“For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

Enjoy these goodies. (more…)

Once upon a time there was a kingdom so orderly that its laws and institutions had all sorts of branchings and variations, like a healthy, growing tree.

One of those odd little variations was the Christmas King. (more…)

I’m laying on the couch when my toddler asks if she can lay down by me.

“Sure.”  Pause.  “Do you want a story?”

“Yeah!”

I start in on Aladdin’s Lamp.  I am at the part where the evil uncle magician has taken Aladdin out into the wilderness, where they find a crack opening in the ground.  “And at the bottom of the crack they saw a gate . . .”

“No, a penguin!”

“What!  Why?”

“Because the crack!  The crack!  And they’re hunting the penguin and she has a mommy penguin and the mommy penguin gives her crackers!”

. . . .

Then my young school age son asks me if I know about the Chief Judge Holiday.  I don’t.  It’s Christmas, he tells me.

Again, “what!  Why?”

“Santa Claus, Dad! I thought you knew that!”

Next time I get my kids’ brains wired, I’m not just hiring just some guy.

This week in Sunday School we talked about the life of Christ. It was a remarkable lesson, as any discussion of His life should be. In the course of our discussion, we read two of my favorite passages of scripture: Alma 7:10-13 and Mosiah 3:5-8. As we talked about everything that the Savior did for us during His life, a thought occurred to me that has come to me before but is worth repeating. We often talk of Jesus’ sacrifice at Gethsemane and Golgotha – He voluntarily suffered and died for us. But His sacrifice was and is far greater than His death. He faced choices every day, just like we do – how to spend His time, how to react to individuals (some hostile, some curious, some penitent, etc.), what to say, how to respond to temptation and disappointment and pain. The list goes on forever. All the choices that we make, and more, were presented to Him. And He chose to exercise His agency in each of those choices to live a stainless, perfect life. Now THAT is a sacrifice. Far greater than dying for something – living for it first.

-Guest post from Friend of the JG JRL-in-AZ

I had a dream last night.

The Dream

In the dream, there was a residence school for the extremely gifted run at the highest levels of society.   Generals and CEOs and Senators were all involved in or interested in the school in one way or another.  The school included teenagers and young adults and even some adults.  K through Postpostdoc.

The most unusual feature of the school was that students would abruptly become “sane.” (more…)

In the Anthropological Time Machine, you can only communicate with other times and only to the extent the knowledge won’t change history.  Motto:–“At least you will know.”  A surprisingly large number of people are still able to use it.

A man from our time was chatting with a man from 20,000 A.D.  (more…)

I went out in the dark to bring in some more pecan logs for the fire.  I heard an owl hoot.  I hadn’t heard it before.  It must be newly arrived in the pecan orchard.

I don’t know the word for the emotion I felt.  But I felt something.  The deep texture of reality touched me.

And I thought that modernism tried to simplify and strip down life to a few abstractions and universal principles.  It was the era of “machines for living,” which inevitably means eliminating complexity and texture and variation to make the management task easier.

Which was unsatisfying.

So the next phase was post-modernism, where we added back variation and texture and complexity, but only at the user choice.  Whereas life was supposed to be a machine before, now it was a machine with lots and lots of user options, or as the insanity increased, maybe even without the underlying machine–user options all the way down.

Modernism is simple conceptual games like Pong.  Post-modernism is the modern gamer market, where you can modify your character in innumerable ways, preselect all sorts of options, and download various skins and music to taste.

But postmodernism is all just you.

Which is unsatisfying.

I did not opt for the owl hoot.  The smell of the pecan smoke I did not create and could not have imagined, and neither the chill in the air, or the stars.

Housecarls at Hastings

God is first described as a father and second as a king.  We could stand to be more patriarchal than we are, but we at least have experience of fatherhood and take God’s fatherhood seriously. Small r-republicans that we are, we ignore exploring His monarchy.

Let’s fix that.

We in the Church are an elite group who are oath-bound to God and to each other.  We live a stricter rule than most Christians.  The God to whom we have pledged everything in return gives us magnificent gifts and in certain places marvelous titles of power.  He calls us his noble and great ones and has sworn fellowship with us.  Because of us, he also promises the same to our ancestors and our descendants.

We are God’s housecarls, we are his warband.  He has ennobled us, us and our whole lines.

From Scott Alexander’s review of Inadequate Equilibria:

Or, to take a ridiculous example from the text that will obviously never happen:

Suppose that there’s a magical tower that only people with IQs of at least 100 and some amount of conscientiousness can enter, and this magical tower slices four years off your lifespan. The natural next thing that happens is that employers start to prefer prospective employees who have proved they can enter the tower, and employers offer these employees higher salaries, or even make entering the tower a condition of being employed at all. The natural next thing that happens is that employers start to demand that prospective employees show a certificate saying that they’ve been inside the tower. This makes everyone want to go to the tower, which enables somebody to set up a fence around the tower and charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to let people in.

