Vort

Not sure how this is a negative. Let them feel awkward. Public school itself is hardly a natural thing. I think I have come around on this topic to approving of monitoring classes, as long as such monitoring is always freely available to parents as well as school staff. Much tomfoolery by both students and teachers could be avoided or at least recorded and addressed. legally or otherwise.

I generally like to take people at their word. If she said she felt the Lord's approval in pursuing a career then who am I to judge? I imagine those experiences are serving her mighty well right about now. I, too, generally take people at their word. But when I hear someone talk about a decision which, on the surface, seems not to agree well with the teachings of the gospel, and they justify their decision by saying, "God told me to do it that way", then I reserve the right not to accept their judgment at face value. I know a woman who told me in perfect sincerity that she did not pay tithing for a period of two years because God told her he didn't require it of her at that time. I do not claim that she was wrong; I grant that my understanding of the mind and will of God is imperfect (almost comical for me to use the word "imperfect" when the reality is light-years beyond me) and that God may well have told this sister exactly that. Who am I to say that God cannot do such a thing? But since her claim does not accord with my own understanding of God's commandments and with my own personal experiences, I feel no compulsion to accept her words at face value, either. I have no doubt she believed what she said. That doesn't indicate that it was actually so. Just so, if a person (male or female) says that s/he was directed by God to take a job, or whatever else, I unapologetically reserve the right to make my own judgment as to how believable I find that claim.

Breathlessly awaiting Chapter 2...

An exceedingly wise decision. Bravo!

As Elder Uchtdorf said: Just Spock it!

FTR, I did not have your post or your words in mind. I was speaking very generally. I value and usually agree with yout takes on things.

I do not believe this. Especially for men who work a professional job, the virtue of living within one's means is almost universally available.

.

It is not at all obvious to me that the woman who feels the Lord directing her to have a job is obviously being told by God that she should have a job.

I see no other reasonable way to take Camille N. Johnson's words. as quoted by @mikbone and as apparently approved by President Oaks. This woman is the General Relief Society President, and her words include: "I had my first son the year after I passed the bar. I had bables, and my husband and I loved and nurtured them while we were both working, It was busy, sometimes hectic; we were stretched and sometimes tired...My husband and I sought inspiration in these choices and in the timing. It was what we felt impressed to do...I juggled pregnancy, having babies, nurturing children, carpool, Little League, Church responsibilities, being a supportive spouse, and my professional pursuits. It was a joyful juggle I wouldn't change...Being a mother is my highest priority. It is my ultimate joy." Obviously, Sister Johnson is an intelligent and accomplished woman. Just as obviously, she put her career as an important part of her life choices, not because her husband couldn't work, but because it was important to her. She claims that she was following the inspiration of God in making such choices. Who am I to say she's wrong? Yet this is clearly and very starkly different from what the prophets unanimously proclaimed scarcely more than a generation ago. There can be no doubt or argument on that point. So what are we to make of that? And please note, Sister Johnson's highest priority and ultimate goal is not being a wife and help meet for her husband. It is being a mother. Yet being a successful mother in the ultimate sense presupposes being a wife and help meet for her spouse. My wife and I had come to a crossroads. I told her what I preferred, but I could not and would not impose my decision on her. Her decision was what it had always been throughout her life: She would finish her PhD and work in a university and/or for the UN. But later, soon after the birth of our oldest child and just after she had been awarded her Master's degree, she came to talk to me and told me that she had changed her mind, that she wanted to focus on our family and on rearing our children. If she had not made that decision, our lives would have looked much different. For one thing, we would have had a lot more money. For another, I don't see how we realistically could have homeschooled our children, so either I would have quit working to try to homeschool them or we would have had to make other arrangement for our children's education. We had five children and several pregnancies that were lost, but I wonder if a successful career woman--and make no mistake about it, my wife would have been spectacularly successful in her chosen fields, almost certainly far more successful than her husband has been in his--I wonder if such a woman would have had the strength, stamina, or even desire to have more than one or two children. The greatest blessings and joys of our lives would likely never have come about, or at least would look much different, had my wife chosen her career aspirations. Well, so, bully for us. Yippee. But that doesn't mean our path is what every woman's path should look like. Fair enough. But the point is, had we been young marrieds now, growing up in the modern world, my wife's General Relief Society President would be on record as using her own career as an example and a talking point. With that kind of feedback and counsel, would my wife have made the same choice? I don't know, but I suspect the probability would have decreased. Oh, okay. So that was a good outcome for people thirty-plus years ago, back in my generation. But today, a good outcome looks different. Do we believe this? Because I always thought there was a divine, celestial ideal for which we strove, an unchanging pole star. But we have our highest general-level Church leaders teaching something much different from what they taught not very many years back. Make it make sense. That's all I ask. And if the way you make it make sense is by discarding as "outdated" or "ignorant" the inspired teachings of past prophets and leaders, then I won't accept what you claim to be sensible.

