Has it always been that way, with bad weather dominating the news? I borrowed Paul’s time machine again - he’s always tinkering with something - and zipped back fifty years. A snowstorm had blanketed the country. I turned on the TV news, expecting to see reporters standing in snowdrifts, pointing to smash-ups on the roads. Nothing! Not until 35 minutes into the program: “We now break to our weather reporter, Sergeant Garrett. Sergeant, what can you tell us?” “It’s winter,” Sargent said, “suck it up! From Frozentusch, Iowa, back to you, Walter.’”

What barbarians! I hopped in the machine and headed home, but when I hit 2014, I got stuck in a snowdrift. I got out to push. All the networks were there. They rushed over. One reporter fell on her keister.

“Whoa! It’s really slick out there! Here’s a man stuck in a time machine! What do you have to say to America, sir”

“Whoa, it’s really slick out here!” I said. “And cold!”

Reporters helped me break free my time machine and gave me a push-start, but I slid right past my exit into year 2038. It appeared that covering snowstorms had brought such good ratings that television news had expanded their coverage to nightfalls.

“All across the country, Americans are coping with encroaching darkness! We now break to our correspondent General Garrett, in Blackentusch, Iowa. General, what can you tell us?”

“Thanks, Charlie. Well, it’s really something out here since the sun went down. I can’t see my hand in front of my face! It’s really very dangerous.”

‘Thanks, General. Now we’ll go to the Federal Bureau of Aggravation.”

“Every day we warn people, and every day there are some who wait till the last minute! You must make sure that you have light bulbs in all lamps and that all lamps are plugged in!”

“Thanks, General. Excellent reporting as always. Good advice. This is potentially very serious and it’s easy to forget that during daytime. But scientists tell us that the sun will absolutely go down tonight – this is not something you want to play games with!”

From 'No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash'

I used to love it when Watchtower publications would run that Vermont Royster quote. After remarking on how far we have come science-wise, he added: “Yet here is a curious thing. In the contemplation of man himself, of his dilemmas, of his place in the universe, we are little further along than when time began. We are still left with questions of who we are and why we are and where we are going.”

It is pretty obvious why Jehovah’s Witnesses would love those words; they make clear that a shallow world of materialism will not do. You can even think those words every time a Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain takes his life. Or anyone else. Suicide is all the rage today. People decide that ‘Hotel World’ has not that much to offer, and they line up at the counter to check out.

Isn't it a little missing the point when people look for the one factor, maybe social media, that is tipping people over the edge? Or suggest that it is all a matter of better mental health care? 

“For over half a century, as a journalist, author, and teacher, Vermont Royster illuminated the political and economic life of our times. His common sense exploded the pretensions of "expert opinion," and his compelling eloquence warned of the evils of society loosed from its moorings in faith,” read the citation when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986.

There are few things I enjoy more than exploding the pretensions of "expert opinions."

On the ‘What’s New’ tab of the JW Library app is a re-release of ‘Will There Ever be a World Without War.’ I thought it was an update of the 1992 tract, and it may be in some minor areas, but for the most part it seems the same.

I always liked the paper brochure. That is not to say I used it much. It presents our Bible view such that it would more likely appeal to someone of Jewish background. For some reason I cannot quite put my finger on, that appeals to me. The Bible is like a prism, and you can turn it this way or that way so that it sheds the most light to different ones according to their background.

The reason I thought it might be updated is paragraph 2 of the last chapter: “As bright as the prospects are for the future, they are not bright for all. Jehovah will not wait endlessly for all men to beat their swords into plowshares.” It is the rare Watchtower publication that says “as bright as the prospects are for the future;” most just harp on darkness galore, and Witnesses in the U.S, at least, will comment at length on “wars and rumors of wars,” as though you cannot throw a stone in any direction and fail to hit ten of them. In fact, they are rare today. That is not to say there is peace—peoples and societies everywhere are violently crumbling, but actual flat-out wars are not plentiful. The modern atheists come around and point to the dearth of real wars as though that were proof that all is improving, and the brochure inserts that line to counter it.

The reason I thought the brochure was not updated at all, or if it was, it was just a little bit, is that the science quotes are all quite dated, from the 1980s or even before, as would have been at time-of-publication. Especially what caught my eye is a 1977 quote from New Scientist, that the “view that commonly expects scientists to be nonbelievers…is a view that is widely wrong.” And “as many as eight of every 10 scientists follow a religious faith or countenance principles that are ‘non-scientific.’”

Is it my imagination or is that greatly changed today, just 30 years later, almost to the point of reversing the percentages? Judging by when these characters go online, one would think they are almost all atheist. Are they? Or is this a case of ‘the squeaky wheel that gets the oil’…the simply scream louder than anyone else.

I call them ‘scientist-philosopher-cheerleader-atheists.’ They overlap with scientists but are not the same. The latter just do science. The former ram it down everyone’s throat as the be-all and end-all.  There are some areas in which science is absolutely terrible as a way to look at things, such as quantifying things that are essentially unquantifiable, due to possessing an astronomical and non-replicable number of permutations. Most ‘living things’ are like that.

So much understanding of basics as: Why does God permit #suffering and the concept of relative freedom lies in understanding of the book of Genesis ...Adam and Eve... but when you refer to it, people roll their eyes...it is a religious fable to them. You get as much #bangforthebuck with such folk by suggesting that they take it as metaphor.

You may get even more, for people love metaphors and they love the idea of proving themselves sensitive and smart by discerning the underlying message.

You don't have to rub their noses in it and insist they take it literally. Go for the underlying message. It is all order of presentation. You can clean up the rest later.

After three books, you would think I would have learned not to release them prematurely. You would think I would learn that reading them through a few times and running them through proof-readers is not enough. I think this book needed more corrections than the other two combined. Maybe because it was more ambitious. Maybe because most paragraphs weren’t written concurrently and many first appeared somewhere else in modified form. Even the ’extremism free’ version fell short of its goal. I have fixed it.

It’s embarrassing. And I apologize to whoever downloaded it. I got impatient, is all I can say. Download it again, if you will. The price is the same: free. All errors are out, and most were not really errors in the first place, but just clunky expressions or oddball punctuation that I brought under control.

Hmm. Is there a search tool that looks for ending a sentence with a preposition? I still have a few of those, but other than an English teaching harrumphing over it, the sin is probably not that great. And the education chapter still strikes me as a little too unfocused. But overall, I am happy with Dear Mr. Putin, and whoever has downloaded it, I invite them to do it again.

The #3 2018 Watchtower made the point about healing: "Consider: If the Creator designed our bodies to heal physical wounds, can we not have confidence in his promise to help us recover from emotional injuries, too?"

Two things interfere, qualifying the healing to a "help us" healing. 1. The mind is in the business of remembering, unlike the knee you scrape, 2. With the knee you scrape, you can get it away from whatever scraped it. In this system, that can be more of a challenge, and won't completely cure out until the new system. As one brother said somewhere on the broadcast: 'In the new system, resurrected people will look back and say 'how could you ever have lived during those times, with the constant stress?"

Move over, signs of the last days. I have discovered a new one that trumps them all.

Kurt, whose status as American Indian is legendary, who absolutely loves 'Indian' jokes and so attracts them by the bushelfull, who coins his own 'Indian' words, grunting 'Squeet,' which means 'Let's go eat,'

Who, in his working days had co-workers addressing him: "Hey, you crazy Indian!"...they were not Witnesses, though Witnesses would do it too, because he was a little 'crazy'...at Walmart, he despaired of getting waited upon, so he lay down on his back on the floor. This sent the place into a panic and everyone raised the cry: "Sir, are you okay?"