TrueTomHarley

“I Martin Van Buren, of the town of Kinderhook, county of Columbia, state of New York, once governor of the state, more recently president of the United States, but for the last and happiest years, farmer of my native town…” Thus begins the will of Martin Van Buren and I thought well of the man for having his priorities straight. I confess I didn’t know much about Martin Van Buren till a recent tour of his home in upstate New York, near the Hudson. More or less, I had assigned him to the list of ‘duds’ who were presidents from Andrew Jackson up to Abraham Lincoln. Upon my excepting Van Buren, the guide let my observation about duds stand, with the observation that no president served more than one term during those years, since “the challenges leading up to Civil War were thought to be unaddressed by those presidents.” It is not for a National Historical Society tour guide to suggests that former chiefs-in-state were turkeys, and I was content to not be dismissed altogether. As it was, Van Buren lost his run for a second term to a turkey, because a depression allowed his enemies to characterize him, a tavern owner’s son educated in a one-room schoolhouse, as the aristocratic high-rolling “Martin Van Ruin,” but the turkey lived only 30 days before succumbing to pneumonia, which is, in fairness, a little too soon to definitively label him a turkey, but his Vice President successor (whose identity escapes me—someone else will have to get on it) was a fellow who was never imagined for the Presidency and is more aptly considered a genuine turkey. Even @James Thomas Rook Jr., who never tires of heralding the MEN who made the country GREAT, restrains his enthusiam of these ones. The opening film they show you at the visitor center of the Van Buren home is among the most compact language-wise that I have seen, with every line conveying a solid and interesting fact. He was the eighth president of the United States, and the first to be actually born in the country. He was the founder of the first political party, which in time became the Democratic Party. Until then, it was until then expected that men would come and go as independent gentlemen and would settle their differences unbuttressed by political ‘party.’ In fact, some of them settled their differences through duel, a favorite technique of Andrew Jackson, whom Van Buren served as Vice President before running for the chief office himself. Aaron Burr famously plugged Alexander Hamilton in a duel, and the guide confirmed as probably true what I had heard—that Hamilton loathed the idea of taking a man’s life and so fired into the air, a strategy not employed by his rival. The house has a curiously cobbled feel to it, notwithstanding what my cousin (the one who restores original Mustangs) matter-of-factly observed, that there are only so many ways in which you can add rooms to a house. The house did indeed undergo major expansion under the direction of a Van Buren son, and the by-that-time former president writes that he is amused to see what his heir will do with it. Perhaps the feature most ‘clunky’ is the major dining room, which accommodates 18 chairs, and more closely resembles a widened hallway, with no windows, with exterior lighting only on one end and sometimes on the other if the door is opened. There is a chandelier overhead and the guide explained that she would normally have activated it, but an employee had accidentally taken the remote home recently and it had not yet come returned. This led me to do my bit for history and suggest that Van Buren likely never used the remote to prevent just that catastrophe. The cobbled look dissipates once you go to the top floor, where massive bedrooms surround a spacious common area. One room had strewn on the floor toys of the era, which added to the impression that Van Buren did indeed most enjoy his latter days in his large home, surrounded with children and grandchildren. There was some sort of a survey form one could fill out at tours’ end, supposedly for some special occasion, but possibly routine. I don’t bother with that sort of nonsense when it is business, since most often they are trying to ascertain just how little service they can get away with until customers scream or, worse, bolt. This one I filled out gladly, however, and dropped it in the mail.

You have it backwards as usual. This is the commercial blog. I have never accepted advertising

Accusations about shunning are the new frontier. The movie Apostasy is a hit in England and it will likely travel around the world, causing huge pressure upon our young ones. I posted a review of the movie under the heading 'As Sherlock Says, It's GAME ON!' but because it linked to my blog where the bulk of the lengthy review remained, it was rejected for spamming. I am feuding with the Librarian, and feuding rather seriously, as my offer of compromise goes unanswered. I am this close to packing it in here, and would almost welcome the fate of Allen the Terrible, so that the decision might be made for me. I would not thereafter prove the resurrection, as he has many times. At a time when Jehovah's people are under vicious attack on many fronts, even banned & physically assaulted in the largest country by area on earth, it is not reassuring that brothers in position to make a difference instead choose to be impartial journalists, hosting gigantic forums where petulant morons have equal say with genuinely spiritual people. One almost wonders if during the final Battle other journalists will show up wanting to make sure that each side's point of view is fairly represented. I understand that all blogs are, by nature, competitive. However, a significant reason that Jehovah's organization works and those of the overall world do not is that members are willing to cooperate, and do not let such matters as turf wars interfere.

