always being a company "yes" man, seem to be the main premises
Come on, be fair - not always a "Yes" man.
He did say "No" whenever the boss did!
Bungi Bill
JoinedPosts by Bungi Bill
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28
When do you think the 7 clowns will add more members to the exclusive GB club ?
by Chook inwill they draw a new name out of a hat or do a kiss test i don't know..
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Bungi Bill
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Why Are More JWs Claiming to be Anointed?
by Ding inmost jws i know claim they are happy being in the great crowd.
they'd rather live on a paradise earth and pet lions than go to heaven.. heaven is a place they can't relate to, a place where they don't expect their friends and loved ones to be.. so why are more and more jws claiming to be of the anointed?.
aren't they looked down upon as if they are crazy, proud, ignorant, or engaging in apostate thinking?.
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Bungi Bill
ttdtt
To that, add a generous measure of mental illness, and the numbers of "anointed are" almost guaranteed to increase!
Certainly, my experience with those more recently "partaking of the emblems" has been that they are usually suffering from some sort of mental illness.
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Karl Marx Genius Of The Modern World
by Brokeback Watchtower inhe was all for getting rid of religions and their delusions for the betterment of mankind.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mydmc1wio8.
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Bungi Bill
MMM,
I read that link you mentioned about leaking buildings, but there is still more to be said about the regulatory regime (or lack of it) during those years.
The move here in the early 1990s was away from "prescriptive" to "light-handed" regulation of industry (sometimes referred to as "self-regulation"), in which the law stated what must be done, BUT ......... not how to do it. This was in accord with the Free Market ideas that were still dominant in business and government.
With regards to the weatherproofing of buildings, the 1992 Building Regulations only stipulated three things:
(i) That the building must be able to last for at least 50 years
(ii) That the roof must last for at least 15 years
(iii) That both walls and roof must be waterproof.
Nowhere did the 1992 regulations make any attempt to tell builders how to achieve these requirements. This was "Light-handed" Regulation in practice, leaving such matters to that buzz-phrase of the time, "individual choice".
The standard that you mention (NZS 3604) is not even cited in the 1992 Building Regulations. Rather than being a "Government" document, this and other such standards were compiled by the Standards Council of New Zealand - an organisation that fulfilled a similar role to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). On their own, such standards had (and still have) no legal binding. That only takes place if the standard is stipulated in legislation.
For a very thoughtful discussion on this whole matter , Brian Easton's Regulatory Lessons from the Leaky Home Experience is a worthwhile read. (Easton is a well known New Zealand economist, who has been involved with the writing of more than 30 books. His observations about regulatory failure and the leaking building issue can be accessed on the following link. http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/publications/files/aea9bc2e751.pdf )
During those years of the late 1980s / early 1990s, attempts to implement Free-Market reforms in this country resulted in much mayhem, but failed to bring about economic recovery. One could certainly write a book about that on its own, and Prosperity Mislaid by Leonard Bayliss is one such informative work. (Again, Bayliss can write with considerable authority. A graduate of Cambridge University, he was an economist with the Reserve Bank for 15 years, before becoming the Chief Economist for the Bank of New Zealand, a position he held for a similar period. Later still, he served as a board member of that same bank).
Not that you need the likes of an economist to tell you about the mayhem that "Rogernomics" caused. You only need to drive around the former forestry towns in the Central North Island to see that some of its legacy is still ongoing (that is, if you are brave enough and your stomach is up to it!)
PS: During that same time, our industry (electrical) likewise went the "Light-handed" regulation way. Thankfully, though, they woke up to themselves in time before a similar disaster as this afflicted the electrical industry.
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First Humans May Have Been European
by cofty inthe fossil record of early hominins in africa is very well established with patterns of later migrations into asia and europe.
the hypothesis is sometimes referred to as "out of africa".. however a new paper from researchers at the university of toronto describes two fossil specimens of an even earlier ancestor graecopithecus freybergi who lived 7.2 million years ago, putting it close to our common ancestor with chimpanzees.
crucially these fossils were not discovered in africa but in greece and bulgaria.. the team are proposing that environmental changes that led to the formation of the sahara pushed the ancestors of graecopithecus freybergi further north towards the eastern mediterranean where the chimp-human split occurred.. this hypothesis is likely to be controversial for all sorts of reasons!.
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Bungi Bill
Interesting, but perhaps a bit too early to be conclusive?
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Karl Marx Genius Of The Modern World
by Brokeback Watchtower inhe was all for getting rid of religions and their delusions for the betterment of mankind.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mydmc1wio8.
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Bungi Bill
It is indeed very hard to fault the Scandinavian countries, both in their economic development and with their social successes. (Although Norway has been helped immensely by its off-shore oil industry). The example of countries such as Sweden and Denmark tends strongly to suggest that a Mixed Economy works best.
That contrasts with the disastrous attempts in the late 1980s / early 1990s to implement a Free Market Economy in this country. (An experiment that is still often referred to as "Rogernomics", after the then minister of finance, Roger Douglas). During the 1980s, economist Milton Friedman gave a series of rather forceful lectures on TV about the virtues of the "Free Market". After that, wondrous claims were made about what it was going to achieve - and for a few years, many people actually believed it, too!
However, the reality was quite different; with just one example of many being the "Leaky Homes" debacle.
