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Personally, I find the lyrics of a lot of the new1 hymns disappointing. They're just rhyming prose, not poetry. They teach truth, sure, but they don't transcend the ordinary or give wings to your soul (so to speak). Many of the older hymns paint such beautiful pictures and evoke such strong emotions, but these just state truths in ordinary language. It's as if someone was ordered to create new hymns in a hurry and instead of poets, they got folks with solid gospel knowledge and a thesaurus... 1(I mean the ones that are actually new, not old hymns newly added / restored to our collection) It's on my favorite MoTab CD, which you can listen to here (on YouTube).

I had a mystery illness in February 2021 that lasted for less than a week. It came on about 36 hours after the blizzard in which we lost power for several days, and so at first there was a concern that I was suffering from something relating to smoke inhalation given that we had the fireplace going 24/7 during that time and I willingly chose to stay indoors for the bulk of it; I'd already had three serious slip & fall events before the blackout happened, each of which was frighteningly worrisome given that I have busted vertebrae. It came on suddenly while I was at work Thursday evening, leaving me feeling rather low and trying to make sense of the confused signals my body was sending off. I powered through the deliveries that night with help from my parents, then took it low and slow for a few days while I healed. I had a round of stomach trouble that weekend, and I was sensitive to how much salt was in my food for a few days, but by the time I had to go back to work Monday evening I was more or less back on my feet. I don't know what it is, but that was the last of that. I got the Moderna shots in July, after this incident. That being said, dad came down with something a day or two after I came down with whatever that was, and it left him bedridden for the better part of three weeks, to the point that I had to physically lift him in and out of bed even while I was sick and even had to give him a blessing. Between how long he was down, the fact that he was obsessed with getting only certain things to eat, and that he had a long time in recovering his stamina, mom is convinced he and I both somehow had Covid. This is a big part of why she raised such a fuss about the two of us getting vaccinated and why she threatened to prevent me from going to that once-in-a-lifetime event unless I got vaxxed.* ...Never mind the fact that by all appearances it seems that the Moderna shot might have done more damage to me long-term than whatever that mystery illness was... *There's an annual Comic-Con in my area, about 45 minutes out from where I live. A childhood idol was going to be one of the headline guests in 2021. My car was in no condition to make the drive, and so I'd have needed to borrow the family truck. She basically refused to let me use it, and pushed my dad into also refusing me, until such time as I got the vaccine. I got the Moderna shot, and things were rather unpleasant after that.

It would be in your messages folder. Twitter security is generally enough to stick suspicious messages and invites behind a screen you have to manually lift to get at, but if you've got your account set up so that Twitter can e-mail you with activity notifications your spam filter (et al) will be filling up soon enough.

FTR, I have nothing against beards, and I wouldn't mind a bit seeing BYU remove beard restrictions. Assuming the guys who wore beards actually took care of them and didn't look, well, um, like i would have looked if I had tried growing a beard in my early 20s.

Facial hair. I don't think so. I hope for the best for Retzlaff. I hope even more that future BYU athletes will take their promise to follow the honor code with greater sincerity. We're definitely swimming upstream in that regard. Maybe we should call ourselves the BYU Salmon.

He’ll find a new position very quickly and this will not affect his life in the way you think it will.

How many times have you had covid that you noticed? That would be the other thing to wonder about, as covid has absolutely been linked to a host of issues from brain to nerves to lungs to heart issues. My wife is a lucky winner of some of this stuff. Gotta love those comorbidities and no clear answer on cause or treatment.

As I noted earlier, I had a very strong feeling that something wasn't right and that I needed to avoid getting the vaccines. I only got the Moderna shot because it was mandatory for me to have it or else I'd miss a once-in-a-lifetime bucket list type of event. A few months after I got the shot the first *mainstream* reports began emerging that the Moderna vaccine was being investigated for potentially causing cardiovascular side effects in certain demographic groups, and as I've had a number of cardiovascular health events since then tied to my pre-existing arrythmia I'm now wondering if the Moderna shot didn't do something. The person who mandated that I get the shot has tried to apologize to me since then, but between how they phrase it and the life-altering health conditions I'm now dealing with that apology just rings hollow.

Same here actually. Right now, Twitter's shot through with scammers and bots, the result of the scammers having figured out they can abuse the group chat feature to spam multiple people at once. The Twitter staff is trying to keep track of it and handle matters, but it's mostly on the users to keep reporting so the staff can keep banning.

I think it depends on the context, but I do think that there is 100% secret combinations operating in governments and businesses all over the world, (and possibly even the church one day) which are leading to a degradation of quality of life, a symptom of which is increased violence.

