We are corrupt.

We are so corrupt and we are ripening for destruction.

We are anxiously busy killing ourselves.

This drug may have some real benefits, but I have utterly lost confidence in so-called medical experts.

Something that I think might help a lot of people from President Nelson’s talk.

(Paraphrasing from my notes)– The desire and the struggle to end sin is itself the end of sin.  The rest is God’s timing.

That blighter Fink-Nottle won the Scripture Prize with his sleeves positively bursting with lists of the Kings of Judah–absolutely!–and on the strength of it they are making him the candidate to stand for MP in the local hustings and the Telegraph has consulting testing integrity experts who say that his blasted skullduggery doesn’t qualify as cheating.  It makes a common man of the people like Bertram Wooster dashed shirty.  I mean to say, one rule for the toffs and another for a hard-working blue collar fellow like yours truly!

So argues a team of Spanish researchers in a splashy new documentary.

Reasons for skepticism:

• “splashy new documentary”
• There appears to be some uncertainty about whether the remains they tested are Columbus’ or not
• They haven’t released their data
• In Spain this probably qualifies as a subversive result and people love subversive results so much these days that they throw skepticism and integrity out the window

That said, it could be true.

I had a peculiar nightmare a few days ago.

***

I dreamed that about ten years older than I now am, I was called to be the prophet.  I felt a suffocating weight of responsibility.  I decided I needed to be healthy and vigorous throughout the term of the calling so I determined that in a year’s time and every year thereafter I would swim to the California shore from an island off the coast (in my dream, Catalina Island).  This resolution would make sure I kept up with exercise and health even in the middle of the day to day press of the job, and it would also mean that when I became absolutely too frail to do my duties, I would free up the office for someone else, by dieing.

I dreamed I did my first swim.  It was hard and desperate, but I made it.

Same thing the next year and for many more years.  It was never easy.

Finally I was getting well on in years, 80s or 90s, something like that, and feeble.  I had a feeling I might not make it this time.  I start out swimming.  There’s a boat trailing along with my wife and some Church people.  The water is cold and choppy.  Waves keep slapping me in the face.  I am so cold.  The sky is gray.  About half way through I can’t go further on, I start going under, the water is all around me filling my mouth, I can’t see, I can’t breathe, and a hand reaches down and grabs my arm.  I convulsively grab back.  They hoist me out of the water onto the boat.  We then proceed to the shore.  I am hunched over under a blanket and brooding.  I realize that my plan was stupid all along.  Of course if I were drowning someone would try to rescue me.  And in the extremity of drowning, of course I would take the help.

We are camped out along the California beach that night.  I sneak off and steal a rowboat.  I row across to the island.  It is very dark, no lights, no stars.  I slide into the black water and start shivering immediately.  I start to swim.  It hurts so bad, I am at my last strength almost immediately.  About 1/3 of the way across, I drown.  I can’t breathe, I can only barely twitch my limbs, I am sinking under, the water swirls around me, I am going under under under

..    and then I woke up gasping.

It gives me the shivers writing about it now.

Here

Here’s a general conference retrospective for t he October 2024 semiannual.

I personally received less inspiration than normal but what I did receive was directly aimed at the concerns I brought in.

What you get here isn’t the inspiration.  It’s notes, some of them idiosyncratic and none the produce of mature reflection.

(more…)

Please enjoy this conference.  Pray for the spirit of revelation to rest upon God’s prophets and God’s people.

Source

The Anglosphere is about 1.5 to 1.6 with Canada worse.  That suggests that in two generations half of the people you think of as England or Australia or America will be gone.  Unless birth rates keep dropping, which they will.

Spain is at 1.1.  Each generation halving.  I feel grief.

Every country everywhere has radically dropping birth rates with no end in sight.

We Saints are following the same trend, just a few years behind..  More temples, less people. I sometimes hear optimists and visionaries say someday every stake will have its own temple!  Man, I hope so.  But I wince because what I am afraid I hear is someday every temple will have a stake.  Wo to him who says all is well in Zion.

Our minds our set up to think of population destruction in terms of deaths.  But the scale of population destruction happening here is the equivalent of a massive universal bloodshed without end.

The Book of Mormon populations died by the sword.  What if they died like we do?
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There once was a bird who wanted to go higher and higher.

