JW Insider

If I had watched it for any kind of entertainment and enjoyment I would not likely have joked about it. I remember as a 16 year old some of the friends said they all were going to see "Billy Jack" (PG). I had just finished high school (GED) so I thought I was mature enough for any PG movie. There was a scene where a woman at a protest gets shot and killed, undoubtedly meant to be reminiscent of the Kent State shooting a year earlier, although I hadn't made the connection at the time. I was literally sick and had to leave. So I hate the visceral violence, but will watch a series like this by speeding through at 4x and stopping every 30 to 60 seconds or so to see if I might have missed any plot points. This way I might be able to figure out why it was so highly recommended. SPOILER ALERT I made it through to the cartoonish ending this way and agree that it was, as you say, a Seoul-centered soul-drain. Its "appeal" to its initial South Korean audience would have been on the basis of the mountains of heavy debt that weighing on all ages there, the biggest factor in suicides. That was the "stract" from which the plot is abstracted. The disparity of rich and poor and the nebulous promises of shiny capitalism have desensitized everyone (mostly the young) to all types of immorality, including the influence of Christianity (as depicted) so that they are willing to put themselves through a living hell for the capitalist prize. And -- REAL SPOILER ALERT -- it turns out that uber-capitalists behind the games are actually even-more-decadent Western powers/individuals. Separately, there were reminders in the series that Korean propagandists of today have influenced their media (almost as badly as Australian media) in fearmongering and trying to depict China as pure evil. Every so often S. Korean media will make up an anti-North-Korean story that gets debunked without a retraction. Sometimes it's as blatant as depicting Kim Jong so-and-so killing his uncle or brother, etc., in some terrible way. But then the S.Korean media shows no surprise when that same freshly killed brother or uncle appears on television a few weeks later (apparently not knowing that he had been killed). I guess the idea is that if you try this often enough, some of it will stick.

Whether it makes sense or not, there's a huge story there, and a lot of the evidence comes from many sources that might seem surprising. It's not really an exception to the idea that communism must still be sabotaged wherever possible. In this case the sabotage was drunken capitalism. And, of course, the form of government is less important to the US and Western allies than the idea of keeping all other other economies too weak. If it still seems like an exception to the rule, there is a lot to say here, but I'll save it for later. The US also destroyed the Japanese capitalist economy, beginning in the 1980's, with specific trade policies. For now, I'll also just leave this topic for later. This doesn't mean that the US doesn't want shining examples of democracy producing strong economies. It's just that certain types of direct competition couldn't be allowed under particular historical circumstances. It's almost too easy to see it with Central and South America. Coups, assassination attempts, kidnappings, riots, sanctions, embargoes, sabotage, US backed terrorism, training small armies in bordering countries. There is also the constant drone of reporting only on dissatisfaction, and twisting facts everywhere. Yesterday morning I listenedd to BBC news on NPR: the big anti-China story of the week, that you mentioned earlier (where I suspect the tennis player just knew she'd need and want some privacy after the bombshell). a story about how the leftist parties of Chile will have to run off in the next election against a growing faction that will even admit openly to wanting another Pinochet a story about how a precinct in Venezuela finally voted in a right wing opposition party candidate The BBC topics the week before included daily mentions of protests in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, supposedly sham elections in Central America, etc. A major point of all this news, especially the last couple of 60 Minutes that I watched, was to make sure that the US audience does NOT see any leftist/socialist government as "democratically" elected. The NYT even ran a piece decrying the fact that the Chinese people overwhelmingly "elect" to have a communist government because it does so much for them. It was almost like: "Why can't the people in China see how terrible their government is, the way we see it?" This popularity of communist governments with the people is, of course, why Chinese people (and their government) can claim to have a democratically "selected" government. They would say it is more representative of their interests than the US version of elected, but unrepresentative, democracy. Hey! I saw that!! 😉 There's a historical and current reason for this. It goes for Cambodia and Laos, too. There actually has been a bit of fomenting again about Vietnam, but not at all to the point of "demonizing" them. I've heard the rumors here that US State Dept folks have expected Vietnamese communism to fall during a couple of previous US presidencies. But now it's actually looking more entrenched. A particular mode of government (like communism) doesn't have to look quite as good as shiny capitalism to still be better than what they had recently gone through. Also, this ties back to the most viable method to weaken a superpower. In this case the superpower is China, and every method is used to try to foment unrest related to China (Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, Inner Mongolia). If nationalist breakaway parties can be formed it could take a powerful country and break it into weaker pieces. In this case Vietnam was thought to be a part of that equation. The arguments over who can fish how far out from their own borders in the South China Sea have probably gone on for over a thousand years. Japan hates China and the US has considered allowing them to arm their own military which would serve US purposes in case of a skirmish over this. (And the US floods Taiwan with military equipment for the similar reasons.) Vietnam and the Philippines have the same issue with China Sea fishing too, and Vietnam has had a negative history with China since Mao. (Mao stupidly funded and helped militarize variously chosen "sides" all over the place, including the muhajideen in Afghanistan, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge communism. And it did much damage to Viet Nam especially when Sino-Russian relations broke down. I've heard that the US loves it that the China Sea conflict is ongoing and has encouraged the Philippines to stand up to China. The US keeps a fleet there too in case any provocation can start and escalate. The US was supposedly really miffed that Duterte was elected again after saying he won't stand up to China militarily, but will just do his best to get along. If Vietnam would at least stand up with a voice against China, then the US could amplify that voice. And demonizing Vietnam would keep it from falling into trade partnership with the US if a split over communism develops. China is taking advantage by building rails and transportation in Laos, and plans to further help Cambodia and VietNam too. The TPP and Pivot to Asia initiatives were set to help break the economic growth of China by favorable trade partnerships with countries all around that would exclude China. I think Trump either didn't realize that this was the purpose, or he knew that a lot of constituents didn't realize it, and therefore thought best politically to discard it as just an Obama/Hillary thing. But it would have had a more "successfully" negative effect on China's economy than the trade wars he initiated. China ended up winning the trade wars, and this caused a lot of farmers to change their minds about Trump while he was still in office. Suicide is nothing to squid kid about so I had to scratch my comment about so many also dying from deadly games of red light, green light, etc. At least I can laugh at anthro[po]morphic coal. But I wouldn't want to "lignite" any hard feelings under the surface. I didn't think you'd "mine." You might have meant "anthracite," but here's my anthropomorphic coal joke: Q. Peat and Re-Peat were in a bog. Peat fell out. Who was left? A. Re-Peat. Q. Peat and Re-Peat were in a bog. Peat fell out. Who was left? A. Re-Peat. etc, etc, etc