Putting this as delicately as I can, it is hard to imagine a response more stupid than this. It follows a report of mitigating Watchtower articles, which thereby become 'public policy.'

I suspect that the new frontiers for "defending the good news" are going to change soon, and that many of the friends are not yet up to speed, preferring to exchange tips on how to disprove the Trinity. It is why I accumulate writing in selected topics. As I recall, articles have been published to encourage friends to use human kindness and common sense in applying counsel on how to deal with DFed ones.

Close the book, throw it on the shelf. There I spent most of my childhood

No wonder I have so many insecurities. My own father used me as a bookmark! Now that’s what I call child abuse! Â #PoorMeÂ

I do note that @Jack Ryan has been known to post ten provocative items in a day.

It also says nothing about the composition of the moon. Yes James, I think you’ve found the smoking gun

I have figured out how to do it and I’ve taught them all.

All Bible translations say that Christians are a spectacle to the world. But the New World Translation better captures the flavor of the Greek word and renders the term ‘theatrical spectacle.’ Is it because its translators are better acquainted with the concept of acting on a stage? They have acted in millions of plays on every front porch. Sometimes they have received rave reviews. Sometimes they have received horrid reviews. Sometimes they have been run out of town. In the spiritual paradise, actors exchange field service experiences. They talk about new approaches. They kibbutz on how to better expose the Trinity doctrine. If they go online, they send paradise pictures to each other. It is all fine to do this. It is as it should be. It is a paradise, after all, and in a paradise, you do not take out the trash. You know that housekeeping will do that. Occasionally, however, some guest notices that the trash is piling up. “I’d better attend to that,” he says, and having done so, resumes his place at the play, just like you would pick up a paper on the Kingdom Hall floor. Or even turds at the dog park, because you appreciate a clean dog park. http://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2018/07/picking-up-women-at-the-dog-park.html It is not to be expected that the coordinators of the play will personally take out the trash. This is again as it should be. They will continue to provide the food and drink and focus on efforts to invite more to the play. Since the paradise is proving popular, they work to extend it into other areas, even taking into account the fact that people ‘talk funny’ over there. Some of them do not even notice the trash, and the ones that do reassure themselves with the knowledge that housekeeping will take care of it. They know that no one who is plowing and screws up the furrows by looking behind is well-suited for the Kingdom of God. They know that when the children are criticizing you no matter what you do, the answer is to let ‘wisdom prove itself righteous by its works.’ They think of David, who noted (or did he?) that people kept muttering about him all day long and chose to respond by keeping his mouth shut. All this is as it should be. Will they thank the one who is attending to the overflowing trash? Most likely not. Who is to say that he should be thanked? Taking out trash can backfire sometimes. Maybe he will spill some. The coordinators keep themselves so busy that they may not even notice him doing it. If they do, possibly they will not be happy about it. “Doesn’t he know that housekeeping is coming?” they may say. Or they may note he didn’t do it right this or that time. ‘Don’t you have faith to see the big picture?’ they may ask. ‘Here: consider another way you could reason with someone about hellfire,’ the other stage actors might add.

On Twitter, I follow a certain journalist who wrote about us. It was a very favorable article, so I do not pick fights with her on other matters. Still, I'm sure you will find a recent tweet from her interesting. She laments that during her college days she had such high hopes for - she listed a few - certain socialist leaders primarily in South or Central America. Then she complains that all of them had let her down. Will that overly affect her writing? I doubt it will. She has been conditioned to think in a certain way. It is part of the perils of being so young and having such limited experience. She looks like she could be my granddaughter. (of course, almost everyone does) Though it is neither here nor there, I have become amazed that i can predict with almost total accuracy, from just knowing two or three circumstances, whether a person will root for Trump or Obama. This is a very predictably divided world we live in.

