Just_A_Guy

Did anyone notice that the rendition of “Be Still My Soul” played at President Carter’s funeral sounds an awful lot like the Mack Wilberg/Tabernacle Choir arrangement?

This isn’t my speciality, which leads me to point 1: 1. Lawyers who practice primarily state-court trial law are often staggeringly ignorant about most federal constitutional issues. (That’s not meant as an insult-I am also staggeringly ignorant about most constitutional issues. But we have a tendency to read some bat-shizzle crazy law review article about a theory that *might* work, and our eyes light up like we found a “get out of jail free” card; and our egos take us from there all the way to an appellate-level bench-slapping. 2. Trump, frankly . . . doesn’t tend to pick good lawyers (remember Michael Cohen, and most of his 2020 election litigators?). It’s relatively rare to have a person who both looks to a layman like a good lawyer, and is a good lawyer; and I think Trump has a weakness for picking people who merely look competent. (On a personal note: I love it when a private defense attorney in an expensive suit walks into my juvenile courtroom. Bless them. They know nothing. They pick stupid fights, make bizarre motions, tick off the judge (but are too dumb to see how mad the judge is getting), I stand there in my frumpy fat-guy discount suit and calmly cite the procedural rule (which Mr. Armani didn’t know existed), and the judge rolls their eyes and rules for me. It’s great.) (Seriously, guys—unless you are looking at spending 10+years in prison and are sure you are actually innocent, you probably aren’t going to do better than the appointed public defender who’s in the courtroom 25 hours a week and gets invited to the judge’s bimonthly courtroom team lunches and annual Christmas parties.) 3. Appellate courts do, with some regularity, become randomly mesmerized with issues that all of the attorneys involved thought were quite irrelevant; and request further briefing and argument on those additional issues. I don’t know if SCOTUS’s current rules/procedures are more rigid about that kind of thing; and I don’t know that we have time for that kind of back-and-forth in Trump’s case. But speaking generally, I’ve seen my state’s appellate courts do it a few times on cases I had handled at the trial level.

Isn’t the Post the paper that had its pre-Musk Twitter account suspended (allegedly at the FBI’s behest) for saying stuff about Hunter Biden that turned out to be true?

It’s interesting to me how humans (myself included) can look at two pictures and conclude “nope, not the same”, but then computers and mathematical/geometrical analysis say “it’s the same guy”. I’m still skeptical; though frankly my major issue remains as it did in 2022: I just don’t believe JSIII could have been in a possession of a photograph of his father and not shouted about its existence from the rooftops (or at minimum, had duplicates made). FWIW: I got to meet Brent Ashworth a couple of months ago, and he’s a believer. So, there’s that.

https://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/2022/carter-center-statement-on-roe-v-wade.html

No, no—it takes one to know one. That’s why I’m ideally situated to comment.

Interestingly, one of the things I saw recently was a transcript of an old video where someone asked Carter what he thought his greatest failure as president was, and his answer was “letting Ronald Reagan gain the presidency”. I mean—what a petulant little snot. Seriously.

Sadly, his response to Dobbs contained none of that. 😞

Carter also publicly denounced Trump as an illegitimate president elected via Russian interference. More to the point, IMHO, he offered full-throated support to Roe and to abortion-on-demand. Hearing all these conservative paeans to him is a little surreal—like hearing people praise Arthur Zander for his service as an LDS branch president and completely gloss over the fact that Zander supported Naziism and excommunicated Helmuth Hubener. Carter may have been a complex character who did some nice things and succeeded in making sure that a camera was there while he did them. But I would venture to guess that when the eternal balances are weighed and self-deception becomes impossible, his role as a powerful and consensual apologist for elective baby killing will weigh heavily on his conscience; and the Grace he spent a lifetime seeking will only come after much more pain than he thought possible.

Considering Dehlin’s own history with women, it appears that Dehlin can’t recognize a groomer even when it stares back at him in the mirror every day.

