I was inspired by Bruce C.’s recent post on poverty and Steve Reed’s comment on the scriptures yielding multiple interpretations.  Specifically, I was inspired to think about the parable of the Good Samaritan.

I do not reject the standard interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the point is that everyone is our “neighbor.”  I accept the authority of both tradition and the prophets.

But there is another interpretation, which actually fits the story better. (more…)

For the last eight years, any disagreement with policies of the current administration were viewed as signs of racism by those inclined to view matters that way. Had the other major presidential candidate prevailed earlier this month, there would have been more of the same, with sexism taking the place of racism as the secret sin motivating any disagreement with the next president. However, with the president-elect we have the script has a little tweak: any agreement with any policy of the next president will be because he is a fascist, and those agreeing with him (about anything) are OK with that. For example (link):

“The Obama administration turned a deaf ear to us and frankly, with President-elect Trump, we feel things are going to move in the right direction,” Matthew LeBretton, New Balance’s vice president of public affairs, told the Wall Street Journal.

The answer was in response to a question about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, an initiative led by President Obama and staunchly opposed by Trump. Boston-based New Balance, the only major company that still makes athletic shoes in the United States, has said the trade policy would hinder its business and help competitors who operate overseas.

Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont also opposed the deal.

But that didn’t stop opponents of Trump from turning on New Balance altogether and accusing the company of formally endorsing not just his stance on TPP, but entire platform.

A beautiful woman, ice cream, little kids — the experience always exceeds your memory.

But if you have the experience often enough for your memory to be equal to it, the quality of the memory itself declines.

There is a way out of the dilemma. It is time and eternity.

His Majesty was in a happy mood this morning.

(more…)

[Mafalda is an Argentine comic strip that ran in newspapers from 1964 to 1973.]

God expresses Himself differently to some of us.  Whether because we can take more of Him than others, or whether because He has to condescend even further to our particular level, I cannot say.

Until Sunday, my latest example was in the temple, where laughing at myself brought me into harmony with the Spirit, who was also laughing at me. (more…)

My week under the sea has ended, my first time under way though I have been serving the navy as a hydrodynamicist for the past dozen years. I may share bits of the experience if there is interest, but for now here are two experiences:

I: The last full day at sea was given to surface maneuvering off the California coast. Toward the end of the day, I requested and received permission from the chief of the watch to visit the bridge atop the sail. He assigned a sailor to help me into a harness, and I climbed up top, and spent a half hour standing there with two officers and one crewman, watching the sun lower and set as we cruised past a large island at 10 knots and the waves washed around us. Twenty minutes after going back down, I noticed some feeling within me and examined what it was. “I feel . . . serene.”

II: A couple hours after coming back in, I sat in the crew mess, eating pizza and listening to the World Series with a dozen crewmen. It felt American.

“Is there any particular scripture story you want to read tonight, bud?”

“How about the one where King David’s son gets his hair caught on a tree and is killed?” You rack your brain. King David’s son? Absalom? Is that how Absalom dies? Yeah, that sounds familiar. But we only read that story one time, and it was at least six months ago. How does he remember it? At first you feel pride at having such a bright little boy, but then it hits you: If he can remember that, what else does he remember? You resolve to start behaving yourself better, lest your misdeeds be recorded on your Permanent Record. (more…)

Stopped at an intersection, I heard a noise to my right, and there were four middle-aged women on the corner waving signs for the congressional candidate they favor, four weeks before election day, when it’s appropriate and good for citizens to participate in political campaigning. One of the weaknesses of the internet age is the weakening of local community, including newspapers and politics. Instead the nation obsesses inordinately on the one election choice we all have in common, electing the U.S. president, and does so for two years.

From an interview with Dave Keuning, Killers guitarist:

In 2008, Rolling Stone said you were saving money to book a trip on Virgin’s first commercial space flight. Is that something you’re still wanting to do?

It’s something I’m still interested in, but Virgin has kept pushing that date back. They said it was going to be 2010, and then ’11, and then ’12, and they still haven’t done it. It’s actually made me a bit nervous about being on the first one. Whenever it happens, I’ll probably let other people do it first for a few years because I don’t want to be the one who blows up.

Near the top of a newspaper article about meerkats’ murderous ways: “The team of Spanish biologists and geneticists behind the study did not set out to point a bloody paw at the meerkat, however. They were more interested in plumbing the evolutionary history of lethal violence, comparing murder rates for 1,024 different types of mammals.”

1024 is 100,0000,0000 in binary. With the numbering starting at zero instead of one, so that the ordinal of the last item, the 11,1111,1111th, is a ten-bit identifier.

Monday night Mrs. Clinton brought up Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe who Trump was mean to, and bragged that she is now a U.S. citizen and will be a Clinton voter. Apparently, Miss Machado has lived a fairly wild and sordid life since her dealings with Trump twenty years ago. Not really the sort of person that candidates of the past would have pointed out by name before a national audience as supporters of theirs. But it’s not the past. It’s now, and as Mr. Trump asked, “Where did you find this?” Part of the answer is that Trump has contributed a lot over the decades, and more each decade than the one before, to creating our Kardashian era in which people like Miss Machado are easy to find. Unpleasantly hard to avoid, really.

So here we are with one candidate who thinks it’s a nifty thing that a woman who posed naked in magazines, served as the getaway driver for her homicidal boyfriend, and threatened to kill a judge has been given citizenship and a vote—because she finds some small advantage in this. The other candidate is married to a woman who posed naked for magazines, thinks that is normal, and has performed an oversized labor toward normalizing public depravity.

Mormons have a very broad and democratic collection of biographies of their 19th Century predecessors. This is due to two causes. The first is our belief that family bonds have eternal significance which leads us to seek familiarity with our dead and to leave records that will allow our descendants to know us. The second is that the first Latter-day Saints felt they were eyewitnesses of something important and wanted to leave a testimony of it. Thanks to these factors, it is easy to find research on hundreds of second-tier associates of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and tens of thousands of multi-page biographical essays on nobodies written either first-hand by the nobodies themselves or by their children. These are of most interest to direct descendants of these people, so today most of those 19th Century Mormons are each known in detail to a few percent of present-day Mormons, but we like hearing the stories of others’ kin too.

A few of my favorites: (more…)

A traveler on a long journey came to a ford.  Due to recent rains, the stream was swollen to a flood.  The traveler was perplexed to know what to do and exercised his mind for a solution. (more…)

Last night Elder Cook spoke to the young adults of the LDS Church. My two older sons attended the broadcast in our stake center. (more…)