This particular scam probably hauls in millions, though not (I hope) from any one person. I think the utility you mean is called system restore. I have used it too. If you do a hard reboot, as I think you must, you will lose any unsaved data. And if you are not savvy enough to know what’s going on, as no one is at first, you will panic when the screen returns even after reboot, not realizing that it comes via a browser session that may be restored. I doubt chasing Trump has anything to do with it. This scam has been around longer than he has.

I am assuming that the @officesupport Twitter account is fraudlent, and that they just monitor social media for any mention of Microsoft.

Those who have followed me elsewhere know I have been grumbling about Word lately. When I grumble, I grumble big. I did it on Twitter, too, even tagging @microsoft. Very quickly I heard from @OfficeSupport Hi, Tom. Thank you for reaching out. Please tell us more about the issue that you're having? Also, which Office application are you using? We'll wait for your response. Me: This is kind of you to respond. The ‘Link to Previous’ button seems to have no effect. Office365Word. Enter chapter titles in odd header & it still populates headers of other sections. Sometimes it does. Othertimes no. Am I misreading the instructions? Would you like to call our technical support team for a help? They can walk you through and guide you on how to use the Word. They can also answer all your questions in real time. Call them at 1-800-642-7676. Me: If I enter the number you have given me, 800-642-7676, into a search engine, I come up with a host of pages saying that the holders thereof are frauds and liars. …We understand the caution regarding this. We would like to confirm that the number we’ve provided is a legitimate Microsoft number… A day or two passed. Then I heard from them again. Hi, Tom! How’s everything? We hope you're having a great time. We’d love to hear about your experience with our Social Media support here: http://msft.social/dDqG3B . Feel free to send us a message anytime if you need our help. 1/2 Me: It’s not going well at all. Googling the phone number you gave me, 1 800 642 7676, returns many pages that say you are a scam. (Concurrent with their tweet above): You may also Subscribe to our Customer Support YouTube channel here: http://msft.social/RqoPMD . Thanks for your time! 2/2 Me: One channel is all I need. If Google says the phone number you gave me, 1 800 642 7676, is a fraud, I will not hold my breath on a YouTube channel. Clean up that mess, if it is wrong. ......... Everyone knows this phone number. This is the number that pops up when suddenly your screen freezes and you are advised that you have a virus or much worse. If you call them, you will find that they speak English poorly, and are intent upon having you cede control of your computer to them so that they may better 'help' you. Look at your address bar and you will see it is simply a web page that has taken over everything else. That does not mean it is easily disposed of. Ususally a hard reboot is required, and also that browser session must be prevented from re-opening. Plainly, these folks are outside of the country, so they are not easily thwarted. Even so, I am a little surprised that the actual Microsoft, big as it is, does not do whatever it takes to shut them down, as it leaves a horrible ugly taste toward their products from those who have been so accosted, and probably drives many to Apple. Maybe @admin, influential as he is, can pass this along to them. This is a job that even @The Librarian (the old biddy) may not be able to handle.

You must have cried when they told you that those Mark verses are phony.

Hey, did anyone here borrow my book "Great Meanie Snakes of the World"? I am missing it, and you never know when the topic may come up.

Any group of any fundamentalist leaning claims this. It is not just Witnesses. Agreed, 'liberal' churches are less likely to claim this, but that is because they are less likely to claim anything. Some of them have been found to have pastors who shed their belief in God.

No. I don't make mistakes. I did it on purpose to show I felt his pain and was at one with him. Obviously. (Oh, all right. I'll go back and fix it.)

