The caption of the above photo by Gabrielle Shiowzawa in the Moapa Valley Progress reads, “Sierra Bunker works to start a fire with flint and steel while Micaela Leavitt looks on at LDS Logandale Stake Girl’s Camp last week.” That made me smile for reasons that may need a little explaining. (more…)

The Moapa Valley Progress reports on a stake young men’s activity:

“The group, organized by the LDS Logandale Stake, traveled via mountain bike cross-country from Caliente, Nevada, over and through the Mormon Mountain range, and ended near the Carp/Elgin exit at I-15.

“The bicyclists, and support staff in following trucks, traveled along an old mining road covering about 88 miles, and traversed an impressive total of about 6,969 climbing feet. Medical support and mechanical support were also provided the entire distance as the group accomplished the trip over three intense days.” (more…)

This part of Peter Beinart’s attempt to bring liberals to sanity on immigration stood out to me:

Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”

The increasing aggression and stridency of the Left is not monocausal, but surely the sense that the Left didn’t need white voters anymore (specifically, white Christians) helps explain why even supposedly moderate lefties did almost nothing to rein in or dissociate themselves from the extremists on campus, in Black Lives Matter, etc.

I’ve mentioned before how the very possibility of divorce makes marriage itself worse. Marriage requires total dedication, a lot of compromise, and self-denial. And fidelity in marriage requires us not to even acknowledge that there are options besides sticking around. Once you commit to be with someone, you think of every reason why you should be with them. You cultivate the love that you have; you see your spouse through Marriage Goggles.

But once you start thinking about divorce, you take the Marriage Goggles off. You may even put Divorce Goggles on. This is how marriages end.

The Left and Right in this country used to at least try to live with one another. But then the Left’s eye began to wander to those younger, more exotic and exciting immigrants. They work so hard for such low wages! They appreciate the Left’s ideas in a way the Right never could! They make such delicious sandwiches!

But what happens when bringing someone new into the home doesn’t result in the eviction of the old spouse?

Out early this morning, I was fortunate to see a beautiful thin old moon. I first saw it before 4:30, three quarters of an hour after it rose, and an hour and a quarter before sunrise. The moon should be an aid to navigation, but I found it quite a distraction working my way through the roads leaving Dulles airport. Its shadowed side was centered at 2:30 relative to the horizon, and Venus was at the moon’s 1 o’clock. They were also striking in a different way at 5:20, after the sky had begun dawning.

Seeing the moon two days before its new phase of course brought the thought, “Only two more orbits until the eclipse.” So, any plans to catch some shade under the path of totality? For myself, I will spend the weekend camped on the shore of Lake Greenwood in South Carolina, five miles south of the central line. Lake Greenwood is also twenty-five miles from I-26 which crosses the state on a bearing remarkably close to that of the eclipse’s path, so depending on cloud forecasts, we may set out Monday morning for the coast near Charleston or the other way toward Tennessee. Totality reaches South Carolina in the afternoon 2:36:10 and departs her coast at 2:49:01.

For any thinking about what they want to do on Monday, August 21, here is a link to NASA’s helpful webpage: link and alternate link.

“Christensen is a Mormon.” It’s got a Danish great-grandfather pulling a hand cart, courting a girl from a family of fourteen, and praying nightly about the truth of the Book of Mormon until “One evening in October, 1975, as I sat in the chair and opened the book following my prayer, I felt a marvelous spirit come into the room and envelop my body. I had never before felt such an intense feeling of peace and love. I started to cry, and did not want to stop. I knew then, from a source of understanding more powerful than anything I had ever felt in my life, that the book I was holding in my hands was true.”

More good stuff such as dealing with death as a believing Mormon. New Yorker readers will be more edified than usual. Also a bunch of disruptive innovation.

Saturday night I had occasion to try to remember my 38th birthday, and found that I could. On that birthday almost thirteen years ago, I went directly to the temple after work and realized as I drove that it marked 19 years since I received the temple endowment on my 19th birthday, a precise bisection of my life.

As for why I was calling up memory of that day, well, (more…)

Anne Case quoted in a Washington Post interview describes our times in a nutshell:

“In a previous generation, you had the chance of getting a good job with only a high school degree — a job where you could move up the ladder, where there would be what we call ‘returns to experience’: that as you grew older, your wages would rise. (more…)

“The baseball season is only a few days old, but already Stephen Piscotty has had what is going to be one of the weirdest, scariest innings of the year.

“The St. Louis Cardinals outfielder managed to get plunked by a baseball three times — in the elbow, the other elbow and finally the head — in roughly three minutes during the Cardinals’ 2-1 victory over the Chicago Cubs.

“‘ … [T]hat was probably the toughest trip around the bases I’ve ever seen,’ said Cardinals starter Adam Wainwright. ‘You just hope he’s okay.'”

link

[Note: The Cardinals didn’t win; they lost 2-1.]

[Google Images result for “Contemplative Pepe”]

I have a theory about the rise of the Alt Right. Or maybe that’s too specific: I have a theory about why the American Right has become considerably more verbally aggressive, politically incorrect, and nationalistic over the last 2-4 years, a phenomenon that encompasses Trump and Trumpism, the Alt Right, the rise of Breitbart and Steve Bannon, etc. (more…)

“Harry Potter has become a surprisingly obsessive allegorical tool for liberals’ opposition to the Trump Administration [ . . .] I’ll disobey Occam’s Razor and offer another mostly unrelated hypothesis about why Harry Potter stories are such useful allegorical material for contemporary liberals, aside from a general hunger for myth and meaning in a post-religious age.

“Harry Potter, especially the movies, is about the legitimacy of authority that comes from schools.”

–Spotted Toad

(more…)

If I were a lawyer working in Phoenix with mostly Spanish-speaking clients, I would try to get for my office the phone number 602-214-0857, though any number in the range from 0783 to 0931 would be close enough. And I’d have a 1 kilogram silicon sphere on my desk, and somewhere where everyone could see it, a 22.4 liter bottle of gas (any gas, ideally). The thought of it makes me want to order a burrito at Chipotle and say “yes” when asked if I want to pay extra.

So, who does have that number?

His Majesty keeps a small trove of candy in the cabinet above the microwave.

(more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life. (more…)

Bryce Harper wed Kayla Varner. The bride was Nevada’s high school soccer Player of the Year in 2009 and 2011.

Brandon Flowers wrote an opinion piece on parking valets.