimes. I mean, it would actually be great to have some guest speakers because it's going to be run virtually. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Tell me when. Yeah. I'm knocking on that door already. All right. George, what do you think is critical thinking a real world skill that should be taught in school? Should we waste time on that? Hold on. Hold on. Let me put my right face on.  You got the libertarians. You got them all over the place. They want to get in our faces, use our tax dollars. I say no, we got to stop this. What do you think? Are you with me? Are you a patriot like me? What? What do you got to say?  I'm not a high speed thinker. I'm more of a reflective type person.  However, I do think that. Yeah, it would be very good to teach this in school. And my God, how do we do it? You know, having moved to the south of the US. From coastal places. I feel like I'm in another world. I'm on another planet here. And it has taken me four years to realize that it has not been easy. And it's like, I have to understand. Yeah. A lot of people around here really do not think the way that I do. How do I bridge the gap? You know, I mean, people automatically make assumptions about me that are not true. They believe that I believe in God, for instance. Yeah. You get that by default here a lot. What's that? You get that by default, just being here. Yes, exactly. I'm just learning that. And, you know, people assume not only that I believe in God, but they assume that I'm a Christian. Yeah. Or that there's your member of their church that just never showed up on Sunday for the last couple of years. You're a Presbyterian of Third Street Baptist, right? Or like, what? What does that even make? Don't those conflicts each other? It's like, what do you mean the conflict? My religion is entirely rational. Larry, has anyone ever assumed anything about you just from the look of it? Oh, yeah. I'm sure most of my life. I've been an atheist since like 1973. And I didn't come out of the closet for nearly 30 years. So people assume all kinds of things about me, I guess. And I guess they still do. Strange use on the street. You know, seeing me go by again, just assume I'm a Christian. Yeah. Because that's the default position in the south, especially in the Bible Belt. But that's one of the reasons I think it's very important for people to come out of the atheist closet. They're going to, or the deist closet as it is, as it were. But until you do, people make assumptions about you, that you're religious, that you buy into all this stuff. And even the other atheists in your community will think that you're religious, and that's all. So help me out. How does critical thinking help you? Critical thinking helps me get to reality. It helps me shave away the supernatural aspects of things that have never been proven or been demonstrated. It helps me in a myriad of ways and on day to day, especially when you watch TV and see all these claims that we're making about the world that you're not using critical thinking you know is not true. I want to tell you the news cycle is one of the most lying things. It's all fake news. It's all fake news. It's the worst news ever. It's all fake. You got to make sure you get the right news. Whatever I tell you is the truth. You got to remember that. All right. Boudreau, I got a question for you. Do you think that we should spend our good Canadian tax money on critical thinking in college? Is there a place for that? I guess the first question is will they accept their fake money? Well, I mean, there's no American presidents on the money, so I don't know. I don't know if it's real or not. Looks like my options. I heard it's plastic. I heard it's plastic. I heard Canadian money is plastic and smells like maple syrup. That can't be real. Don't leave it on your dash. It'll melt. No way. That's terrible. Yeah. I think absolutely. Gosh, I wish it was something we do here in the States. I mean, how could you not use those tools for anything great? You know, science, so history, just, I mean, it's a universal tool that will apply to just about anything. So, yeah, I apologize about my video here. I'm at the social distance pool and social distance pool. Yeah. We're all the water molecules are six feet apart from each other. Exactly. I didn't really answer your question. And I wanted to get back to that. This is George and what I. And what was leading up to was. Well, to teach it in school. Yeah, absolutely. But how do we get it into the curriculum? When all those people who are on the school board are going to fight it. Right. Especially in the lower grades, what gets me is like, we don't really teach evolution and anywhere, anything short of college. Right. And but a lot of people don't even go to college. Right. It doesn't get to the general public. So true. Basic concepts of evolution. So true. I mean, if we can't get that there, how can you expect to get critical thinking there? Yeah, I'm so lucky. I just watched PBS shows growing up or else I would have been completely unprepared going to college. Evolution scientific reasoning is like, what is all this? I only have my Bible. It's weird. Would you mind if I got feedback from Dale? Dale, do you think we should teach critical thinking in schools? Do you think it's worth the money and what kind of benefit do you see from a society that teaches that regularly as part of a curriculum? Well, I guess ignorance would be the alternative and that we know that's expensive. However, there was one political party that during their, their platform in 2000. I forgot what year. They had a thing in their platform about teaching critical thinking. And they were addressing that because they apparently this party has control of the school books in America. And they did not want critical thinking as part of the curriculum because specifically it engendered a, children questioning their parents and a rejection of tradition. And consequently, if you're going to have someone that doesn't object to a lot of things, if you probably don't want them thinking critically, but a dread pirate, you're the one that's doing the court in critical thinking. Yeah. Then I would recommend hats. Now, recommend what has to think responsibly. Please, please think responsibly. Exactly. You can't force someone to do it. Maybe you can request, but that'll make it cool. By the way, there's an excellent show on TV that is all about critical thinking and a more practical basis. And it's by Pin and Teller and it's called Bull Feathers. Close. Though I do be in broadcast. It's on Hulu. We get it on. You can find it. I do like when seeing magicians break down their tricks. Only one, I don't like, I love the mystique of how magic works, but I also love how much skill is involved in trying to make it look like you're doing magic. So there's like two different parts in my brain that get tickled when I watch a magic show or watch a magician break down the trick because I'm like, wow, that's so technical. There's so much small details here that involved with making the magic. Tyrone, you're an artist and you're thinking analytically, which I really like. I'm an artist myself and I have done that from an early age. We respond emotionally to the good work of other artists. We're drawn in. We're hypnotized like any other member of the audience, but we're also analyzing at the same time. How did he do that? Right. And then like do that too. And I think the biggest thing is regardless of whatever I saw in the magic trick, whenever I understand how a trick works, it's always, how do I put it? Less of a jump of impossibility compared to how, what I saw at first. So if I saw a guy like pull a quarter of a guy's ear, I'll be like, he just pulled a quarter of a guy's ear. But then he's like, no, I just put it in my plan and I pulled it out. I'm like, oh, well now I can't see that trick for what it is anymore. But