Brock Talon

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Posts by Brock Talon

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  30

  How Many Masks Will You Wear?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  there are recommendations that we should start doubling up on masks.

  some have even suggested that tripling masks would even be better!

  what’s your opinion of wearing numerous masks?

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  Brock Talon

  I wear 5 masks. Makes me safer... and more politically correct.

  I also like to wear 5 jackets. Makes me safer... and warmer.

  Before I was married and played around, I used to wear 5 condoms. Made me safer... and bigger...
  
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  28

  GameStop - Great Seeing Short-Selling Hedge Funds Get Beaten Up

  by Simon in

  1. social
  2. current

  in case you haven't seen what's happened with gamestop and redditors.. these are the people who drive companies like blockbuster out of business and put people out of work.. but maybe the people have more power after all .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9toogruq7me.

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  Brock Talon

  I missed the last few days on this forum (I don't get on it much). But I just had to respond to the issue I raised regarding the 2008 market crash I mentioned earlier in this post and why I resent fast-buck "house flippers" so much.

  To be certain, the subprime mortgage problem and the subsequent 2008 crash was a complex issue. I will concede that there are many contributing factors as to why it happened. I won't go over them here, but suffice to say that most of the claimed contributing reasons for the cause are more likely just factors. They are not necessarily the cause.
  

  The recent and most thorough studies of this issue have shown that it was the more wealthy "investors" who ultimately defaulted en masse and triggered the 2008 crash. It was not just a bunch of poor sub-prime buyers. These "investors" are the ones who do the flipping. The more "poorer" buyers are just trying to get into a home to live in, one in a market they are competing against with the wealthier "flippers" who play the system rather than live in it. Once the market peaked and these investors could not make their fast buck, they defaulted on their loans en masse and triggered the crash.
  

  See the article below for a better explanation of this.
  
  https://finance.yahoo.com/news/house-flippers-triggered-us-housing-175705459.html
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  12

  What to say? Death of an adult child.

  by jwundubbed in

  1. social
  2. family

  my father married b when both her children and his children were grown adults.

  b had two children, a son d and a daughter m. my sister db, my brother rh, and myself got along well with m but not at all with d, who was a very christian person but not a jw.

  my siblings and i do not have much to do with our stepmother though we are civil and we don't have any hard feelings between us.

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  Brock Talon

  The above is wonderful advice. I lost two children myself, twins. Shortly after birth. Born premature and their little lungs did not hold out and the NICU could not save them.

  Anyone who is a friend of someone who loses a child and that friend says nothing, is not a friend. Saying nothing completely ignores a person's grief during what is probably the worst time of their life. Yes, it is awkward for you, but so what? Friends work through the awkward times because that's what friends do. If you can't be there for someone during their worst time, then you are not really a friend.
  
  That said, you don't have to say a lot. In fact, the less said, the less likely you are to say something that the one in grief could take wrong. How about "I am so sorry for your loss. I am here for you." Give them a hug. Weep with them if you feel it.
  
  One of my better friends did just that with me. He hugged me and we cried together. That is all I needed at that time. After awhile I could talk about it, but not when it was fresh. Other friends did similarly. To this day I love those people even more than I did before my loss. And I would do anything for them.
  
  
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  28

  GameStop - Great Seeing Short-Selling Hedge Funds Get Beaten Up

  by Simon in

  1. social
  2. current

  in case you haven't seen what's happened with gamestop and redditors.. these are the people who drive companies like blockbuster out of business and put people out of work.. but maybe the people have more power after all .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9toogruq7me.

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  Brock Talon

  Sorry Pistolpete, but I personally resent swing traders, day traders, short sellers and the like. The entire purpose of a company selling their stock is so that anyone can buy into that company and own a piece of it. In theory, every stock one purchases should be in a company they believe in and want to own for the long haul. It is a financially supportive transaction that shores up that company so it can do its business and keep their employees employed and their shareholders sharing in the profits via dividends. It should be for the regular person to get some sense of security for retirement, especially now that companies no longer give pensions to their employees and the Social Security system itself is being stretched and threatened. Fast buck traders like you threaten that security for everyone else.
  
