It looks like the men and boys of the priesthood will no longer gather in bodies of a few or several dozen thoughout the land to listen to their leaders cheer and admonish them from Salt Lake City. (link)

“Therefore, he took Moses out of their midst, and the Holy Priesthood also.”—Doctrine and Covenants 84:25

Finishing up with back-to-school night at Ridgeview Middle School, a middle-aged woman in a skirt with a name tag walked down the hall toward me and past me. All the teachers’ name tags were white with black lettering, but this one was black with white lettering. When a bishop or stake president shows up at his eighth-graders’ school, his title is Mister, and his wife’s is Mrs. The call of a mission president and his wife is full-time, though, and even when attending her children’s needs, she is Sister to all she meets, to the saints and especially to the gentiles.

[A blog comment of mine from nine years ago. It came to mind this morning, reading a Mormon globe-trotter lauding her un-Mormon economic choices.]

Riding in trains across Pennsylvania these past months [first half of 2004], I became interested in learning a little more about the Amish. Farming is their main occupation, and many of them use older, horse-powered methods. An interesting point for what follows is that at the beginning of the 20th Century their agricultural practices and lack of financial opulence were not nearly as distinctive as they are now. They stayed as they were and the surrounding world changed.

In many American communities, it is the common practice for husband and wife to both be employed. It wasn’t that way forty years ago, but it is now. Among Latter-day Saints, though, generally only the husband is employed, in keeping with the guide of church leaders. This will have the result of Latter-day Saint families having less money than they would otherwise and being overall a poorer people.

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Concerns regarding brutality by the Henderson Police Department have been raised before on this website. Now a resident says his Third Amendment rights were violated. (link)

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I’m going to swim out into deep waters in this post. Stand by with lifesavers. (more…)

Listening to a snippet on the radio of General Hayden going on about the terrible blow to intelligence gathering that was dealt by Snowden’s interview with the Guardian, I began to wonder if the whole point of the official response has been to drive terrorist plotters away from simpler communication systems. Not being able to use phones and e-mail like a normal person would be a huge hassle. (more…)

Driving down a narrow, rural highway seventy miles west of Washington, D.C., I slow for the tiny Virginia town I’m passing through. A banner on the side of a commercial building proclaims “WE’RE FASTING TODAY.” How interesting. I will be fasting with my LDS Ward the next day. Is there a special need this community is rallying around. Is a town fast a recurring thing?

The seconds it takes to think about all that brings the car closer to the banner, and I glance at it again. The F is actually a T, and WE’RE is actually WINE. WINE TASTING TODAY. Oh. That makes more sense. Too bad.

“We seem to be moving inexorably from a society where organized religion dominates issues of morality—and mortality—but not to the secular promised land of reason. Rather, we are orienting ourselves to a more personal spirituality, at once vague and autonomous. Ordinary sinners increasingly don’t believe that they deserve judgment, let alone hell. Theists and atheists alike dispute any earthly authority’s right to judge, and both feel NDEs give them reason to hope for something beyond the grave. And many believers confidently expect that God isn’t judgmental either.”—closing of a Maclean’s piece by by Brian Bethune

“Libertarians think they can get a Victorian-sized state without Victorian attitudes, but they’re deluded. If you really want a small state that doesn’t tell you what to do and gobble up half your income then start going to church, get involved in voluntary activities, tell the vicar or priest to stop droning on about the cuts and climate change and tell him to start shouting about sin and fornication. Repress yourself, you’ll find it’s good for your wallet.”—Ed West in the Telegraph

“White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday that President Obama called California Attorney General Kamala Harris (D) late Thursday to apologize for his remark that she was the ‘best-looking attorney general in the country.'” Ah, this may explain things: “The daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican-American father, she has been described as ‘the female Barack Obama.'” Was our President just affirming that he, too, is reminded of himself when looking at Miss Harris?

(Washington Post links here and here)

A 31-year-old woman died from heart failure due to drinking Coca-Cola says a coroner in New Zealand. However it took six to ten liters a day to do her in. Ten liters of Coke provides 970 mg of caffeine, twice the level of daily consumption that is considered toxic. Also 1 kg of sugar, though the deceased was of normal weight, apparently due to not eating or drinking anything other than Coke. So Coke will kill you if you drink two gallons a day and use it as your only form of nourishment. (more…)

I spent most of Saturday in a high school gym taking in an end-of-season JV county wrestling tournament, and I wondered if there will be such a tournament in twenty years. Dozens of colleges have dropped wrestling programs, and though only a fraction of the couple hundred boys I watched would be expected to go on to compete with a college team, even if all the programs from twenty years ago still existed, cutting down the prospects for the best has a way of percolating down to diminish the possibilities for everyone.

This morning we learn that wrestling will no longer be an Olympic sport, which is a bit dumbfounding. Can you really borrow the word “Olympic” for a sports festival and not have wrestling? (more…)

There’s a nice little AP article marking the nine years since Opportunity landed on Mars. In the years since, the rover has traversed 22 miles. Coincidentally, the astronauts of Apollo 17 also drove their rover 22 miles during their three days on the lunar surface forty years ago. Fender repairs using map pages, duct tape, and (very importantly) gloved hands were part of those three days. Remote probes’ computers are reprogrammed frequently to compensate for degrading systems, but it’s not quite the same thing. (more…)

Consider first Stan Ridgway’s “The Drowning Man”.

Is there anybody out there
That can save a drowning man?
He’s been out there past forever,
Left his footprints in the sand.

If you made it to 1:32 in that song video, and you’re a Latter-day Saint, the next nine seconds borrowed from Richard L. Evans greatest hit, “Man’s Search for Happiness” (3:21), may have amused you.

This is the way to peace and happiness and the fulness of everlasting life. It is your Heavenly Father’s way.

No coroner has ever really examined the corpse of an Imperial officer choked by the so-called “force.” It might take some of the shine off the mystique otherwise. Consider for example, recent million dollar lottery winner Urooj Khan who died the day after receiving his winnings. (more…)