Just_A_Guy

Some of our liturgical/doctrinal vocabulary comes from the KJV (“more sure word of prophecy”, “nail in a sure place”, etc), and by abandoning the KJV it becomes harder to preserve those scriptural connections and/or pass them on to the younger generation. Additionally, major portions of the BoM text interact with, not just the Bible, but the King James Bible. I can see the Church getting to the point where you can buy—say—an NRSV study Bible through Deseret Book or even through LDS Distribution services. I think it less likely that the Church will undertake its own LDS Study Bible during our lifetimes; if for no other reason than that so many in the LDS/BYU academic community (who would likely be tapped for such a project) are revealing their allegiance to (if not their own identities as) rakes, groomers, libertines, and/or generally dishonest cads; Thomas Wayment being the most recent example.

Perhaps. People do nutty things for “love”. As for your last comment about QAnon: frankly, you’re not going to scare most conservatives with that; given that a majority of SCOTUS justices have been pro-baby-murder for the past fifty years and given that it looks like we are about to confirm our first black woman SCOTUS justice who is utterly incapable of articulating what it is that makes her a woman and therefore, really has no solid logical basis on which to assert that she is even black.

I havent followed this discussion all that closely—certainly @Traveler can speak for himself; and I daresay I’m a little more vaccine-friendly than most other members of this forum. But it seems to me that there is no comparison between the Walton family growing rich because they sell widgets that everyone wants and that Wal-Mart suddenly made affordable, versus Phizer growing rich because its friends in government used the force of law first to subsidize development of Phizer’s product in the first place, second to create demand for Phizer’s product by compelling the citizenry to obtain it even if they didn’t want it for themselves, and third to use yet *more* taxpayer money in order to purchase vast quantities of Phizer’s product at more-or-less whatever price Phizer set. That kind of cronyism is a hallmark, not of truly free markets, but of economically interventionist governments; of which socialism is a subset. And it’s probably worth noting that socialism doesn’t eradicate all wealth; it eradicates (most) private wealth. Government officials still control enormous purses—only now in conjunction with political power. In many (most?) socialistic societies, high government officials still have tended to demonstrate a knack for accumulating large stores of private wealth themselves. And speaking anecdotally (which of course is always a risky proposition), my experience with American socialists is that when you dig a little, it turns out that they tend to be less upset over the fact that the wealth exists than that it’s controlled by the wrong people. Staggeringly wealthy actors and singers and CEOs and ex-Presidents and congresscritters are generally permitted to enjoy their millions in peace so long as they make proper obeisance now and then and rehash platitudes on the virtues of “sacrifice” whose purpose is primarily to remind lower- and middle-class conservatives (and increasingly, even centrists and non-crazy progressives) to Know Their Place. In practice, the difference between capitalism and socialism is that in the former, the rich grow powerful; whereas in the latter, the powerful grow rich. But capitalism reserves the possibility that someone else may eventually grow rich, thus upsetting a corrupt power balance; whereas socialism tends to ossify the existing power structure indefinitely.

SCOTUS typically takes a number of informal (for lack of a better word) straw polls/preliminary votes before doing the final vote whose results are announced as part of releasing the opinion. If Thomas were deliberately trying to cover his own posterior, the better strategy would have been to shift his vote once he sensed which way the rest of the court was leaning. That way he could at least convincingly publicly plead that golly-gee-willikers, he had *no idea* the records would include correspondence with his wife; and he’s as shocked to learn of this as anyone else. The sheer incompetence of his supposed cover-up leads me to wonder whether in fact there was no intended cover-up at all. But as Thomas didn’t release a written dissent, it’s particularly hard to understand what was going on in his head.

I’m not sure that even Nephi unambiguously considered it a handrail. He talks of a rod leading to the tree, that initially extended along a river. He never says it’s a continuous rod that extends the whole distance like some sort of rail. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that the rod of iron is meant to be seen as a divining rod, the use of which Joseph’s scribe Oliver Cowdery would have understood well (cf D&C 8, wherein earlier manuscripts rendered “gift of Aaron” as “gift of working with the rod”). In that sense, it may well have prefigured the Liahona; which makes the “I’m not an iron rod Mormon, I’m a Liahona Mormon” line even more amusing. (“Fool! They were the same thing!”)