  I resent these quick buck people in the same way as I resent house flippers who do not buy houses to live in, but rather to make fast money at the expense of other, many of them doing the minimum to get a house livable in doing so. Houses exist be to bought to actually live in, or at least to rent out for people to live in. Not to be gamed for a quick buck. House flipping is what led to the 2008 market crash, which hurt the little people the most. The subprime house loans were ginned up by the ever escalating home prices created by fake turnover in the market due to home purchase/flip speculation. Eventually it all collapsed (like all ponzi schemes) and I and people like me were left holding the bag for many, many years. House flippers made their money and walked away and the banks were bailed out and walked away. All at our expense. Shameful.
  

  If you do win in the long run and are able to exit your positions with a nice profit, you do so off the backs of others. Instead of investing in a company to financially support them to continue to do business in the long run so that EVERYONE wins, you want to make a quick buck at the expense of others? Your comment "there are people out there buying them... at this price" shows you know that eventually there are people who lose in this "game" and those are the one you are hurting.
  
  In my opinion, it is not a nice way to make a living.
  
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  28

  GameStop - Great Seeing Short-Selling Hedge Funds Get Beaten Up

  by Simon in

  1. social
  2. current

  in case you haven't seen what's happened with gamestop and redditors.. these are the people who drive companies like blockbuster out of business and put people out of work.. but maybe the people have more power after all .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9toogruq7me.

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  Brock Talon

  I have mixed feelings about this issue. On the one hand, it is a bit humorous to see the traditional market manipulators get their comeuppance. Sure. I agree with you all. I smiled too.
  
  But this has now emboldened and taught the "retail" traders to start their own manipulation games and I'm not sure that is so good for the market in the long term. What stock will they play with next, by whom and for what purpose? What is the end game?
  
  Yesterday was a horrible day for the NASDAQ and the S&P500. TD Ameritrade shut down trading on GameStop completely (not a good precedent) and at one point I couldn't even get into my trading platform at all. Some analysts say the bad day was due to the delay to the stimulus, but I don't think so. There is usually a delay to stimulus most of the time anyway and that doesn't freeze out my trading platform. No, something more ominous is afoot and it concerns me greatly. Especially since I have so much invested in my 401K, my IRA accounts, my brokerage accounts, etc... much of my net worth is tied to those assets. Now we can have just any yahoo out there "crowd source a movement" that plays with the market. At least with the professional market manipulators they had a sense of restraint and rules around what they did because they were playing the long game. That certainly can't be the case with this new era of market manipulation. And what about GameStop? It is clearly overvalued now, so what will happen to it when it eventually corrects? Will it overcorrect and go bust as many "pump and dumps" do? These guys are doing this with with others companies as well, like AMC, so this is not a one time thing. There are real people working for these companies who will be affected in one way or another. Some execs will make a lot of money if they time the stock options correctly, but the rest may end up losing their jobs if the company goes bust.
  
  Maybe it will work itself out in the long run... I don't know. But at this time of companies trying to overcome the pandemic related economic factors and the changing of the guard from extreme right-ism Trumpian economics to extreme left-ism Biden/whoever-really-is-in-charge economics, this is not a good time for this.
  
  
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  12

  Are We Now Living in a POST-Science world (at least politically?)

  by Terry in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  if your sex is only what you say it is, without any reference to biological reality, .

  your race can be only what you say it is, without any reference to biological reality.. .

  is this repudiation of science?

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  Brock Talon

  The answer is definitely "yes" to a post-scientific world, as long as it comes from the Left. Consider the way COVID was handled:
  
  There is zero scientific evidence that total shutdowns have protected us from getting COVID. I am not talking about reasonable precautions, but rather hard, fast, complete shutdowns that have persisted in most Left leaning states and cities. In fact, scientific evidence shows that total shutdowns DO increase depression and suicides, divorces, drop outs from school, killing businesses that people have worked their entire adult lives to build, homelessness (which eventually kills), and on and on. Yet the Left have seemed to persist in this hard core mentality regardless. New York, California and states like these are experiencing mass exodus directly due to this (again, something that can be proven) but that hasn't seemed to stop the nonsensical way this has been handled by the Left. Yet, if you look at the CDC reports on states with the highest PER CAPITA deaths reported from COVID, 9 of the top 10 are Left leaning. Research this yourself. New Jersey and New York are the worst of the worst. Science be dammed. Yet Cuomo was on TV every day on CNN acting as if he were some sort of COVID fighting God, when in reality he was probably one of the subjects biggest oafs. Meanwhile, cities and states that have handled COVID reasonably without Draconian shutdowns have faired better in just about every way. Thus, the mass exodus from the Left leaning states (or even those completely Left controlled like CA) are leaving in droves to places like TX, AZ and FL where actual science is practiced in a reasonable way.
  
