JVW

I like to find the most extreme views from both sides and then consider both of them and kind of fall somewhere in the middle with which side I tilt towards depending on the issue. Ultimately, my opinion is going to be rooted in my gut feelings and the way that I perceive the world, I figure the most dangerous thing I can do is read stuff that I agree with.

I get what your saying, and yeah, my response was lazy. I wouldn't have called out CFR on Nehor if he wasn't being about as provocative as you can possibly be in a response. He used all the defamation buzzwords you can use to describe something on the internet in one nicely bundled little post. I agree with your views on Wikipedia and I appreciate your commentary on why it's not appropriate to use in a scholastic setting.

Ok, so basically you just don't like reading anything fun. I get it.

Nobody has an objective bone in their body, we all make attempts though, but that's not why I quoted you here. What I wanted to say was that I had similar issues. Many years ago I was a subscriber and then I changed my mind after awhile because I stopped following politics (I liked subscribing to a variety of leaning news organizations at the time). Unsubscribing from them was very difficult, which means they have good sales people but it left a bitter taste in my mouth. I also agree that what a news outlet chooses to cover can reveal their native bias. I understand that Epoch Times chooses to cover issues that will generate the most traffic, is the most relevant, deals with China (since they're a Chinese newspaper), and appeals the most to people on the right. However, I don't think that the reporting of the topics they chose was worse than any other major news organization, and in fact, in many cases I think their journalism and writing was better. To save from a separate post I'll add this bit here at the end. Both you @Benjamin McGuire and @The Nehor I am wondering what news sites you view as highly reputable, non-conspiratorial, fair and balanced, factual news organizations? I would be interested to add them to my repertoire when I get motivated enough to study a topic in depth which happens on occasion. Eh, I guess I should say this too. Wikipedia? I don't know how long ago you went to University but when I attended Wikipedia wasn't allowed as a source. Wikipedia is a very lazy response and does nothing to satisfy my desire for CFR from the one who you were attempting to CFR for. I heard all of this nonsense from Nehor so I want the CFR from him, with all due respect.

Depends on how much you believe the man in power is a prophet of the God of Israel akin to Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, and Paul. I think it would be very exciting to be asked my opinion by a prophet of God, and I think my wife would be too, i don't think that gender matters in this case.

That juicy part was covered in the first 3 or 4 minutes of the interview. I gave it a few more minutes after that and then stopped watching cause there wasn't anything else interesting being talked about.

I agree, that's really nice. It's just not worth 10 minutes of my life to learn, I'd rather get that snippet from a 30 second short.

I'm glad for you Tacenda. That's really nice to hear.

CFR please CFR please Objectively? CFR please What "disingenuous misinformation tactics"? Please provide examples. Is there any non-disingenuous misinformation tactics? In these CFR requests and responses I'd really like to see actual Epoch Times articles, in context, with the relevant quotes that are "disinformation", "conspiracy theory", "supporting far-right lunatics", and "objectively bad journalism", and "unethical" and "dishonest" please. You are making a TON of claims here. I personally don't like Epoch times that much, but as far as a newspaper goes it reads like a newspaper. I didn't have the same experience that you seem to be having with the site. And I think it may have a point over you in your claims, at least as far as Chinese reporting is concerned, because the CCP has straight up sent gangs to destroy their printing presses out in Asia on several occasions afaik. And one aims suppression fire where the target is in a war, so if there wasn't anything truthful in the paper it would be reasonable to assume that the CCP would safely ignore them.

I watched about half of this video last night and it started off promising but kind of fizzled out. For those who don't want to watch the video this is the story, "I got an unexpected meeting notification on my calendar with President Nelson, so did the other two sisters in the RS presidency. We went to his office and he gave us a pencil and a copy of his women's session talk and asked us for feedback on it. We gave him feedback and chatted for awhile and had a good time. I was so nervous at first!". Interviewer asks, "What feedback did you give? What did you talk about?". Sister says, "That's the craziest thing! I don't remember. Sorry." What I thought was the most interesting part was when my wife said, "Did you know that Sharon Eubank invited a queer lesbian on stage and interviewed her during 2021 BYU Women's Conference?" So I looked it up and that was a lot more interesting to watch and we had a nice conversation about it discussing different angles on what was good and bad about what she said and what she represented. But the OP interview just didn't really have anything juicy in it although this Sister is very sweet and I like her a lot.