So under this bill, Holocaust denial becomes a crime? Yeah, I'm not on board with that level of goodthink.

I don't know what to think.

I have not asked anyone, but I'm not at all surprised to hear this. One of the great mysteries of life is how so many Jews, probably the most intelligent people on the planet (and not by a little bit*), can hold such stupid opinions about certain issues. The old "Mormons turning dead Jews into Mormons" through baptism for the dead is one outstanding example. This, it appears, is another. The blindingly obvious problem here is that "Jew" denotes not only a religion, not only a race, not only a culture, but all of the above (and probably more). "Jews for Jesus" is no more oxymoronic than "atheist Jews", which in my experience is the majority of American Jews. If a Jew can believe in no God at all and still remain a Jew, why should a Jew not be able to believe in Jesus as the Christ and still remain a Jew? *I have read that Ashkenazi Jews have a mean IQ score that is 15 points above the mean of the population at large. (Here is an MIT paper that supports the idea.) (Here is another one, from a source I know nothing about, but that claims that in certain important areas, Jews score more like 25 IQ points above the general mean. 25 points! That is nearly unbelievable. One breathless passage: "Ashkenazin skills in verbal reasoning, comprehension, working memory, and mathematics are simply astounding—the group averages 125 on an IQ test of verbal reasoning. Since 1950, 29 percent of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Ashkenazi Jews, who represent a mere 0.25 percent of the global population.") Fifteen points is enormous, a full standard deviation above the general norm. That means your average, run-of-the-mill Ashkenazi Jew is one of the bright students in the class; the Ashkenazi Jew that scores in the top third of his Jewish peers will score in the top 95% of the general population; and the top 95% scorer among fellow Jews (about 1 in 20) will score in the top 99.9% of the general population (about 1 in 1000). It is neither coincidence nor conspiracy that Jews are vastly overrepresented in intellectual professions such as banking, finance, law, medicine, and creative endeavors; it's just evidence of their superior intellectual capacity or achievements. Rather ironic and almost humorous to compare Hitler's rantings about the Master Race. If any group fits Hitler's twisted Master Race idea, it is the very Jews he was so passionately murdering.

That meaning survives intact and preeminent in linguistics, e.g. "present perfect".