  Scientific evidence was clear that COVID was most deadly to older people, those especially over 70. The Princess Cruise event at the beginning of the pandemic showed this clearly. I read through the report on that with interest and realized this early on as a layperson. (I also bought 95 masks early, even though the CDC and WHO were saying not to do that at the time... again, science...) Reports from the CDC and WHO, etc. made this clear to anyone who would actually read the reports that those with advanced age and preexisting conditions were the main ones to protect .. Again, that did not stop governors from 5 different left leaning states (like Cuomo in NY) from FORCING COVID positive, sick, aged, pre-existing conditioned adults back into nursing homes and thus spreading COVID among the very demographic that should have been protected. They died by the thousands and actually these 5 states accounted for the largest majority of COVID deaths in the US, at least through the summer of 2020. Not sure how that looks now, but this was an unthinkable move by Lefty leaders that had ZERO science behind it. Meanwhile NY and CA governors and mayors were busy shutting down skating parks for teens and stopping surfers from surfing alone in the ocean. Scientific?
  
  In that same light, how scientific is it that these Lefty leaders were seen attending (and defending) large George Floyd protests, but railed against people who wanted to attend church, or simply be allowed work their businesses with reasonable precautions? Scientific?
  
  All scientific evidence pointed to the fact that COVID originated from Wuhan China. Emperical evidence was clear that China shut down travel within its own borders, yet allowed travel OUTSIDE its borders, thus allowing COVID to spread everywhere in the world. The Left leaning WHO defended China for the good part of 2020, and to this day the Left doesn't want to "blame" China for this world changing pandemic, No, it's better to blame Donald Trump.
  
  In that same vein, when Donald Trump banned travel from China in late February 2020, no less than Joe Biden ridiculed him as "racist" for doing so. The rest of the Left did this same name calling, completely ignoring science. I don't defend Trump in everything he has done, but that one he certainly got right. Even Fauci had to give him credit later on, but only after questioning it at first. Yet the Left was able to pin blame on Trump for COVID, when it is reality THEY who made things worse and the Left leaning places are the worst off, even to this day. Notice even now how CA is fumbling and bumbling its way through the vaccination process. This is how the Left handles things.
  
  But the Left does other unscientific things as well. Take the CA fires. Left groups have interfered or stopped the reasonable deforestation efforts because of the tree-hugging mentality gone amok. Everyone should take care of the environment, no one should have a problem with that. But nature shows that if you don't thin out forest, clean out dead trees, create burn lines, etc. once a fire gets started, it will burn through everything including homes, people, animals, businesses, etc. No, it's better to blame Climate change on the fires than look to themselves for their total mismanagement of the issue. Scientific?
  
  How about climate change? The #1 biggest offender in the world in Carbon emissions is China. TWICE as much as the United States, which is #2. Period. Total science. Not even disputed. So, if the Left REALLY cared about Climate change, they would rail against China all day, every day, just for that reason alone. Sure, rail against the U.S. too if you like, I have no problem there; we can certainly do better. But for goodness sake, why is the Left giving China a pass if they really care about the climate? I have seen literally ZERO Left leaning organization that constantly go against the U.S. and other democratic countries do or say ANYTHING about China. If the US. could cut it's emissions in half tomorrow, China would still be choking the entire world. That's like asking your neighbor on the right to stop dumping his trash on your lawn, but the neighbor on your left is dumping twice as much and you say nothing. Scientific?
  
  No. It's idiocy.
  
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  19

  The Amazing Solar System

  by LoveUniHateExams in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i gotta say, i don't know much about the solar system.

  i never was particularly interested in it.. but i've recently read professor brian cox's book (which accompanies a bbc series) and it's completely fascinating.. i'm quite interested in pictures of mars.

  martian landscapes seem familiar and different at the same time ….

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  Brock Talon

  Waton, the Titius-Bode law is intriguing to me, but Neptune always sits there as a big fat gassy giant spoiler. Because of Neptune, the jamming in of Ceres as a planet (or simply counting the asteroid belt as a planet... kinda weak) and the fact that the Bode law doesn't explain the "why" of anything, I tend to think of it as a mathematical coincidence with a degree of fudge rather than an actual law.
  
  But, I could be wrong.
  