Brian Hales is probably the leading expert on Joseph Smith’s plural marriages and he recently did a couple of episodes with “Mormonism With the Murph” on YouTube where he addresses a lot of this. IIRC, as to Section 132 itself: in short, we have a number of contemporaneous accounts (including from people who rejected it, like Marks and Law) of Joseph Smith having shown it to them or otherwise teaching it. Hales also points out that JS basically took plural wives in three “waves”, if you will: 1) Fanny Alger. That situation blows up so badly that JS abandons plural marriage for years. 2) Following a threat from an angel with a drawn sword, JS begins marrying plural wives—but nearly all of them are women who are already married to other men. Hales posits that he deliberately chose married women because, out of respect for Emma as well as Joseph’s own feelings, he planned to have these be sexless “eternity-only” marriages. 3) The angel with drawn sword comes again, basically saying “that’s not what I meant and you know it. Now, do it right.” At this point Smith’s future brides are single women, and several of them later affirm (as genteelly as Victorians ever would) that there was indeed a sexual element to their marriages with Smith.

I mean . . . if one accepts human evolution, unless one believes that (after billions of years) two full humans evolved within a couple of decades of each other and miraculously managed to find each other and procreate, then one is interpreting that humanity is the result of bestial relationships (and even then, not ruling out incest for the first couple of generations of “full humans”, either). The more interesting question to me isn’t “why does our doctrine tell us that humanity arose from incest?”. The question is “why did God feel we needed to be warned so powerfully against incest, when anciently it apparently played such a major role in the human story”?

I think we sometimes forget what a statistically infinitesimal portion of Church membership African-Americans comprised during the periods in question. I don’t believe *any* AA Latter-day Saint is recorded to have received the Nauvoo endowment (Abel apparently did receive his initiatory ordinances in Kirtland). Nauvoo apparently had 22 black residents as of 1843, out of a total population of between 12,000 and 16,000 people—not quite two thousandths of one percent of the Nauvoo membership. I’m not convinced that the notion that the Church might attract large numbers of black converts—let alone the necessity of developing a consistent, uniform policy towards them—was really on anyone’s radar screen at that point in time.

I don’t see this as a problem, actually. 1) The ban was always temporary in nature and if delaying its implementation meant that a couple of specific people who God wanted to wield the priesthood were able to wield it—for however limited a time—then I don’t see that as a problem. 2) Even if Abel’s and Lewis’s ordinations were mistakes from the get-go: the restoration was by its nature incremental; and (as JS told BY when discussing the endowment) some of the things Joseph Smith “set up” were not yet complete/correct in all their particulars. Smith was certainly a “prophet’s prophet”, but that didn’t make him infallible or make his teachings or practices immune to further development after his death.

I don’t mean to be rude in doing a sort of “FIFY” post; I’m just limited in time and feel like the above may be the most efficient way of expressing qualified agreement.

I would respectfully come at it from a somewhat different—perhaps even opposite—perspective. To me, the fact that it was a church policy created a (concededly, rebuttable) presumption that the policy was divinely inspired. The presumption strengthens, as I have argued elsewhere, when one considers that President McKay claimed that of himself he would prefer to remove the ban but that God had expressly denied him permission to do so. Since one naturally can’t prove that a church leader *didn't* receive a particular revelation, the default critique of the ban becomes “well, the God I worship just wouldn’t do something like that!” Modern ban-defenders then reply “not only would He; but He has—repeatedly—here’s the scriptural evidence.” The progressive argument against the authenticity of the ban is, fundamentally, that the progressives understand God and His essential character (not just theology or sacred history, but God’s very nature) better than did any of the LDS prophets between Presidents Young and Lee. The value of the scriptural citations that often come up in these sorts of discussions isn’t “this is how this particular ban against this particular group got started and why the Church continued to enforce it for so long”; it’s “God is way, way bigger than the cage you’re trying to shove Him into.”

