JW Insider

Whack-a-mole was probably named by someone who had seen the word "guacamole" and didn't know how to pronounce it. It's like the old song . . . Guacamole my shoes! Guacamole my shoes! Before you abuse, criticize and accuse - Guacamole my shoes!

As Janice Joplin once said, "My friends all drive [self-driving vehicles]; I Musk make amends." Or words to that effect.

Maybe. But if there are 250,000,000 registered cars and light trucks in the USA and 40,000 deadly accidents. (37,000-ish) per year, that's terrible. But this also involves 3.2 trillion miles put on those vehicles per year. But for now, there have already been several injuries and one death (Tempe, AZ) attributed to self-driving vehicles possibly before there were even 100,000 official street miles logged on these types of vehicles. Extrapolating, if we were to use one death for every 100,000 miles. That would be the same as comparing 32,000,000 deaths per year (cf. 40,000) after self-driving vehicles also reach the 3.2 trillion miles per year that standard vehicles have reached. I don't know how many miles have been logged by self-driving vehicles yet, but if 100,000 is right, and we were somehow to switch over completely right now, we could expect the entire population of the US (320 million people) to be run over and killed in exactly 10 years.

A gun should require more ongoing training than the average person will normally get. I see no reason why "Caesar" should not bear the sword and just hope and pray that "Caesar" will wield their weapons in a legal and responsible manner. Sometimes these videos are used as an incentive to push the wider, more general carrying of firearms by rank-and-file Joe Q Public, and even schoolteachers. But notice the importance of training and accuracy. Assuming this is not a fake or set-up video (for the purpose just noted), evidently the off-duty policeman fired three shots at fairly close range. But in the above snipped clipping I made from the original video, notice what would have happened if one of those shots went through the original assailant's underarm, or he spun around or fell to the ground more rapidly than expected. The bit of magenta clothing in the picture is a young girl being pulled by her mother. Every one of those shots was therefore not just aimed at the assailant, but also at the mother and child behind him. Many trained policemen have been in situations like this and accidentally shot or even killed innocent by-standers. Let's be careful out there!

Someone was just talking about how, in the new system, no one would be able to choose the color of a carpet in a Kingdom Hall. If, for example, one liked blue and one liked beige both of them would want to given in to the choice of the other person out of love and humility, since love does not try to get its own way. This would then be the same for every aspect of design, material, and coloring, not just the color of the carpet. Of course the argument is usually presented by atheists who would dismiss eternal life and ridicule the idea of perfection, not realizing that no two people would ever choose to excel at all the exact same things in the same way.

If I wore it, no one would believe that I had "NO BLOOD." On the other hand . . .

Thanks. Of course, you should be careful to follow such a statement with "But . . . " at least for the sake of certain opposers. Anyway, agree completely with everything you said above. I don't believe that, in the United States, most college degrees are worth the outrageous expense. They definitely were worth it through most of the 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's if you were also an "educated consumer." There was a turning point in the 90's for some and in the 00's for most others, even before the financial crash became visible in '08. Starting in '08 it would be much easier to make a Peter Schiff style video. (That style of video can be made any time, of course, even when you want to fake a point, but you'd have to do a lot more editing to make it look like there was a consensus. Jay Leno could have proven that no college student knew that 2+2=4 merely by only including those who answered incorrectly, or with too long a pause, or were drunk, acting silly, nervous, etc.) Now there are still more jobs available to college graduates than non-graduates of course, and this is even more critical in an economic downturn. But that doesn't mean the degree was worth the expense. And it's stupid that you would need a degree to make coffee at Starbucks. The need to pay down a student loan does indeed make workers more controllable. That's a critical requirement of capitalists who wish to maximize profit even squeezing from those who believe they are well on the way to joining the "American Dream" someday. Student loans and car loans have been a big part of an abusive process to those who need them, but these problems are nowhere as big as the factors that fed 2008. Combined with the fact that the [banking&finance] criminals who abused taxpayers in 2008 are still fighting [bribing politicians] to be able to abuse with even less regulation now might though combine with student loans as a catalyst with these other problems to see a second wave [plunge] of recession/depression.

How about charging $100 to $175 or more for the majority of the seats? That accommodates the insane pretty well. That said, you made the jump to associate a kind of parity between the deaf and the insane. That was stupid. Would you like to buy an orchestra seat for "Phantom" this Saturday?

