Just_A_Guy

As I understand it, the Chinese are heavily investing in researching the military implications of this sort of thing (together with genetic enhancements of soldiers). I suspect that eventually, as a matter of security/military expediency, we are going to have to accept the notion of chip implants/genetic modifications of soldiers; and once they revert to civilian life and begin out-performing non-veteran workers there will be demand to make those sorts of enhancements available to everyone.

Why am I suddenly thinking of Teletubbies?

Greed is part of the issue; but I think the broader issue is "pride". Remember, in LDS doctrine a "Zion society" is the result of a rare alchemy of pervasive values/character traits goes far beyond mere economic communitarianism. It is characterized by communal worship, submission to a religious hierarchy, rigorous adherence to revealed scripture, rigid honesty, extraordinary subjugation of personal beliefs in favor of simply having peace (in both a temporal and spiritual sense), and sexual probity (see 4 Nephi 1). To the extent that scripture or history provide lessons, it seems that Zion societies tend to unravel when people a) don't trust the leadership and/or b) there is a pervasive feeling that a certain number within the community aren't even trying to do their fair share (and this feeling can be either among the "have-lots" looking downwards, or among the "have-lesses" looking upwards). If consecration in the Millennium functions as the United Order did--where private property and free enterprise do exist, and the consecration of excess income is voluntarily extracted through love rather than fear--then I think the old-fashioned capitalists (well, free marketeers, anyways) will do just fine there. (After all, it is the love of money, not money itself, that Paul describes as the root of all evil). The catch, though, is that the Millennium only happens after both the wealthy who are greedy and the poor who are shiftless, are . . . shall we say . . . "purged" from society; and indeed, from the earth itself. That's the problem with communitarianism . . . human nature being what it is, sooner or later you've got to start purging the deadweight. Who do we trust to implement the purges, and what happens to those who are purged? "It can't be worse than the status quo" often leads us into situations that are, indeed, far worse than the status quo ante. I have no problem with individual cities trying stuff like a community-owned grocery store to fill the gaps left by a food desert--it's not my tax dollars on the line. But I'm not optimistic it will work. I think the likely result is, it gets robbed with the same frequency as the private stores that previously existed and were run out of town by thieves. And then the mayor brings in the cops to protect this store, because it's government-owned--but then you think "gee, maybe if we'd just beefed up police protection in the first place, we wouldn't have had to go through all this rigmarole of setting up a state-owned store". (Plus, you get equal protection questions as to why this store, but not that store, gets government protection. It sounds awfully corrupt . . . ) I hear ya, and appreciate your perspective. I personally have a lot of skepticism about medical cannabis--I'd like to see scientific study of the substance legalized so that we can get some reliable data; but experientially it seems like for every four clients I see who have a medical marijuana card, two or three of them are pretty obviously using recreationally. I understand that clinical MDMA for processing trauma was looking pretty promising, and then it seems like the FDA randomly pulled approval--I haven't followed the issue closely, but it sounds like a shame. I tend to get pretty pedantic and sometimes prickly in the rough-and-tumble of debate, but please know that I'm glad you're still here. (By the way--we used to have a forum member who went by the moniker of "Godless" whose life story sounded a little like yours--former LDS, then agnostic/atheist; former military; socially progressive. Are you him, perchance? If so, welcome back.) We *should* bat an eye at the costs of incarceration, for sure. And to our credit, we conservatives been trying to limit them--by suggesting we not fund gender transition surgery for prisoners, for example. 😎 In all seriousness--this is a situation where we should probably be running the numbers and doing whatever's cheapest. But where people just point-blank refuse to go to treatment--incarceration is all we've got left. (And of course, lots of addicts commit other crimes that do merit incarceration, even if their addiction in and of itself shouldn't.) I guess my thought on that is: "Not my circus, not my monkeys." To my mind, the GOPers defecting to the Democratic Party are out of their ever-lovin' minds if they think they can nudge it back to the right. Systemically, the Democratic party is going to be a leftist organ. Since Jeffersonian days, they are the ones who have championed what Robert Bork called "radical [economic] egalitarianism" and "radical [moral] individualism". Iconoclasm, deconstructing and reconstructing society in pursuit of utopia, and giving short shrift to the experiential wisdom of the past, is practically baked into their DNA. It has been said that the "war on poverty", since 1964, has cost of $25 trillion. Assuming arguendo that it has indeed rescued 13 million people from poverty, then that's nearly $2 million per person. We could have given every one of those 13 million people an education at a private university for a cost of $50K per student per year, and had $22 trillion left over. This is insanity. Saying that PPACA "has its flaws", in light of the figures I've posted, seems like a study in understatement. And maybe there's a philosophical difference here. It seems to me that for progressives, doing something that inadvertently makes a situation worse is considered to still be better than doing nothing; whereas for conservatives, the reverse is generally true. What needs to happen, of course, is a free market. Use antitrust law to go after HMOs and health care providers that engage in anti-competitive behavior. Make them post prices. Let health care consumers shop for the best bargains. Prices began spiraling out of control when we decided we could improve health care by insulating both producers and consumers from the natural consequences of their own actions. I don't see how *any* of those could be helped by wage reform. The housing crisis is fundamentally a problem of supply and demand--too many people (and dollars) chasing too few dwellings. If you arbitrarily increase wages, then all you do is mean that there are even more dollars chasing the same finite number of dwellings; and prices go even higher. The only sustainable solution is to create more dwellings, and eliminate barriers to construction/development where we can responsibly do so. I dunno, brother. I think I just showed earlier in this post that, vis a vis the war on poverty--assuming it even worked, we spent $25 trillion ($83,000 per American alive today) to get a result that we could have gotten for under $3 trillion. The amount that Americans are willing to spend on people in crisis, is not the problem. The American welfare state, while well-intended, is quite simply a boondoggle on a level that seems unparalleled in modern history. And while we've had a number of budgetary brouhahas in which the GOP has thrown occasional tantrums over programs whose costs spin wildly out of control while yielding sub-par results--can we really point to large numbers of people who were turned down for federal programs like SNAP, or TANF, or WIC, or Medicaid, on the grounds that "you meet the criteria for eligibility, but we just don't have the money right now"? I don't believe so.