The thing is—when it comes to Joseph Smith and LDS doctrine, we do that quite a lot. The endowment as administered when the St George Temple was completed (or the one today) looked very different then the one Joseph Smith administered in 1842; but we (rightly, I think) tell ourselves that many of those later changes were simply syntheses of concepts JS had begun to visualize but perhaps not fully articulated or developed. Ditto for temple marriage as we know it today. Ditto for parent-child sealings, a ritual that we have no evidence Joseph Smith ever did. Ditto for much of what we understand about proxy temple work and the need to work out our genealogies. Many of our modern conceptions about “spirit birth” and what happens to children who are resurrected, don’t perfectly square with what we know Joseph at times taught. And on, and on, and on. We’ve implemented far more radical changes in the Church, for reasons whose linkage to Joseph Smith’s teachings are far more tenuous; and we generally have no trouble accepting that if Joseph Smith had been alive today he would have welcomed these developments as the further light and knowledge God has always promised to unveil for the faithful. So why then, on this *one* theological development, do we have a driving need to insist that JS absolutely, positively, no siree, would not have been OK with it and is not responsible even for laying the theological groundwork for such a policy? Even among professional historians and anthropologists: “Drawing conclusions from loose possibilities and likelihoods“, is a hallmark of their trades; because the surviving evidence is often so sparse and fragmentary. Whether we’re talking about the identity and use of stone-age tools, or Joseph Smith’s marital trends, or the 1619 Project—professional historians extrapolate and yes, even speculate, to startling degrees; and much of that is a fairly transparent attempt to overly their own political values or notions of social justice onto past events and trends.

You should read Chernow’s biography of Grant. He is very underrated as a president. Drove the KKK into near-extinction, among other things. And, Grant died of throat cancer (after a heroic struggle to produce his memoirs so that his wife would have income to survive on after his death). His inveterate cigar-smoking almost certainly played a huge role in his getting cancer; his drinking, not so much.

I dunno. US Grant did okay (I believe Lincoln rather famously told his staff to find out what Grant was drinking and distribute it to the rest of his generals). I’m more worried about Hegseth’s apparent history of exploiting/cheating on women, even if it didn’t rise to the level of legally-defined sexual assault. Call me old school; but I still think there’s a connection between one’s ability to stay loyal to one’s closest connections/ability to demonstrate sacrificial love at the most personal level, and one’s ability to effectively serve one’s country. A colleague of mine—retired colonel—feels like a retired major probably just isn’t going to have the scope of knowledge or depth of administrative knowledge to be able to implement the degree of change Trump wants in the Pentagon. I think one of Trump’s major failings in 2016-2017 was failing to understand the nature of the bureaucratic/procedural apparatus he was trying to subdue or the ways it would fight back. I’m afraid Hegseth (and some these others—particularly the DOGE dudes and Gabbard) might be setting themselves up to run into that same brick wall; and I’m not sure being relatively young and vigorous is in and of itself enough to overcome all of that. I wish Hegseth luck. In this climate, there’s probably not a politically viable basis to really strongly oppose his confirmation . . . but I’m not anticipating much success from him, either. And while I’m not very knowledgeable about military matters . . . My sense is that our capacity has been slipping for a long time; that our diminished military capacity is about to get exposed in a very painful way within the next 2-3 years; and that Trump and his SECDEF are going to get the blame for that, whether they deserve it or not.

Well, the reason why subways are not safe for her core constituency, maybe . . .