Compliments on your excellent question. I'm an enthusiast, not an expert, so I can give some general information. For more specific detail, I'm sure there are internet sources that can explain things better than I can. Here's a non-technical overview of the topic. "Geothermal" literally means "earth heat". The idea of geothermal is to use the heat of the earth to heat your home (or generate power or whatever). Sounds like an awesome idea, no? The original meaning of "geothermal" was using volcanic-ish heat sources, like hot springs and geysers, to heat up water that then was used to heat your home. You would dig a well a few hundred or maybe thousand feet deep, pump water down it, and collect the steam that returns. This is what I meant when I wrote "true geothermal". (I wish now that I had written "traditional geothermal", because I think that's a better term. There is nothing "false" about the other use of the term "geothermal", which I will cover below and which is what you appear to be talking about.) Note that instead of directly heating your home with the heated water (steam), you can use superhot steam to drive a steam turbine that generates electricity. Some such setups have been built and currently operate as power plants, mostly in Iceland and such places. Recently, the term "geothermal" has acquired a distinct second meaning, where the earth is used as part of a heat pump. If you're trying to heat something up (water, a house, whatever), the earth acts as the source of heat. If you're trying to cool things down (as in air conditioning a house), the earth acts as a heat sink to get rid of unwanted heat. The article you linked speaks of "geothermal" in this second sense. You pull heat out of the earth for heating in the winter and put it into the earth for air conditioning in the summer. It's much more efficient than using an air-blowing heat exchanger, like traditional heat pump systems do. If you have a heat exchanger for your house, you probably have one of these units sitting outside your house, called the "condenser". Geothermal, when used in this sense, replaces your air-cooled (or air-heated) condenser with heat exchange underground, where the temperature is around 50° F year-round, summer or winter. If you're heating in the winter, a fifty-degree heat source is wonderful; if you're cooling in the winter, again, a fifty-degree heat sink is wonderful. The "earthquake" concern applies only to the first type of "geothermal", and IMO it's a complete non-issue. Drilling a few holes to harvest heat is extraordinarily unlikely to actually cause any instability. Pouring water down the hole to heat it up might be somewhat more likely to cause problems, but the likelihood is still microscopic. I very seriously doubt it would cause an earthquake, even if we were running entire cities off of this type of geothermal power production. The Level 2 explanation for traditional geothermal goes something like this: The earth's crust temperature heats up about one degree for every hundred feet you drill down. So if you drill a thousand-foot hole, you can expect the temperature there to be roughly ten degrees higher than the temperature at, say, 10 or 20 feet underground. This underground heat implies that the earth gets superhot if you just drill deep enough, which indeed appears to be the case. Scientists attributed this internal heat to the heat of formation of the earth, of all the elements of the earth coalescing and hitting each other—basically, the gravitational energy of the elements of the earth. Further study and calculation showed that the earth, after almost five billion years, should not still be as hot at its center as it appears to be. The best explanation seems to be that the heaviest elements tended to sink to the center of the earth, leaving the lighter silicates and other such as the outer crust. The heavy elements that sunk deep included most of the superheavy metals. Anything heavier than bismuth (element 83) is always radioactive, meaning that those superheavy elements—polonium, radium, thorium, uraniam, and all the rest—all emit radiation and heat themselves up. So the heat of the earth seems actually to be, ultimately, a type of nuclear fission power. In effect, the earth itself is an enormous nuclear reactor, and if we dig deep enough, we can harvest the heat. But digging holes miles deep is very difficult and extraordinarily expensive. Maintaining such a hole over an extended period may not be something we can do at this time. And the energy density of what you produce would be, well, unimpressive. I'm sure such a thing would not be even close to cost-effective, and no engineering likely to be developed in the next generation or two will change that. So for now, it's still just someone's sci-fi scenario.

I was a child in the 1970s, 7 to 17 years old. Looking back, I think if school administrators had taken a much harder line against student activism such as protests and sit-ins and had been willing to actually arrest, prosecute, and expel students whose protests crossed legal lines or infringed on free speech rights, we would probably not find ourselves in the position we are in today.