Yikes. Good catch, Jack. The persons who wrote and checked the Awake! article in 1988 were probably not dishonest, but they more likely just had no understanding about statistics and how this type of question is used in social surveys. The question has very little to do with the actual percent of students who hope that college gives them an opportunity for making more money -- which is probably always closer to 100%. Most pre-college students are making from $0 a year during High School or less than $1000/year in part time jobs. 100% of them SHOULD hope to make more money, even if they don't go to college for this purpose. Even more so if they are purposely or inadvertently preparing to follow the Bible's admonition: 1 Timothy 5:8 Certainly if anyone does not provide for those who are his own, and especially for those who are members of his household, he has disowned the faith and is worse than a person without faith. The way the question is presented, however, it is possible for all students to say that 100% of them go to college for more money AND that 100% of them go to college for a better job AND that 100% go to learn things of interest AND that 100% go to please their family, etc. The idea is to try to get a feel for the priorities that are in a students head as they are just starting college. A student could conceivably claim that every one of those reasons was "Very Important." All the survey above actually shows is what you said about how it only compares relative importance of motivational factors. It certainly does not say that only 70-some percent went to college to make more money. And the Awake! article is misleading when it says "spiritual goals declining." They probably were, but this survey says nothing about comparing these particular goals with their spiritual goals. Also, as noted above, providing for one's own, especially one's household is a spiritual goal according to 1 Timothy 5:8, or might even be considered by that verse to be MORE IMPORTANT than faith. All that question is really allowing us to see is that students either think that several other factors are more important than money, or that they are not willing to admit that money is as important as it probably is, especially when asked to weigh it against less crass and better-sounding motivations. When I hired people to work on my teams in IT departments (1985 to 2015), I didn't care too much whether a person went to college or not, as long as they could show the correct aptitude for technical testing, logic, programming, designing, data analysis, etc. But over the years, I began to appreciate that, in choosing among those of similar technical skills, those who went to college were almost always preferable. Even if it were for a degree in English, drama, psychology, education, sociology, etc., they were more likely to have better communication skills and more of what was more important to me: an "appreciation of ideas" (the second option of the survey). I would not have cared WHY they went to college, even if it was please their parents, or study for a career they no longer wanted, or even if they had already failed in a previous career. Of course, college holds out the hope and promise of better or at least a wider array of employment opportunities. But this is not always the way things work out. In the United States, both the educational and financial institutions are always looking for ways to profit off students by taking a percentage of any increased income they might get from college. Student loans are managed by these institutions to maximize the profit from each student. Colleges also maximize the amount of tuition that they can get away with.

So we should think like the scribes?

Isn't this meaningless, like saying that the sky is blue because the sky is blue? The whole point of the security council is to reject any condemnation of the "primary" nations who make up the security council. Note closely from Wikipedia: The United Nations Security Council "veto power" refers to the power of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to veto any "substantive" resolution. . . . The unconditional veto possessed by the five governments has been seen by critics as the most undemocratic character of the UN.[1] Critics also claim that veto power is the main cause for international inaction on war crimes and crimes against humanity.[2] However, the United States refused to join the United Nations in 1945 unless it was given a veto.[1] . . . The United Nations Security Council veto system was established in order to prohibit the UN from taking any future action directly against its principal founding members.

Can Titanium and Aluminum be far behind?

I had some respect for Christiane Amanpour in the past even from the time when she spoke for CNN when CNN was the voice of the US State Department. I thought that her particular perspective helped move CNN away from just a state-run propaganda tool, and that her recent absence was punishment for it. But she is back, and I realized from the way she worded things tonight across from Anderson Cooper (regarding tonight's US air strikes on Syria) that it is motivated by more than just the fact that CNN is very excited to be able to report on explosions. She went right back to her old role of restating questionable items as absolute facts, which is of course, the method that our state propaganda has needed to reinforce the military's views from a supposedly "neutral" perspective.

People are already suspicious of the mainstream media outlets from other countries. RT for example is considered fake news here even when (or especially when) it is being more accurate than any mainstream US outlets. And of course, it very often really is fake news, too. Here, it would take someone outside the mainstream ideologies, one who could recognize the great overlap between the supposedly divergent ideologies of, say MSNBC and FOX. I think that Michael Parenti and Noam Chomsky already did an excellent job with their own attempts, Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent, respectively, but their own ideologies make their findings seem suspect to most. https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/chomsky-vs-parenti/

True, and China has already surpassed the technology of most US (non-nuclear) weapons. And a large percentage of US weapons are dismal failures in the field, continuing to disappoint some of of the major buyers who are currently allied with the US.