True. That's why I would never say they originated for that purpose, only that the popularity in retelling them served a new purpose. I thought it was very astute when you applied this even more generally, even to some of us, saying: With respect to Western sabotage in many Eastern European countries that tried communism, you said: That's quite true, too. Which is exactly what I had in mind when I said: But there was also a lot of direct interference that most people haven't read about. The initial "Operation Gladio," for example, was when the CIA (at the time just one of the offices of army or naval intelligence) purposely set out to destroy and sabotage communist parties in Italy, France, Switzerland and Germany after WWII. They trained local armies in sabotage, promoted terrorist activities, and were even involved in massacres, most with a primary goal of breaking up communist parties which were being clamored for in many European countries more than ever before. As an aside, especially for those who would like to think of Hitler as socialist or communist, it should be remembered that this is also one of the ways Hitler himself came into power. Hitler, working as an intelligence agent after WWI, worked to sabotage the communists parties rising after WWI. There were several communist parties in Germany and Hitler worked to attack and sabotage and purge them in his own "CIA" operation, finally getting the support of a large group, (something like "berniecrats against communism") in Germany to outnumber the communists for the 1933 election. This is why the famous 1946 confessional poem by Niemöller, in its final version, goes like this, as carved on a memorial: First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me Adam Smith in the late 1700's and Karl Marx in the 1800's, speak of the inevitable wastefulness of capitalist economies which always drive to excess production as part of the profit motive. It results in cycles of panics and recessions and depressions that have been with the US economy every few years, especially since the early 1800's. Obviously there were huge mistakes, such as China's (Mao's) Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and the Five Pests Campaign, and "backyard" steel production, but the idea of a command economy was precisely to avoid these kinds of wastes, and subsequent hoarding of inventory to control pricing. Mao may have been a slow learner but it was Mao not Deng who finally accepted that he should open up for trade with Nixon and Kissinger. Clearly, they wanted to see how far production wpuld take them on their own, and initial industry was meant to meet internal purposes. In some cases wider trade would have been very useful but there was little trust of trade partners who had things they really needed. So they often over-hoped and over-hyped their initial abilities to raise agriculture production. Mao, for example, raised agriculture production just about high enough, but did not have a distribution system in place. Lenin didn't trust the West far enough to trade for necessary wheat/grains. Still, the goals were finally met in spite of several years of natural disasters all over Asia. But we can't ignore that in Eastern Europe, the United States also refused to trade with or help communist countries after the war, except the USSR itself. If this came from the GC prof, then he must have anticipated that it was western media that provided the propaganda to these countries. It was media that made them discontent. This was exactly the purpose of US backed VOA (Voice of America) and Radio Free Asia, etc. The US poured MILLIONS into the propaganda campaigns, especially directed at intellectuals and elites, to offer them good paying jobs in the West, promise of much better housing, etc. But our view of exoduses from Eastern Europe and Russia is also somewhat skewed by the fact that the far, far greater exoduses (exodi?) happened after the fall of communism. Even birth rates in Eastern European countries had been rising, but with the glut and orgy of capitalism after the fall of communism, THIS is what sent more people running. In fact, in Ukraine, people fled in both directions, some going to the West, but some thinking that going to a newly capitalist Russia was still a bit better off than new capitalism in Ukraine. Someone called it the largest mass migrations on earth in the century. Things were much better in the West materially, but many Eastern Europeans also had a memory of how much worse many had been off materially before communism, too. We get much of our view from elites and intellectuals who fled, after WWII, but there were migrations of poor people going in both directions, even into communist countries, wherever a living could be made. And we shouldn't forget, too, that even in Western countries, USA included, there are many places where economic conditions are worse, with dozens of people jammed into small dilapidated apartments, surrounded by crime, scraping for enough food, etc. That's enough for one post, but I will pick up on the implication that the USSR didn't really meet their production needs until Kruschev. For now I'll just say that the very reason they were able to beat Hitler was because they had already boosted production in farm equipment, steel, railways, agriculture, buildings. (Also literacy, health, etc.) I've heard interviews with Nazi Wehrmacht fighters on one of those history channels where they admit they had been so steeped in anti-Russian racism that they expected mud-huts and no ability for the Russians to fight back with any kind of war machine. Oddly, they admit that when they flew over major cities to drop bombs, some said they were not only shocked but taken back that they might be destroying "historical moments" and landmarks, not expecting architecture and tall buildings.

