One reality about Europe’s current political leadership is summarized here:

• Emmanuel Macron, the newly elected French President, has no children.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has no children.
• Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has no children
• British Prime Minister Theresa May has no children.
• Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has no children.
• Holland’s Mark Rutte,
• Sweden’s Stefan Löfven,
• Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel, and
• Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, all have no children.
• Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, has no children.

Ironically, it would seem that a grossly disproportionate number of the people who make the major decisions about Europe’s future have no direct personal stake in the future…

— Unknown Internet poster

(My endorsement of this post does not imply endorsement of anything else posted at Gates of Vienna.)

That’s how I usually entitled my blog posts about placing non-English copies of the Book of Mormon.  The first term is the language, not the person.  It’s short for “I gave someone a [Language] Book of Mormon at [Location]. I never meant to refer to someone merely by their ethnicity or language, or to reduce them to an ethnicity or language. It has been merely a short-hand to refer to the edition of the book.

Where I wrote “[Language] declined”, that was a shortcut for “My offer of a [Language]Book of Mormon was declined.”  And just a note, I still count that as a success, as per Clayton Christensen, in his article in the February 2005 issue of the Ensign magazine.  If you make an offer to someone, you’ve succeeded in making an offer.  Whether they accept it is up to them.

This one would be entitled: Igbo at the front door. (more…)

And children will keep behaving like beasts.

The Ninth Circuit’s deviation from ordinary principles of law is unfortunate, though not surprising.

— Justice Clarence Thomas, in a dissent from a denial of certiaori.

But capitalism consistently divides labor into thinner and thinner slices, so that the habits of the heart that made capitalism work — thrift, industrious, decent manners — become less and less essential. In the process, virtue falls by the wayside, and we look to government or other sources of authority or simply the market to provide things we’ve ceased providing for ourselves, from parents who outsource moral education to schools, to college students who demand they be protected from scary ideas, to populists of the left and the right who demand that the government fix tectonic changes brought about by globalization and technology. I’m not saying people have become evil or even lazy, nor am I blaming the victims of horrendous crimes such as what we saw in Florida. I’m saying we have, as my friend David Bahnsen puts it in his new book, a “crisis of responsibility.” Everything must be easy. There needs to be an app for that, because I’m too damn busy.

— thus Jonah Goldberg

(more…)

Stumbled upon this via a link at Bruce Charlton’s blog.  The title is How to Win the Culture War, by Peter Kreeft.  He writes from a Catholic perspective.

The sections are: 1) we are at war, 2) who the enemy is, 3) the weapon/strategies to fight the enemy.  At times I need to be reminded of the second and third.  Kreeft’s explanations are the best I’ve read in a while.  He uses Catholic terminology, but the piece is also LDS in essence.  Or at least my mind translates it into things I’ve heard at General Conference.

I also recommend BC’s post “Screw-up or Conspiracy? A Fake Dichotomy.” (A comment contains the link to Kreeft.)  It explains a key to understanding how so many people are duped by the real enemy.

When a gift card says to “scratch here” to reveal the validation code, it really means that.  Scratch the plastic piece of tape with your thumbnail, removing the thin opaque layer from the surface of the tape,  in order to reveal the code underneath the tape.  Perhaps even hold down the end of the tape so that the tape itself doesn’t come off.  

Do NOT “peel” the tape off. Do not scratch the tape off the card.  That will likely pull off a layer of paper from the card, and “trap” the printed code between the pulled-off  layer and the tape.   If you or “someone you know” did pull off the tape and ruined the code, do NOT scrape off the paper from the tape; you may still be able to reconstruct the code by scratching the proper side of the tape. (more…)

(Part 1 here.  Part 2 here.)

Free ebooks that I like:

How to Bake: The Art and Science of Baking, (free Kindle ebook) by Dennis R Weaver.  The author is a professional baker. Has a quick/easy starter recipe using store-bought yeast, that will pick up wild yeast/sourdough over time.

The New Dr. Price Cookbook, (free Kindle ebook) by New York Royal Baking Powder Company. Lots of traditional baking powder recipes.

Woman’s Institute Library of Cookery Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads (free Kindle ebook) by Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences.  Lots of old-timey recipes, from the U.K. and U.S.  Good for ideas.  (I believe the proper name is Women’s Institute. Maybe something got changed in the transcription.)

Books worth buying: (more…)

Does not actually enhance freedom.

My mother tells me that when I was a little fella, I would spend the late afternoon standing on the couch looking out the window for my father to come home.  When he did, I would quickly sit down and act like I was absorbed in a picture book.  But he was never fooled.  In he’d come and we’d wrestle.

Kids waiting for you to come home is one of the pleasures in life.  They are so eager.  Its mostly the younger ones, though the older ones sometimes rush over with news they’ve been busting to tell you. (more…)

Kindle edition on sale for $1.99.  Normally $17.59 in hardcover.  $1.99 is a great price for an ebook of this quality. Professional (not DIY) Kindle ebooks usually go for $9.99.  This is likely a temporary price; expect it to go up. (more…)