The campaign is over 300k now with a 500k goal. To be very clear, I think that the sentiment expressed is quite beautiful, and I'm glad this campaign exists. But there are a few things that aren't sitting right with me as time has gone on. 1) Why do they keep bumping up the goal? The total pool of money that will be donated to anyone involved in Michigan is limited, and as the goal has increased and the pool has grown it's dried up donations that could go to, you know, the actual victims. 2) If we take a step back and look at the situation it could be interpreted by someone as follows. "The guy may have wanted to die by cop. The group of people he chose to take out with him ultimately took care of his family after he was gone. So if I went crazy and wanted to die by cop, if I attack Mormons then I know my wife and kids will be taken care of by the victims." I feel like it's possible that the virality of this campaign could literally incentivize future attacks. 3) The guy who was shot and has had two surgeries and will be undergoing a third in order to not die. His "gofundme" type campaign has only raised 16k... I don't have a list of all other campaigns for other victims in the attack, but they are all equally non-viral and pitifully inadequate to help the actual victims of this massacre. 4) "Love your enemy" has been kind of the tagline of this campaign. I don't know, but I wonder, is throwing money at the enemy the same thing as loving them? Will the campaign have the same kind of impact that a single Michigan victim visiting her home with a freshly cooked meal and crying with her will have? Perhaps, but I think it's worth considering. Put another way, as a hypothetical Ukrainian supporter who views Russia as my enemy, should I donate money to Russia to express my love for them and withhold donations to Ukraine because I'm "with them" already? 5) My biggest, and perhaps only, real grievance with this whole campaign. Many of the people who are sharing it, and many who are donating to it, are using this campaign to basically say, "Not to brag but look how great and loving I am, and how great and loving my church is. I'm so humble. Look at me." I really like the Pareto principle so I, by default, am assuming that 20% are these humblebraggers, and there are 80% who aren't sharing or bragging about it. It literally feels like watching the modern day equivalent of Matthew 6:1-2 "Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward." I understand that the Church has resources, and I will give grace and assume that the Church is using the resources to help the victims. But it feels like the actual victims are kind of getting the shaft here.

Y'all are crazy. Why would any of you want to be the equivalent to a CEO of a multinational company? But instead of employees you are managing volunteers, and have to also live a virtuous, pious life or the entire organization will be negatively impacted by your uninspired decision making. Crazy, crazy people on this forum. Let me see if I can find a few Bishop or Mission President openings and then if you like those we can readdress your petition?

This wasn't about gay people. Stop trying to make it about gay people. This is college students, the kind that like attending sports games and getting drunk and going to frat parties. The target demographic for National Lampoon movies, or American Pie movies. Y'know, college kids. It's fun to yell at games. It's fun to chant. It's fun to vilify and hate on the enemy team, and it's fun to curse. This is not the kind of thing that needs a dissertation written about it examining the relationship and interplay between intersectionality, race, sex, gender identity, cultural background, and politics as to why the students attending the game behaved this way. They are college kids. They drink beer at football games and get rowdy and have a good time. It's not that complicated.

Well, I told my wife about this statement as she hadn't heard about it by last night. She read it and now she is so mad she's seriously considering leaving the church. Just goes to show how different people can view things differently as I thought it was a pretty safe, nice type of statement. Her points were as follows: - Why couldn't he have made separate statements? Why lump in grieving for President Nelson with this tragic event in Michigan? - "We mourn with our members who have lost loved ones, and we join in prayer for comfort with others around the world who are suffering from similar tragedies." This was the line that really did her in. It was an act of terror that directly impacted our church and was in a very specific place and he couldn't make a statement specifically for those people. There is no condemnation of the attack. The event is tragic, but it's addressed in the context of President Nelson's passing and other generic terror attacks that occur worldwide. She thinks it would have been better for him to do separate messages. A message of mourning for Nelson. A message of condemnation and support for the saints impacted in Michigan. And a message of support and prayer for those worldwide who are suffering from "similar tragedies" and "all others who may be experiencing loss and heartache at this time" (i.e. nearly everyone in existence around the world). I think she makes a pretty good point. And I can't say that I blame her for being upset by this response.

Thanks, so now we can drop the number of people on buildings by a max of 1.

That was a very well written statement. Very appropriate and sensitive at this time.

I agree with you. If the church doesn't update it's policy or provide resources for security, even if everyone in the congregation were armed it wouldn't provide a deterrence because the church's official policy is "no guns are allowed inside a meetinghouse" so the assumption will be that nobody is carrying inside a church building. I know that the church has many policeman, veterans, CIA, FBI, secret service, etc. former or current people in it's membership. I know it has the money to hire private security or install security cameras, or whatever in meetinghouses around the world. I just don't think that they will. Which is really weird to say considering that we used to have our own militia and went to war against the United States at one point. I know that, using the Book of Mormon, one could point to the anti-nephi-lehis or whatever group it was that buried their weapons of war and knelt down and were voluntarily slaughtered. You can add to that Jesus' admonition to "turn the other cheek", etc. But at the same time a third of the Book of Mormon is war and I would argue the most venerated man in the entire book is captain Moroni, who rounded up all of the "kingmen" and threatened to execute them all if they didn't help fight the current war they were in. He also was very fierce against the chief judge when rations didn't come and threatened to bring his army and overthrow the government. So I think that if the church grew a pair that would be more in line with the spirit of our modern religious texts than if we just said, "please don't terrorize us again, pretty please" without doing anything about it. At least president Nelson set up the "home centered church" maybe we can just go back to covid times and have every family worship privately in their own homes and then we don't have to worry about any more terrorist attacks. Who cares about freedom of religion or assembly. /s

Dude that guy (Maryland Man) that got sent to El Salvador prison was a human trafficker.

