James Thomas Rook Jr.

Just a note to say I am taking at least a  one year vacation from the JW-Archive and its successors starting this Sunday night, December 30, 2018.
I have been gathering data to write a series of Science Fiction Novels for over 30 years, and my wife will need the money after I go up the chimney.
Besides, I have been on for something like seven years, and it has evolved GREATLY from the silly pablum it started out as, so my irritant is no longer needed.
I will still get emails of course, when somebody posts something. 
If Robert A. Heinlein can turn out his masterpiece "Starship Troopers" in one week, on a typewriter ... and he did  ... while infuriated by Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations, I, with a word processor and Dragon Naturally Speaking voice to text software ought to, with practice, emulate that.
I intend to "write by the pound", six hours a day, five days a week.
I may even get up every morning, , and put on a suit and tie before sitting down at my workstations.
Hahahahahaa!
  Just kidding.

Well Arauna ... you've done it now !
With my apparent OCD I have latched onto a new fixation ... which is actually a continuation of my many years ago reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn " The Gulag Archipelago " series of books.
I watched several episodes on YouTube  of "Uncommon Knowledge", about Joseph Stalin, one of which you posted, above featuring the Author Stephen Kotkin, and am downloading everything I can about this ( pant! pant! pant! ....) I also plan on ordering Kotkin's three books and reading them.
I strongly suspect that my perceptions that everything Stalin is accused of as far as quantities of mass murders, etc. will be born out, but JWInsider has raised questions that need to be resolved in my mind.
Thank you for giving me the key to the door to find out.
I find Solzhenitsyn and Kotkin absolutely credible at face value .... so far.

That's not good. After what happen in Virginia, the common folk are not too pleased with the UN and their affairs, let alone even want them to police their streets.

via .ORGWorld News

Unfortunately their rapes and atrocities are covered up by the UN.   

Yes. Just because you  love facts, doesn't mean you love someone bad. Unfortunately emotions take over rationality. My son came home from school one day, they had just had history, and he was telling me that Hitler had done a lot of good for the people (jobs etc.). I understood what he meant. He did a lot of good initially. But that doesn't mean we think Hitler was a wonderful man. Those gas chambers and concentration camps were real.

Yes, you are very correct of course. But I am the exception. You see I am totally unbiased
Seriously though, it is a very interesting subject and I wish I had more experience of it as an adult. As a child I could not understand why people were not allowed out of their own country and why the borders were guarded by soldiers with guns and dogs, not to stop people coming in, but to stop people leaving. At one time my mum and I were traveling out of the country (because we could) on a train and the border guards were searching underneath the trains with flashlights and dogs. There was barbed wire everywhere.
Just wanted to add one more thing. Some people may not realize but many of our illustrations in our publications remind some people of communist propaganda, especially those where people are seen building houses and sharing food. After the iron curtain fell it took some brothers and sisters a while to get used to some of those illustrations. Not so long ago my mum gave her study the Kingdom book, and this lady, in her 70s' was horrified and said it's like communism. Well it kind of is isn't it? Lol.
Maybe someone should create a topic for this in the JW only club...

And yet it does not negate what is being asked to you and Srecko.
Not all the time because in some circumstances, it is an invitation to a gun fight for some people, and or an invitation to the person in question to be a target, as is with one female which in her case, it did not end well for her; since I am unfazed by graphic material, I will leave to your imagination as to why had occurred.
The problem with this is it is not only places like this, you have soft targets as well and or minor targets.
 
That being said, the question still stands, and as for the Krav Maga teacher, I am beginning to think he is non-existent if you can't even profess his or her belt class. I can name a few if need be, even for BJJ, Judo, etc. for in a respectful sense and credibility, one can simply bring up belt class and the latter can find and or loop up the person with or without a name.

Very long ago I heard an anecdote about the gun.
An older man was driving the car in the streets of Zagreb. Suddenly he must stop the car. In front of him there were some young people who blocked the road with their motorcycles. He came out and asked them to move motors, so he could pass. The guys started laughing and they told him; "Come on, grandpa, count us and see how many of us there are.
He returned to the car, took the gun, came back to them and asked; "From whom do I start counting?"

EXACTLY.
One time in Western Virginia, circa 1966, there was a race riot and people filled the streets, blocking traffic ... and I came upon them unexpectedly.  They stopped my car and I could not pass. 
VERY angry people.
I just took out my revolver, and put it on the dashboard of my car... and BEHOLD! ... the crowd parted like Moses marching through the sea ... and I went on my way.

100and10% true or 110% if we want be precise in writing :))))
Take me for example in this ..... I had never went on public sports events. So, i had never been drunk in a mass of people, never get punch, never screaming and  cheering for a team ....and many more.
Why? Because i was always "somewhere else". :))))

People that have poor decision making ability, and never plan ahead ... are NEVER "somewhere else".
"Stuff Happens".

I read three of Solzhenitsyn's books and found them completely and totally credible.
What did I miss?
 