As I recall, Don Bradley’s book on the 116 lost pages talks about how an Israelitish king had some degree of inherent priestly authority (he used this, IIRC, to extrapolate certain theories about the flight of Mosiah I to Zarahemla and the origins of Zeniff’s colony and Noah’s relationship with his priests). You may want to check it out. In a broader sense: from a technical standpoint, Joseph Smith taught that *all* priesthood is Melchizedek. If you have had the MP explicitly conferred upon you, you implicitly have the authority to officiate in any of the ordinances of the Aaronic or Levitical priesthood (subject to the keys of your presiding officer, naturally). I believe we are told that most OT prophets (presumably including Lehi and Nephi) were ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood. It seems logical that the MP would then have been passed down through Nephi’s kingly line, at least so long as that line remained righteous; and following Israelite precedent, final ecclesiastical authority amongst the Nephites probably remained with the throne until Mosiah II chose to (having been quite possibly horrified by the specter of one of his four apostate sons gaining the throne and thus control over the church) grant the ecclesiastical structure complete independence from the political hierarchy. Given Israelite/Nephite norms, Alma I’s ordination under the auspices of Noah’s kingly line may well have been deemed legitimate as fas as the Nephites were concerned; and on Alma’s arrival in Zarahemla Mosiah II seems to have either ratified that legitimacy or else conferred it anew by the authority of Mosiah’s own kingly lineage. We have no record of Mosiah II interfering with Alma I’s ordination of Alma II to be his successor; and since Mosiah II ended the role of “king” among the Nephites first by shifting to a judgeship system and then by his own death, there was no one left with real standing to challenge Alma II’s authority to name his own ecclesiastical successor. And just in case there were any lingering doubts as to whether the new role of “chief judge” could exercise ecclesiastical authority the way the king used to, Alma II resolved the question by initially serving jointly as high priest and first chief judge and then appointing a successor to serve only in the latter role. In post-Almaic society it will be crystal clear that the church is *not* merely a creation of and subordinate to the state. If anything, the reverse is true.

I’m right here—on the other side of the bailiff. (@pam? You got my back, right?

And is it not true, Mr. Gator, that during or before your senior year of high school you did, on at least one occasion, knowingly and deliberately and with malice aforethought, sing the entire chorus of a brand new song called “MMMBop”?

Well, 1998 was when all the awesome people graduated from high school. It’s a pity you are so young that you missed out on all that awesomeness. (Right, Gator? Right? Gator?)

Everyone wants a green lawn, but no one wants to do what it takes to keep those little reprobates away . . .

I largely agree with @MrShorty, and like him have been heavily influenced by Ben Spackman—I see Genesis as a book of inspired ancient near eastern literature with an internal worldview and logic all its own that points to the sovereignty of Jehovah and explains His covenant to the patriarchs and to Israel as the heir of the patriarchs. I don’t think it is “history” as twenty-first century Westerners would use the term; but I believe its stories primarily originate with figures who really lived. For example, I believe there was an Adam, and an Eve, and a Noah—mostly because Joseph Smith affirmed that he saw them. I don’t know if there was a literal garden of Eden, though I think at minimum Adam and Eve were the first humans of sufficient intelligence that God chose to endow them with spirits and make covenants with them that affected all their posterity. I don’t know if there was a global flood, though I think at minimum God renewed his covenant with humankind through Noah after some sort of natural (maybe local) catastrophe. Generally the parts of Genesis that Joseph Smith endorsed as historical, I’m willing to trust are historical; even if they are in some degree of tension with modern science. But as for the rest: I guess where I lean at the moment is, I see Genesis primarily as a work of literature that teaches about God’s relationship with us and human nature. It is an incredibly complex and carefully-thought-out work of literature—every name, every geographical obscurity, every Hebraic pun that gets lost in translation, everything in that book has a reason for being there. It interacts with, corrects, expands upon, and satirizes other ancient attitudes and practices and works of literature in ways we are only beginning to understand. At the moment I’m more interested in trying to learn a lot of those details and wrestling with the bigger puzzles and questions that the author deliberately throws to his reader, than in trying to parse out questions about “but did this really happen this way?”

I think (and I have nothing to back this up) that Alma the Younger was probably very like Paul, which would suggest that rather than being a libertine who hated all religion he was in fact a zealous, sensitive, and fiercely devoted believer in God who sincerely believed that the “Christians” had gotten it wrong and were putting their very souls in peril by embracing heretical concepts of the Messiah. As I read it the thrust of this vision, like Paul’s, isn’t so much “shape up or go to hell, it’s all the same to Me”. I read it more as “look, that God you’ve loved and tried to serve all along? Those people you’re attacking are His peeps; and you can get on board or not, but if you’re really looking for Him, that community you’re fighting is actually where you’ll find Him.” In that context, I don’t know that the angel is really trying to make any eternally-binding pronouncements about the nature/fallibility of the church, in either its Nephite or latter-day incarnations. This is also one of those sections where it’s worth remembering that the original BoM manuscript was unpunctuated. Most of our punctuation was inserted by John Gilbert, an assistant at the Grandin printing shop, and he never joined the Church. He generally did a good job, but technically one could still argue that the punctuation of the Book of Mormon is only semi-canonical. In most cases that’s a sheerly pedantic point; but the angel’s words to Alma are one of those sections where you can create some intriguing variant readings by re-punctuating the sentences.