The Ivermectin blow-up over Joe Rogan's prescription from a doctor made headlines reverberating into the late night comedy shows and, of course, embarrassed CNN to no end. (Actually, it should have been to no end, but they went right back to lying about Ivermectin.) Most people know this, I'm sure, but when Joe Rogan got Covid he looked for a doctor that would prescribe Ivermectin and some of the other non-standard medications. CNN has pushed the Ivermectin = Horse-Dewormer lie for so long that they couldn't help making fun of Rogan and ran headlines that said things like "Despite Warnings Joe Rogan takes Livestock Medicine" or words to that effect. Joe Rogan invited Sanjay Gupta (CNN Medical Reporter) on his show, and called CNN out on the lie. Gupta could only admit that the CNN had made a mistake. (Ivermectin is, of course, a medicine designed for humans to treat various tropical ailments in humans, and the two doctors who developed it won Nobel prizes for it in 2017. Calling it a horse medicine is about the same as calling penicillin a pig medicine because it is sometimes recommended for pigs/swine.) CNN's Sanjay Gupta had to go back on CNN right after this and allow Don Lemon to interview Gupta in order to restate the case as falsely as possible to do damage control for CNN. Saturday Night Live weighed in with their support for CNN with a very unfunny skit about Joe Rogan taking horse dewormer. Of course, the main reason that Joe Rogan had to be taken down is because Ivermectin apparently worked just fine in helping him get over a bad case of Covid in a matter of hours. (Analogous to the CIA's need to crush any small nation that succeeds with a ruling ideology that differs from their recommended dose of pseudo-democracy or a puppet dictatorship.) Another reason is that CNN is very jealous of people like Joe Rogan who isn't even that smart (my opinion) but can garner an audience even larger than CNN among demographics younger than 65. Of course, Pfizer's problem with Ivermectin is that it only costs about 4 cents for a dose of Ivermectin and it is easy to make. It's a 3CLPro inhibitor (3-chymotrypsin like protease inibitor) and therefore, if taken as an early treatment for covid, will inhibit the virus from replicating in the body, making it easy to fight off without hospitalization or death. Just last week Pfizer announced its patented version of a 3PCLPro inhibitor, which will likely cost much more than 4 cents a dose. A good explanation of this was provided by John Campbell, PhD, who has taught medicine and trained nurses. For a while his explanation was given a warning by YouTube/Google, although the so-called fact-checkers ended up only pointing to info that agreed with his findings.

The joke might have been home-grown, but I don't believe there were any Eastern European communist countries that had not been the victim of Western sabotage. Clever professor. Like evidence for a conspiracy theory that ends up supporting the same theory whether it is proved right or wrong. I have a feeling that most of those jokes, even though based on local truths, were told in the West to gain camaraderie and approval with their new Western audience. I have noticed an elitist bias behind a lot of the Russian and Eastern European humor. But I'll probably have trouble explaining what I mean by this. I think about how Jimmy Kimmel or Steven Colbert will commiserate with the poor in some of their "we" jokes where they are obviously not included in the "we" who suffer from this or that indignity that is the topic of the joke. But a kind of self-deprecation gains acceptance, approval, "sympathy." And this is required to make the joke work for the average audience. I don't know if you remember a Ukrainian born comedian named Yakov Smirnoff, who was already a stand-up comedian in Ukraine (USSR) in the 1970's. He later (in Missouri) taught a course called "The Business of Laughter" and of course he made a successful business of making fun of communism from about 1977 and which peaked in the mid 1980's. Mostly Yakov Smirnoff was right about the difficulties in getting "elite" and/or Western goods in Russia/USSR (automobiles, jeans, etc.) But he also ended up spawning a lot of jokes about standing in line to get a potato, which were just pure propaganda that the West wanted to hear. I think that his feedback loop influenced his early material about the disturbing level of Western consumerism ("What a country!") and pushed it into more and more parody of communism. I don't want to give the impression that I think communism will usually be successful. It's an experiment in government, and experiments fail at least as often as start-up businesses. The rest of the world provides competition in ideologies. Communism will have a natural appeal to the oppressed, but to even try the experiment they will have to fight the elite classes who want to keep oppressing. The rich and the elite have all the control of both military and economic power. In the rare case when the poor are desperate enough to risk a bloody battle, and the rarer cases when they win, the elites will want back in power and will continually look for opportunities. Or they will leave/flee because they hate the idea of no longer being elites. Or to avoid leaving/fleeing they might even help split their country into two parts. I agree with this, but wanted to point out that Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua had also raised the "well-being" of the average citizen. They raised the education level, the life expectancy, the health, the services, the food supply. Cuba and Venezuela have provided doctors and services to neighboring countries suffering disasters. They have housing and food programs, even vaccine-sharing programs with neighboring countries that are constantly being undermined and sabotaged by the US. The ones who leave these countries, often leave because they feel they no longer have the opportunity to prove themselves elites. In many cases the racism is not so hidden, too, because now the poorer majorities, made up of various ethic minorities, are considered to be on equal footing. Many Cubans in Miami give evidence of this idea all the time. The coup leaders that the US supports in Venezuela, Bolivia, etc., are always the ones who pass for "white" and the local rhetoric in their favor uses the most vile racist terms for the darker skinned leaders (like Maduro, etc.) I would consider that their plunge into capitalism was a deliberate and successful sabotage by the USA to weaken their economy and position in the world.

