news is broadcasting that death valley is getting close to breaking a record.
the highest air temp recorded is 134 but that was in 1913 way before the huge spike in co2.
now its 130 and its the end of the world.
@joey: I was talking about the same thing. Bleaching = death when it comes to reefs, however as I said, even the Great Barrier Reef has recovered almost all of its last bleach event.
You can find articles on it but it’s not widely reported on because it doesn’t fit the narrative. It’s also unnatural to assume that the Great Barrier Reef should remain static and that anything that happens to it is man-made, there are a LOT more reefs growing across the world we aren’t talking about.
red cross is desperate for blood at work.
i considered doing it.
is this a disfellowshipping sin?
@bobcat: Jesus said, who among you would not pull their donkey or oxen out of the ditch on a Sabbath day. The Jews have long understood the concept of saving a life being more important than the law. It is one of the defining aspects of Jewish and by extension Western culture.
When you discuss the blood question with the Dubs, bring up those verses in regards Jesus’ disciples threshing grain in their hands on a sabbath day. It’s an interesting discussion.
most churches are back to in-person worship.
not jehovah's witnesses.
is watchtower still managing to fleece the flocks as the sheeple no longer get literature, no longer go to the kh, no longer walk past the donation box?
@road and @dropoff: for the last decade or so, the Dubs haven’t been allowed to save extras anymore, instead putting it in a “savings” account with the branch. This is just a balance sheet as they aren’t allowed to withdraw, and the CO will insist on donating anything over $2000 on the balance sheet.
Thus all big expenses have to be raised by donation, so if you needed a roof repair, there would be a big ask for donations. The RBC would “drain” the little savings that hasn’t been “donated” yet and then if the congregation doesn’t raise enough money, saddle the congregation with a “loan” from the branch which then you’d browbeat the congregation into raising extra every month. However once you have satisfied the loan, the congregation will be encouraged that we have been able to pay so much extra every month, they’ll just keep that amount as a running donation.
I know this because I was on the RBC and have been involved in several renovations. Not only that, but a large amount of people, when they realize this scheme have left the JW because of it, I know of many elders and even CO’s that went this path after “their” congregation (which they had generations of family wealth donated towards and paid off in the 1970s) got sold from under them, then they built a new hall and none of the sale proceeds went towards the new building. When they saw that literally a million dollars worth of family investment over 4 generations went towards the borg in a matter of weeks, they complained and were disfellowshipped, the eldest was in his 80s and became very bitter after that.
most churches are back to in-person worship.
not jehovah's witnesses.
is watchtower still managing to fleece the flocks as the sheeple no longer get literature, no longer go to the kh, no longer walk past the donation box?
They are selling at record pace. Currently the majority of believers thinks they are prepping for the big A.
The problem for them is that running a KH is costly, a lot of the money donated goes towards utilities and maintenance while currently even though donations probably have decreased, the majority isn’t going to paying the lights and heat/ac and cleaning supplies anymore but going towards the WWW aka in their pockets.
Back in the day, I remember electric bills being over $2000/month (2 congregations, 6 regular meetings and a dozen field service meetings, that place was heated 12/7). Winterizing the place and leaving it sit costs maybe $100/month. That is $1900 shipped to their bank accounts (because the elders dutifully “donate” extras).
They currently “recommend” congregations donate upwards of $20/publisher/month for Zoom, if they have an agreement with Zoom, they pay $5/unique attendee/month or less, not having people attend or sharing a connection (such as family) makes up for that.
Not having to print stuff, just publish everything in a PDF, that saves them tons too, for most having a tablet in the KH is still weird, at home, not so much.
@onthewayout: some congregations aren’t quite as lenient. If you’re not in the school, something must be wrong with you, your family members can’t get promotions or positions. And once you get the scrutiny of some elders you’ll be marked as weak and even get the CO to do personal shepherding visit, refusing that is just further proof that you may be an apostate and it may be hard to successfully fade or keep your cool about your beliefs.
suppose we were naïve observers, given the following data, and asked to draw a conclusion.
we see people gather at a busy bus stop several times a day.
at first one person, then another, and another, until they form a group.
we have no rational explanation for why or how a physical event can cause a feeling or a thought
That’s an unproven assertion and a wrong (easily falsifiable) one at that too. You’re also asking the rather unscientific why question.
Why: because the Universe exists and you ended up in the situation that caused it to happen by a chain of causal events. The why question does not make sense in our Universe, everything happens for a reason.
How: The causal event caused your senses to perceive something and neurons to fire, causing a chain of neurons to fire and when that waveform has been generated (and it is this becoming aware of and interacting with your thoughts is what we describe as intelligence or consciousness, this has been well established and has indeed been explored in ancient texts such as the Bible and other stories for as long as we have had stories), you have generated a thought.
This has been well known since the advent of EEG. How do we know this physical event is a thought and is preceded by real world events, well we can relatively accurately predict even with our current large and blunt instruments (we can’t measure down to the level of the neurons yet) what the thought is that you have, up to a few ms before your body can even create a response to the thought, given you have trained the system on a few wave patterns on clearly distinct thoughts. If thoughts weren’t causally related to external input, then we could not generate nor predict specific wave patterns, the whole science of psychophysics would’ve died in the 1950s.
I can even explain to you the way this is tested: you give people a random set of pictures, text or other inputs that are built to generate a thought, you just instruct people to think about each of them for a brief moment and give them a button to press when they have perceived a thought then give feedback on what they just thought about. You can then give, at a later date, far enough for them not to remember every one of them, random sets of similar and the same pictures, same test, have feedback. You do this a few times, you can start to detect patterns in EEG or MRI on similar trains of thought to the point you can predict before they even become fully aware of the thought what they will think about.