I told my wife many times that he would live to be 120 because he would be the prophet until there wasn't anything left to change in the church. Did I know what else could be changed in the church? No. But I believed there was still a lot more to change. Turns out I was wrong. The church is now 100% a different church than it was before President Nelson. He's the only general authority that God has revealed to me was called of Him, and that was a very special experience. He was so full of vigor and enthusiasm. Any time I saw him it looked like if he wanted to he could fly because of how excited he was about the future. May he rest in peace.

I'm so sorry that this happened. It is so tragic. It is also really unsettling. I have been praying for all of the victims and I firmly believe that God is there with each one of them during this dark hour. I'm not a gun guy but it actually makes me want to get a little pocket pistol to carry with me to church until church leadership implements some sort of security measure to protect their congregations. I am really curious to see what the church officially states after this situation resolves in a week or two. If they don't make any other statements than the one that they just made I will be really disappointed. If current church leadership ignores the situation and just says "pray to Jesus and he'll help you feel better" I think that's a really poor response.

I regard myself as somewhat of a conspiracy expert. I've been in the deep end of it and come out the other side and take a lot of what I learn with a grain of salt. Because of how my algorithm is set up I was exposed to a lot of Charlie Kirk conspiracy much sooner than I would've like to have been and it really upset me. The worst conspiracy to read are the people who believe that it was all staged and that he isn't really dead but is living on some remote island now living it up. I'll also note that I don't avidly research conspiracies anymore and there are many threads with various Kirk conspiracies that I haven't cared to try and unravel so I don't have any sense of how valid they may be (e.g. Erica Kirk having family ties to Zionists). There are two things that I've seen the video evidence of, with my own eyes, that I 100% believe to be the truth. 1) There were at least 2, but more likely 3 or 4 different people on different building locations. There is the rooftop that Tyler is seen running across (SW roof), that is a different rooftop than the one that he shot Kirk from. 17 minutes after the recorded video of him running on the rooftop the shot occurs from the rooftop diagonally adjacent (NE roof). It could be the same guy who just booked it with a disassembled, hidden rifle and reassembled it and calibrated the sights, etc. in the timeframe, but it is -possible- that there were two different people on two different roofs. But let's assume it's just Tyler hopping around roofs... At the same time as those two roof instances, there is a recording of a person lying prone on the SW roof. So now we have 2, for sure, distinct individuals on 3 different roofs. The possible 3rd (or 4th, depending on what you believe) person is not visible on a roof. Instead, there is footage aimed at the building under construction behind Kirk on his right. At the exact moment the shot takes place there is a flash of light from inside an open window on an upper floor in the building. I've heard some commentary that the sound the shot made should have echoed if it was fired in an open space, since it didn't echo it implies that the shot originated from within a building. I don't know anything about that. In any event, there is person 1 who may have been on two roofs within 17 minutes, or person 1 and 2 each on a separate roof but recorded on video 17 minutes apart. There is person 2 who was recorded at the same time on a separate roof. And mysterious person 3 that is evidenced not by seeing an actual person, but the flash of light that happens simultaneous to the gunshot from a room in the building under construction. If you want to see what I'm talking about, video explanation and evidence are from timestamp 12:51 to 14:39 of this video https://youtu.be/ZFvXQCQKnH4?si=h0KA_9XMmeVG6JWk (I just spent around 5 minutes looking for the video footage of the flash of light from the open window in the building under construction, couldn't find it. This kind of stuff isn't easy to find, but if anyone really wants to see it I can try and dig it up and post it here in a separate post.) 2) There is a really good video examining the footage of the shot frame by frame. I will not link it here because even though the face is blurred and it is only a few frames, it is still really hard to watch. If any of you want to see it just PM me and I can get you the link. What I saw, when seeing the video frame by frame, was a small blood splatter coming out of behind the right side of around his C1 vertebrae. The frame before the hole appears in his neck the skin of his neck is being pushed out in a very extreme and pointed manner to his left. Based on what I've seen with my own eyes I find it hard to interpret in any other way than that the hole in his neck was an exit wound. The angle of the shot based off of the small entrance blood splatter and the exit wound line up with the flash of light from the building under construction. 2b) In addition to this, after having talked to several gun enthusiasts and watching footage of people shooting .308 rifles, there is no way that the bullet was stopped by his bones as Trump said the ME told him. No way. If there was a bullet, just under the skin, stopped by the bone or whatever, as is currently claimed, then it was planted there. Anyways, based off of what I've seen, and PM me if you want to see the same thing I saw, the hole in Kirk's neck was an exit wound. Those are the two things that I think there is sufficient evidence of that needs to be officially and thoroughly investigated. Off the top of my head I think the private plane taking off is a dud. I was just at that airport and took a tour of the company that works out of there doing custom interiors for private planes. There's a lot of private planes at that airport. I also think the Dairy Queen image of Tyler was likely not taken at 6:38 PM the day of the shooting for two reasons. 1) the timestamp is cut off and 2) there is a Superman movie poster on display. I don't go to that Dairy Queen that often so I wasn't able to directly verify if the poster was up on the 10th, but that movie came out July 10th. So that poster would have had to have been up for 2 months, which is possible, but I don't think likely. But I could be wrong. Other weird things, the person taking down the camera in the tent situated behind Kirk pretty much right after it happened. The text exchange between lovers that conveniently provides evidence for: the lone gunman theory, the motive, the weapon used, etc. all tied up in one neat little text exchange that could very well have been AI assisted or generated. The 12 registered Israeli cell phones near Kirk at the time of the event (https://stateofthenation.info/?p=34395. Netanyahu's denial of association not once but... four times. A lot of the weirdness I think will be resolved as the court case unfolds. Will they show or release a bunch of text history of Tyler to reinforce that the text is legit and not AI influenced? Do they really have the bullet that was shot? Do they really have the evidence to prove that Tyler pulled the trigger? What will his lawyers ask? Unfortunately, due to how we've seen other conspiracies unfold, Tyler is a dead man walking, and he is the lone gunman. This story can unfold in no other way. I read a comment somewhere that I thought was really funny, but also very true. "Now gun experts can know how architects & engineers have been feeling for the past 24 years." Anyways, hope you had fun reading all of this. If you have any questions about any other conspiracy crap you've come across related to Kirk, or just in general, hit me up and I'll give you my two cents on it.

