Too big to fail and Just in Time manufacturing are examples of businesses doing good for themselves in the short run but setting themselves up for failure in the long run.

We do the same in our personal lives.  Spend now, later you wish you had savings.

What would be a similar example of short term thinking for the Kingdom?  I think its when we optimize too much for adapting to where the world is at right now so we can be successful at missionary work right now.

In our personal lives, there is the short term peace that comes from giving in to temptation or to worldly opposition.  And there is the long term peace that comes from rising above the opposition.

Jens and the Pond is my favorite story, bar none, from conference.

Jens of Denmark prays daily to live the gospel and notice promptings from the Holy Ghost. He has learned to act quickly when he feels directed by the Spirit.

Jens shared the following: (more…)

I have discovered a positively sockdologer way to skirt awkward political conversations when foregathering for a jolly Thanksgiving feast with one’s fiancee’s truculent pig-ignorant SJW relatives.

Dashed simple.

Propose marriage.

“I say, dear truculent pig-ignorant SJW relative, speaking of white supremacy, how about it, eh, what what?  I refer of course to hitching our twin destinies.  Let’s tie the knot, rather.  It would be ripping.”

The conversation gets diverted to new topics like billy-o.

WARNING: if having a manly go at Wooster method, it is advisable to have Jeeves among those present .

Tender meat and tender feelings.

Those are rookie numbers, Mos.  Gotta get those numbers up.  Not gonna make it with numbers like that.

Tamara Durand, 52

Virginia Sorenson, 79

LeAnna Owen, 71

Wilhelm Hospel, 81

Jane Kulich, 52

Jackson Sparks, 8

So far.

It is striking to read thoughtful cultural commentators from the 1950s-70s, who are confident that The System – based on materialism and motivated by Leftism – will certainly collapse due to its incoherence and contradictions.

. . .

Of course, The System did not collapse – but instead expanded in power and scope; and has now taken-over the world. Yet The System is indeed incoherent and self-contradictory – so how was this survival possible? . . .

The short answer is that The System captured the procedures and dissemination of evaluation: it captured the ‘knowledge-making’ processes. Therefore, The System now conceals from itself its own incoherence – and its own colossal failures.

-thus Bruce Charlton

The scriptures tell us a few things about knowing that a collapse is about to happen.

There will be signs of the times.

People will continue marrying and giving in marriage (in other words, life will go on, routines will keep happening, normalcy bias)

If it were possible, even the very elect could be deceived.

I believe that the median response from decent people when the collapse happens will be surprise but also a feeling that they should have seen it coming.

I had one of those jumbled meaningless dreams you have when you are waking up.

It appears that some beloved legendary British fighter commander from WWII had died.  I forget his name.  It was something extremely Scottish.  But everyone called him “Truno.”  None of the obituaries mentioned why.  I wondered if maybe it had something to do with with “true north.”  Anyway, this fella died and there were news reports and obituaries and such.  And everyone called him “Truno.” That was the dream.

Then I completed the process of waking up.  As soon as I came awake, my brain said,  “you should worry that the idealization of WWII reveals the fundamentally apocalyptic bent of Anglo-American secular culture.”

Thanks, brain.  I guess I will worry about that now.

Of your vax rule it’s come to your ken, OSHA

That it was written in the house of the stars, OSHA

the rule’d get the big cross

in a Fifth Circuit loss

Thus it rose in the house of the stars, OSHA.

It’s surprising the number of people left and right who agree Rittenhouse should not have shot that guy in the bicep.

He said puckishly.

The Great Ruler’s towering, massive fortress complex overlooked a wide plain.  There nobles and others vying for his favor would come with their personal armies to contend with each other.   The Great Ruler himself would sometimes watch them from the walls.  Leaders who succeeded in these battles could gain great favor and even high office in the Great Ruler’s invincible endless hosts or in his magistracy.