These kinds of unfounded assertions that we don’t understand the subject of consciousness or the brain are found all over the Internet, yet, they are generally created out of ignorance of the subject matter. Then they are often followed with some form of metaphysical explanation that you just have to take on faith alone. Even religiously inclined scientists will easily dismantle these sort of nonsense, if you had ever listened to say Jordan Peterson’s podcast, he is very religiously inclined yet you would’ve at least heard a bit about what I just said. This is one of the contributory reasons I personally left the JW, I took a job where I got closely involved with evolutionary neurobiology, neuroanatomy, psychology and psychophysics and most of the stuff asserted by the WTBTS was just plain BS. I came to understand that scientists have a darn good understanding of what’s going on and that all the assertions that life was just too complex for it to be evolved wasn’t true. Life is a simple set of parameters that when you let it run, it can give the appearance of complexity.
looting is happening everywhere like never before.
brazen thieves walk into stores and bring a bag with them and simply throw whatever they choose in the bag.
popular chain stores have closed in certain neighborhoods because it’s just not worth it.
@Jan: BLM looters destroyed property and fought police in London, Brussels, Madrid, Amsterdam and other major cities across Europe as well as Australia, Canada and other countries.
The fact you don’t know about it is a bigger problem, which is the mainstream media actively hiding the facts.
As far as guns, the US is somewhere middle-ish in regards violent crime. The UK is worse, even Norway and Denmark have orders of magnitude more crime than the US.
news is broadcasting that death valley is getting close to breaking a record.
the highest air temp recorded is 134 but that was in 1913 way before the huge spike in co2.
now its 130 and its the end of the world.
@joey: in my lifetime, the coral reef has been bleached and “died” several times now. We had 5 bleach events as you said that killed each 80-90% of the reefs. Serious question: if 80% died in the first event, where did the 90% of the last event come from?
Facts: per NOAA only 27% has died or bleached since they started monitoring these things, well over a century ago, and up to 32% MAY die/bleach in the next 30-something years. Moreover, 90% of the coral reef that died/bleached in the last event has regrown already, but just like tree coverage literally nobody is accounting for both human and natural coral reef regrown across the world, literally you cannot find any data or get funding for these sorts of studies, even though many countries across the world have successfully regrown massive reefs and reefs naturally grow on ship wrecks and most of the reefs affected during the bleach events have successfully recovered, that isn’t even taken up into the NOAA statistics, nowhere does the graph go back up.
When someone publishes data that has no error bars or noise, you know they’re sending bullshit up and down the chain. How long had Greenpeace shown graphs of the loss of tree coverage in the world, the loss of various other things, Canada has bankrupted entire fishery communities on this data without any evidence, Canadian fisheries can see other countries like Portuguese ships hauling up tons of fish in destructive, 30 year old trawlers right off Canadian waters without any response from their navy or coast guard but the native Inuit and Canadian citizens are themselves forbidden from creating sustainable fisheries, all based on data from Greenpeace and co that is completely false in the face of modern scientific evidence and hasn’t been updated in 20 years since the “temporary” ban on fishing.
news is broadcasting that death valley is getting close to breaking a record.
the highest air temp recorded is 134 but that was in 1913 way before the huge spike in co2.
now its 130 and its the end of the world.
@joey: that’s what Democrats said a few years ago when we had a string of cold weather and ice storms (remember when places like Buffalo was under 6ft of snow and there was snow in Florida). That’s when they changed the name from global warming to global climate change. Now that the weather is hot, everything is caused by global warming once again.
People that can’t think for themselves and want to believe everything they are told, just like JW’s. There is currently nothing special about the weather, the weather has been relatively temperate compared to historical climate. Because, not despite increased CO2 there is a huge growth of vegetation, so there are now more trees on earth than 50 or 100 years ago, less land is needed for agriculture, because the Bolsonaro government in Brazil there has even been a return of Amazon rainforest tree coverage.
Global warming is locked in because we are coming from a mini ice age in the Middle Ages.
suppose we were naïve observers, given the following data, and asked to draw a conclusion.
we see people gather at a busy bus stop several times a day.
at first one person, then another, and another, until they form a group.
@Slimboyfat: there is an easy answer and it is called the scientific method. Yes, if you’re sampling one instance of an event, you will draw the wrong conclusion. Thus scientists will attempt to sample multiple independent and dependent events in different locations to try to deduce a theory.
In your bus example, scientists wouldn’t just look and note the event, they would find other bus stops and see if the same occurs there too. Then they would attempt to control the variables of the experiment by withholding the bus or withholding the people or moving the bus stop and seeing what happens. You can kind of see in that case that if you withhold the people, the bus still shows up, thus you can conclude it wasn’t the people causing the bus to show up.
Likewise with the brain, what you’re looking for is explained through DTI analysis of the brain, you’re basically sticking a bunch of people in an MRI and see whether the blood flow preceded or succeeded an event. And you can confirm it in the other direction as well by activating the area through for example electrodes or magnets you can activate feelings and thoughts.
The brain is very complex but healthy brains are relatively well understood at this point. We don’t know a lot about the specifics of consciousness or memory, but we know where those things happen. We have to continue probing and changing variables, the biggest problem is that humans are a valuable commodity, unlike the Nazis or China you can’t just kill or alter a ton of people in the pursuit of knowledge.