I up-voted your comment because there are so many points I agree with. But naturally that means I have to comment on a few points, too. 😉 A lot of people point to any successes that China has had economically and will either continue to predict colossal, impending failure every couple of years, or they will merely explain it away by claiming it wasn't communism that produced the successes; it was capitalism. It does seem to be a hybrid approach, but so-called "pure communism" is always supposed to make use of the "conditions on the ground" as it were. Marx thought it would look very different in every country where it was attempted. From the beginning, communist theory has always agreed that communism does not need to avoid capital and investment and SHOULD accommodate such ideas with specific regulations to avoid the vicious cycle of inequalities. This is one of the reasons that Marx was against anything like "Marxism" that would grow into a specific set of rules that would be the same anywhere. Whether the internal goals of China were as altruistic as the stated goals is too hard to tell. I'm a skeptic about altruism in governments and expect that having individuals with most kinds of power over others will quickly result in corruption and abuse everywhere. The stated goals and "rules" of communism are supposed to make it more difficult for any specific individuals to gain too much personal economic gain at the expense of others. But there is always corruption anywhere. Using a corporate example, in the USA it's common for the head of a company to make 100 to 1,000 times as much as the lowest wages paid in the same company. (A very few companies can have a 10,000x difference, or more.) This was true of the financial services company I worked for, until it was bought by a French company, which had gained a solid financial footing all over the world by acquiring companies and reducing the total number of corporate "officers" and highly paid board members, and changing the pay scales to only a 40x difference between the highest officers and the lowest salaries. (e.g., $2 million vs. $50,000). But then the officers of primary company began to find ways to take advantage of stock options, leverage, buy-backs, etc, to increase their own top compensation, and then open up tech support in India, etc to reduce the lowest wages, effectively bringing the difference back up near 1,000x (e.g. $10 million to $10,000/year). But when this same company wanted to open up some lines of business in China, which I helped research as part of my job, we discovered that China wanted something far less than a 10x difference in local pay-scales, and required profit-sharing measures among even the lowest level workers, and all of the workers would be treated as shareholders with a vote in the labor policies, and a couple of communist party members would probably be included, and the systems in place had to have more auditing against fraud. Also, China, after several years, would have the right to renew or reject the company's footprint in China, and would be allowed to compete with the company using observed processes and data collected. Of course, some Western companies realize that they can still make large short-term profits in a few years and they go ahead with starting up in China even under their restrictions. But those companies will often come back and complain that China stole all their proprietary processes and "intellectual property." Of course, it's exactly what they had agreed with in the first place. (And many of the Western companies had already stolen that intellectual property from other Western companies before they opened up operations to China anyway.) As an aside, this same company that I worked for (for 20 years) began using an Indian company for most of its consulting, and ended up privately suing that same company for stealing intellectual property. It's fairly well-known now that companies like TATA in India consult for US companies and then go back to India and start up companies in India taking what they learned. The US doesn't make a big deal about it for India however because they are an "ally."

BTW, I have been watching the lunar eclipse this morning and it is one of the "best" I've ever seen. I don't want to divert the good discussion about the virus here, but I still wanted to follow up on the subject of fake news regarding China. And, of course, with the Fauci-China "gain of function" connection, and suspicion about the Wuhan lab connection, there is plenty of virus news appropriate to the topic. This statement has some truth in it, but is also a false statement. It is true that the CCP has succeeded in improving the material prosperity of the average person. Alleviating poverty and bringing quality of life issues to the average person has always been the primary stated goal of communism and socialism. It is the reason there is often such a public impetus for, and public acceptance of communism and socialism in countries that have remained communist. (And public outcry for abolishing the colonial/imperialist traditions in many countries clamoring for communism/socialism.) But the problem with the quoted statement is that MANY communist governments have succeeded in improving the material prosperity of the average person. Russia, as the USSR, was a transformation from a nation of a few comfortable "nobles" who lorded it over a huge underclass of poor overworked "peasants," many barely subsisting from day to day. Under the czars, those peasants lived a slave-like existence and suffered and died greatly from famines every few years. Yet, the transformation began to work rather quickly. It was interrupted, of course, by a devastating war (WW2) which the USSR won (almost single-handedly) against the Nazis, and they also suffered widespread natural famines both before and after the war. Still, the economic policies of the USSR continued to transform it into a country that, within a couple of decades had succeeded in alleviating poverty to the masses, increased education, increased health care availability, better housing, better infrastructure, increased life expectancy, and generally produced a wealth of programs that the population of the country appreciated. Imagine the surprise of the United States when the USSR, for example, went from a devastated nation after WW2, to a nation that had a successful space program that was far ahead of the USA, and could purportedly match military parity with the USA at only a small fraction of the per-capita costs the USA would need to spend. Although the USA and West had been allied with the USSR for the war, the USA in particular was scared to death of this kind of success. They were especially scared of the newfound popularity of communism. I used the example of the USSR, but there were examples in Indonesia, Africa, and Central and South America. Cuba and Venezuela were prime examples close to the USA where US sabotage came a little too late to erase most of the successful programs in those countries. After WW2, the success of the USSR would influence groups in China, Indonesia, Africa, and dozens of countries around the world (even in Europe) to support a communist party. The USA considered it to be it's "job" to crush and sabotage communist parties all around the world. All successes must look like economic failures. All successful communist and socialist governments had to be painted as dictatorial regimes. The USA would give military support to any real dictators to crush any growing communist parties in any country of the world. Assassinations of party leaders were attempted and often carried out. Sometimes this was not so subtle, like the US supporting "death squads" to get rid of the communist parties in Italy for example after WW2, but other times the failures of unprepared and faltering communist states could be left on their own to fail. In communist/socialist countries there is always the option of Western alliances cutting off of trade (sanctions) to hopefully starve enough people in communist/socialist countries to create dissatisfaction with their governments, which will inevitably produce anti-government groups, which the USA will then flood with military and propaganda support (secretly if possible) to hopefully create a civil war to weaken the country, or produce a puppet dictator if the coup is successful. At the very least, sanctions will create a situation where a country begins to rely on a non-Western country for economic support. This is a propaganda windfall for the United States, because if a country like Cuba or Venezuela is forced to rely on Russia or China for support, then they can be seen as an "enemy" and no one will care about the continued economic sanctions. As a good example, how many people really knew that "Biden" kidnapped the envoy to Venezuela a couple of weeks ago when he traveled to another country (outside the USA)? How many people knew that Twitter was given a list of poll-watchers in Nicaragua so that they cancelled the poll-watcher accounts BEFORE the elections were held, and before the poll-watchers had said anything about the elections, either positive or negative? How many people already knew that back in July the US was preparing a set of protests in mid-November in several different countries (including Cuba, Bolivia, Peru) to be able to report on factions of dissatisfaction in those countries. (The mid-November protests happened as predicted, but the results were underwhelming and got very little support. In some locations in Cuba, only one or two showed up, and I saw footage of passers-by scoffing at them.) Here you hit on one of the big problems the West usually has with communist and socialist governments. "True" communist ideologists often emulate the patterns of atheist ideas espoused from the time that Marx, Engels, etc, were formulating their ideas. These get mixed up with Darwin from the same period. The leaders of the USSR and China were drawn from those who espoused atheism, and their lack of tolerance for religion is still a major defect. And of course, there are many other problems inherent in communism ideologies that are not just a result of atheism. Successful leaders of any populist change of government are often drawn from the poor and under-educated (or myopically educated). This results in experimental policies that can fail spectacularly. (Not that this won't happen among Western countries, too.) And of course, those failures will be focused on for years to eclipse the successes. (BTW, did I mention the lunar eclipse last night?) Also, because the communist leaders of many countries were often drawn from poorer, less educated populations in their country, the "West" will often be able to make use of racism, skin color or ethnic factions when fomenting chaos, and sabotage in countries with communist leaders. This might even come naturally to those portions of a population who feel that their privilege to lord it over "lesser" populations was interfered with when the new government pushed for more equality. Of course, the communist governments will argue that this is not a lack of "spiritual values" but is exactly what good religion has demanded all along -- that a government should care for its poor, its orphans and widows, and provide food, shelter, and clothing (and education and health-care) to those who had been so oppressed under the previous regime.