I don't disagree about the need for compromise. I do disagree with the notion that the framers wrote an amendment process into the Constitution but didn't expect that it would need to be followed if folks wanted to present the document as meaning something other than what it said. Take your example of the Bill of Rights: Yes, there was compromise, through a process; the terms of which were outlined in the document itself. You'll note, perhaps, that I picked the figure of "50 years" (ie, since 1974) very carefully. Segregation was not legal in 1974. And I would argue that many of the things you cite were created by progressives in the first place who were bucking the meaning of the Constitution's plain text. I think most of the changes over the past fifty years, specifically, have been primarily on conservative-versus-liberal lines. The media trends have moved overwhelmingly towards secularization and social liberalism; and the movers and shakers in those industries have been overwhelmingly Democrats. As you say, conservatives haven't been 100% right; particularly on environmental issues. That said: I don't think stopping a government-mandated holocaust of infants is a bad thing, even if some state abortion regimens need some refinement to clarify the FUD about when abortions are or aren't medically necessary (which FUD is often created by abortionists themselves--see, e.g., the sad case of Amber Thurman, who could have gotten a perfectly legal DNC and who in fact would probably be alive today if the FDA hadn't rammed through approvals of the abortion pill in the first place). And the US healthcare system--certainly since 2010, and really for a long time before that--is the opposite of the free market that conservatives have long been advocating for. I understand being tired of finger-pointing and the longing for a more cooperative political era. But frankly, JJ--as I point out in my last post, we've been burned by fifty years of working with progressives; because progressives lie about what their true agendas are and because at this point it's become painfully obvious that "working together" is more or less Demspeak for "yield up unto this my people, your cities, your lands, and your possessions, rather than that they should visit you with the sword and that destruction should come upon you." If the left came up with solutions to these Very Pressing Social Problems (many of which exist primarily in urban areas where their side already has nearly absolute power) that didn't entail me compromising my own or my family's stability, security, resources, and/or general liberty, then I would be happy to bless their efforts and quit asking inconvenient questions about just whose policies created the current mess. But as long as the left keeps insisting upon their moral authority to govern me, I'm going to keep pointing out what incompetent (not to say malicious) governors they've proven themselves to be.