On a tangent, I believe that conspiracies are involved more often than not. Truth really is stranger than fiction, and the more I learn about what secret organizations do to manipulate and control public opinion, the more crazy life appears. But I digress, I didn't quote you to respond to this part. I agree with you and I believe that the moment God chooses to return will be the exact moment at which agency no longer exists among the human race. I believe that the mark of the beast will be willingly accepted by the vast majority of mankind and that, in order to receive the mark, the currency traded is the person's agency. The Bible plainly states that in order to participate in the economy (i.e. pay bills, buy groceries, etc.) one will need to have the mark. The tug-of-war in politics and in the world stage is the choice between freedom and security, and the mark will offer the ultimate security in exchange for the user's freedom. An example of an exchange of something other than currency for access to a service is the price to use Facebook. The amount of money Facebook makes, per user per year, from a user's data (which is a privacy/freedom related currency) is ~$13 per user. If given the choice between a user paying a dollar a month to use FB, or to have "free" access to the service in exchange for privacy how many would choose to pay to protect their right to privacy? If FB didn't offer a choice and suddenly changed their model to a paid subscription model, do you think FB would be able to stay in business?

Your conspiracy doesn't run deep enough if you think a rightist or leftist organization(s) are the ones engineering the division and downfall of America. The ones who want to see America fall do have two sides, but it's not left and right, it's: they are the masters, and we are the slaves.

This is a really interesting perspective. When I see someone on TV a fun little metric I'll consider is whether or not I'd want that person as a neighbor. I wouldn't mind if Charlie was one of my neighbors. I don't think he'd commit any crimes or be a predator to my children. Him and his family would be fun to have over for dinner or to chat with when I randomly see him while cutting the grass, even though we have different opinions. And as an added bonus I don't think he'd be telling me I'm going to hell cause of the Galatians verse. Be careful how you use that "cult" word. I don't think it means what you think it means. While there are many who behave as if they are in a cult, whether that's culturally, religiously, scientifically, or scholastically. I don't think any political movement could be reasonably defined as a cult. Would you describe the Bolsheviks as a cult? How about Antifa or BLM? How about the revolutionaries led by George Washington who opposed British rule? Rallying around common interests in the public sphere is by no means a bad thing, and shame on anyone who believes as much, left or right.

Or he wasn't thinking and was just incredibly self-centered and consumed by hatred. I have a friend who is a professor at UVU. I can ask him your question... But what exactly is your question? If UVU is offering temporary online only courses for the rest of the semester? How their online options are changing as a result of these events?