I was also thinking that a lot of the knowledge from when those videos above were made was probably not passed down well in the bureaucratic NASA ....
SpaceX has made some strides.... not all has been lost.
I bet if Von Braun was around nowadays he wouldn't be impressed with our space exploration or space stations in the last 50 years.
Rocketdyne engineers alone (if they are still alive) are probably wondering why no one is using fuel injected thrust vectoring engines....etc....

Yes, and the reason is, at low altitudes the less effective  jets of burning fuel are pressed against the main jets by atmospheric pressure, and their own momentum, and the main jets "wall of fire" layer of friction imparts velocity to the auxiliary jets, because although the main jets are being ejected at many times the speed of sound, the hot and explosively expanding gas flow is turbulent.
What you are doing is trading the inefficiencies of the main jet (thrust = velocity x mass) through friction and the Bernoulli principle to the mass of the auxiliary jets' mass , but there are limits to everything.
I would imagine they are still trying to get that balancing act correct, and with the energies and fluid dynamics (the hot gasses) involved it is quite a trick.
They need some white haired old guy who knows to just come in and set aside the 20,000 pages of calculations and just tell them the answer, but then progress would not always be repeatable, and adaptable to new applications.
Sir Isaac Newton was a one time human phenomenon.

You probably didn't miss much in his books, but one could go on for thousands of pages about where the most credible evidence about Russian history differs considerably from the perspectives that the West has been given.
Solzhenitsyn (I'll call him A.S., if you don't mind) wrote very credibly from a literary perspective. The West ate it up. So did at least 10 minority political/social factions in and around Russia who had fought against Russia being ruled by the communist party. In fact, A.S. was one of the earliest promoters of the fantastic conspiratorial numbers of the supposed hidden Gulag system that he said was still operating on a massive scale, in secret, with millions of people even during the Cold War. Remember, of course, that his books from 1958-68 were published in 1973-4. (Communism underwent changes in the mid-1980's under Gorbachev, leading to the collapse of the communist government under Yeltsin and the Russian Federation in 1991.) Those fantastic numbers had not really been invented yet until he created a version of them.
However, even when communism fell, there was still absolutely no evidence of an ongoing Gulag system. One would have to assume that it is still in operation today, and still secret, and that all those anti-communists were never released when communism fell and therefore never allow to help the current leaders now that Russia is run by anti-communists who want to paint a very bad picture of historical Russia under communism. Surely, these millions of political prisoners described by A.S. could help paint the picture and prove the claims that would keep the communist party at bay. (The communist party is Putin's only true competitor at present.) 
Yet more and more evidence continues to show up about the actual Gulag system from various sources, even Russian enemies. It consistently shows that it was nothing like a system of torture and death that A.S. describes. More evidence comes forth from the release of historical documents from Russia, and many of these are perfectly dovetailed with the evidence from the release of historical documents from Russia's worst enemies including the release of Nazi documents, Japanese documents, etc. The Gulag system was actually Russia's prison system that went back to feudalism, the czars, the Duma. Criminals were to be rehabilitated with sentences that typically maxed out at about 10 years, after which the prisoner was released, with exceptions for multiple murders or heinous crime. There are, of course, abuses in every institution (look at American prisons, too) but Russian prisons were unique in many ways. Where we typically hear stories of exile to Siberia, and monotonous crushing of rocks, the prisons really did include building activities, sometimes mining, sometimes roads, and buildings, but not with slavery and the chain-gang systems common to American prisons. The Gulag was especially full during WW2 with captured prisoners from other nations, but many were given land to farm, or even a place with their family. In fact some German Gulag prisoners, although still hated for their politics, were actually paid more than the average Russian for their work on equipment -- their material production. Stalin himself had been sentenced to the Gulag half-a-dozen times, and escaped each time before serving out a full sentence.
We should remember the context: A.S. came from a large group of displaced Czarists, sometimes called "White Russians" as opposed to Red (Communist), Green and later Brown Russians (Fascists), and Czarists really were often imprisoned and mistreated. This group composed the earliest and most saboteuristic of the parties in the Russian Civil War from 1918 after WWI. And Stalin really did imprison thousands, and one of his security chiefs, Yezhov and his henchmen, really did imprison probably "200,000", and this probably included thousands of murders and unjust deaths. (As stated before, when Stalin recalled Yezhov and replaced him with Beria, the reports of deaths dropped dramatically, and some say up to 91% of the "200,000" were released.) But Stalin, a paranoid leader, amidst powerful saboteurs, was also personally responsible for many hundreds of unjust imprisonments and likely many executions, too. So almost every bad story heard must have had at least some truth to it, even if the several-orders-of-magnitude differences had not been invented until decades later.
(Of course some of the violence of the Civil War could not be stopped and had little to do with Communism. It was the peasantry running wild after Germany had colluded with Lenin to help crush the Czar. They were killing their landowners and taking the land. Lenin, of course, wrote against this, but there was nothing they could do about it except condemn it. Lenin argued with Marx that successful communism should be built on the backs of capitalism, and supported the capitalist status quo as the basis for continuing the revolution.)
But again, credibility comes from the fact that Stalin really did promote frequent purges, where lists of thousands of members of the communist party were dismissed from the party. Stalin's purges have often been confused with so-called "death lists" but it primarily meant that you lost your privileges as members of the party, and therefore your aspirations of political advancement were gone. Of course, this dismissal from the party could often be based on one's committing crimes, even war crimes, war profiteering, etc. So executions especially during the excesses of war, could have been fairly common.
The writings of "White Russians" (Czarists) were common and held to the same common themes whether from those who escaped Russia in all directions, including all parts of Canada, even families I have spoken to that ended up in Brooklyn. A major theme, of course, for credibility is to build off some of the violence, and excesses and injustice and magnify it to defend against the communist government. But these stories, are full of lies as they exaggerate different things, and full of inconsistencies as some will pick different areas where the problems were and report that there were no problems in areas that another writer will pick on.
These types of fabrications need to be merged ALL the evidence in ways that various scholars have attempted. Some scholars are better than others, of course. But when even anti-communists, or non-supporters of communists who have accepted A.S. and other writers in the past have begun to recant based on EVIDENCE, then it's probably time that the rest of us at least looked at some of this same evidence. There is no perfect way to get historical truth from history, but there are still some methods that are better than others.
We can't just decide to reject all scholarly evidence in favor of a writer who fits into an existing group who have been continuously discredited by all new evidence, while even unexpected sources of new evidence will uphold the current body of existing evidence. In other words, I don't think this is a valid guideline quoted below, because it simply says ignore anything that doesn't fit the very source of most of our prejudices:
To be sure, A.S. does provide pieces of evidence that can't be ignored outright. But we have to evaluate them for what they're worth.
There is a ton of specifics that would take days and pages. But I think as we begin to discuss claims like "orchestrated famines" "death purges" supposed "massacres" etc., the picture will come into better focus.

