Right now it's important for Americans to hear such nonsense because it is a perfect opportunity to be hit with the reality already mentioned, that our infrastructure, manufacture, resource and education capabilities are too badass to sink just yet. IOW, naive pronouncements by hopeful foreign statesmen serve as a very useful inoculation against precipitous behaviors like everyone cashing out of the banks.
If one proportionally transforms dates of benchmarks in ancient Rome and the U.S. (royal interval, republic interval, imperial interval), we still have a good forty years left of the U.S. being a nominally representative Republic. After that, rich and poor will have centrifuged and separated out sufficiently that a demagogue populist, probably with military background, will be very appealing to an American people who have seen their standard of living, and probably livelihoods, scuttled vis a vis emergent powers. The masses sometimes and cyclically hope that a single strong arm can clean up their house and paint the fence toothy.
Posts by rmt1
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23WSJ - Front Page - Predict End of USA by 2010 - Garbage...
by Confucious ini was very surprised that the wall street journal would publish this crap worthy of infowars.com.
and i was even more surprised they put it on the front page.. but it's in today's wsj - dec. 29 edition.. it's a story about a russian professor that is predicting the end of the usa by the year 2010.. he points to the fact that states will withhold support to the federal government.. they went so far as to make little diagrams on what states would go to canada and what to russia.. this one is easy though - say what you want to say - but 2010 is only a year away - and nothing is going to happen to the usa.. i'm not a flag waving redneck either - but the infrastructure of the us is too strong - too advanced.. con.
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rmt1
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King of the South?
by Satanus inhas anyone heard anything about him?
the wt has not talked about the southern king for a few decades.
the present american financial crisis is a golden opportunity for the wt to pull this card from the bottom of the deck.
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rmt1
My memory may be faulty but I recall something to the effect that the North would kick the South's ass and take names, and then Gog of Magog is drawn with a fishhook to attack god's people or something. The memory is sharp because it had the uncomfortable implication at the time that Russia would somehow militarily beat the U.S. in some indeterminate arena. If I am recalling correctly, a JW right now could look at the limitations of American imperial / unilateral strategies as compared to the rise of China.
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Father dying - request for suggestions how to best use time
by rmt1 ini am a staunch atheist, so i don't need any advice directed at myself in terms of what i should pray about, what i should believe in, ect.. .
what i do need advice about is how or to what degree i need to bear in mind the jw mindset and paradise earth hope.
now, from my perspective, he has wasted his life waiting for armageddon, and now he gets to see exactly how much of jah's paradise is ever coming to earth - zilch.
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rmt1
I am a staunch atheist, so I don't need any advice directed at myself in terms of what I should pray about, what I should believe in, ect.
What I do need advice about is how or to what degree I need to bear in mind the JW mindset and Paradise Earth hope. Now, from my perspective, he has wasted his life waiting for Armageddon, and now he gets to see exactly how much of Jah's Paradise is ever coming to Earth - zilch. But from his perspective, he will be summoning all his mental powers while on his deathbed to strongly visualize what it will be like to wake up in the New System and be received by all his sons and grandchildren while surrounded by God's beautiful nature and grizzly bears acting like teddy bears.
I really want the high road, and I really want to play this out correctly. I hope that my motivations are not to model for my entrapped familial brothers how it is to be an emotionally mature and psychologically successful worldly person. That would be vain. I believe that taking the highroad means not allowing any of my religious politics, or our differences of religion, enter into the equation. This does not mean caving in and allowing him to think that I am somehow penitent. This doesn't mean flinching and somehow allowing that I believe there is anywhere he is going to. This does not mean slipping up and allowing him to believe that there is anything correct about his religion.
What it does mean, I hope, is that I can address him as the evolved, homo sapien male that grew up in the post-war years, married into a peculiar religion, fathered some offspring during disco and Reagan, and always busted his blue collar ass. It is the biological father that I want to address, for nothing of value to anyone would result from me addressing the religious, politically-JW male that sired me.
SO. Whoever can shed some experience or reasonable insights - can you separate your recommendations and focus on what the biological father needs to hear - what he did right as a parent, what he must be thanked for, where the chip-off-old-block aspect has succeeded, etc.
I have no interest in sympathy so please keep it. I am solely interested in how to approach this from the perspective of how to make his homo sapien journey as valuable to him as I am able to give. I have no gifts to bring ba rumpa bumpup; all I have is this atheistic drum. But can I say something that is utterly evacuated of JW spin that would have closing, final value? I hope for responses that are serious as cancer.
My thanks in advance. -
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For my atheist friends....Happy Festivus!!!
by BurnTheShips inmaybe i will set up a festivus pole next to the christmas tree in your honor next year.
aluminum has a very high strength to weight ratio.. festivus is your heritage.
it's part of who you are...... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8g4ztf7him.
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rmt1
Festivus bites, which is the entire snide point. It is a cry of anguish in the face of globalization and flattening of cultural, ethnic and religious hierarchies. It is a reaction to the demographic blowback of the American empire.
I'm an atheist and I smoke the virgin birth, Silent Night, and all that shit. -
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More proof of Global Warming
by BurnTheShips inpeople freezing to death.
o fortuna!.
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20081222/gpg0101/81222109/1207/gpg01.
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rmt1
Gore is hypocritical and fake. Day After Tomorrow is exploitative Hollywood. As far as demagogues and entertainment industries go, exaggerating exploitation of a de facto situation/disaster is _normal_.
The show-me-the-money part of this debate is incontrovertible evidence that the thermohaline cycle is slowing. It's big and will be hard to mistake.