The Annual Meeting gave an update on this. The delays are acknowledged but work goes on a few pieces at a time. Some buildings haven't been fully designed yet and they don't have all permits yet. Prep work on the ground area for each building hasn't been completed yet and a bridge has to be upgraded to bring materials in and out. Several phrases were used that imply the chance for more delays. But they expect to keep at it -"Jehovah willing."

I was not trying to clarify a time structure. I was only showing to what extent we will begin making assumptions based on our own assumptions. And if it means adding or taking away from the Bible, or even promoting a contradiction to the Bible, we often won't realize just how easily and quickly we are ready to do this. That's a good example. Notice how the Bible doesn't say anything about Adam and Eve having canine teeth, and yet we can be so quick to make an assumption that has no Biblical evidence, one way or another. If animal teeth can be explained by what kind of vegetation those animals were consuming, then why couldn't Adam have canine teeth which could be explained by what kind of vegetation he would be consuming? You seem to be saying that Adam had no canine teeth at first, but Cain, Seth, Abel, and Cain's wife were born with canine teeth. And then Adam and Eve grew them after they were expelled. But there are no scriptures supporting this assumption.

Allowing the animals to eat other animals after they died is supposedly a clever solution to the idea that Jehovah would never have created carnivores. But it's only an explanation that might otherwise explain carnivorous teeth and claws and carnivorous digestive systems, and carnivorous hunting instincts. Otherwise we would have to explain how and why such teeth and claws and carnivorous digestive systems and carnivorous hunting instincts evolved so quickly from the time of Noah. But even though the solution is clever it shows that the person who made up the solution didn't believe the Bible the way they thought they believed it. (I know it wasn't you who made up the solution, I've seen it in several fundamentalist sources.) The Bible is clear enough that the overall intention of Creation was initially for humans to be vegetarian and for animals to be be vegetarian: (Genesis 1:29, 30) . . .Then God said: “Here I have given to you every seed-bearing plant that is on the entire earth and every tree with seed-bearing fruit. Let them serve as food for you. 30 And to every wild animal of the earth and to every flying creature of the heavens and to everything moving on the earth in which there is life, I have given all green vegetation for food.” And it was so. Technically, of course, this could mean that all animals would eat vegetation even if they also ate meat, so that all animals were either vegetarian or omnivores, and would therefore be competing with man for the vegetation. But trying to use the scripture in Genesis to prove that there were no carnivores falls short of explaining the carnivorous features and instincts of some animals. Merely claiming that they ate dead meat still contradicts the very idea they are trying to make use of from the Bible. Any animals eating dead meat are still eating meat, and not following the supposed "rule" of Genesis 1:30. And if you allow for animals to eat dead meat that died on its own, then why not allow maggots to eat of the same carcasses? What are they doing that is so different from what the larger animals are doing? If a person is going to "go against" the Bible to claim that large animals could eat dead meat, then why not also allow them to be carnivores? The Genesis account never says there were no carnivores anyway. It just says that all the animals were also given vegetation to eat just like humans were given vegetation to eat. If one were take this to the absurd degree and not even allow for maggots and decay, then they aren't allowing Adam to have microbes in his intestines. They aren't allowing birds to eat spiders, or even to eat insects like mosquitoes. They aren't allowing for mosquitoes either, unless they believe mosquitoes evolved a new digestive process, and they are claiming that spiders evolved a complex "instinct" to create complex webs and capture flies. And some plants like "Venus fly-traps" evolved complex "instincts" to respond to captured flies and spiders, too. And all of this evolution, including spider webs, etc., would have to happened in the last 4,000 years???? I wonder how the human digestive system would work with chemical reactions and enzymes only, without any microscopic organisms to help the process. Reminds me of a poem "Antiquity of the Microbe" supposedly the shortest poem ever, attributed to Ogden Nash or Strickland Gillilan: Adam had'm. Ogden Nash and also Augustus De Morgan are both associated with another poem that has a bearing on the topic: Great fleas have little fleas Upon their backs to bite ‘em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, And so ad infinitum And the great fleas themselves, in turn, Have greater fleas to go on; While these again have greater still, And greater still, and so on.