The Russians certainly took enormous losses in WWII—but they didn’t really have a choice. The Nazis looked at Slavs and other Eastern Europeans as sub-humans only a few steps above Jewry; the Russians knew they were going to die whether they fought or not and so they figured they may as well fight. But Russians don’t like dying in stupid wars any more than anyone else: when they lost a war they thought they should have won in 1905, and then got bogged down in WWI, they killed their own tsar and sued for peace; they withdrew from Afghanistan after suffering at least 14,000 dead over ten years (and they’ve just lost at least half that amount again in the last three weeks). As for whether Putin used nukes, I still think the million dollar question is: against whom? The US would shoot back, and he’s not formally at war with us. Nuking Ukraine would sour the investment he’s put into subjugating the country. If Putin wants to use a nuke in a way that won’t elicit an immediate counterstrike from us (or the UK or France) (any one of which could well result in Putin’s own death), it seems to me that he’s going to have to find a way to drag another non-nuclear, non-NATO country into the war on Ukraine’s side and then nuke them—hoping that fears of “holy crap, we could be next” will lead the Ukrainians to surrender en masse.

Wasn’t a visit to an American grocery store also what convinced Yeltsin that communism was done for?

I totally agree with you. But the trouble is that I think the history of this century indicates that American presidents, regardless of party, cannot be trusted to stand by the security commitments that previous administrations have made (and in fairness to those presidents, that’s probably reflective of the American people’s general unwillingness these days to risk the sacrifices of war—especially nuclear war—for the sake of something so abstract as “national honor” or “making the world safe for democracy”). In a perfect world American presidents would always cowboy up and stand by our friends. But since they clearly don’t (and won’t), the next-best option is to let our friends know that they are free to create new defensive alliances with local neighbors who will keep their promises. Our fecklessness has already created local power vacuums; the question is whether we will get out of the way of the local good guys who want to fill it before the local bad guys come crashing in. And if that realignment means we spend a few billion per year less on defense, and/or that Chinese nukes are by default aimed at Tokyo rather than Los Angeles and Russian nukes are aimed at Helsinki rather than New York, and the Russians retire their ballistic missile submarines—so much the better.

I am coming to the conclusion that the US should reduce its NATO commitments. An expansive NATO was necessary against an ideological foe bent on global domination; but in the absence of such a foe a vast network of alliances and commitments among dozens of countries only increases the possibility of a world war breaking out over some petty border dispute initiated by a local strongman with limited territorial ambitions. To maintain stability and act as a check against expansionist bullies, I am wondering if the better plan is a series of regional defensive alliances each anchored by a trustworthy nuclear power: a Central European alliance that checks Russia and is centered around Ukraine, Finland, and a nuclear Poland (or perhaps with additional nuclear security guarantees from France, if we don’t trust Poland with nukes); an East Asian alliance that checks China and is centered on India and a newly-nuclear Japan; and maybe a middle eastern alliance countering Iran that’s centered around a non-nuclear Saudi Arabia (and subtly backed by a nuclear Israel, as well as the threat that if Iran gets nukes the US will make sure that Saudi Arabia gets them too). A stripped-down NATO might continue on with the US guaranteeing security for English-speaking nations that actually border on the North Atlantic, and the US might look at also organizing a separate defensive alliance with Central and South American countries to deter Chinese meddling (if China or its local vassals get too aggressively exploitive on the African continent, a Western European alliance of France, Spain, and Germany may look at offering support to free nations there). The US, either through or independently of NATO, could also offer training and matériels and intelligence to the other alliances; but would make it very clear that it was not offering any security guarantees to members of those other alliances. The fact that the US was no longer committed to involve itself in a regional war against Russia/China/North Korea would hopefully mean that, if a nuclear war did break out, at least we wouldn’t necessarily be the inevitable targets.

As I understand it, Ukraine is desirable primarily for its wheat output. If you’re Putin, and you’re planning to recoup your war costs through the sale of Ukrainian grain—people need to not be worried that the grain may be radioactive. Which makes me wonder about that invasion plan of Moldova that Lukashenko let slip—maybe the plan is to pick a fight with Moldova, nuke them (or any non-NATO country that gets involved), and then hope the Ukrainians get scared and surrender themselves and their still-edible grain crops.