@Phoenix_person, I'm sort of cutting up and splicing together elements of several of your recent posts in hopes that I can craft a more thematically-cohesive response. I hope you don't mind. When you talk about abolishing for-profit health insurance companies, I think it's helpful to pin down: What would you do about private non-profit health insurance companies (like IHC/Select Health, here in Utah)? If private non-profit health insurance companies are permitted to remain in business, then I really don't see the urgency in going after the for-profit ones. What's the harm in allowing for-profit insurers to compete with the nonprofits, if they can? If nothing else, it keep the non-profit players honest (their providers and administrators, after all, are still working for a salary and still have incentive to gouge their customers; and the fact that they don't have shareholders to placate doesn't make them saints). If the for-profits can provide a better product for cheaper--good for them. If they can't--then, assuming we can establish a truly free marketplace, in time they'll peter out of their own accord. But I continue to maintain that nationalized health care is a terrible alternative overall. You may get some advantages of scale using that method; and you certainly have the advantage of being able to use the contributions of the healthy--all of the healthy--to subsidize the costs of the sick. But there are a few things to bear in mind: So long as the medical professions continue to provide an improving product utilizing the services of more and more people and requiring more advanced equipment--to some degree, costs are inevitably going to go up. And as you point out, the medical professions already require an advanced degree of training. You want these people to be very good at their jobs, and they will expect to be compensated accordingly. Artificial price ceilings cause supply shortages. That's just basic economics. American surgeries are expensive, but--assuming you can fund them--you can usually get them within a month or two of when you need them. I still remember, by contrast, a special about a guy in the UK who had renovated his apartment to look like a Star Trek crew cabin (I watch weird stuff. Don't judge me) and he mentioned in passing that he hadn't bothered to create a bed because he had sciatica and his (presumably NHS) doctor had told him he needed to be sleeping on the floor to alleviate the symptoms. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law got diagnosed with sciatica around the same time and was cured by a surgery that took place three weeks after the diagnosis. One of the primary complaints about private-sector health insurance companies is that most clients pay far more into the system than they get out of it. The thing is--that's how health insurance (whether public or private) is supposed to work. The whole idea is that to be sustainable, you've got to keep exploiting 60-70-80% of your clients in order to subsidize the other 20-30-40%. That fundamental dynamic doesn't change just because you nationalize the system; all you're doing is making sure that the people getting exploited can't choose to remove themselves from the system. Government bureaucrats are going to tend to be less responsive generally to consumer preference and market shifts. At the same time, government bureaucrats do get, and respond to, pressure to lower costs/improve the financial health of their programs; just as the private sector does. Any sustainable health insurance cost-sharing system is going to have to disincentivize frivolous/unnecessary uses of medical services--there's got to be a bean counter, at some point, saying "no, we won't pay for that." But those bean counters are sometimes wrong, and there's got to be a way to get some form of care independently of the bean counters. Government agencies sometimes manage costs in brutal ways; particularly when they have some degree of legal immunity and/or they don't have to worry about some private-sector competitor that may be offering a better (or more humane or ethical) alternative that would highlight the bureaucrat's own incompetence. Witness, for example, the experiences of Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard in the UK; the not-insignificant amount of assisted suicides in the Netherlands by twenty-somethings whose ailments were primarily mental, not physical, in nature; and the mad rush for nationalized health services in much of the Anglosphere to approve euthanasia. It's kind of ironic that Sarah Palin was so roundly mocked by the left for raising the spectre of critical-care-denying "death panels" that, the left now concedes, do exist in the private sector but somehow magically won't exist in the public sector (at least, not the American public sector. Talk about American exceptionalism!). One of the perennial flaws of progressives is that they tend to assume that the "progressivism" stops with them. (Or maybe they realize that it won't, but they don't dare say it aloud.) Once we've embraced the fundamentals of collectivism--one individual can go hang for the sake of the "greater good"--why should we stop at being Denmark or the UK or France or Canada? Why shouldn't we go on to embrace the Venezuelan, Cuban, and/or Russo/Soviet models? As I note above: Many of these western systems you laud are already denying life-saving care (probably at least in part for financial reasons), already blocking people from getting it elsewhere, already nudging people into euthanasia. (Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah is an interesting meditation on this--he argues that two fundamental, paradoxical values baked into the founding of the US are "radical egalitarianism" and "radical individualism"; and that the logical implications of those values cannot help but lead to collectivist tyranny and social destabilization, which then become cyclical--the tyranny increases to control the behaviors through which the moral rot manifests itself.) Another of the perennial flaws of progressives is that they seem to assume that their enemies will never obtain control of the state apparatus they themselves have built. Do you really want Donald Trump's administration making end-of-life care decisions for Latinos, or Marine LePen deciding which Algerian immigrants do or don't get treated at French emergency rooms? Are you sure national health care systems won't devolve into the sorts of regimens where these kinds of decisions are routinely nakedly politicized? Do you really want to make the State the only game in town when it comes to health care? The state, and the state alone, decides who is and isn't eligible to have their pains alleviated or their lives saved? Especially when there are still people living in those European countries you laud who once lived under--or were within a hair's breadth of living under--the regimens of Hitler, Stalin, or both? Do we really trust in our ability to recognize the monsters who would abuse this sort of power? Look at Assad--ten years ago, he and his wife were the darlings of the progressive media establishment. And now it turns out that one of his preferred methods for dealing with his enemies was sticking them underneath a hydraulically-powered