my skepticism is now like at a healthy level. Because now I know people can't pull coins out of people's ears and that there's techniques to do it. And that's cool. And I can use that so that the next time I see a magic trick that fools me, I'll be like, well, he's not doing the car trick. He's not doing the lady behind the curtains. That's not a false mirror. How is he doing this? How is she doing this? That's incredible. Like in my head it's like, I know this is a trick, but I'm also really impressed by the fact that you still managed to fool me. Exactly. We admire his skill. Right. And pulling it off. Knowing how the trick works doesn't ruin the magic trick. It just makes it more impressive the next time I get fooled. And I feel like college can, the curriculum that Dred Harris is teaching me, the worst thing that can happen is that people's standard of evidence increase and that the next time they need to believe something, they're applying more critical thought and that the, the only thing that'll come from that is a better world in my opinion. My God. I mean, let's say if we have a minister who has a way of working the crowd and we can analyze the shtick that he's using, that's a Yiddish word. Yeah. Dick and I, boy, I don't know how to translate this word. May the Schwartz be with you. His act.  It's stage craft. Yeah. Stage craft. It's, it's, it's a calculated method of working the, working the crowd. Right. Just thinking of, you know, there are ways that Adolf Hitler worked the crowd the same way that a Southern preacher works the crowd, you know, they start off real slow and reasonable and rational and very, very slowly increase the pace, increase the pace, increase the intensity like a DJ, intensity volume. And by the end of the speech, the guys are screaming. And the audience is just eating up everything that he's putting out and cheering, you know, Trump Trump before we get to Trump, because I know you want to get to Trump. Sorry. Do you think you'll teach in that capacity? Will you start slow and go fast? Have you thought this out like you have a syllabus in the head of time? No, no, no. And it's not. I have used Gary, Gary, Gary, what do you think? What do you think? Okay. So you're questioning anti. Yeah. So what's the class? Well, it's going to be over probably 15 weeks. We do two sessions a week at an hour and a half and then break those, those hour and a half further down so that each, you know, during each session, there's a time dedicated to the SE part. So applying practical, you know, applying the skills practically in a, sort of virtual class setting.  You don't want to start out slow with the idea that, you know, you're going to grab someone's attention and keep it. You got to come out guns blazing essentially, talking about, you know, logical fallacies, you know, biases, cognitive biases and all that kind of stuff really to sort of build the crude toolkit in order to finesse and discover nuance and all that as you move further into the material. Hmm. What kind of material are you going to have? And yeah, basically like that, like, Well, I've got, you know, I've got a couple of good texts that I can refer to and, you know, certainly some online resources.  It's all out there. It's just a matter of putting it into a package. That's, you know, not only palatable, it's interesting and tasty. Dale, you said you looked like you had something to want to say. What's up? I was wanting to ask, when the person after goes through this, what do you hope that this person will use in a practical day to day thing? I mean, we do a lot of dealing with the splitting hairs and right down to the minutia of religion, but how might someone use it? Let's say in, I don't know, car buying or the practical daily exercises. Absolutely. Scam products that are being sold perhaps. Yeah. And that's exactly what I see the benefit on a very practical, pragmatic level is, you know, examining some of the claims that we are constantly bombarded with in media of all kinds. Pardon me. And, you know, if, you know, if it turns out we have younger people that show up to, you know, participate, that would be great. But if we can get, you know, some of the older generation as well, who have children to whom then they can impart these newfound skills, then, you know, it's carrying it into the generational thing where, you know, we might not be teaching critical thinking in school, but if you teach parents critical thinking that trickles down into the family and then translates into, you know, a younger generation. I feel like Dredd's just doing his small part to make Canadians even more better than the rest of Americans. Go, Dredd! We're going to make sure someone's surprised.  Oh, it's very Christian. So in the newspaper, every second week, it advertises religious services offered in and around Grand Forks. And 12 of the 14 are Christian. One of them is Buddhist. And the other is the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. We managed to get in there. Nice! Very good. I would like to mention something about this, getting back to the previous topic where we're talking about the speaker using a way to manipulate their audience. There's a term that goes in churches nowadays is called spiritual manipulation, where the preachers, like a director in a movie, knows how to manipulate the emotions of their audience so that by the end of his standing and sitting in music and soft talking, leading to loud talking and emotional movement, get the people at the end to think that they've actually got the spirit of God moving inside them. I mean, it's nothing more than manipulating the emotions of the audience that they're talking to. It's embodied in that phrase, spiritual manipulation. If a person listening to this broadcast might want to Google it and look at it. I've also heard a flashpoint of gaslighting. Gaslighting is sort of like subtly lying to a person and making them believe something that's not true for a long period of time. But flashpoint of gaslighting is getting one person in a crowd of people who all tell them the same lie and just through peer pressure, they accept that it's true. And if you're like the lone non-believer and a group of believers and they're all saying, you've just been consumed by the spirit of God. You can stand up. You feel like you're good. You might feel something where it's just like, oh, I guess I am. I guess if you don't have a rational basis. I've written an article on my blog about the movie Old Yeller. Did you ever see that movie? I read the book. Well, did you cry at the end? I did not cry at the end. Well, most people, when they see the movie, they cry at the end. And what was the director's point? What was he wanting you to do? He's wanting you to manipulate your emotions over the course of a couple of hours so that at the end you have this great cathartic moment. That's what preachers do every Sunday. They manipulate your emotions to try to do it as much as the director would. There's also just like in the standard way of talking slowly but very confidently makes people listen to you. It's very, very weird. And it's not just used by preachers. It's used by salesmen, politicians. Anyone that's trying to convey or sell an idea is using techniques to make you appreciate them more than you maybe should. And once you have that information, you can go on with critical thinking. As you spoke, I was thinking the phrase popped into my head, church as theater. Right. It's a performance. It is. Especially in these big mega-churches where they have music and video and dancing a lot of times. Dancing? Yes. I actually had an interpretive dance come to a Baptist church I was at one time. Really? I can imagine that. Wow, how times have changed. I've been out of church so much and been reading about the history of churches so much that I've been getting into puritanical ages where there was no dancing, no