Be sure to watch the video, too! And you guys wonder why some people think 'merkins are crazy!
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fodeja
JoinedPosts by fodeja
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Florida town casts out Satan
by fodeja inso that's florida for you then.. .
inglis mayor carolyn risher said september 11 terror attacks inspired her to compose a proclamation banning satan from her town.
inglis, florida (cnn) -- if he's thinking of visiting florida's west coast, satan might want to steer clear of inglis.. the mayor of this small fishing village in florida has declared the prince of darkness persona non grata -- in essence, telling him to go to the devil.. "satan, ruler of darkness, giver of evil, destroyer of what is good and just, is not now, nor ever again will be, a part of this town of inglis," mayor carolyn risher says in a proclamation, which was issued on official town stationery.. risher said the events of september 11 inspired her to pursue the proclamation, which the town commission supports.. "it gave me the inspiration that these people need to be ready if something like this was to happen to the town of inglis.
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Florida town casts out Satan
by fodeja inso that's florida for you then.. .
inglis mayor carolyn risher said september 11 terror attacks inspired her to compose a proclamation banning satan from her town.
inglis, florida (cnn) -- if he's thinking of visiting florida's west coast, satan might want to steer clear of inglis.. the mayor of this small fishing village in florida has declared the prince of darkness persona non grata -- in essence, telling him to go to the devil.. "satan, ruler of darkness, giver of evil, destroyer of what is good and just, is not now, nor ever again will be, a part of this town of inglis," mayor carolyn risher says in a proclamation, which was issued on official town stationery.. risher said the events of september 11 inspired her to pursue the proclamation, which the town commission supports.. "it gave me the inspiration that these people need to be ready if something like this was to happen to the town of inglis.
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fodeja
So that's Florida for you then.
Inglis Mayor Carolyn Risher said September 11 terror attacks inspired her to compose a proclamation banning Satan from her town.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/01/29/town.satan/index.htmlINGLIS, Florida (CNN) -- If he's thinking of visiting Florida's west coast, Satan might want to steer clear of Inglis.
The mayor of this small fishing village in Florida has declared the Prince of Darkness persona non grata -- in essence, telling him to go to the devil.
"Satan, ruler of darkness, giver of evil, destroyer of what is good and just, is not now, nor ever again will be, a part of this town of Inglis," Mayor Carolyn Risher says in a proclamation, which was issued on official town stationery.
Risher said the events of September 11 inspired her to pursue the proclamation, which the Town Commission supports.
"It gave me the inspiration that these people need to be ready if something like this was to happen to the town of Inglis. We need to be ready to meet our maker," she said Tuesday on CNN's "American Morning."
She said there are people in Inglis who needed to repent.
"If our churches band together and pray, our nation and our town can be a godly nation and a godly town," she said. ...
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The Pope...
by Abaddon in... well, in addition to condoms being bad, now the pope says lawyers who work on divorce cases are doing something bad.. poor old guy; he should retire, but he really believes and will likely die in harness or become so decrepit that he is no longer capable and will be replaced.. however, at least jw's don't corner the market in saying stupid things!.
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people living in glass paradigms shouldn't throw stones...
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fodeja
I agree that the Pope is a bit of a questionable figure, but compared with most of his predecessors, he's a good man. I don't think he really has much influence anymore, though.
And at least the Catholic church does a lot to help poor countries and people, they have hospitals and charities...
This is the one thing I find praiseworthy enough to ignore the bizarre things in today's Catholic Church. In predominantly Catholic countries, the church is doing a HUGE lot of work for less fortunate human beings, regardless of their religious convictions.The JWs as an organisation, of course, don't lift a fscking finger. So, give me a senile man with a funny hat and weird ideas of morality any day, if the alternative is a group of apocalyptic nuts whose ideas of "charity" can be summed up with the words "Watchtower" and "Awake!".
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Why I think the Borg will have another enemy soon.
by Mindchild inthere is that old story i'm reminded of sometimes about the world being full of three types of people.
the people who make things happen, the people who watch things happen, and the people who have no idea of what is going on.
i thought you might want to at least be in the second catagory so i wanted to share something i found interesting with you.. i have two short poems and a short story for you to read below, and if you care to read these you might find something quite remarkable about them.. long years have passed.