The sequel: Stake Conference.

Of course it is. It's a college town. Most college students are living independently with little or no income and are therefore, definitionally, in poverty. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just a stage of life. The real problem is chronic poverty--by which I mean, an individual remains stuck in the bottom quintile of income, decade after decade, for most of their productive lives. I believe what @NeuroTypical was driving at, is that people who do those things will not stay in poverty. Indeed, but that's kind of my point. Crime doesn't follow poverty, it follows culture. So you won't solve it by giving people free stuff even as their moral values remain unchanged. (If it were, then people getting food stamps and Section 8 would never commit crimes, right?) Truly addressing crime requires a level of social and community engagement that is far more universal, and far harder, than just voting to give away the tax revenues of the people who didn't commit crimes. Frankly, I'm not sure it can be done except through the auspices of a Judeo-Christian religious renaissance--any government rapprochement with which, would throw half the country into conniptions while also creating genuine Constitutional issues. I think the problem is even more complicated and multifaceted than that. Originally you would only go to prison (defined as: be incarcerated for over one year) if you were convicted of a "felony", and there were only nine felonies: Murder, Robbery, Manslaughter, Rape, Sodomy (which at the time, meant male-on-male rape), Larceny, Arson, Mayhem, and Burglary (hence the law student's mnemonic, "Mr. & Mrs. Lamb"). We've had at least a century of politicians at both the state and federal level who want to be seen as "tough on crime", and who thus have moved more and more offenses into the realm of "felonies"; and in general I think that's a bad thing. Under classical common law, Michael Vick would never have gone to prison at all. I like animals, and I have no particular objection to laws against cruelty to animals or dogfighting or whatever Vick was convicted of. But I would agree with you that it shouldn't be a felony. I don't think I would quite agree with your notion that "our penal system was built on the idea that adults with bad programming can't be reprogrammed". Classical discussions of criminal justice all the way back to the Enlightenment have talked about the need to balance retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation. But there was certainly more of an emphasis on deterrence. I think that was due to the twin factors that a) there just wasn't a lot of science about human psychology and rehabilitation [which candidly, even now, I find is often not repeatable on a patient-to-patient basis] and b) in an era where science hadn't provided us with marvelously addictive substances--in most cases deterrence just plain worked on that subset of people who didn't drink themselves to an early death or eventually starved through their own indolence. Jail sucked, prison sucked worse, and people who were released really didn't want to go back there and were willing to change their lives accordingly. Speaking anecdotally and for my own jurisdiction (I have no idea what happens in others): People don't do prison, or even jail, for first- or second- or, often, even third-time drug offenses--even when the drug involved is the hard stuff like meth or heroin. What generally happens is they miss a hearing (maybe a pretrial hearing, or maybe a post-sentencing review on a piddling little diversion or a plea in abeyance agreement), the court issues a warrant, the criminal calls the court and sets a hearing in exchange for the warrant being vacated, and then the criminal blows that hearing too, and then we rinse and repeat three or four more times; and finally the judge says "Screw it. I'm issuing a $5,000 warrant, cash-only." If we can't get the people who need help to even show up to meetings with people who sincerely want to help them--what then? We still don't really know what to do with drug addicts. I'm too lazy to look up the stats, but I seem to remember being at a CLE recently where it was suggested that generally, residential drug treatment programs are something like 35-45% effective over the long term. For all our talk of rehabilitation, in many/most cases we just plain don't know how to do it reliably and well. None of this excuses our simply resigning ourselves to the status quo, or choosing to look the other way at a failing system. But I do think this is another example of the phenomenon I mentioned in another recent thread whereby 1. Progressives get their way and their values become commonplace (in this case: secularization, de-stigmatization of fornication and adultery and casual divorce, trivialization of abortion, acceptance of gangsta culture, erosion of academic standards and teachers' disciplinary authority in schools, de-stigmatization of gateway drug use, and a general deliberate rejection of any cultural traits that seemed to WASP-y); 2. A slough of second-order consequences ensues that leaves us worse off than we were before; and 3. My friends on the left demand we Do Something™, with with that Something (in this case, one that sounds an awful lot like trying to bribe criminals not to break the law) generally tending to limit my rights or dig into my pocketbook while, coincidentally, being something that past experience and precedent suggests is unlikely to yield a palpable improvement. This all makes me pretty reluctant to allow the left to set the agenda on future systemic reforms. Perhaps, as a certain president once suggested, we should agree that the people who created these problems "can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back." I don't oppose rehabilitation in principle. I work in my state's child welfare system and I see parents go through the best rehabilitative services that our government has to offer, every day. But I also see, on an individual level, that there is a point at which (if you'll forgive the use of economic lingo to discuss a social problem) the marginal utility of additional services doesn't justify the marginal cost of additional services. That will naturally vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; but from a federal standpoint--after sixty years of a War on Poverty in which the poverty rate only went from 19% to a shade below 15% (and it's not even clear whether that was primarily due to government policy or market forces), I'm leery of demands (particularly, ones laden with emotional pleas) to simply put more money into the problem. So when I see an argument like the above, my initial gut reactions are: To put things bluntly: given the availability of food stamps and Pell grants, it's difficult for me to imagine why a mentally competent adult in this country would a) sincerely not know where their own or their children's next meal was going to come from [They might not know where their meals next month will come from, pending the results of the paperwork-intensive re-application process that many government programs put their clients through periodically; and yes, that is stressful. But, their next meal? No, I don't believe it.] or b) not be able to get into, and get funding for, a community college program. Additionally, in many urban areas, an alphabet soup of county and municipal level agencies offers everything from parenting courses to resume workshops to financial management and general life-skills classes. Before we go about creating new programs, I think we need to study why the programs we have seem to be such abysmal failures at reaching so many of the people who need them the most. PPACA was supposed to fix the problem of medical bankruptcies for lower-income families. If I understand the CBO website on PPACA correctly, the federal government provided $1.8 trillion in health insurance subsidies last year (my per capita share of that was around $5,400; and since I'm the sole breadwinner in a family of 8, that's actually $43,200). That's twice what I plan to give each of my kids as a combined college/mission/wedding fund--in three years, on one program alone (and a program that doesn't even work, to boot), the federal government will have frittered away everything I'll ever be able to save for my kids' futures. I sympathize with any family that continues to struggle with medical debt 14 years after the passage of PPACA. But frankly, the Democratic Party has shown itself incompetent to the point of malevolence at addressing this particular issue. Housing shortages and prices are certainly an issue. But again, traditional progressive policies including regulatory hostility to suburban expansion, various layers of red tape and occasional whining about "gentrification" in urban renovation/renewal, manipulation of the mortgage industry to favor pet constituencies, rent control in some urban areas, making eviction more difficult (thus deterring landlords from putting properties on the market in the first place), and competition with immigrant families who are often willing to pool resources and accept a lower standard of housing, all tend to exacerbate these issues. Additionally: Salt Lake City experimented with a "housing first" approach to chronic homelessness a few years ago. It failed. Spectacularly.

