Last year this time we tried doing a fast from big corporations for a month.  Some of you joined us.

This year we are going to try again.  Complete separation probably isn’t possible.  Do what makes sense for you.  The goal is to be conscious of how much you are a trapped consumer and to try to exert some control, if only for a few weeks.

In the gospel, the good news is the bad news. They are the same news.

The good news: you weren’t meant to live like this, you are far from reaching your potential! There’s so much more to come.
The bad news: You weren’t meant to live like this.  You are far from reaching your potential. There’s so much more to come.

And  more!
(The Book of Mormon version, not the Arizona ruin.)

When I was young, the war chapters in Alma were my favorite.  I read them over and over of a Sunday.  Today I would say its the story of Zeniff and his people.  There is something about being surrounded and hanging on that hits me.  You can see it it in my favorite talk.  You can see it in my enthusiasm for Hodgson’s The Night Lands and John C. Wright’s superb Awake in the Night Land.

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There once was a wealthy man with a crippled child.  He asked two friends for help.

The first friend said that with sufficient funding he could build an exosuit for the child that would move his body around as if he were not crippled.  With the proper programming, the exosuit could even cause the boy’s body to move through complicated motions like a dance.

The other friend said he would prefer to try a difficult course of surgeries and especially of physical therapy.  It might not work, but if it did the boy’s body would be healed.  The boy would be able to move of himself.  He would dance instead of being danced.

The first friend scoffed at the pain and risk involved, but the wealthy man chose the second friend anyway.

“But we need to let them have agency!”

Yes, we do.

Agency is primarily a question of choosing your identity.  I.E., your relationships.  Specific moral choices are usually downstream from that.  Are you a progressing, repentant son or daughter of God, or are you something else?  From that choice, everything else follows.

Children and teenagers in particular are primed for wanting to choose an identity.

Among humans, where there is no boundary there is no identity, and where there is no boundary enforcement there is no boundary.  An identity that does not demand anything is not an identity.  Similarly, a relationship that does not demand anything is not a relationship.  There is nothing there to choose.

Boundaries, rules, and standards with teeth make agency possible.

Yes, we need to let them have their agency.

The dead of the graves, the graves of the dead,

the crosses white spread overhead

Too young to die, too old to live–

today we them memorial give.

If I were not working on Isaiah, I would be working on the books of Abraham and Joseph.

There is a possibility that the church *might* have some of the Book of Joseph, and that part of what inspired the Temple Rituals.

Also, we effectively have a facsimile from the Book of Joseph.

Let none say that Bertie Wooster is not a dashed climate activist.  Of course I am.  Noblesse oblige and all that, what what!  Why just this eve I instructed Jeeves to grill the young master a ribeye.

I more and more see arguments that look like this parable below.  Originally confined to the internet.

There’s a dude who’s jackhammering a hole into a dam and packing it with explosives. Along comes a man who asks what he’s doing. (more…)

The Nephites always seem outnumbered by the Lamanites.  Yet Nephite ethnography describes the Lamanites as hunter-gatherers who live off of game.  It’s possible that this is just a trope, some kind of traditional form of ethnic prejudice, and the Lamanites didn’t really live that way.  In support of this is that the Gadiantons are later described in the same terms.  I don’t think its just a trope.  I think the idea came from somewhere.  So if we take the scriptures seriously, the Lamanites are hunter-gatherers at least until part way through  the book of Alma, while the Nephites grow things, yet the Lamanites outnumber the Nephites.   This is  real puzzle.  Usually agriculture supports much higher populations than hunting does.

I have a speculation.

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Its interesting to read old popular fiction.  You get a better feel for what makes popular fiction popular fiction.  (By popular fiction I mean fiction that is meant to appeal to the public taste, not necessarily fiction that sold well).

I just finished readering C.S. Forrester’s 3rd Horatio Hornblower novel.  Really good book, but also pretty informative about how such books work. (more…)

I dreamed that Hell was an exquisitely confected array of interlocking corporations and trusts.  All prepared with the most careful art.

But it mattered little, because there were very few things at all to be owned, most of what little there was was broken, and ignoring the corporate forms altogether the devil jealously kept those few things heaped up in a little pile of trash on which  he sat like a mountebank dragon.

Inspired by the conference theme on wearing your garments–

To riff on Chesterton, everyone has an identity.   When they reject an identity, they don’t cease to have one.  They just start conforming to a different one.

You always dress to belong.  The only question is, to what group do you dress to belong

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On the sweetness of Mormon life.

The young man bashfully starts his talk by making eye contact with the lectern.  He says, I gave a really good talk two years ago for mothers’ day so the bishop asked me again.  The thing is, my mom wrote that talk.