Thermopylae probably happened around this time of year.

Honor to those who in the life they lead

define and guard a Thermopylae.

Never betraying what is right,

consistent and just in all they do

but showing pity also, and compassion;

generous when they are rich, and

when they are poor,

still generous in small ways,

still helping as much as they can;

always speaking the truth,

without hating those who lie.

And even more honor is due to them

when they foresee (as many do foresee)

that in the end Ephialtis will make his appearance,

that the Medes will break through after all.

— Cavafy

This was a really cool summary of current trends in biology.  The conclusion, about agency, will be of particular interest to the Saints.

Yesterday had some synchronicity.  We are currently reading The Boys in the Boat as a family.  I posted a quote from it yesterday.  It’s a book about the collegiate rowing team that won the Olympics in 1936 but also a book about Joe Rantz, one of the rowers, struggling to achieve the perfect trust necessary for perfect rowing after a hardscrabble adolescence where he was abandoned by his dad at his stepmother’s behest during the Great Depression.  She is the classic wicked stepmother, though the author works hard to give you perspective enough to see why she fell into the trap she did.  You end up seeing her as more pathetic and meager than villainous.

Not Joe Rantz’s stepmother

Then yesterday I was linked to this mini-essay on wicked stepmothers.   The writer first makes a point that the correlation between unrelated men in the home and physical or sexual child abuse is high.  About 50x more likely if I recall (though still less likely than not).  “Unrelated men in the home” = Mom’s boyfriends or Mom’s new husband.  The Wicked Stepdad (or more commonly, the Wicked Stepboyfriend).  She then says that similarly the stepmother is much more likely than a biological mother to be emotionally abusive.  Its why wicked stepmothers pop up so much in fairy tales.  She lays out a series of mechanisms and steps which are point for point what happened in The Boys in the Boat.

Note: the statistics do not  mean that any given stepmother or stepfather, or even that stepfathers and stepmothers in general, are likely to be wicked.  People have a hard time with statistics emotionally so I think its important to point that out.  Most abusers are steps–true.  Most steps are abusers–false.

A rowing coach is looking at his freshman tryouts and musing on the coming years.  Victories?  Losses?  Championships?  The Olympics?

All that Ulbrickson knew, had to start here on this dock, with the boys who were now wandering off into the waning light.  Somewhere among them–those green and untested boys–lay much of the stock from which he would have to select a crew capable of going all the way.  The trick would be to find which few of them had the potential for raw power, the nearly superhuman stamina, the  indomitable willpower, and the intellectual capacity necessary to master the details of technique.  And which of them, coupled improbably with all those other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in the wake of the shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the boys in the boat.

-The Boys in the Boat

Thanks to the felicities of the LDS website’s ever-improving search function, I messed up last time in counting the references to ‘wives and children’ in the Book of Mormon.

The phrase ‘wives and children’* appears 32 times in the Book of Mormon.  25 times in what I call Nephite Modernity, or the Nephite Warring States period, the books of Mosiah and Alma.

The great majority of those are references to defending wives and children as a justification for warfare.

Outside of Nephite Modernity, the two ‘wives and children’ references that refer to defense are Mormon 2:23, where Mormon uses wives and children rhetoric to inspire this soldiers.  It kinda works–“and my words did arouse them somewhat to vigor.”  And Ether 14:2, where each Jaredite man has to sleep with his word to defend what is his during the night, including wife and children.  Its pretty clear that fighting to defend their homes was a huge part of Nephite ideology during the Mosiah-Alma period.  The other two references are, I suspect, Mormon being a Captain Moroni fanboy.  The first one is clearly Mormon modeling his speech on what worked during the Nephite glory days and the Ether chapter could be a Mormon summary where he inserted his own concept of what the Jaredites were fighting for, though I don’t know for sure.

*or some variant thereon, such as ‘our wives and our children’.