I am no fan of Fox, nor Carlson, but I agree. I am equally ashamed of MSNBC and CNN and NPR among others. Trump has become the perfect distraction so that most of the major networks don't worry about asking difficult questions about foreign policy. Of course, there are times when any one of these networks will be correct on certain issues, but it must serve an existing (and very predictable) ideology. I assume Trump is always looking for ways to remain popular with an anti-Hillary/anti-Obama base, but with a very limited and obsolete political world-view. This will probably continue to serve him well for another few years because his opposition offers little more than "We're not Trump" in response. (And the fact that most Americans are politically gullible to the propaganda of only one of two camps.)

Thanks for collecting so many of the salient points in a single post. Most people in the United States who feel that they are getting the truth through true freedom of the press, speech, etc., believe the major networks that only pretend to be showing two sides of an issue. I caught a very lucid piece of questioning by Tucker Carlson on FoxNews, who asked a Republican Senator why the US would be so anxious to attack Syria without attempting an investigation into the so-called chemical attack in Douma. The Senator's response was that he must be a supporter of Putin to even ask such a question. White Helmet propaganda videos are still very sloppy and full of contradictions, and individuals among them have been caught in blatant lies and acts of terror of their own. Fortunately, Trump appears to be backing down on his own rhetoric today, and the White House admits that they realize the fight would quickly escalate into something "messy." The US still has limited proxy control over large parts of Syria where most of the oil fields are, but is accidentally tipping its hand in some of the recent admissions to this effect.

Matthew 8:14 14 And when Jesus entered Peter’s house, he saw his mother-in-law lying sick with a fever. 1 Cor 9:5 5 Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? 1 Timothy 3:2 2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife,

I just noticed that I said this without a proper qualification. Most of us know that there is no reward for good works, such as preaching, pioneering, giving excellent talks, going to Bethel, serving as a missionary, ministerial servant, or elder, or Governing Body member, etc. Jehovah rewards his servants, not for the good they do, but for the proper loving motivation in the heart. But, true proper motivation will result in actions. If we truly love God (faith) and our neighbor we cannot help but act upon that love. We will show our fellow human neighbors and brothers mercy, patience, love, empathy, kindness -- all fruits (outgrowths) of the proper spirit in our hearts. To the extent possible in our own circumstances, that automatically translates to action (good works). True faith cannot exist, therefore, without good actions that follow. Not everyone can do the same amount however (the widow's "mite," workers who arrive at the 11th hour, etc.). But if those who put in more work are jealous or disturbed by the lesser work others have done, then they don't understand that it was not the work that was rewarded, but the proper motivation. They don't understand what this means: "I want mercy, not sacrifice"

Back to the purposely misinterpreted question of "How Christ-like is Superman?" Many stories with a hero will have Christ-like elements. There was the book "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell for some evidence of this historically. Kal-El in Hebrew would appear to mean the "Word of God" (Voice of God) or the "demigod" or the "fast god." Also, as Moses was put into a basket and sent down the river to be discovered by adoptive Egyptian parents, Kal-El, this "greater Moses" is put in a space "basket" to be discovered by adoptive earth parents. There was another picture of Jesus in our publications around 1978 where he had the front hair curl on his forehead that was even closer to Superman style than the December 15 1979 Watchtower cover, but I don't remember which month it ran in. If I run across it, I'll post it.

