boris johnson is often mocked, but he has recently achieved what former pms thought highly unlikely - boris has gotten the uk a brexit deal, and has got brexit done, keeping his manifesto promise.. well done, boris!
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@Phizzy: That was exactly what Brexit was all about. Sure there will be continued negotiations, but the control remains solely in British hands.
The Brexit deal as it is currently written allows both the EU and the UK to unilaterally decide whether to follow certain agreements and Brexit was always about sovereignty, any trade deal changes have to go through the regular channels, there is no third party that can cram down a rule like Germany does on EU members.
president donald trump’s push for $2,000 covid-19 relief checks all but died wednesday as senate majority leader mitch mcconnell proposed an alternative approach of loading up the bill with other white house priorities that appeared destined to fail.
one priority was for congress to repeal section 230. question: just what is section 230?
answer: if a news site falsely calls you a swindler, you can sue the publisher for libel.
I think you're misinterpreting Section 230. Before Section 230, we also had Internet forums, we've had those since the late 1970's. The problem was the issue of censorship, people were suing when providers censored posts from the Internet or edited them without their permission. There has always been a subculture of people that believed that freedom is absolute, this caused Democrats to pass Section 230 which established "good faith" censorship. Note that Section 230 is so poorly written, SCOTUS has repeatedly stated it violates the first amendment and other laws and struck down significant provisions of Section 230 already.
Section 230 states that: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
Without Section 230 you still have the free speech clauses of the constitution, what has happened is that, naturally, Democrats and content providers have taken the 'good faith' and 'otherwise objectionable' argument and extended that to everything they don't like while still getting the "not treated as the publisher or speaker". The argument on the right is and has been that if you edit a post, you are an editor and therefor liable for the content. We will just revert to the pre-2000s Internet where you could post whatever you wanted within the rules of a forum and if the service providers don't like it, they'll have to be honest and tailor their rules according to what they want on their forums. But right now Facebook etc have pulled a bait and switch and said to be pro-free speech but whenever someone exercises that right against their own interests, they find a reason to cancel them.
the way he’s talking, i wouldn’t be surprised if he creates a third party .
he’s unhappy with republican leadership.
can you see trump leaving the gop and going rogue?
I don’t think so. He’s been the strongest unifier of the conservative vote. He doesn’t like the RINOs in congress who vote for a 900B bill with less than $600 for those that actually need it. True conservatives and Trump has gotten rid of a lot of pork over the last 4 years but the instant they think Trump is out, they go back to their old ways.
Pelosi sits on the board of the Kennedy performing arts center that got more millions than the entire restaurant industry and there are Republicans that happily go along with this because pork in their districts.
I do think the Democratic Party is at a rift, there are two groups tugging at the Biden administration; the AOC wing of the party and the Pelosi/Feinstein wing of the party. They will lose the House in 2022 and that will split the party as each blames the other.
boris johnson is often mocked, but he has recently achieved what former pms thought highly unlikely - boris has gotten the uk a brexit deal, and has got brexit done, keeping his manifesto promise.. well done, boris!
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And it's a pretty good Brexit deal as well, very little was given up, all promises on the UK were kept and the EU capitulated, as always, the few concessions made (around fishing etc) ends in a few years.
i think it should simply be there to help us citizens.
and besides giving money to other countries, stop giving money to the arts and entertainment..... give money to help taxpayers struggling with debt .
period!!!
Going back to the original question: Should a stimulus bill be helping other countries: Off course not, unless it is directly stimulating the original country.
Eg. you could see where keeping low oil prices by stimulating the economy of a good ally such as Israel or UAE would be helpful, since low cost oil is necessary to keep the economy going, especially since Biden is going to cut off domestic supplies.
I however don't see where helping terrorists like Iran (aka Palestine), or African countries that shift Islamic leadership every few years in bloody conflict, or China/Russia/EU that have its own communist agendas is any helpful.
On the topic of stimulus, quite honestly I don't think stimulus is helpful at all. Bush did a major stimulus bill, Obama then came along and raised taxes and healthcare costs to pay for it all. Under Obama we payed more taxes EVERY YEAR than any of us received in the stimulus and our deficit still grew out of control due to regulatory overhead. Trump somewhat balanced it out again with major regulatory reform which stimulated the economy to levels we hadn't seen since the 1950's, but he never really got around to fixing the deficit problem, which compared to GDP (pre-COVID) didn't really grow but also didn't get reduced.
You want real stimulus: cut taxes and regulations. Why do we give people $600 when 4 months from now we have to pay much more than that in income taxes? Simply cut income taxes by $600-2000/year.
we were told by watchtower that no way jesus was born on dec. 25th.
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what do you think now?.
@Sea Breeze: There is a difference between biblical/religious scholarship and archeological scholarship. The biblical and religious scholarship, even the atheist ones, do not deny that a Jesus-character existed in Abrahamic mythology, nobody really does, but that character is also tied to other characters that came before, similar messianic figures came both before and after.