slab, and crushing them to death. We spend fifty years freaking out about how every Republican presidential candidate is Literally Hitler--and then we get an honest-to-gosh Hitler in Syria, and we put his wife on the cover of Vogue. Liquidating the billionaire class and re-distributing the proceeds into a nationalized health care system might make us feel righteous and indulge our more sadistic aspects of our natures; but isn't going to sustainably improve the lot of any American health care consumer. As I noted recently in another thread, the federal government spent $1.8 trillion on PPACA last year alone (source). The US has approximately 800 billionaires with a collective net worth of about $6 trillion. Assuming you got the full value of their holdings when you confiscated them (which you won't, because liquidating their holdings turns them into penny stocks that will flood the market just as investors, wondering what fresh communist Hades might be coming for them next, would be fleeing both the market and the country): you can subsidize PPACA through 2029 at the latest; and then we're back to square one--but with no more golden geese left to kill. I don't see anything in the Hippocratic Oath that requires medical professionals to render services involuntarily or for a lower rate than they would prefer to charge. If a critical mass of doctors truly read the oath as you suggest they should/do, then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. (Leaving aside for the notion that while [most] doctors take the oath, the folks who develop your vaccines and design and build your MRI machines and spin out your blood samples take no such oath.) Certainly there's an implicit generalized awareness that the profession is intended to provide a crucial, even sacred benefit to others--but then, my oath as an attorney (see p. 2) has a similar awareness; and we certainly don't expect lawyers to render services for free. Frankly, PPACA was a poison pill to begin with. The only way they were able to make the federal numbers look "revenue neutral" back in 2009-2010 was by comparing ten years of revenues against five or six years of outlays. The cost was always going to be net-negative in the long haul.* Forcing the HMOs to take clients who they knew were going to cost them money, was always going to force those HMOs to either inflate premiums (stoking the sort of Moral Panic we're now witnessing) or go bankrupt in the end. We all knew even then that Obama and his supporters wanted single-payer, and that PPACA was seen by them as a stepping-stone to get us there. Their hope was that the HMOs would mute their opposition if they got enormous payoffs in the very short term. *That said, conservatives should also acknowledge that Trump sort of accelerated things by unilaterally exempting Americans from the individual-mandate portion of PPACA and thus pulling a lot of potential revenue out of the system. And this sort of hints at another issue with the health care business. We've undergone something of a cultural shift in the last sixty years where we believe that we each have the right to the very best medical care that's out there, we have a right to be pain-free, and we have a right to have every potentially-relevant test from a smorgasboard of available serum panels run on us any time we feel "off" becuse "you can never be too careful". And money is no object when it comes to keeping us in tip-top physical condition; particularly when the money involved is other people's money. This creates a lot of tension in the American system, and needs to be checked in some ways. But it also has its merits. I don't know your full story--just snippets from posts you've made elsewhere. But--if I may tread softly--my understanding is that at some point you got into a really dark place, and you tried to end your own life; resulting in the injuries you mention above. I'm genuinely, sincerely glad that your attempted suicide was unsuccessful. I don't even mind that the American health care system likely poured fabulous amounts of resources into your treatment and recovery. I hope things never get that dark for you ever again. It sounds like you've put a lot of effort into being a contributing member of your own community, I personally value your thought-provoking contributions to this forum, and--while I know it's not really your thing--I strongly believe that you are a beloved child of God whom He views as having infinite worth and potential; and I hope the way I communicate with you consistently reflects that belief. But for the purposes of this discussion, I will say: I rather suspect the American system is probably one of very few systems in the US that would have put so much time and effort into preserving your life at a time when you yourself were thinking that it would be best ended. I hope you don't relocate to Germany; because if (heaven forbid) you have a relapse--I'm not convinced they'll do for you what America would do for you. And if you do relocate, and some NHS bureaucrat suggests euthanasia at some point--I hope you punch 'em square in the nose, and catch the first flight back to 'Murca. I would refer you to my point about billionaires above, and also suggest you watch this video--it's very dated now, but still does a very good job of showing that a) the amount of money our government spends is quite unrelated to how much tax revenue it actually raises or could raise; and b) while we may resent the existence of billionaires and even millionaires, eradicating all of them and redistributing their assets won't really improve the quality of our lives all that much. I defend the rights of billionaires to be billionaires because I understand that fundamentally, the folks who criticize billionaires most harshly aren't going to effect meaningful change and aren't really mad just at the uber-wealthy. They're mad at anyone who's doing better than they themselves are--and as a relatively solid, state-employed member of the middle class who owns a house and a sailboat that its manufacturer classifies as a "yacht", that probably includes me. This could be a really interesting collateral discussion; but suffice it to say: I absolutely endorse the right of employees to unionize; so long as they aren't infringing on a) the rights of would-be employees to work for cheaper or b) the rights of their employers to higher those would-be employees. I don't understand why efforts to unionize Amazon and Wal-Mart haven't borne more fruit. (Maybe they have and I haven't been paying attention; I don't know.) At any rate--this is a significant reason why I also support limiting the numbers of economic immigrants that we accept each year from the third world. I'm skeptical of the notion that all employers should be legally required to pay a "living wage"; simply because a lot of teenagers and part-time workers don't need a living wage and they should be able to sell their labor for whatever price they are willing to accept from their employers. In closing--because it's late and I'm tired, and because you said "Scandinavia", I will close with this joke: Did you hear that Norway has started putting bar codes on the side of all their warships? That way, when the ships get back to port, they can scan the Navy in.