This is really awful. I didn't want to just ignore this. It's all the more tragic for you, it evidently being so close to home, and so recent. I don't want to trivialize it by mixing the topic of drug addiction into a conversation about child abuse statistics, but you already know that this is a huge problem in parts of the world, and we can be thankful for the protections among Jehovah's people that leave us relatively immune from so many of such problems. I see your point, and in spite of the interpretation people have imputed onto this conversation, I don't agree that our problem with child abuse is nearly as bad as is generally found on the outside. I have only disagreed with using a flawed set of numbers and apple-and-orange ratio comparisons to make the claim. And I am concerned that after being associated (in several major legal systems) with a flawed process, we might appear to be defending the flawed process. Our numbers may actually be 10 times better, or 6 times better, but we attract unnecessary negative attention by appearing to defend a process that has been used in the way it has, especially in our own organization's recent history. My wife started a Bible study with a woman, now a sister, who had a drug abuse problem, not an addiction problem. I was asked to study with this woman's brother, who did have an on-and-off drug addiction problem. He was getting treatment, but it was a long process for him and he never managed to get to a point where he thought he was ready for baptism. If he had been baptized, he might have still struggled. But I would agree with calling the organization a "lifeline" for this type of person. Learning to rely on Jehovah to help overcome major issues with wrong desires becomes a positive habit in itself. I think he had a desire to get to a point where he could feel proud of his life, feel a purpose in life, and to some extent feel that he had a social structure and network to fall back upon in time of need. Part of what held him back, he said, is that he didn't feel worthy of association with a group of people who appeared to be ready to love him as he is and take him in as a friend. It's something I've seen in the prison work, too. Even after a baptism, some prisoners don't feel worthy of associating with the class of person that Witnesses represent to them. (For cases like this, I like the experiences such as the brother on the monthly broadcast a few months back who had been a true-to-life criminal, but speaks with joy and obvious acceptance of his past, present and future.) Even in the context of writing a book that could use a "study" or two for more credibility, I still don't see why you are looking for a specific number. The point is that we have made progress beyond most religions on most issues, but we always look to use the Bible as our guiding set of principles. Sometimes this makes us look a bit backward, but we stand on our record in dealing with all the issues that plague the world today. We don't dig our heels in to hang onto traditional ways of doing things, but we look to the Bible for the wisdom and counsel to meet all challenges, old and new.

I don't know. The hair is similar, but the cape is different.

I'm guessing that there is a 98.4572% chance that DefenderOTT actually is AllenSmith. (Do you ever go to that part of the forum that shows who is logged in at a given time and therefore, indirectly, who just logged out, and what post they are currently looking at at any given time?)

I do see a reason not to run with it. Even if it turns out to be correct, there is no 6.3 figure from any study or anything like a study, just as there was no 10-times-better or 18-times-worse figure. Imagine just a couple of tweaks to account for what are currently unknowns. And, most importantly, you can't draw any conclusions that are based on the 12-13% CPS figure without some idea of how many of the JW cases would have also been "confirmed" using the same criteria that the Australian CPS uses for confirmation. (Which as was said before, should never come into the calculation for any reason, because all of the JW reports were already filtered for sexual abuse, and the Australian CPS only reports the 12-13% after all types have been confirmed or non-confirmed.) Remember that we can only compare the number of children confirmed to be sexually abused in the CPS data with the number of children that would have been confirmed to be abused based on the JW cases. For example, lets look at 1 possibility out of thousands of possibilities based on what a confirmation might look like from the "17 cases." (I'll use all 17 cases here based on the likelihood that these cases actually run from a report on the period from about September 1, 2015 to July 31, 2016, or 11 months, although I am rounding to 12 months.) 8 out 17 cases: dismissed as false or unsubstantiated claims against these 8 perpetrators. That's about half. 1 out of 17 cases: the JW only molested non-JWs, which has been true of known cases elsewhere. (effectively making JW children safer, at least around this predator) 1 out of 17 cases: 2 JW children were molested in a public school setting, through no fault of any Watchtower process or negligence. 2 out of 17 cases: confirmed to involve only one child each 2 out of 17 cases: confirmed to involve two children each 2 out of 17 cases: confirmed to involve three children each 1 of 17 cases: confirmed to involve 7 children. Remember, that this does NOT include an unknown additional number of cases that slipped through the cracks, where molestors are no longer JWs, having left or been disfellowshipped in the past but who molested JW children, unreported, while they were in the congregation but whose activities continue to add to the CPS numbers. I say this because of JW "turnover." While currently one out every 352 Australians is a JW, it is probably true that one out of every 140 Australians either is now, or has been a Witness. But, for simplicity, we are ignoring any kind of old or new numbers from JWs already included in the CPS data. So, even after dismissing 10 of the 17 cases as having no effect on the safety of JW children, we still could potentially have 19 children confirmed to have been sexually abused. Of course, more JW cases would be dismissed for non-confirmation because they are probably based on reports, accusations, or confessions that are probably 10 years after the crime, on average. On average, we are therefore measuring how many 10 year old cases might come to light against a time when public awareness and new civil laws for teachers, hospital workers, etc, require every potential or suspected case to be reported. We will not even attempt to account for that, but it would clearly skew the JW numbers to appear much better than they would be in actuality. Also, we should keep in mind that CPS must count children who did not wish to report, and whose parents may have wished not to report. But the process works much quicker with CPS, and helps to confirm more cases because they were usually much more recent. Remember that since we should only be comparing the number of "confirmed" children abused, we can now compare our 19 confirmed children (out of 68,000) to the 5,559 confirmed children (out of 24,000,000). That alone would create a comparison of .0279% for JWs and .02313%. which would mean you would be 20% less safe as a JW than you would be in the general Australian population. Of course, another person might think that 0 of the 17 cases would be confirmed. And using CPS methods on such old cases this might even be true. Or you might think that only 5 of the cases would be dismissed, and the remaining 12 would confirm sexual abuse on a mix of one, two and three children each (averaging 2), for a total of 24 confirmed cases. That small difference from 19 to 24 would result in a calculation that says you are 54% less safe as a JW. Because we still have those intent only on creating contentions among brothers, I will add again that I do not believe these numbers mean anything. I'm just showing what could likely happen if there were a real study based on apples to apples numbers. There is no study, and I still believe children are safer among JWs than the average population, and much safer as JWs than among many other religious groups and institutions. And, as I've said before the changes the Watchtower has been making to the process is 100% better now than it was. (But I don't believe that the 100% is a real statistic.)