frolicking between genders and you can't eat certain foods and you have to wear certain clothes. So the fact that we can now have churches accepting dancers in a Baptist place is like history is like pulling over itself. Well, it was a lone dancer. There weren't two of them. There's a cat. Hey, we're at the bottom of the half hour. Larry, why don't you take a seat? Okay, this is digital free-thought radio R and WZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back. Stick around. Hello and welcome back to the second half of the show. I'm Dodder Five and this is the digital free-thought radio hour and WZO radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, July 5th, 2020 and let's talk about the free-thought groups you can join here in Knoxville. First, there's the Atheist Society of Knoxville, founded in 2002. We're in our 18th year. ASK has over a thousand members and you can find us at KnoxvilleAtheist.org By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. No, we do it again and we all say start one. Larry, do it again. I'm ready. If you don't find one in your town, start one. That's right. Another large free-thinking group here in Knoxville, the rationalists of East Tennessee, they've been around for more than 20 years and you can find them at rationalist.org. Go to their page and click on upcoming events to find out what they're up to. We talked about the Atheist Call-In TV show. Wait a second. There's an Atheist Call-In TV show? Yes, yes. Why didn't you tell me? Don't get mad. Don't get heated. Now, you can go to YouTube and find it by looking up Free Thinkers United Coalition of Knoxville. We've got 10 years of archives of shows under Free Thinkers United Coalition or Free Thought Forum. Knoxville, you can look at it and find it either way. With us on the show, we have the Wombat and we have guest Boudreaux, Dredpiret Hicks and Red Leader and George. Boudreaux dropped out, apparently. He was with us. That's all fine. Where are we going now? We were talking before about how Dredpiret is going to be teaching critical thought in schools, which I think is absolutely fantastic and any indifferent that he's going through with that. Also going to be doing some SE and also talking about the benefits of doing that and then also how he's going to teach it. How about this? The idea of talking in front of people is always one of those scary situations, but also the idea, the weighted burden of these people aren't going to like what I'm going to tell them is like an additional weight, especially if you're like in a predominately Christian area and you're talking about things like critical thinking and people are like, let me question my faith. I'm not allowed to do that. I'm just going to not like this guy.  Do you have any apprehensions and what are your current concerns at the moment? Well, certainly the apprehension is that no one wants to sign up for it. So that would put an end to it real quick. But in discussion the college administrator the fact that this is going to be on a virtual platform opens up the audience considerably so that we're not taking simply from the sort of 8,000 people locally, that might attend the local college, but now from 100,000 people spread over a number of communities through a pretty large geographical area. That eases the sort of apprehension I have of having no one interested in it. I think, you know... Will you also be able to record the classes? Yeah, I think that would be a reasonable thing. Dude, if you did that and made it like a curriculum on YouTube, that would be fantastic. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I've seen some other courses a couple of college professors down in I believe in Seattle have a bolge What? Of course. It's called calling bolge you know It's a French thing. I don't want to swear on I appreciate it. That's what the course is called and they advertised they just put up everything all their courses on YouTube and that's even a course I'll be taking some material from. Yeah, no, I mean, if people are interested in, you know, paying the fee to get a credit so they can hang a little certificate on their wall and say I'm a critical thinker, that's great. But, you know, it's certainly something I would like to see everyone have access to and as many different formats and as many different people willing to teach the subject as there are might be out there, all the better I think in the long term. Well, slash red leader, let me throw something that we're going to go back in our time machine we're going to go back in the way way back machine and you're back machine. Yeah, you're now a young a vibrant adult at the start of his life right after high school. What would this class need to tell you to make you interested in Hoppedon like how what would it need for you to be like, okay, I'll check this out When I was in the military, I did psychiatric work and in our training one of the things that at that time the most popular things going on was transactional analysis I'm okay, you're okay, the games people play, these were fairly well understood concepts and one of the things we did is for an exercise was we watched soap operas. You would call out you would label the things that people said, the interactions and what we found was is that in soap operas very very little of the dialogue is on an adult basis for the most part it's someone telling someone oh you've got to do this or someone blaming somebody for their kind of ills now that would be a practical application but I might suggest watching Fox News and I believe there would be a lot of world feathers called if the class had sessions where they were going to say we're going to watch the news or we're going to watch the soap opera and we're going to break down how these people are talking with each other you'd be like that would be a practical application plus you might want to consider the commercials on TV they know why is this person saying this where are they getting this information from check it out yeah and that would be certainly an element I'd like to employ is bringing you know the 30 second or one minute commercials and then just having the class around table discussion to break down what the message is how they're trying to get it across what they're trying to sell and the manipulative the manipulations that they're employing to do it you know I'm thinking about categorizing the techniques yeah you know putting these techniques into containers you know like incognitive behavioral therapy as I as I know it I really would like to come back to this transactional analysis it's day came and went for a while but it's a really great concept and I would recommend that the viewers take a minute to google transactional analysis especially on youtube and watch a few videos on it just to get that tool in your tool chest so I don't really know what transactional analysis is maybe I've done it but I don't know what the term means what does it mean like the last two or three things we said to each other was a verbal transaction oh my gosh where's my receipt Larry I know you've been I know you've been taking things from me and I got my taxes to pay too but if you analyze those as Dale was saying you find out that you're talking to each other like grownups or they're talking to like an adult to a child when you're telling them that they should do something that they're not doing there's other ways of breaking it down too but that's the basis of it is to analyze the transactions that you're going to and the best thing to do is keep it in mind when the transaction is transpiring so you can see what the person is trying to manipulate you into oh man that's so much I love that yeah go ahead Dale I might suggest also as far as critical thinking to look at some of these political commercials that go on now we know that these commercials work or they would not be doing them but we've got people on