Child of the '70's here. Chicken Pox vaccine didn't exist until 1995, so yeah, absolutely the parents all did their best to manage it made the rounds with their kiddos. MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) showed up in the '60's. In the '70's, we actually stopped smallpox vaccinations because the eradication effort had been so successful. We humans have a long history of medical advancement, and also medical "advancement" that turned out to be not so medical or advanced. There have always been physicians willing to prescribe treatments at all stages of human civilization. And there have always been willing folks, and skeptical folks, and hopeless folks, and hopeful folks receiving or refusing the treatments. Sometimes the healers claim the power of the supernatural or divine. The ruling class will often urge this or that treatment, and sometimes use their power to force a treatment (like the Biden administration did during covid). Undeniable miracles of modern medicine exist. Germ theory and antibiotics helped us move away from the good old days of only 6 out of 10 children living to adulthood, and people dying of small cuts in their skin. Stuff gets sketchy when advancements in medicine gets tied to politics. Everyone swiftly forgot Trump's "operation warp speed", designed to get the vaccine hastened through the trials and released in time to help Trump win the next election. You can still find the videos of the leftie politicians like Pelosi throwing shade on Trump's poison from the early days of the pandemic. Then Biden took over, and everyone did a politically-biased 180 so quickly I literally watched people do the Covid version of tearing down the posters that said we were at war with Eurasia and replacing them with Oceania war posters and then immediately forgetting Eurasia ever happened. Honestly, kudos to the people who just picked the best opinion they could muster and stuck with it for the past 5 years. At this point in my life, I value stubborn people who might be wrong, than wishy washy people who get led around and just have stress when things are hard to think about. The picture of President Nelson baring his old man arm for the needle was a traumatizing event for some members, and more than a few testimonies were lost when they just looked at the image and didn't pay attention to the actual message. Everyone hoped the covid vax would be more effective than it turned out to be. Lots of people and organizations and folks with influence got behind it in various ways, and then reality showed up, that it was just sort of effective, not a miracle cure. It didn't stop covid, just sort of slowed it down. It didn't stop deaths, just make them a bit more rare. It didn't stop serious problems that came from covid, it just made them a tad less serious for many. And there will always be people who can't tell the difference between an anecdote and data if you paid them a million bucks for each correct answer and gave them the answer book, and the rule of "I knew someone personally who had something happen, therefore:" remains with us forever.

Keep in mind that anything prior to the Words of Mormon wouldn't have been influenced by Mormon. 1 Nephi through Omni were taken directly from the small plates - Mormon didn't abridge these, he just added the plates. And "Jesus Christ" is definitely used in the small plates. Now, that might be the English translation of what was used in the small plates, but one can't say Mormon inserted anything into this part of the record.

Probably more likely to be chatGPT.

No one actually does research. They watch YouTube videos or the like and consider themselves having researched.

This is actually where I worry we have the opposite danger. I don't trust the people who discourage trusting science and doctors. And it starts with planting that seed of doubt in parents. If all the "do your own research!" folk would just share their research, I might feel differently, but it's always a weird psychological game. "Oh, you trust the government? You don't think for yourself? You don't think you can find the info I have? You actually believe the research you found?" Lots of smoke, no fire. And the results are pretty bad and creating a lot of anxiety, which I think makes people more susceptible to manipulation. Telling people to not trust good data and research without giving them a solid alternative is evil.

My ratings: Note that I'm not a composer or a poet. I'm a singer/performer. So, these ratings are not about the talents of the composers. I rate them based on how much I'd enjoy singing them and how much they make me feel the message. Look Unto Christ: 6.5 Oh, How Great is Our Joy: 4 I'm a Pioneer Too: 6 (Children's song) As I Keep the Sabbath Day: 3 Read the Book of Mormon and Pray: 4.5 (Children's song) I'm Gonna Live So God Can Use Me: 3/7 (The 3 is as a hymn for church; the 7 is as a simple song to sing that is religious and uplifting... it's growing on me) The Lord's My Shepherd: 4 Because: 5 This sounds very much like a song from a musical. The composer is solid. But it is one of those "filler" songs of the story rather than an uplifting one. His Voice as the Sound: 6 O Lord, Who Gave Thy Life for Me: 5. Not as much pleasure as a singer. But I believe the lyrics to be solid and the music is just right. This is going to become an oft sung hymn in sacrament because people can sing it and it has a worthy message. Still, Still, Still: 10. I not only have loved this song in the past. But this arrangement is solid. It is one of my favorite Christmas hymns. I'd love to hear this every Christmas.

Eleven new songs https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/eleven-new-hymns-now-available-in-hymns-for-home-and-church Look Unto Christ Oh, How Great is Our Joy I'm a Pioneer Too As I Keep the Sabbath Day Read the Book of Mormon and Pray I'm Gonna Live So God Can Use Me The Lord's My Shepherd Because His Voice as the Sound O Lord, Who Gave Thy Life for Me Still, Still, Still

So far I am unimpressed with the new choices.

More like this, but shorter.

@Vort in college.

Is that why @LDSGator is so cranky about MLMers?

He looks like an out of work 70’s adult film star

I saw a discussion where her entire defense was "ChatGPT said such".

Haha. Maybe true now. I'm an old man out of touch with modern tech apparently. YouTube?! Come on man! What a boomer! Get off my lawn!