Let me add that this is the reason we so vitally need alternative energy sources. Solar would be ideal, and the possibility of gigantic solar mirrors reflecting down concentrated sunlight for us to turn into usable electricity has excited imaginations for generations. But of course, such mirrors could easily be used to set forests or entire cities on fire. Other supposedly green solutions, mainly wind turbines, but also niche applications like tidal power generation and true geothermal power production, get batted around and pacify many who think that e.g. wind power sounds like a great solution to all our problems without realizing that engineering, structural, and logical problems make these things vastly more expensive and impossible or at least highly unlikely to generate a significant fraction of our power demands. Nuclear fission was hailed as a magic wand that would, with a wave, solve all our problems. A generation later, it was reviled as poisonous destruction that would inevitably doom us all. It is only now making something of a comeback, and we are saddled with terribly inefficient light-water solid-fuel reactors that, despite great safety reforms and methods, are still inherently dangerous because they are inherently unstable. Molten salt reactors, nuclear fission reactors that are much more efficient and orders of magnitude safer than the light-water reactors mentioned above, remain in the "good idea" phase because governments can't seem to find the political will to commit five years and ten billion dollars to developing usable prototypes—and it would probably take half that amount of both money and time, or less, especially if the safety and regulatory requirements that don't make sense to apply to an MSR were done away with. And of course, the granddaddy of energy Shangri-La, the fusion reactor, has recently been making a strong comeback, with the same assurances I remember from my early childhood, promises that usable fusion reactors are only 25 years away. Meanwhile, breakthrough after supposed breakthrough are breathlessly reported by a duped and duplicitous media that clearly does not understand what they are talking about, and the people involved keep sucking at that government teat. Efficient and massively available power storage would greatly help our efforts here. Amazing strides in energy storage technology have been made just since I was in grad school 30+ years ago, studying many of the issues of battery storage from the perspective of a bioengineer thinking about artificial organ applications. But we aren't there yet. Lithium batteries are great and all, but to put it simply, a battery has to last for a hundred years to become really cost-effective as a useful storage device. There exists such technology even today, but it's still too large, too heavy, too expensive, and too limited. Sulfur batteries are, in 2024, on the horizon, and maybe in a year or two we'll see non-degrading mass battery energy storage at an acceptable efficiency which revolutionizes our power grid. That would be super cool. Flow batteries are another intruiging possibility; a completely non-degrading vanadium-based flow battery can be made today that will in principle last forever. But vanadium is pretty expensive to mine out of the soil. Maybe more problematically, you have to use a strong sulfuric acid solution to get enough vanadium to dissolve in the electrolyte to make the energy density sufficient to be really useful, and that makes a vanadium battery pretty dangerous. In addition, the concentrated sulfuric acid electrolyte tends to want to eat up everything it touches, especially the ion membrane, which tends to be pretty expensive. I think some combination of nuclear power (hopefully the MSR type) and really great battery storage technology (my money is on flow batteries or maybe the sulfur technologies) offer us the best path forward. I don't think electrical farming will happen in my lifetime, but if you have good power sources, you can make acceptable fuel literally out of thin air. I'd like to see it happen. If you've successfully read through my little essay, congratulations! You're as big a geek as I am. (You can take this as a compliment or as an insult, but it's meant as a simple statement of fact. You geek.)

I would suggest that whether one believes that men can or should become as God is is to some extent a sematic matter. I mean, in at least one sense, I think no Bible believer can possibly argue against the idea that we are commanded to become as God is. Matthew 5:48 reads (KJV), "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect." I do not see how this can possibly be interpreted in any other way except that we are to become perfect as God Himself is perfect. Plain meaning of words and all that.

I also believe I fully knew what you meant. You meant to cast so-called homophobia as an intolerance displayed by some and directed toward those who love people that they should not (in the judgment of the intolerant) love. I think this is exactly your meaning, without reading anything into your words or making anything up. And my point was that this meaning is false. Now, as I wrote before, I think you had another point, one buried inside the rhetoric. That point was something like: Some people choose a different social and moral path, and their choice should be respected and they not be excluded from normal societal functions because of this different choice of path. That argument is possibly one that I could get behind, or at least not necessarily disagree with. I mean, if their path includes torturing animals or beating their children without mercy or gallavanting naked through the elementary schools, then I'm probably not going to agree about the necessity of respecting their choices. But in other cases, possibly including some aspects of homosexual conduct, I might agree. Had you said this, I may well have agreed. But you did not say this. You said what I explained in the first paragraph above. I know you think I target you. I do not, at least not intentionally. In my belief system, you are a son of God, and therefore merit the same human consideration that I or any other child of God deserves. But I don't believe that such innate consideration and respect extends to refusing to call out a false argument or a loaded comment when such is presented. Saying that homosexuals were and/or are persecuted "because of whom they love" is a false statement, and it desperately needs to be called out for the falsehood that it is.

This is a miracle of modern technology. As Albert Allen Barrett's landmark 1978 paper said, "Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food." (Note that Barrett, a professor of physics, was a committed Malthusianist. I'm not saying I agree with all of his opinions or conclusions. But his remark about modern agriculture being the conversion of petroleum into food is right on the mark.) Without modern farming methods, we would already be well beyond the so-called carrying capacity of the earth for human beings, which various estimates for traditional farming methods seem to put at 1-2 billion. Those of us on this list, indeed the whole world's population, can thank modern intensive farming for our very lives.