I hope you don't feel you are being blamed in any way. I know that you used the original "study" in good faith and for a good motive and purpose. It was a major one, but not the only one. My response to it was intentionally simplified, so that such a discussion as this could deal with some of these facts incrementally. Otherwise it could seem too overwhelming to someone who hadn't yet looked at it carefully. As I said just prior to getting into the details . . . Here are some other points that make it difficult to compare "apples to apples." The 12% number, which will vary slightly from year to year does not refer to a percentage of notifications about child sexual abuse. It can only be tallied after all the investigations are completed into every type of child abuse complaint, and only refers to a percent of confirmed cases. It can't be used directly as a percent of not-yet-confirmed cases. In the cases reported by the Witness congregations these have already been identified as child abuse cases requiring reporting. They start out as already identified allegations of sexual abuse, but not confirmed. But in the case of the reports from the congregations, we don't know how many children were involved. A single report could be about a person accused of abusing 10 different children, for all we know. Or it could be a false claim altogether. Of course, it is also foolish to try to create a comparison with such a small sample provided by the congregations. A difference of only one case out of such as small number creates a huge difference in the comparison. CPS (Child Protective Services) take reports of accusations, bruises and emotional trauma (etd) from the perspective of teachers, social workers, law enforcement, neighbors, etc. Most of the congregation reports are not from children, but are more concerned with the adult. You can start to see this from a review of the Australian cases and many of the anecdotal cases about Witnesses coming in from around the world. The average time it takes for an abused child to report is several years. The Australian CPS numbers do include persons who have been abused in the past, but are expected to mostly focus on those who are (or might be) in current danger. A real study could be done if Australia's CPS numbers had accurately kept track of religion both of perpetrators and victims. A better study could be done if there were numbers from the congregations broken down by year, at least since 2011. But even here we are comparing apples and oranges again. Typically old cases come to the attention of the congregation. If they are new cases, then it is likely that they are already baked into the CPS numbers. CPS focuses on new cases. CPS looks at it mostly from the danger posed to a specific child. The congregations' cases focus on the guilt of an alleged perpetrator who may have victimized anywhere from 0 to 20 children, or perhaps 1 or 2 children 20 times each. (Most familial sexual abuse cases seem to go this way.) And then again, we have the problem that the Australian ARC data is proof that the congregations never themselves would report cases to law enforcement or social services even when a perpetrator might be victimizing more people inside and outside the congregation. We also know from the interviews that elders involved in the cases did not encourage reporting by victims. ARC went ahead and reported hundreds of these cases to law enforcement for investigation. I read a few of these cases as reported in newspapers and they are horrendous. So the biggest problem is that we are comparing against a system that evidently OVER-reports (CPS) based on the evidence from its own investigations. The congregations have a long history of UNDER-reporting and hiding. So even a study that goes back many years, based on congregational data, would be worthless for comparison purposes. I'm sure we do better than most institutions with respect to the propensity for criminal perpetrators to associate with us -- just for the purpose of access to children, and the fact that they are often punished and socially ostracized if caught, and that the nature of the congregation allows for very few interactions with the outside world. (For example, non-JW perpetrators have less access to JW children, as they are less likely to join boy scouts, sleep-away camps, etc.) These things don't stop determined criminals, but they must surely give them some concern. There are more issues than these, but it's enough for now.