One of the interesting aspects about the issue of theodicy is that people who live lives of chronic suffering, pain, brutality, and loss seem not to grapple with it nearly so much as people who themselves are either thoroughly unacquainted with that kind of adversity (but are tormented by the thought that others experience it), or experience it as a change in circumstances to a life that overall has been quite comfortable. A coworker who is better trained in philosophy than I has recently helped me to understand why Trinitarians are so obsessed with God’s sovereignty/all-powerful nature and the theoretical necessity of an Unmoved Mover. But I don’t know that we LDS need to be quite so bashful about admitting that there are some things God can’t do. There are some experiments/ simulations/ tests that will simply be ruined if the scientist intervenes in a particular way, or does it too often, or otherwise becomes predictable to the test subjects; and the scientist’s power and knowledge—while superior to anything the lab rats can comprehend—nevertheless can’t unilaterally change those principles. I’m not sure if any one person “needs” to experience atrocities. But if we are to become exalted beings that are to create and govern worlds, then we must understand why *we*, as super-powerful divinities, must not act in a certain way towards our subjects; and thus I think we all “need” to experience a world in which atrocities are imaginable. God, I think, can’t exalt us through a mortal probation where atrocities are impossible. All He can do is show that He is willing to Himself undergo the very vilest, most horrifyingly excruciating experiences that such a fallen world has to offer.