On the contrary, this is not primarily a semantic point. Yours is an openly false expression of the idea that's supposed to underlie what you're talking about. The claim is that homosexuals have been and are persecuted because of whom they love. That's false. Period. It is an untrue statement no matter how you slice it. And it is intentionally so; the expression is designed to cast the issue in terms of a spiritual experience (love) rather than a physical act (sex). It's a bogus claim. Love, per se, has literally nothing to do with it. Homosexual activity between people who don't love each other would provoke the same response. Now maybe your claim is that it doesn't matter, that people shouldn't keep track of who is sticking which body part into whom. Well, okay. Maybe that's a valid argument. Then make that argument. Don't obfuscate the issue by making false and irrelevant claims about persecution due to whom one loves.

Please note that this is quite obviously false. There are some few people throughout history who have been killed literally for loving the wrong person. I doubt that description almost ever applied to homosexual couples. "Loving" is not and never has been the issue, unless you think that "loving" your father or your son or your brother or your best friend means engaging in intimate sexual relations with him. I see PP's point and think it has some merit, but the leftist shaming/blaming expression of that viewpoint discourages me from adding my voice.

Now you understand why he's Mordor-bound.

These are my personal observations. Take them for what they seem worth to you. There are two types of men: Those that understand women on an emotional level Those that do not understand women, but naively assume that women are emotionally pretty much like men, only more prone to tears The second group is far larger than the first. Most temple-worthy Latter-day Saint men find themselves in Camp 2. Your husband is statistically likely to be a Camp Twoer. Men can also be divided (roughly) into two camps along another axis, namely, how they feel toward women: Those that respect women Those that do not truly respect women as people, but see them as things to be used to achieve their own ends. Call these Camp A and Camp B. Curiously, at least in my experience, Camp A seems at least as large as Camp B, and probably larger, both inside and outside the Church. To hear women talk about it, you would never guess that to be the case, but I think it is. Some men call themselves "pick-up artists". These men are usually from Camp 1 and almost always from Camp B. Women find these guys irresistable. Why? In part at least, it's because they are from Camp 1 and understand women. And because these men are also from Camp B, they use their understanding of women to get into their panties. For them, that's the game. They are expert flirts. For women, flirting is a game to see if they (the women) can garner external validation. For men (at least for the PAs), flirting is a game to see if they (the men) can successfully seduce the women. This is a dangerous, volatile situation. The women involved in flirting may not consciously be looking for a sexual "hook-up", and may even believe they want to avoid that. But they are craving that emotional validation, and the men (at least the PAs) know exactly how to feed that hunger. Many women have found themselves in bed with a man they don't know and/or don't even like because they "followed their heart" (meaning their emotions) into the bedroom. Odds are that you would not follow through and cheat on your husband. But let's be clear: You're playing with fire and stand a nonzero chance of getting burned. If you view your marriage through a gospel lens, you will consider it of infinite importance, and would not risk its integrity to get some attention any more than you would risk your child's life to get some thrills. Whether or not the other guy was a PA is beside the point, at least as far as that goes. (By the way, women divide into the same two sets of camps as men. Like men, most women dwell in Camp 2, which is why women so often naively and wrongly claim that men are "emotionally stunted" or some nonsense of the sort; they expect men to be women that shave their faces. However, my observation is that women are pretty equally divided between Camps A and B, and if anything tend more toward Camp B. Men are and always have been viewed by women as caretakers. As a result, women view men quite dispassionately—many men would say ruthlessly—as to what the men can offer to the woman. This is most obvious when talking with young women in their late teens and twenties. If Carb had listened to his sister's friends much longer, he likely would eventually have heard conversation that would have included the women objectifying men, including their husbands, to a shocking degree. Not all women do this, of course; my wife never does. But if men stay quiet and pay attention to what women say in public and in private, many of them will be amazed at what they hear. Women are not the people we men often think they are. More to the point, women are not the people we men have been taught that they are.)

Nails through the wrist as a method of crucifixion is a kind of specialized knowledge or information that researchers and historians know about, but it isn't widely known among regular people.