But until and if that happens, it continues to be the opposite of stupid to vigorously explore alternative fuels, for too many reasons other than carbon footprint. -
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In The Beginning...
by Blueblades inbeginnings are always difficult.
wherever one starts, there is always the question: what was before that?
this question comes from our sense of objective causality - that everything must be preceded by its cause.. must everything have a cause?
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rmt1
Don't know / can't tell if anyone is actually bothered by the unsearchableness of the first springs, but here's how I'm not bothered: My cathexis or emotional attachment to the question approaches the horizontal asymptope of zero (x-axis) as the logarithmic scale of what may have passed before us grows beyond my immediate comprehension.
Eg. An oscillating model of universal Big Bang and Big Crunch, universe after sequential universe, does not present any conceptual problems other than the question of when and how it began. So this model is a little too comprehensible and so I have mental energy left over to be bothered.
Eg. A serial Big Bang model where a new universe erupts out of the cold head-dead dissipated state of the previous, is also sort of a blossoming idea, very comprehensible, and causes the same problem.
Eg. A parallel Big Bang model, where there are multiple universes forming simultaneously as bubbles in a higher-dimensional foam- now that's a little hard to get around, because it requires a spatial relationship between universes with Hubble expansion throughout. It's an annoying model so I don't give it too much concern.
Eg. A Copenhegan multi-universe by itself doesn't answer the when how of the beginning. But a multi-universe that is the result of a collision between two higher dimensional branes (membranes, but 4th dimensional) starts to wear down my concern about beginnings pretty quick.
To sum: I hope to think I have some rudimentary assessment about how unspeakably insignificant I am in comparison to what's out there, that the emotional attachment of my observing 'I don't know where the beginning is' approaches zero, and indeed the emotional attachment of the question begins to approach zero, so that I don't ask it. -
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Imagine no religion - living life in peace?
by jws ina lot of people have pointed out that a lot of the world's problems have religion at their core.
religion's crimes are vast.
from crusades to inquisitions to genocides to our current wars.
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rmt1
Religion is the predilection for a group to maximize chances of survival by realigning animal evolutionary suspicions with some dominant polarity of narrative etiology. It is not a superficial facet of homo sapiens. It's an integral component of consciousness and responsible for getting homo sapiens up out of prelinguistic fear-response and being able to assign some approaching-rational cause to the thunders and lightnings of evolutionary past. In our modern terms of consciousness, there is no possible state of "What if there was no religion." There would be no homo sapiens if there had not been religion. But what you'd have is what you'd be back to originally, before "religion" conferred group fitness through galvanization. You'd have an upright, larger version of chipanzees - highly intelligent and social but not in a position, yet, to conceive, communicate and explain to each other the phenomena in their environment. One could well call that a peaceful period - we were a long way off from Predator drones. There was no ideology around which to formulate pre-existing rights to resources. The worst threats were animal predators, disease, starvation, exposure, and an occasional "homocide" through basic competition. But you could still call that period "living life in peace", relatively. As for modern homo sapiens "living life in peace," that would take weed.
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"We Are No Longer Minutes Aways From The New System ---We Are Seconds"
by minimus inthat's the latest being circulated from our dear witness friends and relatives.
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rmt1
LOL WTW "I wouldn't be surprised if the Filthful and Disgraceful Slavebugger starts using tenths of seconds when the people start slowing down again. Then, milliseconds." That's like the Fed cutting the prime funds rate to NOT zero percent, because that would be showing their hand, but a range between 0% and .25%. JWs will never ever be able to say "It is happening now."
But this seconds business: I've been out now 10 years and the last I was in, they wanted the UN to somehow mandate a stoppage to all religious organization and somehow take over religious property? I mean, that's what they mean when they say the beast will turn on the harlot and devour her, right? They aren't just throwing around exploitative bible porn but actually have some estimation, expectation on how such a grandiose interpretation might physically happen? Right? That would take 1) a bunch of time to convince the public that the temporal secular powers have a right to take away their god(s) 2) discussion, committee, etc. 3) implementation. That process alone would take tons of God-seconds.
And then isn't there something about the King of the North, King of the South, and hooks in the jaws of Gog and Magog? What's their new light on that now? That's got to be a couple more God-seconds. -
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In The Beginning...
by Blueblades inbeginnings are always difficult.
wherever one starts, there is always the question: what was before that?
this question comes from our sense of objective causality - that everything must be preceded by its cause.. must everything have a cause?
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rmt1
I'll offer a simple model for how time could have looping cause or a non-existent First Cause:
Time flows in one direction.
The earth rotates in one direction.
Time is contiguous and continuous along all points we observe.
The earth's surface is contiguous and continuous.
A single causality in time has a small adjacent set of causes and a small adjacent set of effects.
A single point on the exact Equator has a single adjacent point to its West, and a single adjacent point to its East.
Now think of our 3D reality existing within a 4D hypersphere where time is a fifth orthogonal direction. And think of East as cause and West as effect. If time wraps around the hypersphere, then any individual line of causality will meet its (Eastern) "cause" if it traces its effects down the 'Westward' line, and will meet its (Western) "effects" if it traces its causes down the 'Eastward' line.
You will logically ask, well who created the 5-dimensional hypersphere with time as a continuous loop, and you got me. -
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"We Are No Longer Minutes Aways From The New System ---We Are Seconds"
by minimus inthat's the latest being circulated from our dear witness friends and relatives.
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rmt1
Hard economic times are the JW version of Black Friday - it's when they recoup losses in RNF that occurred during the times when the normal majority of humanity had a decent livelihood and level of happiness. This is when they can store up the necessary number of converts for their next lean time. But they have to act soon!! There's only so many shopping days left for them to store up enough nuts for winter.