JW Insider

Yesterday, I was at Wallkill and Warwick. And it wasn't what you might be thinking. It was to take the grandkids (ages 3 & 6) apple picking. When my own children were young, this was an easy thing to do. Load everyone in a car; drive at least 30 miles outside NYC; watch for signs; take your pick of places; end it with a simple hay-ride, and then take home your pick of apples. Now many of the farms that manage these things only take reservations for picking. They charge $40 for a half-bushel. The have expensive vendor stands creating a makeshift food court, a gift shop, a donut shop, a cider shop. The one we ended up at yesterday had about 500 cars when we arrived (and parking for only about 400). And live music. (?!?!)
Not quite the vibe I grew up with.

That too (normally w/ some inflationary precautions, ha ha). But the day of reckoning over debt is put further off if there is more international interdependence on that same dollar. The Petro Dollar was only the largest tactic. Other tactics include military aid in $USD, foreign aid in $USD, IMF loans, and even putting military bases in as many countries as possible which forces the host country (Japan, for example) to deal with a lot of $USD alongside their own currency.
To keep it propped, other nations must give it its props.

True. They are on Wall Street, too. So is Pharma. They are all getting a "shot in the arm" from this situation. [Oh no! Is he talking about Stonewall Jackson, again?]
Boeing (NYSE:BA), $136.3 billion ; Raytheon Technologies (NYSE:RTX), $131.5 billion ; Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT), $100.0 billion ]
AbbVie (NYSE:ABBV) $56.2 billion (rev) $11.5 billion (earnings) Bristol Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMY) $46.4 billion $7 billion Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) $93.8 billion $20.9 billion Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) $81.3 billion $22.4 billion

That too (normally w/ some inflationary precautions, ha ha). But the day of reckoning over debt is put further off if there is more international interdependence on that same dollar. The Petro Dollar was only the largest tactic. Other tactics include military aid in $USD, foreign aid in $USD, IMF loans, and even putting military bases in as many countries as possible which forces the host country (Japan, for example) to deal with a lot of $USD alongside their own currency.
To keep it propped, other nations must give it its props.

Any scenario these days of the US govt working for the interests of non-renewable energy company seems a little hard to swallow. Aren’t they public enemies #1 for pumping up climate change?
Making trouble with Russia is always a thing, I agree. I recall Trump posing the question, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with Russia?” Whereupon outside forces intervened to virtually ensure they would not.
You would think so. But the world is so screwy today. And the notion of national leaders betraying the interests of the populace is widespread.
Yeah, I guess there was some mix-up as to that. My bad.
 
Well…he’s a big boy. He should know better. There are some topics you can’t let within 100 yards of a Bible person—all of them, really. Nonetheless, I’ll refrain from (maybe) commenting along that vein pending another thread.

Please, do it you for me!

I suspect that @Mic Drop, the original poster of this topic, didn't expect it to turn into a discussion about interpretation of Bible prophecy. But it might be interesting to bring this up elsewhere. If you'd like, I (or you) could start a new topic under one of the JW forums. I just noticed something in that Daniel passage for the first time today.

(Daniel 11:43) . . .And he will rule over the hidden treasures of gold and silver and over all the desirable things of Egypt. And the Libʹy·ans and the E·thi·oʹpi·ans will be at his steps.
I guess this assessment is a bit controversial...

I don't think that was the only reason. Several countries in Europe would not be ready to stand by the US-sponsored sanctions against Russia (because they don't want their citizens to be faced with cold this winter). They were still compromising on the economic sanctions, but would have no more reason to compromise if the pipelines were sabotaged.
The US/NATO war against Russia which is being accomplished by using the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder is a war where Russia has tried to negotiate a peaceful solution for years. Since 2014, Ukraine has bombed and tortured its own Russian-speaking citizens in the Donbas regions, killing at least 14,000 of them just in the last 8 years. In fact, when Russia pulls out of a region, Ukraine uses it as an excuse to continue bombing their own Russian-speaking populations there even during this war. Russia has been trying to support the Russian-allied Donbas regions going all the way back to the Minsk agreements. Even during this war, Russia has offered to negotiate and the West has interfered with these negotiations. Boris Johnson even openly intervened at a point when it seemed Ukraine was ready for peace. Remember that the BILLIONS of dollars in military aid, is not free from the US military contractors. They still get paid through US citizen's tax dollars and payments approved from Ukraine's puppet government, that the US set up there.
So the basic idea that makes even more immediate sense is that Germany and others now have no choice but to support the US war against Russia via Ukraine.

Haven't seen much evidence for the validity of the second part of that question. The idea that the US would push for a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has been public even for many years prior to the US coup that replaced the president in 2014. Even Biden stated many years prior that the way to get Russia involved would be to push for more NATO countries, including Ukraine, along the Russian border.
Also, Rice was not the only person to admit that Europe needs to be forced into a greater dependence on US energy. It's a well-known, and sometimes openly admitted goal of US war in the Middle-East to gain control over the energy resources. Trump admitted it openly at least once. The very reason that the US continues to occupy about a third of Syria has been to continue stealing control of its oil. The commission that looked into whether Assad (Syria) actually "gassed his own people" had actually already debunked it, although the debunking was from the same people who would later change their story. Libya was building up better relations with the US, when Gaddafi started pushing for national control of the oil resources, and cooperation among African nations. It is not really a secret that this is why Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and others decided to murder him (and laughed about it).