It seems worth noting that the question of whether the priesthood/temple ban originated with Joseph Smith, is quite distinct from the question of whether the ban reflected what God wanted the Church to be doing during the time that the ban was in force. A response of "no" to the first question (which seems to be the primary topic of this thread), does not preclude an answer of "yes" to the second. As to the first question: I tend to be an "institutionalist". I think that generally speaking, professional Church historians (and by this I mean, primarily, those employed by the Church) are acting in good faith. If they say there's no good evidence that JS originated the ban--I'm inclined to believe them. At the same time: I think @Maverick has raised some points that, frankly, I don't recall either Church historians or some of the acknowledged "experts" like Paul Reeve, et al, bring up. And frankly, whatever policies re ordination Joseph Smith did or didn't implement: He left us with a heck of a lot of scriptural evidence that God does sometimes consider certain lineal groups "cursed"--both in a general sense, and in a Gospel/sacerdotal-privileges context. And while we're generally quick to impute "racism" in Brigham Young while denying/excusing it in Joseph Smith: Smith seems to have genuinely thought that African Americans of his day were "cursed", at least in a very general sense. It doesn't take a dyed-in-the-wool racist to look at the breadcrumbs Joseph Smith left, and "connect the dots" in the way that Pratt, Young, Taylor, Smith, et al. subsequently did. I think historians, and even professional Church historians, do tend to lean a little bit leftwards. I don't think most of them are mentally/emotionally prepared to grapple with a God who would deliberately do something that most of them openly describe as "racist". (And a subset of them, frankly, see this as "battlespace prep" in trying to erode the credibility of the current crop of apostles on LGBTQ issues). And I think these professional historians' work on this particular issue can't help but reflect these biases. It's rather like secular historians who try to explain the origin of the Book of Mormon but start with the proposition that it just couldn't have been what Joseph Smith said it was--props to them for being true to themselves, I guess . . . but the simple fact is that they aren't truly willing to fearlessly go wherever the evidence takes them, and so the result of their work is somewhat compromised.

Deadly force was certainly justified as long as he posed an immediate threat. But if you neutralize the threat *without* deadly force, and he remains neutralized . . . You don’t get to (for example) wait 5 minutes and then say “you know what? I want a Mulligan. He might wake up, so I’m just gonna shoot him now.” I want to tread softly, because I don’t know whether (or how many times) Neely regained consciousness after first being knocked out and I’ve never been in an altercation like that and I’m sure the decision-making process starts looking very different when the adrenaline is flowing. But if it’s true that someone was saying “I’ve got his arms, you can let go”, and if it’s true that they made it to the next station and had every opportunity to evacuate the train car . . . It’s just hard for me to justify a continued chokehold after that point.

Just an unfortunate situation all around. Penny’s act in initially subduing Neely was heroic. We need more people willing to do this. But I confess I don’t understand why it’s tactically necessary to keep someone in a chokehold (as opposed to switching to some other hold) once the opponent has drifted into unconsciousness. Then again, considering the caliber of other goons that the New York prosecutor has let skate through—it’s hard to avoid concluding that either Penny was prosecuted for his race, or other lethal menaces are being released because of theirs.

Lockean philosophy?