Possibly the greatest title for a medical journal article I’ve seen. You might think with a title like that, the article can’t help but be a dud. However, it delivers the promised payload. The charts especially blew me away.
From Rana Mitter’s China’s War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival:
God’s Gonna Make You Laugh. By “Bishop” Noel Jones. (He’s not an LDS bishop.)
I don’t know if it’s any good yet, but I wanted to post the link while it is still free. It will likely revert to normal price Tuesday night (tonight, the 28th) at midnight.
Kindle reading apps are free for iOS and Windows, and I assume for Android and MacOS too.
Bookbub.com is a free daily email list that sends you links to temporarily free and discounted ebooks at Amazon and elsewhere.
I find about 2 or 3 free books worth downloading each week.
I tried some of the sci-fi list, but they usually just give you the first book of a trilogy for free in hopes that you buy the rest of the series.
Most of the free ones I find worthwhile are non-fiction, and religious/spiritual.
I am thinking that repentance has not yet set in, per Adam’s recent post. She has not yet seen that her sin is real.
There was a prophecy that the time would come when the Latter-Day Saints would be the only people not at war with one another.
I will admit, I thought that sounded a bit lame as a prophecy.
After all, men and women will always be dating.
Except now we have feminists in array against men, and men opting out of dating entirely. The war of the sexes has been raised to a whole new level. Not even as much fraternizing with the enemy anymore. See Grass-eaters in Japan, and MGTOW in the West.
But we can always just kick back and play a video game blasting aliens, right?
No, evidently not. See the Gamergate Controversy.
But I can always read barbarians and buxom babes in chain mail, right? Even just wizards with conservative viewpoints? Promising farmboys and rogue starship captains who don’t embrace the Progressive mindset?
Not even that? What is the world coming to?
Why science Does Not Disprove God, by Amir Aczel.
Based on interviews with eleven Nobel Prize winners and many other prominent physicists, biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, as well as leading theologians and spiritual leaders, Why Science Does Not Disprove God is a “well-informed and readable” (Wall Street Journal) analysis of the religious implications of our ever-increasing understanding of life and the universe. The renowned science writer Amir Aczel (“One of our best science popularizers”—Publishers Weekly) masterfully refutes the overreaching claims of the “New Atheists,” providing millions of educated believers with a clear, engaging explanation of what science really says, how there’s still much space for the Divine in the universe, and why faith in both God and empirical science are not mutually exclusive.
Interview with the author, 40 minute podcast by John Batchelor.
I’ve discovered this week just how much His Majesty can be a pain in the
One of my favorite passages from Epictetus:
Never say of anything, “I have lost it”; but, “I have returned it.” Is your child dead? It is returned. Is your wife dead? She is returned. Is your estate taken away? Well, and is not that likewise returned? “But he who took it away is a bad man.” What difference is it to you who the giver assigns to take it back? While he gives it to you to possess, take care of it; but don’t view it as your own, just as travelers view a hotel.
Fron The Enchiridion (The Manual), chapter 11. Also here.
No, I don’t actually believe that.
G. mentioned in passing the other day one of those quirky Mormon teachings that I’ve been curious about for a while: “Satan rules over the water.” The origin of this teaching is Doctrine & Covenants Section 61, in which the elders have to halt a river voyage when they see “the destroyer riding in power upon the face of the waters.” The Lord declared to them, “Behold, I, the Lord, in the beginning blessed the waters; but in the last days, by the mouth of my servant John, I cursed the waters.” D&C 61:14. And then later on: “I, the Lord, have decreed, and the destroyer rideth upon the face thereof, and I revoke not the decree.” D&C 61:19
What I wonder is whether “the destroyer” who rode upon the face of the waters was, in fact, Satan, or if it was instead a destroying angel sent by the Lord, as in the days of the Passover. (more…)
What do people collectively want? It’s hard to say. Voting gives you one kind of answer, but voting isn’t nuanced. Voters can only say yes or no to ballot questions as phrased and as they understand them. It’s possible that with more explanation they might feel differently, or with even slightly different phrasing they choose the other option. Or else they can only select between candidates. Different voting systems give different answers. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says that no voting system can ever perfectly capture voter intent. Polls are even more fallible.
That’s where the concept of the General Will comes in. What if someone knew the people well enough to have an intuitive, almost literary, sense of what they wanted? That’s why dictatorships claim to be democracies. They say they’re giving the nation what it really, collectively, wants.
The reason it’s hard to know what voters want is because it’s hard to know what a voter wants. Individuals are something like a collection of people over time. No man can step in the same river twice, the Greek said, because it’s never the same man. The mind is always engaged in editing memory to fit the needs of the present, which it wouldn’t need to do if we were really fully the same throughout, if we always had the same end in view. (more…)