The coanda effect is simple to understand, and it will make a big, hot fire .... but thrust is another thing, altogether.
Imagine the following video, with hydrogen gas being sucked into the fan, and burning along the outside of the disc ... reaction (thrust) is a function of throwing stuff behind you that is heavy, or light stuff going very, very fast.  But, it has to push against a surface 180 degrees from the action, to have an efficient and strong reaction.
The Coanda Effect (version 2013).mp4

How about "Be somewhere else" ?

I find that if strapped in a chair with dozens of large plastic wire ties, and someone is trying to remove my kneecaps with pliers, it makes me very anxious, panicky, sad .... and VERY talkative!
I hate that ...... don't you?

It's all about money.
The reasons Smart Phones have made a hundred years progress in ten years is the opportunity and reality of "OUTRAGEOUS" profits.
The current designs are too hot, and too heavy, and like a bullet, produce a drag vacuum behind them.
Merely a matter of engineering ... but GOOD engineering takes hundreds of highly motivated engineers and highly motivated companies.
So ... what motivates most engineers?
MONEY.
LOTS and lots of money.
You would be surprised, if you do not already know ... how motivational being grossly overpaid is... and how much it is inspirational.
Several times in my life, I was paid three times the going rate, and paid in advance ... and I finished projects scheduled to finish in six months ... in six weeks.
Not only that, I could walk down the beach with two buckets full of money, and didn't even have to suck my stomach in.
 
 

... and now, fer yor entertainment .... SIX SCREENS OF THE BEAKER!
YAAaaaaAAAAY!
 
SIX SCREENS OF THE BEAKER .mp4

I find that if strapped in a chair with dozens of large plastic wire ties, and someone is trying to remove my kneecaps with pliers, it makes me very anxious, panicky, sad .... and VERY talkative!
I hate that ...... don't you?

It is still unclear to me if we are still paying $4,000 every day to this court. Anyone know what happened to that fine? Or did we satisfy the judge by providing what he/she wanted?

...works good for bees, also.

I just found this interesting comment on YT
Regarding the court fines: I just read something interesting today from the book "Defending and Legally Establishing the Good News" (WTBTS 1950). It says on page 81, last paragraph under "FINES": If, after appealing a criminal court fine related to your JW membership or JW's doctrine, "then instead of paying the fine, discharge it by going to jail, if allowed to do so by law". "If it is his (Jehovah's) will that you go to prison and there give further testimony after failing on appeal, that should be done joyfully. Trust in Jehovah for protection". So which JW will be going to prison over the $4000 daily fine from the court? I think these fines are against the WTBTS, not the elders or congregation. In Los Angeles County, jail time is typically used to pay off court fines at the rate of $38 per day. (each day of $4000 fine would equal 105 days in jail) Maybe they can send the entire Governing Body to prison? Wouldn't that be fun to see. I'm sure they can delay the fines for a few more years, but eventually they will have to pay. If WT pays this fine instead of choosing jail, they would be in violation of their own command.?
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