The way it’s been explained to me is: 1). Drilling permits are good for ten years. One of Biden’s campaign promises was to stop issuing new drilling permits. Although he has not kept this pledge, oil companies fear that he may start doing so in the next year or two. They have to hold enough permits in reserve to continue operations through the end of a hostile administration; they’re not about to blow all those permits with no assurance that they’ll be able to get more when they need them in 2023 or (should the gods curse us with a second round of Biden/Harris) 2027. American oil’s current business model has the rare advantage of being both cautious and (given rising prices) insanely lucrative—and we expect them to increase supply (forfeiting their unprecedented short-term profit margins) and endanger their future operations, just to raise the short-term political prospects of a president who is on-record acknowledging that he hates their living, breathing guts and wishes they were all unemployed? Yeah, no—not gonna happen. The trouble with spending fifty years whipping up hatred towards a particular group of people is that sooner or later—they start to hate you back; and a few platitudes about “patriotism” at the last minute when the going gets tough typically doesn’t undo half a century of malice. 2). It’s not strictly a game of how much oil we can get out of the ground. Ten or twenty years ago, US oil refiners largely gambled that most of our oil in the future would be “sour” (high-sulfur) oil from overseas; and they tooled accordingly. North American oil is “sweeter” (lower in sulfur); and even if we pumped/drilled more of it, the capacity to refine it all domestically just doesn’t exist right now.

Remember back when many progressives with ties to the LDS community were so very, very concerned about the possibility that then-President Monson may be suffering from dementia; and insisted that it was important—nay, imperative, for the good of the Church!—that a full and complete description of his medical condition be released to the public? Those were good times.

FWIW, in thinking about this thread yesterday I did some googling and found his physician’s summary of President Biden’s last physical from late 2021. The report conspicuously omits any discussion of cognitive ability; but (speaking as a layman, and maybe @mikbone could supplement this as I understand him to be a surgeon by profession) as far as physical health goes, it does seem to be remarkably good for a man of his age. The report also specifically notes that Biden works out something like five days a week.

What staggers me is that the NAACP and BLM leadership both wrote letters to the court pleading for clemency on his behalf. I mean, this guy’s behavior is a major reason that some of us have a reason taking these organizations’ claims and proposed solutions at face value. You’d think they’d be eager to throw him under the bus.

Just from the clip I watched: it appeared that maybe there was some confusion between Harris and the Polish guy about who was to answer the question, or maybe a pause to see if an interpreter was needed . . . At any rate there was an awkward silence while everyone was waiting for everyone else to say something, followed by laughter. Now, I frankly think that Harris is a prime example of a mean girl of loose morality who never outgrew her meanness or her looseness. And her cackling non-answers to Pence in the VP debate still stick in my craw almost two years later. But . . . The criticisms arising out of this particular incident seem to be rooted in a preconception that Serious People must never ever smile, laugh, or appear to be enjoying themselves; and that to do otherwise indicates their true status as insensitive ogres with no regard for human tragedy. I’m not sure that’s really fair. A similar criticism was leveled against Lincoln, who replied “I laugh because I must not cry”. When you’re dealing with that level of stress, humor can be a real sanity-saver. Certainly I prefer some level of decorum at a press conference; but this is really a quibble over style, not substance.

Does this (either your argument, or the total count of nuclear stockpiles—and I admit that I’m the one who floated the figures under discussion) distinguish between strategic nukes versus tactical nukes, nuclear-tipped torpedoes and the like? It seems to me that the latter could have a legitimate use against a hardened target or a massed troop formation, depending on the nature of the lingering radiation/fallout that the bomb would cause. As to the strategic nukes: I agree with you from a moral standpoint; but the problem remains that from a practical standpoint—they work. The sheer number of them in existence, and the impossibility of taking them all out of play with a first strike, is a big part of the reason they work.

I read somewhere recently that only about 1/3 of the nuclear warheads in the world are (for lack of a better word) operational at this point. (So, something like 4,000; not 12,000.)

As I understand it, etymologically “judicial” comes from the Latin word for “judgment” whereas “legislative” and “legal” both derive from the Latin word for “law”. Which makes sense—the legislative branch (theoretically) creates the laws; the judicial branch (theoretically) judges conflicts in accordance with those laws. From an architectural standpoint, the judicial branch judges. One could argue that there’s no direct universal sociological requirement that the judgments be just; they just have to be judgments that the broader society is willing to accept in accordance with its own values. Of course, our particular society places value on a particular concept of “justice”, so we expect the judicial branch to deliver it (and indeed, may well rebel against a system that fails to do so). But from a civic stability standpoint, all you need is some sort of conflict resolution system—just or not—that a critical mass of society is willing to go along with.