TV now that are saying that they are 100% for you know who and that they're against this and they're against that and it's just obviously a way to attack someone's emotions the voice that's very dramatic this is going to be the end of our civilization support and so on I'm really sorry that with we having this zoom and all that we don't have our political candidates doing Lincoln Douglas debate with the time period and all of that and then just let them fight it out back and forth instead of having moderators but I was trying to say that critical thinking political voting would be a great way to apply it that would benefit not only the person but your community at large you know one thing that occurs to me in this discussion is that here in the US in the state of Indiana I believe we have one or two politicians who are attacking academia for teaching critical thinking say it isn't so well do we have to combat this on a larger scale I wonder what the benefit on their side is is just to appease voters who look who may have a chip on their shoulder from a perceived idea that people who go through college or critical thinking courses look down on them and they're trying to you know or threaten them or is it more of like a conspiratorial you know gray men sort of like a hey the dumber we can keep these sheep the longer we can keep them dumb the better like the less questions they ask the more fruit we get maybe it's a bit of both I don't know I feel like I definitely do feel that there is idea of a us versus them mentality regardless of whatever your classification is if you're a plumber you might look down on like people who are as specific as a career path because you in your head think well we're plumbers they're scientists they they aren't us and they might even look down on us maybe it just takes one interaction for you to color all scientists as people who hate plumbers but everybody needs plumbers dude everyone has toilets I was talking on discord with a guy who was like I'm a plumber and I don't and I I don't think that's a bad career way and I know there's scientists out there who look down on me I was like scientists don't look down on you we need plumbers too like everybody needs a plumber like job is the one that could be like chopped off the block but like we need plumbers and stuff like that we need minors we know that stuff so blue collar people might have the idea of like hey critical thought not that important and people who have it may not like us as much and that's very easy for us to be like okay well that's the case we're just me a block of voting block and we're waiting for the politician to be like I hate people who ask questions and think critically and they're like we're gonna vote for this guy and I'm like how's that a thing yeah how is that a thing yeah you know dread there's a couple other videos out there that you might be interested in including in your course Peter Popov you know the the healer there's a great video out there where who was it the amazing Randy the amazing yeah great radio signals in his as a year another one is Marjo Gortner you ever heard him he was a child preacher of prodigy that his parents raised him to be a preacher I mean from the very earliest age and he they trained him basically to manipulate the crowd and what's interesting about Marjo Gortner was when he got to be about 30 he he realized that he was really hurting people doing this he was taking advantage of them basically robbing them using their emotion instead of a gun and he turned and did an expose of all of it so you might be able to find that and what's his name Marjo M-A-R-J-O-E Marjo Gortner G-O-R-T-N-E-R actually there's a link I'm looking at that I'll put the link in our chat so you can get to it cool if you're doing this class in a brick and mortar building it would have also been cool to have like a taste test with Coca-Cola versus like the generic store brand and you put them in like just undisclosed cups we're just gonna do a taste test with 10 people who volunteer who can drink soda and we're gonna see which ones you guys like better or which one you actually think is Coca-Cola like the brand and more than likely it's gonna be a 50-50 split more or less because they are the same ingredients it's mostly water plus some sugar right and so the idea is how is it that people are willing to spend upwards of eight times more for this sugary water than this and then you can look at all the advertisements that people have been exposed to since they were youth to Coca-Cola being branded alongside Olympic athletes in the background of American Idol songs like connotated with very successful people throughout a youthful age and how people understand the jingles and how they like attach it to their national identity and it's like you are buying a brand that has been substantially incepting ideas of you wanting it since you're young like you have to realize that like a lot of the things that we're talking about in this classroom isn't stuff that's happening to you right now it's stuff that's already happened to you you've come into this class with bias right and it's important for you to recognize what that is yeah I don't know I've always been fun that's awesome you know one thing interesting is back when drinks were like five cents Coke and Pepsi Coke and Pepsi had a war this is history no no no I do I do remember when they were six cents I remember going so this is how old I am I once in my entire life bought something with a nickel and so I can say I've done that at least one time and it was a tutsi roll pop so I remember that I remember that walking back I remember you'd be able to put a penny and a nickel on a drink machine and get a coke if it was one time ago Coke raised their price from five cents to six cents at this time and Pepsi decided not to save everybody 20% of the price of it but people interpreted it differently they interpreted that they're buying the better stuff the more expensive stuff the stuff that costs more the premium stuff and it backfired on Pepsi and I bet that was Coca-Cola's hand and making sure that that perception skewed that way because they wouldn't just be like oh we're so lucky people think our expensive products most like let's twist this spinning it spin super important there's so much to talk about there's no shortage of stuff to cover I will bring up this though kind of an important thing there are of course things that we might be bonded to through personal identification like our religion and stuff like that but there are also recent events that might make us critical thinking more emotionally charged than others for example people who get falsely accused of doing crimes like in the news for something like for example there have been sexual allegations that have happened and while there are definitely people who have committed them and I'm happy for the victims to be speaking out which support them there have also been false accusations as well and people caught on those crossfires if someone had a good basis for critical thought I think what their most important thing would be is a tweet good enough to condemn someone or should there be a more substantial means of figuring out how we can figure out if something's true or not and how we can actually go about applying consequences accordingly without just one tweet and you're done it's hard to talk about things like that in this particular political environment this particular age especially as everyone's been sequestered at home for a while you got protests going on this heightened sense of I've only known social media for the last eight months or something like that how do you start bridging that kind of gap across that emotional divide because I think most people can think most people are keen with the idea of this is going to benefit me if I can think more clearly but if it starts going to an emotional mind field