His Majesty was wearing a sour face when he came out to breakfast this morning.

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I did a search for “BYU” on Twitter on Saturday night to look for articles about the Cougars’ thrilling basketball victory over Gonzaga.* Instead I got a steady stream of 17- and 18-year-old Mormon kids either celebrating getting into BYU or lamenting their rejection letters. It’s that time of year. (more…)

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Love is not best considered as a feeling, it is not necessarily something at the forefront of consciousness. For many people, their deepest love is something which structures their life, rather than being at the front of our conscious deliberations for most of the time. Some (I am one of them) are very expressive of love – but this is not a necessity; and some very loving cultures and families and marriages do not go in for statements, hugs or tears.

*

My understanding of the absolute necessity of loving God above all else is metaphysical rather than psychological – that without this, all other loves (including the love of Jesus) lose their meaning and function.

The supremacy of our love for God is that it makes all other loves possible – it makes other loves a matter of eternal significance.

-thus Bruce Charlton.

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“European demographers even have an elegant name for the phenomenon: They call it the Second Demographic Transition (the First being the shift from high birth rates and death rates to low ones that began in Europe in the early industrial era and by now encompasses almost every society). In the schema of the Second Demographic Transition, long, stable marriages are out, and divorce or separation are in, along with serial cohabitation and increasingly contingent liaisons. Not surprisingly, this new environment of perennially conditional, no-fault unions was also seen as ushering in an era of more or less permanent sub-replacement fertility.

“According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency, the probability of marriage before age 50 has been plummeting for European women and men, while the chance of divorce for those who do marry has been soaring. In Belgium—the birth-land of the scholars who initially detected this Second Transition—the likelihood of a first marriage for a woman of reproductive age is now down to 40%, and the likelihood of divorce is over 50%. This means that in Belgium the odds of getting married and staying married are under one in five. A number of other European countries have similar or even lower odds.”

(From “The global flight from the family” by Nicholas Eberstadt, found at AEI and mentioned at Marginal Revolution)

Fast Sundays seem to be for puttering.

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So school teachers’ lesson plans are “trade secrets” exempt from the various Freedom of Information statutes? In a Sith’s eye!

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There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

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Thesis: Winning elections is pointless when the culture and the people themselves are corrupt. A few people at the top won’t be able to change the character of an entire nation. We have to build a better society from the ground up.

Antithesis: Any effective cultural change must go through the centers of power and influence; elites alone have the power to change society. All of the largest social changes of the last century were imposed from the top down.

Possible syntheses: (more…)

My little baby just got out of the hospital. She’s fine now, no need for sympathy, I mention it because I learned something from the experience. (more…)

Our current political debates are a conflict of unrealities. The leftist unreality is that consequences do not exist. The conservative unreality is to act as though the Left does not exist.

How else to explain this?  (more…)

His Majesty has found a new way to eat his porridge: Flavored with shredded ham and Swiss cheese, with a fried egg on top.

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“A driver exited his vehicle with a knife and charged another man, who was critical of his driving, police said. The man who didn’t like the driving pulled a gun and shot the man who had the knife.” (link)

A former stake president explained once that in his calling he was supposed to recommend potential mission presidents to his leaders. Mission presidents needed to be under 60, or up to 65 in cases of exceptionally robust health and vigor.

When the ages for young missionaries were lowered, and thousands more made themselves available for service, and dozens of new missions opened, that required finding more mission presidents than before. One of those tasked was Stephen Hansen, 71 at the time of his call to preside the Utah Salt Lake City Mission. Wednesday, Sister Carol Hansen, his 69-year-old wife died quite unexpectedly, though naturally. It seems likely that President Hansen will be released early.

A few nights ago, in the sleepy haze that follows nightly prayer but precedes full unconsciousness, Mrs. MC and I discussed how we discipline our kids, what we might change, etc. Nowadays, no right-thinking parent ever defends corporal punishment, even if they sometimes practice it. It’s time outs, privileges withheld, that’s it.  (more…)