* Some decisions only success can justify.  We don’t like that because we want the rightness of our acts to be judged by our intentions. Even so.  Power is good, and holding power only lends more weight to preaching, so giving up power in order to preach is one of those decisions. In the case of Nephi Helaman’s son the decision succeeded spectacularly.  He and his brother converted thousands in areas they could not have gone to had they still been Nephite leaders

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The gospel is for comfort?   Yes, but not just for comfort.   Not by half.

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I prefer not to.

A young man, mission bound, gave a talk yesterday on how to become a real expert in something and then related it to the gospel.  The answer wasn’t credentials.

His first three insights were practice, study, working in an area where the underlying phenomenon is repeatable and not just random.  These all had obvious applications to the gospel.

But his fourth suggestion for expertise was feedback.  That was less obvious how we go about getting gospel feedback.  I suppose the answer is to lean into priesthood interviews.  But also to direct your prayers that way.  I usually report in prayers and ask for help with failures and for advice on what next, but I rarely ask for an evaluation of how well I did.

With the recent contretemps of the Aunt-majority parliament in Blighty (criminals out of the Big House, social media posters in), ditto similar hijinks in la Aunt France (the Telegram chappie arrested on the tarmac), one wonders if a sprightly young toff of impeccable pedigree and impeccable taste should not prolong his sojourn abroad?  It’s dashed unpleasant, being in the chokey.

Jeeves asseveres that the company of the other Drones would enliven the otherwise dreary confines and what not, and no doubt the good fellow is right.  Still and all, one prefers to do one’s own enlivening.

Last time, we noticed an interesting feature of Alma’s highly-crafted advice to his sons.  His advice to Corianton the fornicator refers to murder at the beginning and then returns to talking about death as a blessing from the Father towards the end.  In other words, we have good death and bad death.

I don’t usually think of death as a good thing (and still don’t really) but Alma seems to be saying that receiving a mortal body and a mortal death are both necessary preconditions to the resurrection.  I don’t know why he thinks that, more study needed.

Regardless, a sermon contrasting bad death and good death puts me irresistibly in mind of a virtue chart.

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Corianton went off fornicating on his mission and Alma calls him on it.  But even the rebuke portion of his sermon is pretty doctrinal.  Alma starts by situating fornication on the scale of serious sins.  First denying the Holy Ghost, he says.  Second, murder.  But next to those two, its fornication.  Rhetorically effective, but also interesting in itself for us and it sets up the later parts of Alma’s discourse to Corianton in ways that aren’t obvious to a casual reader.

Interesting in itself– notice how each part of that trifecta of serious sins corresponds to a part of the complete human, body and spirit.

Denying the Holy Ghost  —————>  Spirit

Murder  ————————————->  Sins against the end of the body

Fornication  ——————————->  Sins against the beginning of the body

If you wanted to stretch even further, you might analogize each of these three to a member of the Godhead.  Denying the Holy Ghost obviously corresponds to the Holy Ghost, Resurrection is an obvious role for the Son which corresponds with life creation/the (re)beginning of the body), but is God associated with death in some way?  It seems fanciful.  On the other hand, we are reading something fancy here.  Look at the elaborate beautiful chiasmus in Alma 36.  The idea that Alma’s discourses to his son are highly structured literary works is not something we should reject.  More to the point, the rest of Alma’s sermon talks repeatedly about Christ as the Resurrector and mentions several times that men are “appointed to die” and then in Chapter 42 says that it was “God” who appointed death.  That is very suggestive.

One of the blog’s greatest hits is MC’s essay the Military Mental Model of Mormonism. It continues to get attention and I recently discovered that the doofus who runs the blog has inadvertently marked it as private. That’s now fixed.

Once again, observations about the last two weeks of Book of Mormon reading when no one only the intellectual elite are interested in them anymore.

By Antiquary – This file was derived from: St Michael and All Angels, Brighton, stained glass 6.jpg, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77509103

We are hitting on everything from the flaming sword that blocked the tree of life to Alma’s take on how the Law is the schoolmaster (somewhat different from Paul’s).

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WJT has a pretty hilarious method for exposing AI companies’ crude efforts to manipulate their product results.

Ethnically Amnibaus.