Haven't seen much evidence for the validity of the second part of that question. The idea that the US would push for a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has been public even for many years prior to the US coup that replaced the president in 2014. Even Biden stated many years prior that the way to get Russia involved would be to push for more NATO countries, including Ukraine, along the Russian border.
Also, Rice was not the only person to admit that Europe needs to be forced into a greater dependence on US energy. It's a well-known, and sometimes openly admitted goal of US war in the Middle-East to gain control over the energy resources. Trump admitted it openly at least once. The very reason that the US continues to occupy about a third of Syria has been to continue stealing control of its oil. The commission that looked into whether Assad (Syria) actually "gassed his own people" had actually already debunked it, although the debunking was from the same people who would later change their story. Libya was building up better relations with the US, when Gaddafi started pushing for national control of the oil resources, and cooperation among African nations. It is not really a secret that this is why Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and others decided to murder him (and laughed about it).

In 2014, back when the US publicly admitted to plotting the coup in Ukraine (via WikiLeaks), Ms Rice admitted the overarching goal of weakening Russia's energy business by sabotaging their economy so that rich supplies of US energy would be favored over Russian energy.

It's been suggested that NATO Article 5 should come into play, meaning that all NATO nations should now attack the United States on suspicion that it was the U.S. that just attacked a viable fuel supply for NATO countries like Germany.

FWIW, Here is the full picture for Thinking in case someone might get a skewed picture from the incomplete picture:

And several of those downvotes she received came from you-know-who, which makes them about as meaningless as downvotes can get.
If one were to do a quick comparison. She gives out less than 1% of her votes as downvotes. The ratio is 1967+55+148= 2,170 to 13. That's not even counting the ones that indicate a sense of humor.
By comparison, C-D67 has given out more than twice as many down-votes as ANY other kind of vote. Where have we seen that before, I wonder???
 
 

Sure. It's a bad habit from past employment, but I think a lot about what people can do with statistics. You know: "lies, d#$%n lies and statistics." You can make people believe in things that are true, only half-true, or completely false. Here are my own numbers below. I had never looked at mine before, and it reminded me that the 11 downvotes I gave out were part of a joke that I was playing with someone else here.
But I can also state, with some sense of real accomplishment, that nearly 580 of the 618 downvotes I received, all came from the very same person, even though they came from about 27 of that same person's various accounts.

 

Sure. It's a bad habit from past employment, but I think a lot about what people can do with statistics. You know: "lies, d#$%n lies and statistics." You can make people believe in things that are true, only half-true, or completely false. Here are my own numbers below. I had never looked at mine before, and it reminded me that the 11 downvotes I gave out were part of a joke that I was playing with someone else here.
But I can also state, with some sense of real accomplishment, that nearly 580 of the 618 downvotes I received, all came from the very same person, even though they came from about 27 of that same person's various accounts.

 

FWIW, Here is the full picture for Thinking in case someone might get a skewed picture from the incomplete picture:

And several of those downvotes she received came from you-know-who, which makes them about as meaningless as downvotes can get.
If one were to do a quick comparison. She gives out less than 1% of her votes as downvotes. The ratio is 1967+55+148= 2,170 to 13. That's not even counting the ones that indicate a sense of humor.
By comparison, C-D67 has given out more than twice as many down-votes as ANY other kind of vote. Where have we seen that before, I wonder???
 
 

It's named after the astronomer Charles Stephenson:
Stephenson 2-18 is a member of the open cluster Stephenson 2, which occupies an area of 1.8’ of the sky but is not visible in amateur telescopes. The cluster cannot be detected in visible light at all because it is heavily obscured by dust, but it can be seen in infrared light.
It lies in the region of the sky between Alpha and Beta Scuti. The open cluster Stephenson 2 is one of the most massive open clusters in the Milky Way. It was first noticed by American astronomer Charles Bruce Stephenson, who reported the discovery in June 1990.
Stephenson 2-18 (St2-18, also known as Stephenson 2-18 and RSGC2-18) is a red supergiant (RSG) star. It is close to, and a possible member of, the open cluster Stephenson 2. It is about 6,000 parsecs (20,000 ly) away from Earth in the constellation of Scutum and is one of the largest known stars. It is also one of the most luminous of its type. It has a radius of 2,150 times that of the Sun, and has a volume 10 billion times that of the Sun. This star has a spectral type of M6, which is pretty unusual for a supergiant star and corresponds to its cool temperature of 3,200 Kelvin. But there is also a hypothetical Quasi-star... Quasi-star, also known as black hole star, is hypothetically star are believed to have only existed of beginning of the universe when most a the material in the galaxy was hydrogen and helium. A Quasi-star could be as large as 10 billion kilometers or roughly large than 7.000 times the radius of the sun.

Sure. It's a bad habit from past employment, but I think a lot about what people can do with statistics. You know: "lies, d#$%n lies and statistics." You can make people believe in things that are true, only half-true, or completely false. Here are my own numbers below. I had never looked at mine before, and it reminded me that the 11 downvotes I gave out were part of a joke that I was playing with someone else here.
But I can also state, with some sense of real accomplishment, that nearly 580 of the 618 downvotes I received, all came from the very same person, even though they came from about 27 of that same person's various accounts.

 

This only works if there is no corruption and honesty. Maybe that's acceptable to you, not me. However, as someone stated earlier on this post, stick to scripture and on topic. Statistics are of no concern.

I could tell you but then I'd have to down-vote you.

I could tell you but then I'd have to down-vote you.

I could tell you but then I'd have to down-vote you.

The neat thing about the internet is it doesn’t matter. Write what you write and go to bed. I’ll make sure the ruffians don’t erase it while you sleep. Then when you wake and see ten dumb comments appended to your remark, blast away.