how do you start to separate I've been thinking about how do I talk with my neighbor across the street who is a you know I've mentioned him to you guys before I think he's an ardent Trump supporter he feels that Fox News is too far to the left and he's a nice guy you know how do I talk with him how do I bring this man around how do you get past the emotions how do you do that what my intention is and let me know if you think I'm all wet or I thought that the way I will work with him is that I will tell him I stories in other words I will tell him about me and I will be honest because I've got to start somewhere if I tell him you should this this this this he's going to turn off how can I bridge the gap yeah Dredd what do you think how can we bridge that gap that's tough I guess is just about tone and composure connecting you know I guess just if you're reading the room essentially and you get a sense that someone's escalating or getting triggered is just you know bring it back by tone and composure I don't know if there's any really good formula outside of that Larry I want to I want to make a confession here okay wait you're actually a Trump supporter I am as much a hypocrite as anybody else you know at the advanced stage that I am now I can look back over my life and see whoops I've made this mistake I've made that mistake and the other thing is that even though I I think of myself as a critical thinker I can be suckered like anybody else absolutely I can fall for it that doesn't make you like emotions are behind it yeah that doesn't make you hypocrite like the path of critical thinking is in destination it's the pursuit it's a process yeah and it's true too that we're all we're all subject to the Dunning Kruger effect at some point you know scientists are experts in their fields but they can be absolute dummies in some unrelated without recognizing it yes yes I shouldn't say that there could be women that try to ask men out who are scientists and do a terrible job at that too so it goes both ways Larry what do you think about dealing with people who are emotionally charged on a subject and you're trying to convey like some sort of critical thinking principles like well I'm not the best person to you're married what's going on here you have a daughter every man should pay for my dinner whenever we go on a day you're like daughter I love no we should really go to Wombat for that street epistemology is the answer to that I would think me I'm confrontational I mean when it comes to you know somebody using their emotions to justify their beliefs I'm just going to start throwing facts out I'm going to start throwing questions at them it has its place for sure but I think even though I don't use it as much as I should street epistemology is where it would be at on that yeah you know using the Socratic method to get them to examine their own positions Larry what is street epistemology we talked about this just talking to people we have to define this for newcomers epistemology is the study of how we learn things how we know things and taking it to the street and talking to people one on one is what Wombat does a lot and it's using the Socratic method to examine the methods to which they reach their conclusions rather than attacking the conclusions themselves and I want to throw this out Adele do you think there's a better process to getting to people without emotions getting in the way like what is a good way to talk to someone about an emotionally charged subject I don't really have much of an answer but I do know that Fox News let's take that show for that channel for example they have the regular straight news but then they have their editorials and they'll find that one of the things they want to do is emotionally charge their audience and the best way to move a population is not by appealing to their sense of fair play and decency or love for their fellow man the best way to move a population is by fear and hate and revenge and protecting yourselves so consequently you will find people that watch shows like O'Reilly and the Judge Jeanine and all of that by the time they're through with their show they actually have their adrenaline levels up the old Yeller tried was a movie that tried to tug at your emotions Fox News for the most part tries to hit him with a sledgehammer so if you can be aware that people are lying to you and they're manipulating you for that you might have somebody who says yeah I'm a Christian and this politician over here is talking about how he was saved after his father died and stuff like that he might just be trying to manipulate me surprising how almost glaringly obvious some of these manipulative tactics become once you sort of become accustomed to the onslaught that they are in these different media forms and what not you know sometimes I kind of shake my head at my own past at having been you know having been you know entranced essentially put in a fog of you know these erroneous beliefs and then now sort of having that veil lifted looking back and thinking how did I ever get there so that's an interesting trip I also think it goes back to what Nathan had said before is there's never a bad time to stand up for true things and it's always to your benefit to have a good method to parse true things from false things and if someone says for example hey I think tweets should be all the proof you need to attack and condemn and get people fired and all this like okay sure I hear that as a method but wouldn't it not also benefit you to have a better method in the event that someone does a tweet and they end up attacking someone who's innocent and we find out they're innocent and the next time someone wants to speak out and they only have twitter they can't use it because when they do people won't believe them because we've used that system to attack innocent people before it's not in your benefit to just have to end and sit on it you always should try to improve it even if you have something that kind of works now what science is is a system that's always trying to improve itself and it never just says hey we're done we figured it out so like what I would just say is we should always take every moment as a learning opportunity to improve the methods that we have to determine true things and false things good advice we got at the end of the show already Dred Pirate where can we find your stuff at now we are streaming live on my facebook page at Mind Pirate that's P-Y-R-A-T-E very cool very cool Dale do you have anything that you would recommend people check out maybe future students of Dred's the pin and teller show both feathers we'll check that out they talk about all of these different ways that people get lied to and I took a psychology course and one of the fellows in the class mentioned that he was a mechanic and he would say things to people like now children do children ride in this car sure yes well in other words I want to do this huge repair and why would you ask children ride in it evokes the idea oh I get it I get it I get it it's like triggering parental responses to right George check out bull feathers it's like BS look for BS George what would you recommend people check out I have nothing fair enough two weeks in a row and going strong I don't challenge nothing I believe in it alright so Larry you want to bet let's chat YouTube you're already here if you're watching this have a good time also hope you had a good fourth of July yeah that's about it we're on podcast people listen to us on podcast you're on the less chat podcast right now go to YouTube and look for let's chat there you go that's one bet's channel and for myself I have a book out there it's called atheism what's it all about go to Amazon and look it up under Larry Rhodes Larry s Rhodes be sure to check out my blog which is at digital free thought dot com and our radio show archives and atheist songs and other articles are on that page if you have any questions for the show send them to ask an atheist at KnoxvilleAtheist.org and we'll try to get to them in future shows and if you're listening to podcasts like them go to itunesditcherilluminarypodcast.com et cetera et cetera and you'll find us under digital free thought radio hour and to wind up the show I'd like to remind everybody that everybody is going to somebody else's hell the time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real until then don't sweat it enjoy your life and join us again next week Wednesday night 7 o'clock on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPFM right here in Knoxville Tennessee so goodbye everybody goodbye everybody goodbye