But they do talk about things in the CCP government that they do not like. Of course they talk about bad things happening in their area. There are even protests. My son knows persons who have participated in the protests. You can even find them discussed on YouTube and WeChat channels.

@Arauna@TrueTomHarley@NoisySrecko@Space Merchant @Pudgy: It was my fault that this topic was diverted to a discussion about China. So I moved the China-related posts over to the link pictured below:

No. My own study and research about China is ongoing, not just based on a visit or a long association with a Chinese colleague who visited family in both HK and the mainland every year. And my son's learning of the language and continuing contact with several people in several districts of China is also ongoing. And still, I don't know all about Xi. The basic modus operandi of anti-China propaganda is to exaggerate a long list of items, so that if one is seen to be possibly debunked, then a whole slew of other issues are ready to be flung. This way, one can always divert attention against specific bits of propaganda by merely saying, "Oh yeah, then what about Taiwan? . . . What about the China Sea? . . . What about the Uyghurs? What about the Wuhan lab? What about Tibet? What about damming rivers and water rights? What about Inner Mongolia? What about Hong Kong? What about organ harvesting? What about support of countries that the West hates? What about mining in Africa? What about trade wars, currency manipulation, aggressive military actions, etc.? The list is made long enough so that a complete debunking of any one claim will be meaningless. Any debunkable bit of propaganda must still be true, because the long list of other items must prove that there is no need to pay attention to evidence about any single item. The mind is shut before one can discuss the first item, much less a second and a third item. And then there is the problem that anyone defending China in the midst of all this propaganda must immediately be labeled naive. That person will be seen as trying to exonerate China completely from these issues, even though some have a partial basis in truth. This implies the strawman argument that a defender must think China can do no wrong. I won't take on your list of issues again here by showing where the likelihood of both evidence and lack of evidence actually points. But I would repeat again that a lot of evidence and research tells me that most of the anti-China propaganda I have heard, including most of the topics you bring up, are based on exaggerations and re-interpretations of issues that are common to many countries. When these issues are repeated widely, often, and over long periods of time, they become intractable. A lot of lies and propaganda are told about Western countries, too. Much of it is based on some fact, but it's mostly a geopolitical game that goes on everywhere. I know that in the past I personally was much too reflexive and naive in just accepting anything bad I heard about China, just because I knew that they really are pretty bad on a few issues (like accepting freedom of religion). Edited to add: Any statements or evidence I might offer that defends China from exaggerations should not be confused with defending Japan, Russia, or Ukraine, or any of the several countries which are forced to look to China for aid when those countries are cut off from Western alliances for aid.

Even that solution has a built-in problem. The reason is that the goals of various organizations can easily be reached by merely leveraging the West's distrust of China. When any of the individuals and organizations would like attention or funding they need only report a negative story from China, and then claim that the negative action was an official act of the Chinese government. It's like someone reading about a bank robbery in the United States, and then claiming that Biden (or Trump, etc) is now seizing all bank assets in the United States. Too many people in the world read English for such a story to gain traction anywhere. But stories about China can even pretend to be correctly translating a Chinese posting, and not enough people would complain. My son and I went through a NYT article a couple years ago that linked to several pages of Chinese documentation about Chinese goals with respect to religion, anti-terrorism, etc., and many of its translations were skewed to the point of creating direct falsehoods. Some were about as bad as if an English article had said "the U.S. Public School system provides education and vocational training" and the translation became "Regime-sponsored juvenile detention centers promote propaganda and forced labor." The idea of the US "provocation diplomacy" is to make sure that all these anti-China stories, some true, some exaggerated, and some made up out of thin air, will become such a constant stream that it's too tedious to produce material defending the preposterous. So the general idea of a dystopian regime sticks. You won't find material defending against every negative claim. Because even if China stands up 100% against a preposterous claim, the report in the West is still going to be that China "admitted" the problem when they didn't. Or that China said they aren't doing that any more. Or that they could only deny the problem in the face of "overwhelming" (i.e., non-existent) evidence. This probably sounds ludicrous, to most consumers of anti-China reporting, but I have amazing examples of everything I just said. It is true that religion is not the same thing in China as it is in Christian and Muslim countries. In the West and Mid-East, the depth of one's faith is shown by how strongly you will stand up for (and how strongly you will defend the difference between) your belief and the belief of something you think gets in the way of that belief. In the US, it's often the fundamentalists against "progressive politics" that defend or promote abortion and gay rights and the like. In the Mid-East it can be the same thing, or the difference between two version of Islam. Even in the US, UK, and elsewhere in Europe, a thousand times more religious ink has been spilled over the tiniest of differences between similar religions than over the major differences between disparate religions. In China most people don't think of religion as beliefs that need to conflict with the state, they just think of religion as sets of specific, traditional old rituals. This was also true in old Greece and Rome, where most religion was hallowed rituals, not specific beliefs. So the communist propagandists in China are really more actively "religious" in "evangelizing" a belief system than they would expect of the religions themselves to be evangelizing. In fact, it's promoting beliefs where most of the problem lies with Christian-styled religions in China. They all inevitably came from the West, and most of them have also been the source of spies and missionary-imperialism. Today, the ones that get in trouble try to convert people from non-Christian religion to Christian religion, and most of those have made strong statements against governments in general, and the Chinese government specifically. The communist ideologists, still feel a duty to try to convert Western religionists to a more secular or at least a more ritualistic religion that doesn't fly in the face of the state. I know of a non-JW case in China where the young man, of a 'Christian' religion, was exploited by a evangelizing group from Spain when he was in college in China. When it was discovered that this evangelizing religion was exploiting young people for money, and volunteer evangelism, it was only that group from Spain who got in serious trouble, but not the Christian group he was already a part of.