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fodeja
Mindchild,
I tend to agree with Jan that "intelligence" or "wisdom" (and "life") are things we keep talking about all the time, but we can't quite make up our minds what they really are.
If anyone's interested, check out the titles "The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence" and "The Philosophy of Artificial Life", both edited by Margaret A. Boden, published by Oxford University Press. There you can read the opinions of all the great names in AI and A-Life. Most of them are pretty unsure about these basic concepts (and even if they aren't, their hypotheses are quite easy to attack).
There is an old rule of thumb about what intelligence is. If a man is standing on a railroad track and sees a train rushing towards him, this is information or knowledge. Intelligence is using knowledge to recognize the consequences of what will happen if the train hits him. Wisdom is getting off the tracks.
What if a bird is sitting on the railroad tracks?f.
(edited spelling)
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Why I think the Borg will have another enemy soon.
by Mindchild inthere is that old story i'm reminded of sometimes about the world being full of three types of people.
the people who make things happen, the people who watch things happen, and the people who have no idea of what is going on.
i thought you might want to at least be in the second catagory so i wanted to share something i found interesting with you.. i have two short poems and a short story for you to read below, and if you care to read these you might find something quite remarkable about them.. long years have passed.
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fodeja
I don't know how much you have been keeping up with A.I. but it is a whole different ball game these days and the paradigm has changed dramatically in the way to go about making intelligent machines. There is NO programing now. Neural nets learn to see for themselves by interaction with the real world
Nonsense. Neural networks have become slightly more complex, but they're still programmed. They don't "learn to see by themselves", they're trained for pattern recognition in a way that could be called artificial selection, or breeding. Same with GAs.
What's changed - although that's been happening quite a while ago - is the "paradigm" (gosh, I hate this word) of central control, i.e. most current AI/A-Life research is based on systems of more or less weakly coupled, relatively simple components. Since the resulting behaviour is often unpredictable (at least practically unpredictable), this is sometimes called "emergent computing". Another buzzword, some very interesting and useful results, but no great breakthroughs in sight so far. Anyone remember the "fuzzy computing" hype?
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Why I think the Borg will have another enemy soon.
by Mindchild inthere is that old story i'm reminded of sometimes about the world being full of three types of people.
the people who make things happen, the people who watch things happen, and the people who have no idea of what is going on.
i thought you might want to at least be in the second catagory so i wanted to share something i found interesting with you.. i have two short poems and a short story for you to read below, and if you care to read these you might find something quite remarkable about them.. long years have passed.
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fodeja
No, Mindchild, these are just smart ALGORITHMS, not smart machines.
Correct. AI has found its niches, but nowadays it's still far from creating anything that would be called "intelligence".
GAs (which, by the way, aren't particularly new - John Holland came up with this stuff in the 1970/80s) have their uses, especially for optimisation problems. This, however:
...taught themselves how to read, understand the context, and write about what they learned.
is quite a sensationalistic claim. "Understanding" the context, as in understanding the way we attribute to a human, is currently out of the question. There are very, very few advocates of strong AI left in the field, and they don't deliver a lot of promising results.Anyone remember ELIZA? This was one of the first programs to simulate something like intelligence, and it even fooled some intelligent people. Yet, it was an incredibly crude, rule-based piece of software.
Thus, by 2020, we will have personal companions that can read an entire encyclopedia in a few seconds, that will never forget anything, and that will surely remind us of when our perceptions of reality (i.e. belief systems) don’t match the consensual world. In short, it will tell us (if we ask) that the Borg is full of it and it will offer proof for why this is the case. These computers will seldom make mistakes.
I remember quite clearly that unbeatable chess computers and human-level translation engines were predicted for the 1970s. We may be approaching the chess computers, but even state-of-the-art automated translation is still quite crappy, which goes to show what the level of "understanding" language is today.I'm not saying that this cannot happen, but I'm saying that the stuff that's printed in popular magazines is quite far away from current research. Throwing more raw computing power at a problem doesn't magically generate the problem-solving capacities humans have.
