Leaderboard

I would make the argument that this is only one contributing factor. The massive expansion of 24 hour media and the need to always have something new and fresh in order to stay relevant (and profitable) means that media companies are digging a lot deeper. So I think we hear about more of these things because the entertainment news industry reports more of them to get more eyes.

One could argue we codify "moral philosophies" condemning murder, rape, fraud, and theft. I don't personally subscribe to the assumption that religious adherence is a prerequisite to moral behavior. I have mixed feelings about this as another category. At its core, it feels like the same problem, just looking at it prospectively rather than retrospectively. Ultimately, I think I'd advise that the answer to "when life begins" isn't needed in making this decision. I'd be prone to counsel that spiritual guidance and revelation is available and capable of guiding to the correct answer even without this knowledge. Indeed, spiritual guidance shines brightest when the answer isn't obvious. Regardless, a lot of my actions would fall in the same camp of "let them believe and feel what they need to believe and feel to endure the crap sandwich they are being fed." My job is to support and assist on the road to healing of all forms. And lectures on what we do and don't know about the beginning of life have no healing power.

To sum it up, as a matter of civil/social policy, I believe abortion should be legal and safe. I also believe people (usually) shouldn't do it, but it's my/our job to persuade them not to. It came from me: To rephrase, I don't think the question makes any sense unless force a claim some difference between "alive" and "life." So no, no one here was arguing that point. It was a necessary stepping stone into my rant. I get where you're coming from. I think we're largely in agreement, if I'm understanding you correctly; as based on my discussion about "well duh it's a living thing." and any line of gestational age we choose to draw about when it is acceptable and when it isn't is arbitrary*. So, please give me credit for doing my best to build on that common footing when I say this: I don't think it's relevant. When you look at the Church's possible exceptions for when an abortion may not be an immediate and despicable evil (me? dramatic? what?)....well, let's look at them: Pregnancy resulted from forcible rape or incest. A competent physician determines that the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy A competent physician determines that the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth. The most logical thing I can see that these have in common is that they are situations in which the mother's agency was not invoked. So when a mother didn't choose to have sex, imposing the consequences of pregnancy is not necessary. When the mother didn't choose a situation that puts her life at (acute) risk to continue the pregnancy, we need not condemn her for choosing to live another day. Women don't typically choose to have children with severe, life ending defects, and we don't need to condemn them for opting not to go through a tiring, painful, emotionally draining experience to deliver a dead child. I'm repeating a lot of things here, I know, but I really want to emphasize that from an LDS perspective, abortion is a valid and justifiable procedure to counteract the tragic moments when the conditions of a pregnancy violate the woman's agency. So, from a religious perspective, I just don't think it's relevant when the spirit enters the body. * that's a really incomplete sentence, but I don't want to fix......

The way your statement is phrased makes it really hard to dive into without going really far off track for this thread. And it gets really complicated when you try to define "divine law." Right off the bat, we're getting into a debate based on something that doesn't truly have an objectively factual standard. I will concede, however, that societies that have a strong and common moral philosophy are more likely to remain stable. In particular, when that moral philosophy seeks to balance personal rights and responsibilities with not seeking one's own pleasure and profit and the expense/extortion of another, stability is more likely. I have a serious reservations with this statement: My reservations derive from the fact that, again, "divinely revealed truth" has no objective standard. Whose divinely revealed truth? Is that the LDS truth? the Methodist truth? The Islamic truth? The Buddhist truth? As one example, I don't think we should be using civil law to prevent people from using recreational marijuana. Let people smoke it if they want to. We should be using persuasion to convince them to choose not to, rather than the force of law to make them afraid of doing so.

