From the Washington Post:
“The first thing Frederick County Commissioner Paul Smith does when explaining his controversial views about a woman’s proper place is to hand out a pamphlet from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
Yesterday morning afforded a lovely coincidence of a crescent moon, Venus, and my southbound drive under a dawning sky. There is something about a crescent with Venus close by on the concave side that looks just right. (Islamic flag designers the world over agree.) It seemed that there would be one more waning crescent in this cycle, and there it was this morning, much thinner than yesterday and no longer in intimate proximity with Venus.
I wondered how long it would stay visible. Twenty minutes before sunrise, it no longer stood out in the sky. I had to use the line between Venus and the coming sun to find it. Ten minutes before sunrise, it faded from view, sometimes seeming to be part of my perceptions, sometimes not. The moon is up there now, as big as the sun, but completely invisible to me.
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Let us praise the gallantry of Joel Northrup, Iowa high school sophomore and state wrestling tournament favorite, who forfeited the first round rather than use all his strength and skill to dominate a girl. Let us jeer the lunacy of tournament organizers who set up such matches. Let us castigate our own impotence that such harmful foolishness goes on and on. (link)
My review of The Great Divorce from the perspective of a Latter-day Saint is up. I think you’ll like it. Let me know what you think.
You can read and comment here.
Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel as played for priesthood meeting by a convert aunt of Sally DeFord who played piano for silent movies: link.
“This brief research note aims to estimate the magnitude of the association between general intelligence and physical attractiveness with large nationally representative samples from two nations. In the United Kingdom, attractive children are more intelligent by 12.4 IQ points (r = .381), whereas in the United States, the correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness is somewhat smaller (r = .126). The association between intelligence and physical attractiveness is stronger among men than among women in both nations.” (link)
Lacking a compensating trade-off between looks and smarts, many of us will have to make do, as Elwood Dowd recommended, with being oh so pleasant. Also, those who selected a looker for a spouse weren’t so shallow after all.
“When U.S. civil affairs teams (and other special forces units) quietly investigated the problem, they quickly discovered a common denominator. Virtually all of the younger men who beat their wives (over their inability to become pregnant) had been former ‘apprentices’ of older Afghan men, who used them for their sexual pleasure. Upon entering marriage, whatever the men knew of sex had been learned during their ‘apprenticeship,’ at the hands of the older man. To put it bluntly, some of the younger Afghans were unfamiliar with the desired (and required) mechanics for conception.
“To remedy this situation, the Army called in its psychological operations teams, which developed information campaigns in Pashtun areas, explaining the basics of heterosexual relations and their benefits, in terms of producing male offspring. It may be the only time in the history of warfare that an army has been required to explain sex to the native population, to curb the abuse of women and young boys–and retain U.S. influence in key geographic areas.”
(link)
Merry Christmas, what ho, what ho, what ho! (more…)
This is the time of year for Christmas devotions. This year my thoughts have been on the impulse to serve the needy that we have at Christmas. We don’t have it at Easter. My thoughts have also been on the Christ child. The religious significance of the grown Christ, on the cross and in the garden, is obvious. But what did Christ do for us as a bare baby?
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As seen at Marginal Revolution, a study of turning the hearts of the children to their fathers:
An initial study involved 80 undergrads spending five minutes thinking about either their fifteenth century ancestors, their great-grandparents or a recent shopping trip. Afterwards, those students in the two ancestor conditions were more confident about their likely performance in future exams, an effect that seemed to be mediated by their feeling more in control of their lives.
Three further studies showed that thinking or writing about their recent or distant ancestors led students to actually perform better on a range of intelligence tests, including verbal and spatial tasks (in one test, students who thought about their distant ancestors scored an average of 14 out of 16, compared with an average of 10 out of 16 among controls). The ancestor benefit was mediated partly by students attempting more answers – what the researchers called having a ‘promotion orientation’.
Agatha Christie’s Christmas Story Star Over Bethlehem starts out sounding like a piece of mid-priced sentimentality, but then it gets really good, really quick. All is not as it seems. (more…)
“Kids who leave high school either take up post-secondary education, and enter the most politically engaged space they’re likely to occupy in their entire lives, or they start earning paycheques—a moment at which government policy becomes frighteningly real, as if a monster in a children’s book had suddenly leapt off the page and started devouring the furniture.” (link)
Not only will it be like this, it must be like this. (more…)
“The dear leader likes to look at things.
updated every other day and sometimes on the weekends too.” (link)