This isn't true. The likelihood that "China" did this is also pretty close to zero.

I've noticed that for many (most?) general items, Google will return a bunch of options that will often include Amazon, but rarely as the first choice, and often with only a single example from Amazon while Walmart and other online sellers will each have multiple examples presented.

It was my fault that a recent topic about Russia and Scientology was diverted to a discussion about China. So I moved the China-related posts here.

Way back in school days we used to make up fake Greek & Latin names for things, just to kill time (i.e., chronocide) scrambled eggs = poultrus cluckus abortus Evidently, Monty Python had some fun with the same idea in "Life of Brian."

I'm sorry to hear about the awful pain and suffering. I didn't know, and I hope that doesn't mean I wasn't reading your posts carefully. I'm in my 60's too, and up until recently, if I was still up at 2am, I played a few quick games against opponents sometimes on Scrabble, but mostly on chess.com because chess always makes me tired enough to fall asleep soon after. This weekend, also at 2am, I enjoyed a lazy, virtual flight from London to Paris to Versailles to Le Havre to Copenhagen etc. (My bro-in-law, an actual pilot, is in Copenhagen.) I like the ground scenery at low altitudes, and it's fun to see if you can find places using only your compass and visual landmarks. It's relaxing but it doesn't put me to sleep. I just want to go on to the next place. Here attached below is just a very short (choppy) snippet from Monday night's flight from Ramapo, NY then over to the Hudson River and a quick peek at the north end of Central Park. I find the scenery relaxing, especially over the areas that are built up in 3D. centralpark.mp4

True. Big companies are now competing with a lot of money to push VR again, where consumer interest usually fizzles out, except for a niche audience. Some of the new VR games are played outside in a large space like a tennis court so that you have more room to physically maneuver and not bump into an opponent so often. Most newer ones have some fail-safe mechanisms so that if you walk outside of a preset boundary, the view through the headset becomes transparent and you see the real world. I find that virtual piloting of an airplane can be a very relaxing experience and doesn't interfere with anything I'm listening to unless I want to try a difficult terrain. A couple of nights ago I kept trying unsuccessfully to take a prop airplane to the top of Mt Everest and had to switch to the F16. But the view was amazing. I also enjoy the Swiss Alps, Grand Canyon, even attempting to land on the winding Colorado River below. (Trivia question I was just reminded me of: Which has the higher altitude, Denver Colorado or the top of the Grand Canyon?)

For anyone not aware of the context, check out this site owned by jw.org: https://www.jw-avcenter.org/ I don't actually know the latest. But I do know someone who knows a couple who just got sent home (unexpectedly) from their work assignment on the project. The surprise was based, I think, on delays. Covid-19 may have played a part in meetings with the town of Ramapo, or supply chains, or whatever. My son was interested in the solar and geo-thermal projects which were part of the plan (see the site above). He's already been involved in several solar projects, and one is paired with a geo-thermal project, also in upstate NY. http://www.ramapo.org/page/news-7/news/information-related-to-the-watchtower-matter-455.html If the site is up to date, then little has been documented about anything since May 2021. Maybe that's OK, but I hadn't heard any updates for a while, and was concerned about the delay I just heard about. 5/26/2021 Presentation to Town Board 5/25/2021 PROCEDURE FOR WATCHTOWER PUBLIC HEARINGS 5/10/2021 Public Hearing Notice for DEIS, Zoning, and Comprehensive Plan Update 4/28/2021 Draft Environmental Impact Statement Appendices 4/28/2021 Draft Environmental Impact Statement 4/28/2021 Notice of Complete Draft Environmental Impact Statement and SEQRA Hearing 12/9/2020 Final Scope for Watchtower DEIS issued by Lead Agency on 12/9/2020 10/16/2020 Comments on Draft Scoping Document 9/23/2020 Informational Meeting Presentation 9/10/2020 SEQRA Notice 2 Resolutions Adopting Positive Declaration and Extending Public Comment Period 8/12/2020 Positive Declaration 8/12/2020 FEAF Part 1 FEAF Part 2 8/12/2020 Zoning Petition Concept Site Plan Draft Scoping Outline 8/5/2020