Hi everyone, today is the 2nd of November, we've got a storm coming in, I can't remember the name of it, but it's gusting up to 75mph on the coast. My client today has cancelled, partly because of the weather concerns and also because he's there under the weather themselves. So if you're watching this, I hope you get well soon mate, and I'm going to fish the spot that we had lined up for today anyway, which is the River Choux in Canesha Memorial Park. It's a good spot for adverse weather conditions because it's got the shelter from the valley, and it's also got the tree line either side, and it has a very low, a slow response to floodwater. It'll be running chocolate brown, but it won't be anything like as high as neighbouring rivers. It's got good depth, good cover, good flow, there's a chance of a barbell, but I need to get this kit set up quickly before it's rain really comes in. Two or three years since I last properly fished this river for my own pleasure, certainly in terms of trying to target a barbell and a chub. The reasonable success catching fish in the sort of three to four pound range might have even been about five years ago. Question is, are there any still in this section? Probably not before they all drop down into the main river.  I mean really, if you'd watch the news, you would have thought that right now my umbrella would be blown out up into the sky and I'd be swept off my feet by a raging torrent. I don't half sensationalise it. In my last video, I used the Creel boilers to good effect, but I think in this venue I'm going to fish the worm because A, it's underrated, B, there'll be loads washed in with this flood water, and it just gives me the chance of a bonus species like a perch or a roach. I've left all my lob worms in my course coaching box at home. I've drawn a quick stop bead connector, and hopefully you can see that. That's just hooked on, and it's that bead that you push over the top that keeps it all in place, and behind that I've got a running ring, which I'm going to attach two ounce lead on.  That's really promising. There we are, we're in. Oh, he's off. No, he's not. I'm glad I've gummed up. There's so many snags in this river. Now he's going upriver. Can't really afford to give him an inch, but he thinks differently. Sweet. Hey, how about that? Get the conditions right, and you'll catch fish. I was really keen to do some pike fishing after my disastrous session at Langhorst, but that's cool. Really nice to know these fish are still here. Just put my silly hat on. Only a babba, really. About two and a half pull in that current. The hook may be very lively. Like grayling, the way they flip round. That's why I need an unhooking mat with babble. That's got so much energy. Hey, three or four pounds I reckon. So they're still in here. They're not easy to catch, but when the floods come up, catch a rising river and they will go on the feed. Hopefully that's the start of many to come. It's so important to rest babble. It's so important to rest babble when you're... Don't mind the babble, I think it's me that needs a rest. Multitasking. This one's actually ready to go. Because he's a smaller fish, I could get him in quite quick. He wasn't out of the water long. Beautiful fish. It's weird, you've got more chance of catching babble here, it seems, than you have chub. Ten years ago that certainly wasn't the case. Very much the other way round. It's free to fish here, which is pretty incredible. Does get busy at weekends. Parking's £2.50 for eight hours. So with my second rod, I want to just put a bait out and forget about it. I want it well out of the way, so I can have some space in front and a funny gland fish on either rod. A lot of debris coming down now. Oi, you made me jump. Go on, shoot. No, no. Oi, God, shoot. Shoot. Go on. Shoot. Go on. No, no, get away. Yeah, so there's three things you've got to watch out for here. Dogs, dog poo and rats. Oh, no. Go on. Shoot. Shoot. Go away. Go on. Shoot. Scram. Go away. Go on. Shoot. Get out. Go on. Shoot. Go on. Shoot. Get out of it. Go on. I don't get it. You need a rod license to fish, but you don't need a license to own a dog. It's funny, despite all the pre-baiting, I've not had a touch since, and it begs the question of what's more important, pre-baiting or casting into the right spot, or the bait you're using, or the method you're using, all those considerations and conditions you're fishing in. But, yeah, the tackle manufacturers and the bait manufacturers will tell you it's the bait you're using or the tackle you're using. Pre-baiting, I think, is massively overrated, because if you're not putting that bait in the right spot, it's not going to make the blindspit difference, because, you know, this is a wild environment. It's plenty of natural food for these fish. They're going to be holed up somewhere where they're safe, and it's probably better to put a single bait out into those areas where they think they're safe than it is to try and draw them out. So that's what I'm going to try and do next. Get a bit braver with my casting. There's not normally much flow to this river. As you can see, it's really starting to tank through now. Along with this, that's gone on for the more crap that's coming through the river and making it very difficult to present a bait for more than 10 minutes before too much stuff gets tangled down the line. I see from the bend in the rod just how much crud there is on there. Look at that. One tip I would give for fishing here is to wind in quickly. If you wind in slow, you'll catch a snag. Well, that's it. What started off to be a very promising session has been pitted out very quickly. It was coaching and chatting with you today. You have time to hang up and go home. So I didn't want you to say that to you.


As a program is improved over time, the new versions are given updated version numbers. And actually the versions of most programs are specified with two numbers called the major version number and the minor version number. And they're written with the major version first, followed by a dot, then the minor version. The general convention is that as you release only minor upgrades, you increment only the minor version number. Only when you release a new version which is significantly different do you increment the major number, and when you do that, you then reset the minor number to zero. For example, if the current version of Firefox is 2.4, but then you release a major upgrade, you would call that 3.0, 3.0. You also have to be careful to recognize that 3.12, for instance, is a later version number than 3.8. Even though the quantity 3.8 is greater than the quantity 3.12. The way you're supposed to read it is that 12 comes after 8, therefore 3.12 is a later version than 3.8. So a good question is, when a new version of a program is released, how do you update your software? Well, with some programs you may simply have to download the new version and then install it just as if you were installing a totally new program. Some programs though are a bit smarter and every time you run them, they will check on the internet to see if there's a new update, if there's a new version. And some programs will even