The bird spent much of its time beating up into the sky.  Its wings grew strong.  It also became a master of currents and convection.  It grew wiser and subtler in its knowledge of air.  It even, in its desire to go higher, learned things and did things for high quality food surfaces–so that it could spend longer times trying to get higher before it had to come back down–than any bird had before.

But it grew old.

As it lay dying, struggling to launch itself for one last try, and failing, a wise old creature came by and told it sadly that in fact the air grew thinner the higher up one went and this is why the bird had in the days of its great success only been able to eke out a few more feet of height in each attempt.  In fact, the creature explained, eventually the air grew too thin to breathe and vanished altogether.

“Then I will make more air,” the bird defiantly exclaimed.  The dying bird struggled once more to get off the ground.

A voice from heaven said, “that is right.  Soon you will come to a place where I have already created infinite air.  The muscle you gained in  your glory I will return to you along with all your knowledge.  You will finally be able to soar like you were meant to.”

Mormon adds a note in 3rd Nephi 5:20

I am Mormon, and a pure descendant of Lehi.

He says ‘Lehi,’ not ‘Nephi.’  Mormon was aware that a lot of crossbreeding had happened with the Zoramites, the Mulekites, and with the surrounding peoples who were not descendants of Lehi.  Though Mormon here seems to be acknowledging some Lehite Lamanite ancestry for himself.  It may be Mormon’s Lamanite ancestry that  makes him fair to the Lamanites from time to time despite being of the sole survivors of a genocide himself.

The second notable thing here is that lineage was very important for the Book of Mormon peoples, especially for elites.

Which leads me to my extremely tentative working hypothesis about race in the Book of Mormon.

(more…)

There’s an ongoing story about a Kansas State fan joining the Church which may be the weirdest thing you’ve heard all week.  It’s weird enough that I feel Joseph Smith and Brigham  Young would approve.

Last week Kansas State football came to BYU.  They were highly ranked and expected to trounce the unranked Cougs.  Instead BYU did the trouncing, 38-9.  With a fair amount of what looked like divine intervention along the way.

(Link if the embed doesn’t work)

It so happens that before the game some Kansas State fan was so confident he said that if the Y won he would get baptized.  He got a lot of joshing after the game which he silenced by saying, ‘nope, I’m meeting with the missionaries and reading the Book of Mormon now.’

https://x.com/koltonemaw/status/1838766011337539598

Link

All-knowing Cougarboard has been able to verify at least part of his story.

My theory is that this guy was already meeting with the missionaries and the whole thing was just a lark by him, but who knows?

I picture K-State fans in heaven cussing up a storm when this kid made his rash promise and they looked over to see the angels of intervention smirking at them.

(more…)

The winnowing of modernity accelerates. In thirty years, you will be either a radiant saint or a raving addict. Your attention is already the apple of discord over which every corporate body (government, MEGACORP, religion) on earth fights. The “rules”, such as they are, will be evolved to aggressively exploit simple compliance. If you have in place discipline and the ability to be disagreeable, then you have in place at least some defenses. AI will only sharpen the assault on your attention. (The “open” in “OpenAI” must be of the same nature as an “open marriage”.)

-thus a friend of the JG

On the sweetness of Mormon life

In your small rural ward on the high plains, its your resident Britisher’s turn to speak. She talks about when she was a free-spirited hippy student at art school back in England. She had a dream. She was walking with two dowsing sticks. The sticks came together and light erupted from the ground. The light went before her to a quarry. When she went down to the quarry, she found that the rock walls were painted with animals and trees. Then Christ came out to greet her.

After she graduated, she got a job at a natural history museum. She worked in a kind of open air well in the center of the building with exhibits and displays all around her. She decided to check out the local LDS church for curiosity. She tried to sneak in inconspicuouly but didn’t succeed (hippy, torn jeans, tank top, frizzy fro, one wonders why). As the missionaries were talking to her one day she learned about the stick of Judah and the stick of Joseph. The Spirit told her that was her dream.

She then went old school LDS talking about light both physics and metaphysics. Her inner artist was showing. She concluded—this was obviously very important to her—that we spirits had come to earth to be bodies because bodies gave us more ways to interact with light.

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.

Czeslaw Milos

Or for our mediocrity