A few weeks ago, I mentioned to my wife and kids that I found a person on craigslist selling a $900 Celestron 6SE telescope for $400-something and I offered him $300 to see what he might say. He said he couldn't get the motorized finder and computerized mechanism to work, but that the lens/mirror/scope/accessories were in perfect shape and never really used. He sent pictures and agreed on $350. Then I was embarrassed, and actually not that happy that I had to drop the deal because my 3 kids all quickly pitched in and got me a new one from B&H Photo. Well, it got its space debut tonight since it's clear, not too cold, and all my kids and two grand-kids were over at the house. It was an easy setup, even though it's a lot heavier than anything we've had before. (What we had before was a`cheap model we got for the kids when they were actually kids. And that cheap one was like one I had when I was a kid 50-some years ago.) So this one was quite a different experience for me. If I had taken the time I could have aligned it with just 3 sky objects and I could then punch in names or coordinates of up to 40,000 stars and galaxies and it would automatically point me right to them and keep them tracked as the earth turns and they move across the sky. But the grand-kids couldn't stay up too late and I figured it would be quicker to just manually aim with the side-scope and go. Turns out that the thing is too big to move around manually at small sky objects when the tripod is on soft ground and grass. Long story short, I'm no longer angry that they spent extra to get a new, fully-working, automated telescope. Even though I didn't set up the automation yet, I was still able to use the remote for easy manual movement up, down, left, and right in small increments. This made it a breeze to point at something big like the moon and then use the remote to slowly scan the sky for new starts and planets. We started this at only 8:30pm when the sky was still bluish instead of black and we also have some street-lights that can make visibility in the telescope less than idea. But it was still picking up thousands of stars we couldn't see with our unaided eyes. The moon was bright and gorgeous, and I was happily satisfied that everyone got a chance to see the craters and hills so clearly. But then I maneuvered with the remote quite a distance to the right and Jupiter with 4 moons were as clear as day. Then about half that distance again to the right and down a bit we saw Saturn and you could distinguish the separation in the rings. Perfect stargazing night, and we didn't need to stay out past 9:30. Next time, I'll hook it up for some clusters, galaxies, nebulae, etc.

A blogger here has a picture of Sister Claus where apparently her husband is obscured in the photo. (Not important to this topic, but I was baptized in Tulsa in 1967, and got bit by a dog while out in door-to-door service there. (Age 10.) Somehow, the police showed up almost instantly, and I remember my brother and I talking the police out of calling animal services to have the animal put down. The householder was crying because the police were insistent.) http://reddirtimports.blogspot.com/2012/04/is-that-poster-of-judge-rutherford.html http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IP7rvcl80So/T2ar7XDsyjI/AAAAAAAAABc/qAVbljkWR1I/s760/South%2BUnit.jpg The other pictures include an article from a Tulsa paper advertising Rutherford's speech which (as @Space Merchant already mentioned) had actually happened on Monday, just prior to the major part of the riot. Notice as an aside that Tulsa had a population of 70,000 and it was promised that "thousands" of persons from Tulsa, if they lived another 4 years, would never die. (Larger cities like Pittsburgh were given "tens of thousands" and even larger cities like NYC were given "hundreds of thousands.)

As you may have already known @Space Merchant there is a bit more context here: https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/watchtower-study-october-2021/1921-One-Hundred-Years-Ago/ On Tuesday, May 31, 1921, what came to be called the Tulsa Race Massacre erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.A., after a black man was jailed and charged with assaulting a white woman. When a mob of more than 1,000 white men clashed with a smaller group of black men, the fighting spread quickly to the black neighborhood of Greenwood, where more than 1,400 homes and businesses were looted and burned. The official death toll was 36, but the actual number may have been in the hundreds. Brother Richard J. Hill, a black Bible Student and resident of Greenwood, related what happened: “On the night of the riot, we had our Bible study class as usual. After the class was over, we heard shooting downtown. We went to bed listening to it.” By Wednesday morning, June 1, the situation had worsened. “Some folks came and stated that if we wanted protection, we had better go to Convention Hall at once.” So Brother Hill along with his wife and five children fled to Tulsa’s Convention Hall. There, an estimated 3,000 black men and women were housed by the National Guard, who had been called in to restore order. About the same time, Brother Arthur Claus, who was white, made a courageous decision. “When I heard that rioting squads were running about throughout Greenwood, looting and setting fire to homes, I decided to check on my dear friend, Brother Hill.” Using The Harp of God, Arthur Claus taught a study class of 14 children Arriving at Brother Hill’s home, he encountered a white neighbor holding a rifle. The neighbor, also a friend of Brother Hill’s, assumed that Arthur was one of the rioters. “Why are you in this man’s yard?” he shouted. “Had I given him an unsatisfactory answer, he would have shot me,” Arthur recalled. “I assured him that I was Brother Hill’s friend and that I had been to his home many times.” Arthur and the neighbor successfully protected the property against the looters. Soon Arthur discovered that Brother Hill and his family were at Convention Hall. Arthur was told that black people could not leave there without an order signed by General Barrett, the officer in charge. Arthur related: “It was a real task to get to see the general. When I told him my plans, he asked: ‘Will you watch over this family and take care of their needs?’ Naturally, I heartily agreed.” With the order in hand, Arthur rushed to Convention Hall. He presented it to an officer who exclaimed: “Why, this is signed by the general himself! Do you know that you are the first person to take anyone from this place all day?” Brother Hill and his family were soon located. All of them crowded into Arthur’s car and headed home. “All of us stood equal among God’s dedicated people” Brother Claus made sure that Brother Hill and his family were safe. His example of fearless brotherhood had a good effect on others. Arthur related: “The neighbor who helped protect the Hill’s property drew closer to the truth. And a number of people got interested in the Kingdom because they saw that there were no racial barriers, that all of us stood equal among God’s dedicated people.”