The archeological scholarship however does not presume a real Jesus existed (at least not since the 1900s) when the Bible said he did. There is no archeological evidence of the person Jesus existing, his birth place of Bethlehem did not exist until decades later, there is no evidence of a person named Jesus of Nazareth being crucified in Roman records, there is no evidence of him or his family (Josef, Mary etc) in any Jewish records either, there is no evidence of any notable magician or prophet in contemporary writings either and all of the gospels were written generations later than when they were supposed to be. Even the lineage of David has recently been proven to be completely mythical, there are no other records than the Bible to prove David existed or any of his children down to Mary.
Jesus is commonly accepted to be an amalgam of several Jewish scholars and the stories based on sectarian writings from the era with heavy influences from other religions. Jesus has always been a myth based on older myths.
If someone finds a Tolkien book in the 30th century, they would be able to make pretty much all the same arguments that Christians use to defend Jesus to defend the existence of Frodo and Sauroman, actually, the Tolkien books, even those written after his death, are much more coherent than the Bible stories.
There's a big difference between who claims to be a JW and who is actually a JW.
- JW Periphery: There are those that claim they are JW to a third party researcher: estimated to be ~14M people worldwide, this could be people that were raised, have been baptized or are studying, those that sometimes still attend, those that only attend for the memorial or those that still believe but don't attend etc etc they never really took up another religion, so they're often still counted among the JW by a third party.
- JW Adherents: There are those that the WTBTS claim to be a JW: estimated to be ~7M people worldwide, these are all the people that have been baptized and are regularly doing whatever qualifies them to be counted. These include PIMO, some apostates, some that go through the motions, those that do the minimum in public but in private don't really do anything, those that repeatedly get disfellowshipped for smoking or adultery and then get reinstated a few months later.
- Sheep: There are those that conform to all of it, both in public and in private, but don't really do 'more' than meet the requirements. They are children and family of elders and pioneers, those that have some form of appointment and have to keep up appearances or want the social interaction. They may not believe all of it but they would never say so out loud. I think that's about 2M people, it's really hard to quantify as you have to be "inside", but I would say that accounts for ~30% of any congregation I've ever been in. If the really hard times come, or the "core" falls out of their social fabric (for whatever reason - death, disfellowshipping etc), they quickly spin out to the JW periphery described above and within a few years or a generation they disappear completely.
- Goats: There are those that are hardcore JW's for life. They are pioneers and elders that truly believe. I think based on my personal experience, we're talking less than 500K-1M worldwide and dwindling faster than any of the above groups. They are the ones having part time jobs and giving everything to the WTBTS, they are hard on everyone around them to the point of sociopathy. When they wake up, they crash quickly out of the organization.
from the borg?.
i point to none other than cal lehman and the towerwatch ministries.
towewatch.com.. the years following the collapse of the ussr and the 1995 generation left a bad taste in my mouth for a long time.
I think it was a combination of this site, the Watchtower Library and some online ministries for me, that finally brought me over the edge
I've always had doubts, people that made me really think were a set of pioneers/elders in a congregation who posed difficult questions where the Bible and Watchtower doctrine don't match. Surprisingly they're still JW's to date, but they had raised serious doubts. They believed their own logical conclusions were wrong and they didn't study hard enough, these were people that were dedicated for pretty much most of their life, they had part time or no jobs, lived in a trailer and they couldn't understand it, why would I be able to.
One day I got a call to make a talk about a bible verse that night, the person that was scheduled couldn't do it, the Watchtower Library was only on Windows and I couldn't get it to work on my Mac, so I went and looked online, I found a discussion on this site on the topic and then some other online ministries had full bible-reasoned sermons on the topic. I copied a sermon, modified it a bit and did the talk.
I then got a talking to from the elders, I said, it was wholly reasoned from the Bible, what was wrong with it. They said "the Bible verses weren't wrong but your explanation wasn't from the Watchtower". I said "I quoted literally from bible verse to bible verse" and they said "you can do that research in your personal study, but in a talk you should quote what the Watchtower publication says, not just the Bible". That started me thinking and brought me down the rabbit hole that is this site and other sites like it.
i'm not really sure where to put this post or "thread", so i'll just put it in the physical activities area.
i just want to know if anyone on the forum has any experience with having a hip replacement surgery done on them, or perhaps a friend or relative.
what was your experience, if it was you?
I've sat through the medical research side of things:
- There is no replacement for your real original hip, a good surgeon will get it down with precision, but it does not flex the same way, does not conduct heat the same way etc.
- If you do need it done, get a good surgeon, it may be routine, but if they cut and file too much from your leg bone you will have continuous problems. Your body does not adapt to the difference.
- Make sure you get the latest technology, talk to your doctor. In the US metal-on-metal is no longer FDA approved, but it's still done in Europe, Canada and other socialized medicine systems because of its low cost, if you live there, you may want to consider private insurance or taking a plane ride to the US.
Plastic likewise has issues with buildup of plastic shavings. Full ceramic is currently the gold standard and there are some carbon fiber options in development. There are also some procedures that have started using more bone-preserving procedures, this may or may not be applicable, but if your doctor doesn't know about these options, or tells you they're unnecessary, get another doctor.
