Vort

To be clear, my comment was directed not at @Ironhold, but at the "various individuals" whose musings he reported.

Such hogwash. People look for any reason to coopt the word of God for their pet cause.

What's this? Is Larry Bird back on the court?

When I was a child, we would sometimes drive to Hermiston to pick out our watermelons. Mmmmm. Hermistons.

I can't.

If we are being honest, nothing beats a good apple pie. Nothing. The key is to use tart apples and not nearly as much sugar as you normally find in apple pies. Yuck. Also, mix the flour and shortening as little as possible so you get a nice, flaky crust.

By the way, I have never tried this, but I have been told that you can effectively create a "bump stock" simply by holding your semiautomatic rifle such that the recoil of your shot bounces the rifle off your shoulder and back into your (stiff) trigger finger, allowing you to pop off five or six shots per second. It is said that holding a short dowel in place of your finger on the trigger makes this even easier. Not sure how you really legislate against such a technique.

Not sure I agree. Maybe I do. There is a broad consensus, even among gun owners and Second Amendment advocates, that fully automatic weapons are inappropriate for private ownership. Bump stocks are a method of creating an effectively automatic weapon. (Set aside for a moment that the recoil from fully automatic weapons make them much less effective than semiautomatic weapons for any shooting beyond a short, perhaps two- or three-round burst. This will be at least equally true for bump stocks.) The win that I see is that the Supreme Court insists on "textualism", that a law must be interpreted as written and not just as whatever meaning the individual judge wants to impose on the law. An "automatic weapon" is well-defined, and bump stocks simply do not meet the definition. So that's good. But I think most people agree that bump stocks are a societal danger and nuisance. The correct way to approach the problem is through legislation, not through activist justices pretending that words don't actually mean what they say, but instead mean something else that the judge wants them to mean.

The ultimately finite nature of human individuals and of time itself is not the issue. Any time you sin, you have intentionally removed yourself from God. You cannot fill that gap; you have no such power. In effect, sin—any sin, however small—creates an infinite gulf between you and God. Thus, we all need an infinite atonement to bring us back to the Father

Welcome to the forum, @HaggisShuu. Embracing and living the gospel consists of two steps: 1. Getting on the path 2. Walking the path These two steps are the same for everyone. It appears that you have successfully managed to get on the path, and that you're motivated to follow the path. So your only remaining step is to walk the path. Sounds like you have already begun doing this, too. Making the baptismal covenant was your first step, the one that put you on the path. Now you do what all the rest of us do: Put one foot in front of the other. If pornography is your current challenge, then get with good people, maybe your elders quorum president or bishop, and figure out how to take steps. It's that simple. But simple is not the same as easy. Self-improvement is often not easy. Here's the thing, though: Self-improvement may be hard, but in the long run it's far, far easier than any other path you could take. God bless you in your efforts.

Aka an ottoman, named for a guy named Otto, presumably because he was eight feet tall.

True enough. But one will take the longer route to ruin.

My Mom used to say, "Perception is reality." (I think she was quoting me.) But this is fundamentally cynical, to a really disgusting degree. "Discussing things over a beer" sounds great, and if it were real, it would be great. But, as he did with pretty much everything else in his life*, Obama meant this as a photo op and a talking point. There was no substance behind it. He said something stupid, and he tried making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And the press, no surprise, helped their savior out all they could. The Obama years were nauseating. *Except apparently for his children. I remember he refused to send his daughters to DC public schools. He actually caught some heat in the media for that, but he didn't back down. That was one of the very, very few things that Obama did that I actually had respect for.

Abortion ban, I believe. Who wouldn't cheer a nominal Catholic that supports abortion?

Even moreso in 2012. The margin of victory was smaller, but the Obama worship was strong and was openly engaged in by pretty much all the major news networks not named Fox.

Nothing to see here. Wasn't really funny, anyway.

Hasn't been all that long ago since cousin marriages were common and looked upon favorably. Just sayin'.

I'm sure that's just his selection for nighttime reading.

Thomas Jefferson: "Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just [and] that his justice cannot sleep for ever..."