The Lord of Yan showed great promise.  He was sure to make it to the plains and do well there, so they said.

But instead he left his home and estates and went wandering alone.

Over time he acquired three followers.  They were cripples.  One was blind.

In the public square of a large market town he proclaimed them his army.  With them, he said, he would prevail.

He and his three-cripple army then marched towards the  fortress complex and the wide plain.

The Lord of  Yan had a reputation, both because of his early promise and because he had gone wandering.  His announcement made a minor sensation.

People came out to see him and his three cripples all along the route.

Many volunteered to join him.  He said no.

Commanders and leaders offered to join him with their skilled, trained bands.  He said no.  The minor sensation became bigger.

Some of the most famous names of the continent sent him letters offering to meet him in battle on the plain.  He did not reply.

Many nobles and their troops gathered there, waiting to see what the Lord of Yan would do.

He and his cripples arrived.  They marched up to the main gate of the fortress complex.  There the Lord of Yan denounced the Great Ruler as a bloody tyrant and declared war.

The Lord of Yan and his three cripples won.

***

This is a dream I had many years ago.

I remembered it again today when I read these two verses.

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One of our friends has a light review of Ender’s Game.    Some good incisive points and you should read it.

There are two main claims I’d like to make.

1.  None of the other books besides Ender’s Game are canon or should be treated as such.  I can give reasons for this but the assertion came first and the reasons came second.  Mostly you just either get it or you don’t.
2.     Ender’s Game is a sympathetic book about Faustian man.  Amazing capabilities married to juvenile maturity.  It is a Faustian tragedy in two senses.  The first sense is that it showcases the real successes but also limits of the Faustian approach.  Not every concern is a discrete problem with a sociotechno solution.  But Ender’s only hammer is to analyze a problem, find the areas in solution space that have been ignored because of convention, and then exploit them ruthlesslessly–so that is the hammer he uses over and over again.  It is also a Faustian tragedy in that the Faustian world view tries to push to the very limits, including in the tragic form.  Whereas the classical tragedy considers someone who is flawed, Faustian tragedies explore how good intentions and good actions can still cause disaster.  Faustian tragedies explore how the same thing that makes the character great also leads them to their fall.

(The review is mostly right but goes a little too far trying to counter the yay total war view of Ender’s Game (and ignores real America’s own very Jacksonian character).  The thing with the Faustian bargain is that you can’t unmake it.  Once you  see the buggers in terms of threat analysis eliminating them entirely as a threat is probably the “right” solution even if the buggers sincerely assure you it was a misunderstanding.  In a real Faustian tragedy, there is no ‘if only the hero had done X, everything would have been better.’)

The price one must pay these days for the bread rolls one playfully hurls at the Drones Club beggars belief.  Rather!  One is used to the potations flowing like water in situ Drones Club, but not the dashed shekels.

A coquettish little pinch of inflation from time to time is all very well, dash it, but one doesn’t wish to be manhandled as if enduring the roguish courting of a 14-stone barmaid with a stevedore’s bicep.  I mean to say!

C.S. Lewis talks about ‘trough sexuality.’  The idea being that most human things go through peaks and troughs.

Trough spirituality is a great gift.  It is the gift of integration.

The spirituality you experience when you are not feeling the burning fire helps you tie the ordinary things about you into your spiritual life.  If your only spirituality were peak spirituality, you would be a divided person.

the tares shall be bound in bundles, and their bands made strong, that they may be
burned with unquenchable fire.

No fire fueled by straw is unquenchable.

The flame that burns the tares is not a flame from the tares.

Left to themselves and their own fire, tares would burn out and turn to ash.

Left to themselves, the wicked would become colder and smaller and darker and ever more nothing.

But the flame goes on.  So . . .

The flame is either the flame of reality itself, the burning light of God that cannot be turned off.

Or is something actively provided by God, in which case we must assume it is a kind of a mercy. That being ever colder and darker and smaller is worse.