In today’s marketplace—yes, in your own neighborhood, town, and cities—scheming, deceiving promoters are making available to gullible purchasers all kinds of enticing offers. We are sorry to report thousands within our ranks are being duped by the glib tongues of those who offer and solicit in whispers. “Once in a lifetime opportunities” and “Just for you” approaches are unusual no more. Such offerings and deals should be avoided like a plague.

I believe the Lord wants us to become alarmed and concerned when we see the wicked and unscrupulous taking unfair advantage of the weak and uninformed. No Latter-day Saint should exploit another man’s situation, manipulate, lie, steal, cheat, or deceive. Our responsibility is to assist each other in avoiding involvements that can be devastating to our welfare.

-Elder Marvin J. Ashton, from his talk “Give with Wisdom that They may Receive with Dignity”

I’ve seen any number of people express the regret that the brightest minds in our generation are devoted to inventing subtler financial manipulations and more addictive online ad platforms. (more…)

[In the Washington Post sports news]
As his free agency heats up, Bryce Harper begins ‘social media fast’

Don’t bother looking to Bryce Harper’s social media accounts for clues about what the free agent outfielder makes of the reaction to the 10-year, $300 million deal the Nationals reportedly offered him in September. At least not for the next week. (more…)

Last month one of our commenters, COB, opined at this site concerning our coming pattern of Sunday worship:

When something is good, and helpful, you want more of it. When it’s not helpful, you want less of it. We have God specifically telling us that church time is more harmful than helpful. [. . .] If what we need is actually LESS time together, then the membership itself is actually not only not helping each other but potentially harmful.

When I read those words, it called to mind a time not long ago, when my wife came home from the Relief Society meeting feeling underserved. (more…)

We live in a vast charnel house, a morgue, a knacker’s yard . . .  Dead people, dead animals, odd ends of decaying meat are just laying around, heaped up there, rotting here, a stray piece rolled into that corner.  Its easy to get sick.  A little cut can swell into a great putrid infection.  A little carelessness with your food, you can be puking for  a week.  Its easy to die.

If you want to thrive, you have wear masks at all times, have to be careful where you step, have to follow careful rituals, can’t afford to slack off.  You and your whole house.  You can’t do it by yourself.  Every one with painstaking care when they are outside, at all times.  Everyone following the most stringent procedures when they come back inside the House.

But not enough do it.  Too many live diseased, crippled, and high-mortality lives.  It is difficult not to.  It is very difficult.  And there are agitators who wander through the decay without mask or glove, proclaiming their freedom.  No one else can shout as loud as they can, as they wear no mask.  No one can easily refute their lies that careful living is joyless, because the joy is in the Houses, and no one can go to one, not really, until they have joined it and are washed and cleaned and passed through quarantine.

The strict rules of hygiene are hard, but now with the agitators they are harder.  We can be mocked and attacked for our masks and our gloves.

Some of us wonder why we have be so extreme.  (Those of us are getting the infections and dying off.) Some Houses wonder if they could not spread the word of hygiene better if they weren’t so rigid about it. Masks and washing and stuff appears so alien, we need a hygiene that speaks to today’s youth. After all, the message of hygiene is ultimately a message of health and hope, not despair and grimness. So these Houses wash without washing and ward off disease without warding it off, and perish.