Maybe. But I see MGTOW as something far more insidious. Like feminism itself, MGTOW's foundational assumptions and claims are not completely specious; on the contrary, many such claims are exactly on the mark. This fact makes MGTOW, like feminism, more dangerous rather than more true. It's easy to see the excesses and evils of feminism. Just look around. It's not as easy to see the evils of MGTOW, because our society is not yet conditioned to look for them. We may be with MGTOW today at the point that feminism was with the US population in the 1960s, with a lot of people nodding and saying, "You know, they have a point." Feminism has proven to be one of the most malignant societal cancers of our time; much of the corruption and decadence of today's United States can be laid at feminism's door. MGTOW, if left unchecked and unchallenged, will be as cancerous as feminism, and might well complete the evil that feminism began: The dissolution of the relationship between men and women, and the resulting utter destruction of the family. This is and always has been feminism's ultimate goal. Honestly, MGTOW is no different. This is a bitter pill for me. I recognize the truths that MGTOW preaches, and some part of my mind and spirit rejoices that, finally, someone is willing to point and state openly that the emperor has no clothes. But mainstream MGTOWism is not merely a rejection of western feminism; it is a dismissal of the feminine altogether, a proclamation that women are nothing but vaginas to be used at will but never bonded to. Ironic, really. Modern feminism glorifies women as of inherent, intrinsic worth, requiring no other condition besides a vagina to be revered and protected, while MGTOW accepts the value of women as being that same vagina, and nothing more. It's easy to say that feminism brought MGTOW on itself, but that's like saying your skin cancer brought on the bone cancer, so good riddance to both. As alluring as MGTOWism might be to many men, it is not the correct response to modern feminism. It is ultimately a furthering of the same evil that feminism represents. We would never want our daughter or our sister or our wife or our mother to be treated as MGTOW often portrays. If we see women, even feminists, as sisters and daughters, we can perhaps see through MGTOW at what we should really be striving for.

Which accounts for both the color and the taste.

Many today worship a God who bears only passing resemblance to the God of our fathers. 2 Nephi 28:7-8 has never been more reflective of society than it is today: Yea, and there shall be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die; and it shall be well with us. And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God—he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God. Verse 9 names this abomination for what it is: "...false and vain and foolish doctrines..." It's easy to blame this mess we are in on the irreligious and godless. Easy, but wrong. The godless wicked, like the poor, we have always with us. Theirs is the common condition of fallen humanity. They are to be pitied and reclaimed by love as errant brothers and sisters, not reviled for their perceived filthiness. The problem, as the mortal Christ taught, is not the wicked of the world, but the wicked who claim to know God but who act contrary to His will and commandments. The hypocrisy of one who has received the things of God and who claims to be God's disciple is inherently more damaging (i.e. more wicked) than the hypocrisy of the worldly hordes strolling the halls and thronging the observation decks of the great and spacious building.

More to the point is that a "wartime economy" is a sort of a fiction. It is a short-term measure that is unsustainable for more than perhaps a decade. It is inherently consumptive and inflationary. Real economic gain means real wealth creation that is generalized throughout society. Wartime economy appears to cause this by ramping up war industry production, but that mainly just gets people working at jobs. In and of itself, that doesn't create wealth, and the product created is consumed by the war effort. Jobs per se do little or nothing to create wealth; otherwise, we could simply have a set of people digging ditches on Monday and another set filling them up on Tuesday. old (I think) alluded to our need to have a common goal or set of goals, which we don't really have. "Make a lot of money" is too meta and doesn't count as a common goal. I do think that World War II created real economic benefit for the US, but I firmly believe that is because it created real product and service, including building the infrastructure to allow mass creation—which I admit is also sort of meta, but in this case I think it was an actual, tangible side effect of the WWII war effort.

Just curious: Why is it that those who vote for Trump are expected to apologize for their vote and explain their thinking, while those who vote for the far more vomitous Biden feel no such constraints? I openly admit I don't particularly like Trump, but I will make no apology for voting for him. The choice between him and Biden is so clear that it is not even a choice, like "choosing" between being locked in an outhouse for an hour or being tortured to death, or between having your tonsils removed or your eyes gouged out, or between eating steak medium rare or well done.

Great write-up. Nephi was enough of a metallurgist to recognize on sight (at night, no less) that Laban's sword was made of very fine steel—fine for the time, that is. Modern steel would doubtless have been tougher and maybe harder, certainly of much higher purity. Nephi's obvious metallurgical knowledge and ability to refine and alloy other metals, including gold but also copper to make bronze, perhaps even iron to some degree, marks Nephi (IMO) as a smith. In my own private intracranial Book of Mormon movie, Nephi at twelve is already apprenticed for some years to a smith and has gained a lot of facility in the smithy (shop). So he's able to identify fine steel on sight. When God tells him to build a ship, Nephi is immediately aware of the need for tools and how he has to find copper and zinc and other ores to make a durable bronze for creating woodworking tools, a thing which probably would not have occurred to me or to most other people who haven't worked with metal as a smith.