Now, fortunately, after Tower One is established and has been running for a while, somebody tries to set up a competing magical tower, Tower Two, that also drains four years of life but charges less money to enter. Unfortunately, there’s a subtle way in which this competing Tower Two is hampered by the same kind of lock-in that prevents a jump from [Facebook to a competing social network]. Initially, all of the smartest people headed to Tower One. Since Tower One had limited room, it started discriminating further among its entrants, only taking the ones that have IQs above the minimum, or who are good at athletics or have rich parents or something. So when Tower Two comes along, the employers still prefer employees from Tower One, which has a more famous reputation. So the smartest people still prefer to apply to Tower One, even though it costs more money. This stabilizes Tower One’s reputation as being the place where the smartest people go.

In other words, the signaling equilibrium is a two-factor market in which the stable point, Tower One, is cemented in place by the individually best choices of two different parts of the system. Employers prefer Tower One because it’s where the smartest people go. Smart employees prefer Tower One because employers will pay them more for going there. If you try dissenting from the system unilaterally, without everyone switching at the same time, then as an employer you end up hiring the less-qualified people from Tower Two, or as an employee, you end up with lower salary offers after you go to Tower Two. So the system is stable as a matter of individual incentives, and stays in place. If you try to set up a cheaper alternative to the whole Tower system, the default thing that happens to you is that people who couldn’t handle the Towers try to go through your new system, and it acquires a reputation for non-prestigious weirdness and incompetence.

Sometimes the towers take more than four years off your life.  Sometimes they destroy your chance for family.

Some towers offer a devilish bargain when you walk in the door.  They will give you your four years of life back–but you have to agree to drink and drug until you can tolerate strangers having sex with you. But this isn’t wildly recognized as a devilish bargain because the devil is clever.  He doesn’t offer it as a bargain at all.  Instead, there is a cultural expectation that anesthetizing yourself like a whore to let your body be used like a whore is the exciting part of Tower Time.  It is as if there were a widespread notion that the best part of receiving riches and power from the devil was the chance to offload your soul.

There are a few niche towers where in exchange for not losing four years of your life you get marriage and maybe a first child.  These are viewed as retrograde and oppressive.

There is a rumor that there used to be a mythic tower where you didn’t lose four years of life if you sought beauty and wisdom.  The employers don’t like the rumor, because if there were another reason to go to the Towers other than getting a good job,  you couldn’t count on Tower alums having the proper careerist mindset.  The Towers hate the rumors as a vampire hates garlic.

God bless Dr. Charlton.  If he did not exist, we would have to invent him (but would be unable to).

Our starting point should be that the basic inescapable features of life are meant and have a point and a meaning in the divine plan.  Things like breathing, eating, talking, sleep, and elimination. (more…)

And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter. There are in the modern world an admirable class of persons who do long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.  William Morris and his followers shoed how much brighter were the dark ages than the age of Manchester.  Mr. W.B. Yeats frames his steps in prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice to the forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear.  Mr. George Moore collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved.  There are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian games.  There there is about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas.

It is painful to regard human nature in such a light, but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore does not wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight.  It is even possible that Mr. W.B. Yeats never pulls crackers.

If so, where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions?  Here is a solid and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar.  If this is so, let them be very certain of this, that they are the kind of people who in the time of the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of the Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the time of the Olympian games would have thought the Olympian games vulgar.  Nor can there be an reasonable doubt that they were vulgar.

-thus G.K. Chesterton

The problem with “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” is the “for tomorrow we die.”It is the justification.  Seizing a last few defiant gasps of happiness before the great dark is a lie.  Rejoicing now in anticipation of greater rejoicing later is the true rule of the universe.

The illegal alien who murdered Kate Steinle got off.  Because he was an illegal alien; because she was so obviously a core American; because he murdered her for no real reason other than that she was a core American, and he was not; because his murdering was an inconvenient fact.

Justice was done.  Social justice was done.  He murdered her, but he did not social justice murder her.  So he is guilty, but he is not social justice guilty.  He walks free on all those charges.*

He has more rights in my country than I do. He has more rights in this country than you do.  We would not walk free.  We only have the right to  justice.  He has the right to social justice.

Who, whom.

We are the whom.

That is the definition of social justice.

America’s 200-year vacation from history is over.  It doesn’t matter if you agree or not.  Reality doesn’t need your consent.

Classical liberal regimes die this way.  The Right in Weimar Germany.  Both Right and Left in Republican Spain.  First their wacko fringes kill and go unpunished  Then the killings get organized.  Ultimately they get official.

*But not completely free, because hilariously the California jury couldn’t forgive the ritual impurity of handling a firearm.

After the requisite soul-searching and angst and all that, Nephi cut off Laban’s head, snicker-snack. He probably did not know at the time that he was setting up a type of Christ. (more…)

I think authenticity is the modern day version of the Puritan doctrine of election.

Remember that Puritan Calvinists believed that only the elect could be saved and that election was a pure act of will by God.   This meant you could not achieve election by your own efforts.  But it also meant that you could not really know when you were elected.  The resulting anxiety drove a lot of Puritan behavior.

Now, our modern Puritans want to be authentic.  But how to be authentic?  If you are trying to be authentic, you aren’t authentic.

The resulting anxiety drives a lot of their behavior. (more…)