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How do you know if you're going to heaven?
by Christiangal inthe only way to go to heaven is believing that jesus christ is god's son, and that he was sent here to earth to die on the cross for our sins.
if you confess him as lord and savior, then and only then, will you be certain that you are going to heaven.
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fodeja
And what is Hell? I dont believe in a literal, burning hell.
Three words: District, Convention, Summer.
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A Worldwide Rally
by cornish ina rally against bullying cults.. one thing i remember reading in steve hassans book combating cult mind control is how much cults hate publicity ie having their dirty deeds out in the open.. i was thinking to myself what do people usually do to highlight some concern or make a protest,here in the uk one popular method is to do a march demonstration and hand a petition or something to the prime minister at ten downing street,would it not be great if ex members of jehovahs witnesses and sympathisers and possibly including ex members of other cults could get together and have a large rally in the nations capital,a point of contention could be destructive cults having charitable status or something but including issues like blood shunning,manipulation etc culminating in downing street,other countries could have similar simaltanious rallies in their capitals.it would probrably grab the medias attention.. are there enough of us?.
just a thought,mayby a little over the top!
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fodeja
One thing I remember reading in Steve Hassans book Combating Cult Mind Control is how much cults hate publicity ie having their dirty deeds out in the open.
I may be wrong, but my impression is that these days, the WTS needs publicity, and it doesn't matter very much whether that's negative or positive publicity. The JWs aren't a mass religion. They will always attract only a small percentage of people -- people who would understand negative publicity as "persecution".
So, IMHO, it's best to deliver targeted information to Witnesses and don't bother the majority of other people with things they couldn't care less about. The average non-Witness probably doesn't waste more than half a second of thinking about JWs per year, and it's likely something as "oh my, this guy is standing here every day with his silly magazines".
I think that's fine.
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CO says 35% inactive
by target inthe co visiting a congregation in madison wisconsin told them that 35% are inactive.
i wonder if this is the pattern with most other congregations.
that was about what it was in the last congregation i was in.
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fodeja
I heard one S.O. tell his congregation that "we are experiencing exponential growth"! I kid you not.
Hey, I mean, he could be right. A yearly increase of, say, 0.001 percent is exponential growth after all.
Of course, these days, it looks more like exponential decay.
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John Walker
by mike047 inthe u.s. government is returning john walker to the states for trial.
what do you consider an appropriate punishment for his mis-deeds?.
i think, he should be[if found guilty]stipped of his citizenship and returned to somewhere in the mideast to spend the rest of his life,with no possibility to return to the u.s. for any reason.
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fodeja
I wonder how the wife and three children of the dead CIA agnet feel about Johnnie who took part in killing the CIA agent in the prison uprising.
So that has been elevated to the level of "fact" by now?
To me, what's most disturbing about this entire Afghanistan thing is that there is virtually NO comprehensive, reliable information available to the public. It basically looks and sounds like it's all coming from one single source. Even respectable newspapers are essentially rehashing the same soundbites anyone can get on TV. Anything else is quickly, and effectively discredited because "those others have an agenda to push" (and they're terrorist supporters for sure!). Oh, yeah, like the US government doesn't have an agenda to push, and the US media doesn't care if advertisers think their reporting is "unpatriotic".
I don't really care much about this JWL case, but I see it as one prime example of successful manipulation: here we have an American public that has, so far, been spoon-fed with carefully screened information in tiny doses - and that's enough to have intelligent people scream for the death of someone.
What do you KNOW about this guy? What do you KNOW about anything that happened in Afghanistan in the past months, for that matter?
That's not to do with conspiracy theory, and please don't give me the brainless "liberal" labeling (which is just as intelligent as the "apostate" label). It's common sense to understand that unless you have other ways and means to check facts, your "reality" is formed by whoever chooses to tell you what "reality" is.
In JWL's case, there's at least a chance of getting to know the whole story - that's what a public trial is about. The POWs, oh, "battlefield detainees" on Cuba? Don't know. Someone said they're terrorists, and that "someone" isn't a disinterested observer. For me, that wouldn't be enough to issue a goddamn parking ticket. For others, it's apparently enough for a public beheading.
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