go so far to automatically download and install the update themselves. When a program does this, usually they will at least prompt the user for permission to do so. Some users are apprehensive about new updates because when a new update is released, it may fix things, it may add new features, but there's a good chance it also may break some things. So some people like to wait a little while when a new version is released and hang back and see if other people have problems with the new version before they install it themselves. There's an idea that has caught on in recent years which you might call a software repository. A software repository is some kind of system, some program maybe, that downloads and installs and updates software on your system. So rather you the user having to manually download and install all of these separate programs, it's one central program that does all of that for you. The idea of such a system actually first showed up on Linux. On Linux you have this thing called APT which stands for the Advanced Packaging Tool which is this whole repository system. So a user on Linux when they install software they typically don't install separate installers, they just use their package management system to grab some piece of software and install it. And one advantage of this centralized system is it's generally better at automatically making sure that all of your software is up to date. In the last few years this idea of a software repository has been picked up by commercial software makers. For example, Apple has created such a system for its iPhone called the App Store. App here is short for application, meaning a program. And the idea with the App Store is it's one centralized location which a user goes to to browse through available programs and then they can purchase any of those programs and have it downloaded and installed and then automatically updated when new versions are released. Steam is another such system and it runs on Windows and it's primarily about games. So if we take a look at what Steam looks like it's a program which you download and install on your system and then if you open it up you're presented with an online store from which you can purchase and download any games. And then in Steam you have your list of games which you've purchased and you can launch them from here. So for these games it functions as an alternative to using the start menu. And again a very nice thing about this sort of system is you don't have to worry about keeping everything up to date. It automatically keeps everything up to date for you. Again Steam is just about games. There isn't yet a well established application store for just general programs on Windows, but it seems likely that there will be sometime soon in the future. We talked briefly about file formats and file extensions, for example .doc files or Microsoft Word document files. When it comes to these file extensions Windows has this concept of file associations meaning which installed program is associated with files ending in that extension. If you go to this set associations window in the control panel you'll see the list of all the extensions that Windows knows about and which program by default it will use to open that type of file. So here for example files with the extension .docx are opened by default with Microsoft Word. That's why when you open a .docx file what you're doing is opening Microsoft Word because Microsoft Word is currently the program associated with .docx files. Now it turns out that OpenOfficeWriter can also open and view .docx files. So if you wish to use OpenOfficeWriter as your default application for dealing with .docx files you can go into this window and change the association with .docx files. However if opening a .docx file in an OpenOfficeWriter is something you only wish to do occasionally a better thing to do is just right click on the file and then go to the open with menu and you'll be given a selection of different programs which can open that file. And so you can simply select there OpenOfficeWriter and that will open the file in OpenOfficeWriter just for that one time. It doesn't change the default association. Underneath the hood most programs are quite complicated things and like all complicated things designed by humans inevitably they're never perfect. Programs have imperfections which we call bugs. A bug is simply just some kind of undesired behavior of the program. And some program bugs may cause a program to just lock up to freeze up and stop responding to the user. Hopefully this doesn't happen very often but when it does we need some means to kill a program to get rid of it. When a program locks up like this we can't close it by normal means. We can't just click on the red X in the top right corner that usually doesn't work when this happens. So the way you can terminate a misbehaving program in Windows is to use what's called the Windows Task Manager. The best way to open the Task Manager is to use this handy keyboard shortcut of holding control and holding shift and hitting escape. In the Task Manager window you'll then see these different tabs. There's the applications tab, a processes tab, a services tab, performance networking and users. The two most interesting ones here are applications and processes. Applications here is just used as a synonym for programs so applications here will show you a list of all of your running programs. And you can terminate any program in this list by clicking on it and then clicking on the button that says end task. If that fails to work you can alternatively try to kill a program through the processes tab. The list of programs you see in the applications tab is actually sort of a lie. It's just a friendly gloss over what's really going on in your system. In truth as far as your operating system is concerned the programs that run are called processes. And so when you look in the processes tab you see the true full list of all the processes that are currently running on your system. The surprising part about this list is it tends to contain quite a few more processes than there are programs you yourself started. The reason for this is that many of the processes that run on your system are there functioning not as visible programs to the user, but as sort of background services as we sometimes call them. Things that run in the background and manage various aspects of your computer. Most of these processes are actually in a sense part of Windows itself. For instance in the list here you'll see a process called DWM.exe. It's the desktop window manager and it's actually the part of window responsible for moving your windows around and displaying them and so forth. So this processes list is a bit less friendly than the applications list. However a nice part about the processes list is that it has a column here in the list for CPU time. For each process it is displaying the percentage of CPU time which that process is currently consuming. So say if you have a process listed here where the CPU column reads 50 that means that process is currently taking up 50% of the CPU time. Knowing how much CPU time a process is currently taking up can be useful because sometimes what happens is that a process when it gets in a stuck state, it gets stuck in a loop such that it is actually using the CPU but otherwise not doing anything useful. This may be bad because it might make the other programs in your system run much slower. So what you can try if you ever find that your programs are running really slow is to open up the task manager and try to identify any process that seems to be hogging an inordinate amount of CPU time. Say upwards of 90%. If you find that there's a program hogging the CPU you should first try and close it by normal means and if that fails to work because the program has actually locked up then you can come back to the process list and kill that process.