A 30-ish, I would guess, reporter attended one of this year's regional convention, this one in New Orleans, and wrote some reasonably nice things about it. He didn’t fall upon his face and do a Zechariah 8:23 – ‘We will go with you people, for we have heard that God is with you people’ – but considering his non-religious reporter background, I’ll take what he did write and thank him for it. You don't have to quibble over every little thing. Since I have time on my hands, and no, I was not notified by an attendant (guard), let me see if I can respond to a few things he raised. His words are in italics. Mine in regular font. The Jehovah's Witnesses' Annual Convention Was So Organized It Was Creepy. They are extremely organized. It might strike one as creepy who is not used to it. Aside from the occasional door-to-door visits and that one time, which I still feel guilty about, when my brother drenched some evangelists with water balloons from our second-story bedroom window, I had never really met a Jehovah's Witness. It took me two trips to the dry cleaners to get those water marks out of my suit. Also, I knew Prince was a member, and any religious group that could claim Prince as one of their own was either extremely terrifying or weirdly edgy and almost cool. The ebook Tom Irregardless and Me contains the most complete, and perhaps only, written compilation of Prince’s JW life. It is in the free download section. …they even took care of cleaning, despite the Superdome's retainer on dozens of janitors. It may be the only event for which they get time off. The Witnesses usually show up a day beforehand, as well, for a massive scrub-down. One Superdome employee said to me, "These guys are guarding the elevators like Obama is here." As far as I know, he did not come. He would have been invited, but may have been hard to reach. Plus, their floral-printed dresses and charcoal suits made most guests look like they were dressed for a wake. If one is not used to seeing folks dressed up, and it is a rarety today, the sight could easily give that impression. As a further sign of their top-down control of every aspect of the convention, or maybe just a tight budget, none of the concession booths were open. It is like that in every convention and has always been. People brown-bag it. However, go back far enough to the 50’s or so and there were makeshift kitchens set up & taken down to serve a full meal to every attendee. Food arrangements have progressively streamlined since then. It's a bit unsettling to realize you're one of the only people in a room of nearly 40,000 who think you're not destined for heaven, and not even destined for the earthly paradise that the remaining Jehovah's Witnesses will inherit after all the other degenerate heathens like me are abruptly taken out by the apocalypse. Their beliefs are their beliefs after all, but I don't often contemplate the afterlife in the presence of a group whose faith is so relentless. It's convert or burn, and that's heavy s**t, man. [**s mine] We would not phrase matters this way. We just try to bring the gospel to as many as we can, and after that things are out of our hands. As the expression goes, ‘It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.’ There was a big, climactic event on the bill that sounded like it was supposed to be a live drama depicting something from the Book of Something. Jonah. it was from the Book of Jonah. Actually, it was the entire book, which is overall quite short. …everyone was wearing way too much makeup. It was like a B movie made by the Bible Channel. I actually thought the movie was pretty good, overall. They have come a long ways in a short time, and once were downright cheesy. Great attention is paid that all props are historically accurate. It may be that you just miss the Hollywood pizzazz that moviegoers become accustomed to. Admittedly, they are not paid actors. They, too, are volunteers. a bunch of men walked around holding "Quiet Please" signs that had already been made. This happens before all sessions, as it takes participants a while to break off visiting with friends they may not have seen for a long time. But while I still don't understand the Jehovah's Witness faith or its people, and while I may still think of them as cult-addled nuts, they're still just people. You know, I’ll take this. I appreciate it. And I really do like the article with its reminder of the first impression we make on many today. But they also like peanut butter sandwiches. I hate to think of the garbage I might eat were it not for my wife, who attends to such things far better than I do. ...and they especially like organizing conventions. The exact program is reproduced hundreds of times during the year around the world, each with the same degree of organization, so as to serve every member. Ours was in Rochester, and here is a post on a previous one. http://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2018/07/reporter-at-2-oclock-roger-that.html

It's been in the works for some time. You name and device tops every list.

You are being too cerebral about this. Take a fruit with you from the supermarket out the door, without paying for it, making it a forbidden fruit. The experience will help you see the problem from a new perspective. If it does not, I will appear at your trial as a character witness.