I think it is saying exactly what I quoted... because... I quoted it. If there is a different point you think it is making I am not getting it from the study or your post. Could you clarify? Then what does this mean? ----- I didn't say it was a "treatment". I agree it was a method to see if it made people depressed. But why? Acute Tryptophan depletion has been shown to reduce serotonin levels in otherwise emotionally normal humans. When they did so, they found (Just as you said) that it didn't result in any increase in depression symptoms. So, if the method used was supposed to reduce serotonin levels. And that condition didn't result in more depressed people, the conclusion was that lower levels of serotonin do not result in depression. That is what the finding was. These statements imply that this only works in one direction. But the theory behind serotonin based therapy is that it works in both directions. Too little = depression Increase it = cure depression So, this study essentially shows that lower levels don't seem to be indicative of depression. So, why do we think increasing the levels would cure it? As I said, this is preliminary. We'll see how the medical field treats this. Scientific truth must always be open to scrutiny. If this is met with outright rejection without actually addressing the facts of these findings, we know something is up. If it is met with "a healthy skepticism" then that would be a reasonable response when other studies (as you linked to below) show other findings. The interesting thing I see here is that these also deal with just one side (i.e. the up, but not the down - as you alluded to before). If there is a particular reason that this is a valid method of determining the validity of the treatment, I'd be interested in hearing what it is. I understand your desire to cry foul when someone is saying "STOP TAKING ANTI-DEPRESSANT MEDS!" I had hoped that my disclaimer about the study being preliminary was enough to attenuate that idea. But I guess not. As for the Church website articles, I am very persuaded by the words of wise men saying the best they know how. But part of that is that they are depending on modern medicine knowing what they are doing. And usually, I'd agree. But we all know that medical science has turned on its heel on more than one occasion. Is this issue one of them? We'll see.

And just in the last day or two, David Warner, who played Evil in Time Bandits: The iconic guy who tried to torture Captain Picard into seeing five lights.

This is actually linked in the Come Follow Me for the week. There is also another one that is linked (different actors). Both put together make an interesting combo.

Is it more than normal, or is it just that you're getting to the age that it's your formative favorites that are dying?

When I was younger, I had frequent depressive periods as well as occasional manic periods. When I was a teenager, my parents and several other adults in my life made it clear that I wasn't measuring up. People wanted to know what was "wrong" with me that I wasn't as they always expected me to be, and I was told that I needed to "get over" myself. I was constantly compared to Eeyore and told I just needed to "smile" more. It wasn't until a few years ago that relatives on my dad's side of the family explained that autism spectrum disorders ran in the family, and that only came out after *all* of my nieces and nephews were found to have spectrum-related disorders. As of two weeks ago, I myself... have officially been diagnosed as having been on the spectrum this entire time. I'm so high-functioning that I don't have any of the stereotypical behaviors, which is why quirks like "I get tired after long periods of social interaction", "I sometimes get overwhelmed in high stress situations and need to back away before I lock up", and "I've learned through trial-and-error that this is the best way to do something" were mistaken as something else or otherwise dismissed by people around me. In other words, all of the issues I was going through were the result of my having been on the spectrum and having never been tested because my parents didn't know what to look for. If I had been tested, I likely would have been pinged early (I was already pretty weird by the time I started school, and the head trauma from various misadventures didn't help any) and so I could have gotten the training and instruction I needed when I was a child. This would have helped me during junior high and high school when a lot of things were going wrong all at once, and likely would have better informed my choices as a young adult. Without that vital piece of information about the family history, I could have easily been doped up on Ritalin or some sort of other drug meant to make me "normal" but which didn't actually get to the root of the matter. As it is, the fact that I never got the diagnosis at an early age and never got the intervention meant that I basically lived my own personal hell, and it negatively impacted the way my life has turned out. So yeah, family history, environmental factors, head trauma, and so on... all of these need to be looked at in regards to mental health treatment. Just giving people drugs isn't always going to do it, and could make things worse.