I feel my heart beating fast. My heart is beating fast. My heart is burning. In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful. May peace and blessings of Allah be upon the most honored, the Prophets, the messengers, and the Beloved of Allah, the Merciful. Our master and prophet, Muhammad, and his family, the good, the pious, and the curse of death upon their enemies, There are three topics to tackle today. The first topic is for all believers to adjust their passions into content or contentment. Because passion is temporary and content is stable. Content is connected to your intellect and passion is connected to your heart. Thus, any situation you are in, any situation that occurs, when that situation or stimulus ends, your passion will end. However, contentment is stable. Stability is an evidence of someone going through one past for the past 80 years. Illness couldn't affect them. Aging couldn't affect them. For what reason? It's because they have that stable content in them. For example, Al-Alam Al-Amini, the most renowned Shi'a author of the book called Al-Abakat, he used to read when he's standing until he gets tired. Then he would sit and read until he gets tired. He would switch to his left side until he gets tired. He would switch back and live on his right side until he gets tired. For what reason did he do that for? He insisted on equipping himself with knowledge to defend Imam Ali, to defend Ahl al-Bayt, al-Sirat and al-Salam. He had that content in him. Same as a person who goes through one past for 80 years, 90 years, nothing could affect them because of that content that they have in them. Therefore content is stable and passion is temporary. Now we know that there is love towards religion. There's an ultimate love that people have towards religion. But if it was a passionate moment, we have to adjust that passion into a stable content. For example, you have a daughter at home.  She will do what you asked her to do because she's afraid of your threat of getting beaten. Therefore, once you don't supervise her and you're not around, she won't do what you asked her to do because she does not have that content in her. She only did what you asked her to do because she was afraid. However, if you try to convince her to put that content in her, even if she's walking with a bad group of people, don't get worried. Even if she's in a bad environment, if you are not supervising her, don't get worried. Why? It's because of those seeds of content that you implemented in her. Your children try to implement those seeds of content in them so that even when you're not around, you don't worry about them because passion is temporary. I'll give you an example of a story that happened in history. Of a man who came to Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa alayh. He told him, O Prophet, I do not love anything in this world more than committing adultery. The people who were around the Prophet yelled at him. They hit him. They said, go away. What are you saying? Rasulullah told him, come. Don't cure something wrong in a wrong way by hitting or yelling. It's not a solution. Rasulullah said, come. Keep approaching. The man kept approaching until his knees touched the knees of Rasulullah. That's how close he was to the Prophet. The Prophet told him, he used logic. Listen to this logic. He told him, do you have a mother? The man said, yes. He said, do you like someone to do that to your mother? He said, no. He said, do you have a sister? The man said, yes. He said, would you like someone to do that to your sister? He said, no. Rasulullah said, whatever you don't like for yourself, don't like it for others. The man left. He said, I went to the Prophet liking nothing more than committing adultery. And I left from the Prophet hating nothing more than committing adultery. He put that content in him. He did not yell at him. He did not hit him. He did not threaten him. He used logic. Likewise, if you have a daughter at home in a situation of hijab, for example, you want your daughter to wear the hijab. Don't force her to wear the hijab. Don't yell at her to wear the hijab. Because even if she did wear it, that will be temporary. Try to convince her. Try to use the words of intellect of why she should wear the hijab. Make her a haflat takleef. And all the girls that attend this haflat takleef, for them to understand, to have this content in them of why they should wear the hijab. If they don't have that content in them, then they are in danger. Whose responsibility is this? It's the mother's responsibility? It's the father's responsibility? Because the West will pull our daughters away from us. Don't think that this isn't a serious issue. The internet is in every home. Television is in every home. With yes and no, it isn't sufficient. Open the doors of conversation. There are barriers between parents and children today. Open those doors. Open that barrier. Open the doors of conversation. Speak to them. Put that content in them. So that even if you're not around them, they are not in danger. With saying yes to your daughter or son and no, it isn't sufficient. Try to implement those seeds of content in your children. This is the first topic. The second topic is to adjust our passion that we have towards our religion into a stable contentment. Secondly, I would like to talk about to turn off the fire, the problems. And what I mean by turning off the fire, I mean the serious problems that you see in communities today. The serious problems that you see that happens between two couples today, between families today. You see, there are three types of people. Because in the communities, if there is a change of history, change in war or change in technology, problems would occur with or without. So imagine there's change in technology, change in some countries in war. More problems would occur. You would always see those three characters. The first character is the one that creates problems, that makes those problems. So you'd see a person who would go to community A and talk about community B. Then they would go to community B and tell them what community A said about them. That is one type of character. You see type two character where they are the watchers. They just watch. They see two fights happening, they don't interfere. Two problems happening, they don't interfere. One beating another, they just watch. The third type of character is the one who interferes to turn off the fire, the problem. Imam Ali, peace be upon him, he himself used to interfere. Rasulullah, peace be upon him, he himself used to interfere and turn off the problems. Try to help, especially if you're asked for help.  He never said no once in his life, only in this tashahud. When you say la ilaha illallah, meaning no Lord but Allah. They say that if there wasn't no for this tashahud, if there wasn't for this tashahud, his la, his no would be na'am, a yes. He'd always help.  Try to be the one who interferes to help solve this misunderstandings. There was this Sheikh, a scholar, it was a hundred years ago, this story. His name is Sheikh Zayn al-Aabdeen al-Mazandarani in Iran. He was praying his morning prayers in a mosque with his helper and he was going back home. Suddenly a lady stops him.   Can you tell him to return me back? The sheikh looked at his helper and said, change your direction. They went to the house of the man's house, her husband's house. He knocked the door. That man opened the door. He saw his scholar, sheikhna come in. He said, no, I just tell you one word.  Return her back. He said, yeah, sure, let her come in now. One word. With one word, you could help solve a problem. And with one word, you can destroy a whole community, a whole generation. Don't forget to be the one who helps to turn off the fire. The last subject that I would like, and the last principle that I would like to conclude this lecture with, is to fulfill the time, the empty time of the youth, our children. Those youth today, on their spare time, if they have an empty time, their leisure time, this is where the shaitan begins. This is where the shaitan starts to speak, to ruin, to destroy a person. Because that person is empty, they have wasted time. It's our responsibility to fulfill their time, whether it's summer holidays, whether it's winter holidays. If we are a community center, make programs for them. Maybe to teach them Quran with adding some sports. Maybe to teach them more about Ahl al-Bayt, give them awards, motivate them. So that they don't have this empty time. If the community doesn't help, then us as parents, it's our responsibility. Don't just depend on communities or programs that would help your children. Us as parents, it's our responsibility to give them to fulfill their empty time. How many orphans are there in this world? Maybe just in Iraq? Five million orphans. How many orphans are there in India and Pakistan, in Syria? Those orphans are the future generation. They feel empty from inside. Try to adopt an orphan, and what I mean by adopt, you don't have to make them live with you. You can spend money on them. You can check on their health status. You can invite them for dinner, invite them to your house with your children. Make them feel, fulfill that empty time that they have. Because they don't have a father, they might not have a mother. They feel empty, and in that empty time is where the shaitan begins and starts.  Think about the children around you. Think about the orphans around you. So step number one, for the believers to adjust their passions that they have towards religion into a stable contentment. Step number two, problems that occur in communities, in centers, in places, in families today, try to interfere to help this misunderstanding and not ruin. Step number three, as much as we can, we should fulfill in the time of our young youths so that the shaitan does not enter and destroy them.  The distance between us is the path to a group of problems. The religious problems, the moral problems, the spiritual problems, this young man who lives in the distance, It can be translated as a step, and this step will be the beginning of many steps.