This is probably a reference to an Awake article of the 90s. I wrote of it here: http://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2010/10/jehovahs-witnesses-and-blood-transfusions.html and here is the specific passage (the post is lengthy): I also thought it well to take a look at that May 1994 Awake quote which Matt uses to advance the notion JW youths are dropping like flies for their transfusion refusals: “In former times thousands of youths died for putting God first. They are still doing it, only today the drama is played out in hospitals and courtrooms, with blood transfusions the issue.” Not that I accuse Matt of anything devious. I've no doubt he used the quotation in good faith. It's likely from a web source purporting to be informative, but in reality existing only to denigrate a faith its author detests, trying to make JWs look as fanatical as possible, and doing so for philosophical reasons, rather than anything having to do with medicine or lives. So is the statement taken out of context or not? It's a little difficult to tell, for there is no context. The quote is a one-line blurb on the magazine's table of contents designed to pique interest in the articles to follow. The articles to follow describe the cases of five Witness youngsters in North America. Each was admitted into a hospital for aggressive cancer or leukemia. Each fought battles with hospitals, courts, and child welfare agencies determined to administer blood against the patient's will. Each eventually prevailed in court, being recognized as “mature minors” with the right to decide upon their own treatment (though in two cases, a forced transfusion was given prior to that decision). Three of the children did die. Two lived. It's rather wrenching stuff, with court transcripts and statements of the children involved, and those of the participating doctors, lawyers, and judges. In no case do you get the sense that blood transfusions offered a permanent cure, only a possible prolonging of life, ideally long enough for some cure to be discovered (which has not yet happened). One of the children, who did die, was told that blood would enable her to live only three to six months longer, during which time she might “do many things,” such as “visit Disney World.” There's little here to suggest that “thousands of youths are dying for putting God first” who would otherwise live. Frankly, I think the quote is sloppily written. “They are still doing it,” says the quote. Doing what? Dying? Dying in the thousands? Or putting God first without regard for the immediate consequences?

If you think ‘theybes’ are the coolest thing since GPS technology, you just may not be comfortable as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. If you think the idea is stupidity on steroids, Jehovah’s Witnesses may be a home for you. (Theybe parents encourage their child not to read anything into their anatomy, and they seek to keep it hidden from others to the extent possible, so the children can choose their own gender when they reach 4 or 5 years of age, not having been ‘prejudiced’ by genitalia) If you think ‘moral decadence’ is a pejorative phrase, you will not feel at home with JWs. If you feel it is spot-on ‘tell-it-like-it-is,’ you will. If you think the world today is ‘onward and upwards; Yes, there are some problems, but nothing that human ingenuity can’t fix,’ the Kingdom Hall is not where you’ll want to be. If you think this world is in its death throes, you may. It is all perspective. It’s all spin. When people of the first perspective write a book or make a movie about JWs, you know they are going to slaughter them. The very same circumstances that Witnesses view one way will be viewed, and usually skewed, the opposite way by those holding opposite views. There is no mystery to it. They may or may not be apostate, per the definition that good @sami supplies, but that is not the main point. They have decided the lifestyle they left behind is not so bad after all, and have returned to it. Peter speaks of it in canine terms. So does @Vic Vomidog Once again, today’s Trump/Hillary uproar proves to be a godsend—a template seen in other areas of life. Both parties see the very same exact set of facts. Then they spin, represent and exaggerate them 180 degree poles apart, and do nothing but rage at each other on the media. It all serves to expose the nonsense of ‘critical thinking.’ We think from the gut, not the head. The heart chooses what it wants and then entrusts the head to create a rationale for it. The overall ‘crime’ of Jehovah’s Witnesses, it becomes more and more clear, is to dare to be separate. It is no more than 1 Peter 4:4 at work: “Because you do not consider running with them in this course to the same low sink of debauchery, they are puzzled and go on speaking abusively of you.” It confuses them, but they figure out the appropriate response in a hurry—to speak abusively of those holding the Christian course. “Water’s just fine here in the low sink!” more and more people shout. “Whatever is wrong with you, wanting to stay out? We even have Jack the lifeguard here, and he has cleaned up his language today. Oh, and did I tell you that he's making a movie?”