The church released a video a few years ago based on the story of Esther, that I thought was brilliantly done:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs Abraham Maslow postulated that for the average human being, there's a general order of precedence when it comes to what a person seeks after, and that most people won't move to seeking anything higher until they've sought after the more basic. The most basic of these needs are what he calls the "survival" needs - oxygen, water, food, sleep, physical safety, shelter, a mate - and are so essential for living that the average person will drop everything if any of these are in danger of not being met. Right now, between inflation, the supply chain shortages, the spike in fuel prices, and a lot of other issues that are all fusing together into one giant mass, a large swath of the United States has been pushed back down to the "survival" needs level. People are struggling to find and keep jobs (there's a great mismatch between what the market needs and what many people are trained for / willing to do), and those who do have jobs are finding it harder to make ends meet even if the basic supplies they need are available. Much to the chagrin of various pundits and politicians, folks are indeed dropping everything to focus on their survival. "Why do you care so much about gas prices when abortion is in danger?!" many a pundit has shouted, inadvertently indicating that they have the means to where they're insulated from rising prices. "If you're that upset about gas prices, just buy an electric car!" several politicians have declared, not understanding that the person who is struggling to pay an extra $1.50 / gallon can't afford the $48K for a new vehicle or that public charging facilities are rare outside of select major cities. Whether the folks in office want to admit it or not, this November is largely going to be based on the question of "Am I, as a citizen, meeting my survival needs, and if not then who is responsible?". When that becomes the dominant question going into an election, the party in power has good odds of being unseated in the belief that they did nothing while the problem got worse.

Has anyone noticed an uptick in the number of celebrities dying (of natural causes) this year? Paul Sorvino (Goodfellas) James Caan (The Godfather) David Warner (Tron) Phillip Baker Hall (A list a mile long, but I most recently remember "In Good Company") Ray Liotta (Unlawful Entry) Fred Ward (Remo Williams) Naomi Judd (Country singer) Gilbert Gottfried (Iago from Disney's Aladdin) Estelle Harris (George's mom on Seinfeld) William Hurt (Broadcast News) Alan Ladd (Shane) Sally Kellerman (the "hottie" professor from "Back to School" with Rodney Dangerfield) Ivan Reitman (Director of Ghostbusters) Howard Hesseman (WKRP in Cincinnati) Louie Anderson (Comedian) Meat Loaf (Musician) Bob Saget (Full House) Sidney Poitier (Look Who's Coming to Dinner, Lillies of the Field, Sneakers) Some of these you may not recognize. And there were some that I didn't recognize. But I just happened to hear of a lot of them just by listening to the news. And I was just amazed at how many were this year. About 90% of these actors were ones who I really enjoyed seeing / hearing on the screen. I'll miss their talent.

People really don't want to hear the "r" word. There's always been an emotional reaction to such news. I remember decades ago, an economist was set to testify in congress about the economy. Some of the behind-the-scenes dealings leaked out - not sure if the story is true or not. Apparently TPTB were using all the pressure they had, to keep the economist from saying the word "recession" in his testimony. So he ended up using the term "banana" to reflect the shape of the curve of whatever was being measured.

Welp, looks like those projections may be off by a bit. The reality was just reported. We're apparently in a recession. But I can't find the numbers to back it up. Why is no one posting the numbers? Here is a Forbes article on what a recession actually is. Finally found an official site with GDP growth. https://data.oecd.org/gdp/quarterly-gdp.htm#indicator-chart 2nd quarter was +0.24%... Gee, I'm so excited we're not in a recession. This bank offers its data https://data.oecd.org/gdp/quarterly-gdp.htm#indicator-chart Their number is not a quarterly number. I believe they're saying that the Year-over-year GDP growth was -1.6% That would mean that the 2nd quarter (including a couple weeks of July) show an overall shrinking of the economy for over 6 months. That's a recession. Thankfully, it isn't a very deep one. 1.6% at least gives us a buffer from a depression. I'm not predicting a depression, yet. But if Biden keeps doing some of the things he's proposing, it will become a depression. And it won't be the normal 2 year lag. We'll see market reactions within a month. EDIT: Apparently, these are all unofficial numbers. We still don't have the "official" number until the 28th. We'll see.