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Wow i do not reconize this religion anymore...
by _Morpheus inhad the misfortune of stopping by the "regional" convention yesterday.
i promised my daughter i would come to sunday afternoon so she wouldnt have to ride home with her mother.... holy crap it was weird!
im sure all of this has been covered on the forum but to actually see it.... just wow.
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Bungi Bill
Whatever sort of religion we thought it was never existed.
Sparrowdown, that sums it up perfectly!
(Must try and remember that one)
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Becoming a jw actually made me a much more worldly person.
by lancelink ini was raised a catholic from birth to age 15, that's when my dad started to study with some jw's that came to our door.
i was too young/ naive to notice how my lifelong friends were slowly being replaced with so called " outstanding spiritual youths".. anyway, there was randy and kevin, the sons of the po from the hall, everyone thought that they were the most spiritual people i could hang out with.
these guys taught me the fine points of :.
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Bungi Bill
The object was not to get caught.
Commandment No.11 - "Thou shalt not get caught."
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Becoming a jw actually made me a much more worldly person.
by lancelink ini was raised a catholic from birth to age 15, that's when my dad started to study with some jw's that came to our door.
i was too young/ naive to notice how my lifelong friends were slowly being replaced with so called " outstanding spiritual youths".. anyway, there was randy and kevin, the sons of the po from the hall, everyone thought that they were the most spiritual people i could hang out with.
these guys taught me the fine points of :.
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Bungi Bill
Not smoking or drugs, but certainly alcohol. In fact, the pioneer brother who "brought me into The Truth" liked a drink or two (or six!) Regrettably, I proved to be an able student.
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40
we have a laid off bethelite with an engineering degree!
by nowwhat? inthis guy have been at bethel for 25 years when he could have been making 75-100 thousand a year as an engineer.
so they kick him to the curb so they don't have to house him and his wife anymore.
they run into a problem at warwick and they ask him to come back for 3 weeks.
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Bungi Bill
University education does tend to be overly academic (the engineering courses, anyway), with the result that many graduate with no idea about how their learning relates to the real world.
More than a few times, I - a mere busted @$$ electrician - have had to explain to graduate engineers what the various pieces of plant are in a High Voltage Switchyard. These guys knew all the theory about how such things as power transformers, circuit breakers, instrument transformers, static capacitor banks etc. function; but just could not recognize one if they saw it! Another graduate engineer was compiling a maintenance procedure for the standby diesel generators, but did not know what "crank case blow-by" was. It was left to somebody like me -who had grown up in an era when you both could work on your own car, but couldn't afford to pay somebody else to do so - to enlighten him!
However, rightly or wrongly, the emphasis today is on academic qualifications ahead of practical experience. I learned that the hard way; a realisation that sent me back to school four years ago to obtain at least an Advanced Diploma. That qualification did help me in getting my present job, though it is doubtful whether the Advanced Diploma course added much to my technical knowledge.
PS: Sorry if this sounds like a disgruntled old veteran complaining that "the new guys aren't as good as we was"!
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Are Jehovah's Witnesses a cult just as evil and dangerous as Islam?
by cookiemaster ini know you might think i'm exaggerating but if you really think about it, maybe i'm not.
these two religions originate with the same ancient belief system.
islam is a dangerous middle eastern cult that seeks to control every aspect of its members' lives.
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Bungi Bill
I don't know that the rise of secularism had anything to do with Christianity.
Whatever peaceful message Jesus Christ preached, it still failed to prevent Christians from carrying out the most savage of atrocities on each other (and also on persons of other religions, including Jews and Muslims). I know that different things frighten different people, but to me, burning people to death at the stake is an even more cruel way of killing them than stoning or beheading. Both Catholic inquisitions and Protestant reformers were guilty of carrying out this "cruel and unusual" form of punishment - and all in the name of the "Prince of Peace", Jesus Christ!
In 19th Century New Zealand, it took the newly-converted Maori people very little time to wake up to these facts. They quickly noted that the Ten Commandments took a distant second place between Monday morning and midnight Saturday - then got placed on indefinite Leave of Absence whenever there was a war on!
Similarly, the same point was not lost on African people. So much so that they developed a parody of the hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers", which reads:
Onward Christian soldiers, into heathen lands,
Prayer books in your pockets, rifles in your hands.
Bring the happy tidings, of where trade might be done,
Preach your Peaceful Gospel, with the Maxim gun.
(Those familiar with firearms will know that the Maxim was the world's first automatically-firing machine gun. During the late 18th and early 20th Centuries, it was the Weapon of Mass Destruction. European colonial powers made widespread use of it to "pacify" the "savages" of Asia and Africa). )
As all of us here should be aware (being former JWs), people can read the bible until they are figuratively "blue in the face", it still does not necessarily turn them into better people. Our enlightened Western society is definitely the product of Secularism, not of reading the bible.
Whether or not Secularism is the natural result of Christianity, though, is quite another matter. It could possibly be argued that Secularism gradually evolved in response to such disasters as the Thirty Years War (1618 - 1648), or the Spanish Inquisitions; with a view to keeping all future religious disputes to the verbal level? If so, it largely succeeded - whereas Jesus Christ's "Gospel of Peace" had very little effect on matters!