  In any event it doesn't matter; my feelings about Pluto are more emotional than logical. Eris is nearly as large and probably just as strange, but it wasn't known in my childhood days when I first learned about our solar system. When Eris was eventually discovered, it seemed to be part of the reason Pluto was demoted. Booo! Down with Eris! Go away spoiler.
  
  ...now, that Planet X / Planet Nine? If that baby EVER shows up some day, then we might be talking a whole different story...
  
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  19

  The Amazing Solar System

  by LoveUniHateExams in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i gotta say, i don't know much about the solar system.

  i never was particularly interested in it.. but i've recently read professor brian cox's book (which accompanies a bbc series) and it's completely fascinating.. i'm quite interested in pictures of mars.

  martian landscapes seem familiar and different at the same time ….

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  Brock Talon

  Personally, I love Pluto. When I was a child, I learned "there are nine planets in our solar system"... but since then, Pluto has been reclassified as a "dwarf planet" which is not a a first class planet at all. This was a very controversial decision that not all astronomers agreed with and I followed the argumentation with great interest. But because it had not cleared it neighborhood of other objects, "they" decided it was not a "planet" and that was that. Still, it qualifies for a dwarf planet, so it still is a "planet" in my book. (As apposed to an asteroid, comet, or some other more trivial celestial body.)
  
  Well, I love all the odd things about Pluto, among these are:

  Pluto's biggest moon, Charon, is about half its width. They orbit each other like a dual planet system. (See photo)
  

  Pluto has an elliptical orbit (year) that takes 248 Earth years to complete. If there were humanoid life on Pluto and their lifespan was similar to ours, they would never age to even one Pluto year old. Most would die before reaching 1/3 of a year old. Its orbit also comes closer than Neptune's orbit at its closest, but Pluto orbits at an inclined plane to that of the solar system's eight planets. Because of this very odd elliptical orbit, the methane can freeze and snow (with red snow!) and then thaw and refreeze again during its 248 year orbit as it gets closer and then farther from the Sun.
  

  Pluto is tiny (about) 2/3 the size of our moon, but rotates at 153 Earth hours. If there were humanoid life on Pluto and they had to work 1/3 of a day like we do (working 8 hour days) their work day would be 50 hours.
  
  Pluto was named by an 11 year old who was fascinated by Roman Mythology. Pluto was the god of the underworld, also named in Greek: Hades. All of its moons are named similarly: Charon, Styx, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos. If you don't know these names, you don't know your mythology! I always loved Greek and Roman mythology, so I love Pluto and its moons for this alone.
  

  There are so many other interesting things about Pluto, the most prominent of the Kuiper belt objects and probably the most well known dwarf planets.
  
  I thought I would share this cool stuff about my favorite planet: Pluto. Yes, Pluto will always be the ninth planet to me. Go ahead and make the other dwarf planets actual planets if you wish. I don't care. And even though it rains diamonds on Neptune, Pluto's red methane snow rocks.
  
  
  Pluto and Charon doing their eternal dance
  
  
  
  
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  7

  I'm feeling cold

  by Lost in the fog in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  when i was a jw i would look to the bible or the wt society to answer all of my problems.. now as an older person i get cold in the wintertime and have trouble getting warm down to bad circulation.

  i found an answer in the bible at 1 kings 1:2, but i don't think my pimi wife will let me apply this bible principle.

  lol.

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  Brock Talon

  Don't fool yourselves, back in those days pretty much EVERYONE was smelly, young or old, pretty or ugly alike.

  Without constant bathing with soaps and body washes, deodorants and talcs, lotions, perfumes and colognes, dental hygiene aids, etc., we would all smell like farm animals.

  Being a king and waited on hand and foot, David was probably one of the better smelling people back then.
  
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  11

  Video: Surprise Reunion After 10 years of Shunning

  by NuzzleNudge in

  1. jw
  2. experiences

  https://youtu.be/ribgldualbm.

  my husband hadn’t seen his sister for 10 years.

  we were jehovah's witnesses and thanks to their disgusting, arbitrary brainwashing, 10 years of loving our family was wasted shunning them.

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  Brock Talon

  On a beautiful Sunday morning with my family sleeping in and the whole house quiet, I was unexpectedly brought to tears by this video.

  I guess it's because I know I will never experience this kind of healing with my estranged extended family, I was simultaneously happy for the people in the video and sad for myself.
  

  Still, I wish I could watch a hundred more like this. Really, really wonderful. Thanks for sharing NuzzleNudge.