Listening to a snippet on the radio of General Hayden going on about the terrible blow to intelligence gathering that was dealt by Snowden’s interview with the Guardian, I began to wonder if the whole point of the official response has been to drive terrorist plotters away from simpler communication systems. Not being able to use phones and e-mail like a normal person would be a huge hassle. (more…)
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An economist’s studies led him to the insight that failure and unexpected obstacles are major drivers of innovation and creativity. But innovation and creativity aren’t just virtues for the workday. Creativity–creation–is the fundamental attribute of God. What starts out as an economics principle becomes an insight into the fundamentals of life: it is when we are desperate that we become the most godlike. We blaze brightest when thrown into the fire. (more…)
“Due to an aging population, non-Hispanic whites last year recorded more deaths than births.” (link)
Driving down a narrow, rural highway seventy miles west of Washington, D.C., I slow for the tiny Virginia town I’m passing through. A banner on the side of a commercial building proclaims “WE’RE FASTING TODAY.” How interesting. I will be fasting with my LDS Ward the next day. Is there a special need this community is rallying around. Is a town fast a recurring thing?
The seconds it takes to think about all that brings the car closer to the banner, and I glance at it again. The F is actually a T, and WE’RE is actually WINE. WINE TASTING TODAY. Oh. That makes more sense. Too bad.
“We seem to be moving inexorably from a society where organized religion dominates issues of morality—and mortality—but not to the secular promised land of reason. Rather, we are orienting ourselves to a more personal spirituality, at once vague and autonomous. Ordinary sinners increasingly don’t believe that they deserve judgment, let alone hell. Theists and atheists alike dispute any earthly authority’s right to judge, and both feel NDEs give them reason to hope for something beyond the grave. And many believers confidently expect that God isn’t judgmental either.”—closing of a Maclean’s piece by by Brian Bethune
Today would be Betsey’s 12th birthday. This is what I wrote on her birthday eight years ago.
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According to the Sacramento Bee, “Nevada health officials no longer will send psychiatric patients alone on buses to cities across the county.”
“The Bee’s investigation found that Rawson-Neal [a psychiatric hospital] purchased Greyhound tickets for more than 1,500 patients since July 2008, dispatching people to every state in the continental United States. About a third of those patients were sent to California.
“One of those patients, James Flavy Coy Brown, who suffers from schizophrenia, was discharged in February to a Greyhound bus bound for Sacramento, a place he had never visited and where he knew no one. He said a doctor at Rawson-Neal told him to call 911 when he got to Sacramento.”
Perhaps I should disclose that I rode Greyhound from Las Vegas to California a few times, but in all cases I paid for the ticket myself.
“Libertarians think they can get a Victorian-sized state without Victorian attitudes, but they’re deluded. If you really want a small state that doesn’t tell you what to do and gobble up half your income then start going to church, get involved in voluntary activities, tell the vicar or priest to stop droning on about the cuts and climate change and tell him to start shouting about sin and fornication. Repress yourself, you’ll find it’s good for your wallet.”—Ed West in the Telegraph
The God who created worlds without number doesn’t seem too averse to grand ambition.
–Thus MC.
Elder Christofferson preached Sunday that the aim of the gospel is to draw down “perfect justice and infinite mercy” from heaven. The phrase stuck with me. Perfect justice and infinite mercy. (more…)
“White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday that President Obama called California Attorney General Kamala Harris (D) late Thursday to apologize for his remark that she was the ‘best-looking attorney general in the country.'” Ah, this may explain things: “The daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican-American father, she has been described as ‘the female Barack Obama.'” Was our President just affirming that he, too, is reminded of himself when looking at Miss Harris?
I saw the other day the Sphinx’s painted face.
She had painted her face in order to ogle Time.
And he has spared no other painted face in all the world but hers.
Delilah was younger than she, and Delilah is dust. Time hath loved nothing but this worthless painted face. (more…)
The flower of the pear-tree gathers and turns to fruit;
The swallows’ eggs have hatched into young birds.
When the Seasons’ changes thus confront the mind
What comfort can the Doctrine of Tao give? (more…)
Reading complaints a few weeks back that too many Latter-day Saints marry before completing courses of higher education, I felt concerned that a natural corollary of that is that people who don’t complete a college education shouldn’t marry at all. Perhaps the unfolding 21st Century for many will be less like the 20th Century abounding in middle-class families and more like earlier ages when bunk houses, barracks, brothels, servants’ quarters, convents, and monasteries absorbed many whose economic limitations put marriage and children out of reach, and those who want a different future will have to choose paths of their own bucking prevailing trends.
The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia has put out “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” There is such discussion of the Great Crossover (mean age at first marriage passing age at first child), and a running theme is that delayed marriage plays out differently for the two-thirds of the nation that doesn’t complete a college degree.
A summary can be found at Washington Post: link. Coming at the topic from another angle, perhaps you’ll enjoy “Settle Down” by Kimbra. Or perhaps you won’t, if your tastes in song and dance don’t run that way.
I am my father’s oldest child, born when he was 40. He died at 83, so while he lived he was even in memory always older than me. I’m now 46, and I remember having a 46-year-old father. I also have a child who is forty years younger than me, and thinking of him, I am glad for my father that I was born to him.