The thing is, we already have a federal program geared towards making sure that women, infants, and children have enough to eat. And that’s above and beyond a broader program of food stamps/TANF. The programs are not particularly well-administered, in my experience; but they do exist and they do work. Moreover, I’ve been a desperately poor parent[*]. I would venture to guess that a lot of folks—especially LDS folks, who are encouraged to start having children early—have been. I never resorted to crime. In that time of poverty it was my upbringing and values and social network, not my need, that determined my life choices. It’s certainly dangerous to over-generalize; but on the whole I don’t think people steal because they are hungry. Rather, I think they steal—and fail to succeed professionally—through a combination of entitlement, a lack of self-discipline, and a rejection of the possibility of (or the character traits, skills, and activities that enable) social mobility. That sounds like a moral judgment, and I don’t mean it to—a lot of folks, especially these days, just weren’t raised to know any better; and political/“community” leaders have tended to cater to and exacerbate these traits, rather than working and demanding accountability to see that those traits are extinguished. *EDIT: on a re-reading, what I should have written is “I’ve been desperately poor *as a* parent.” Though, I’m a pretty poor parent, too.

Yeah Yeah, it would create interesting questions about "who defines what the *value* really is?". I suspect that when it got to the California Supreme Court, the prosecution would have to prove that the shopowner really had an arm's length buyer willing to pay $951 for the item. Props for creativity, though.

Remember, though, that Jefferson also anticipated that such ratifications had a very good chance of being bloody; and he was OK with that ("tree of liberty watered by the blood of patriots", and all that). Jefferson, for all his greatness, was not at the Constitutional Convention; and among the founders he was something of an outlier in a lot of ways. I think it strains credulity to suggest that a critical mass of the Constitution's authors felt that the document's clear meaning as it existed at time of authorship would or should be open to amendment by judicial fiat as an end-run around the amendment process that they themselves had written into the document. The interesting thing to me about the "evolving technology" argument vis a vis the 2nd amendment, is that the ratchet only turns one way. The Second Amendment exists so that the citizenry can effectively function as a check against the federal government; and for all our worries about evolving technology in the hands of the citizenry, we seem not to talk that much about how evolving technology in the hands of the government skews this carefully-crafted balance. In other words: We're supposed to consider how much more lethal small arms supposedly are now; but we must never ever consider government's increased technological capacity for tyranny--its ability to track, monitor, and control human communication, association, and movement; its ability to wage open warfare on its own citizens and destroy entire cities (and some states) at the touch of a button. Nor do we really engage much with institutional developments like the erosion of traditional checks on federal power; the decline of state sovereignty; or the fact that state militias are now virtually obsolete and their sort-of successor national guard units are now subject to unquestioned federalization on the barest of pretexts. Might some of those argument suggest that we actually need more robust safeguards--and especially more effective armaments--against federal tyranny now than ever before; even if there is a higher collateral cost? And really, I'm not sure I'm convinced that commonly-available small arms are particularly more lethal now than those that were commonly available in the United States during the 1950s or 60s; or indeed, even in the 1920s or 1930s. What has changed is that a (compared to 1930s or 1960s) staggeringly large proportion of Americans now live in social isolation; seek meaning through notoriety rather than human intimacy, believe that life is an accident of nature, cannot articulate a cohesive basis for a universally-applicable moral code, see little reason to plan for either an individual or a collective future, and see neither the fact that they are humans nor the fact that they are Americans as giving them any sort of common bond with or obligation to their countrymen. Frankly, it feels to me like progressives spent most of the last 50 years changing the culture and demanding stuff, and we conservatives warned them that it would cause problems, and they said "give it to us anyways!", and eventually they got what they wanted--and now that they've gotten it, the problems we prophesied of are coming to pass; and to solve those new problems, progressives want us to cede just a little bit more more of our liberty and safety. (But this time it will work. And shut up with that nonsense about "second order consequences" and "Chesterton's fence", you bigot!) That's always how it is. Just a little bit more; and just a little bit more again, until suddenly--people are having their kids taken away for publicly questioning the efficacy of NHS doctors, or being sent to jail for silently praying at a place where an abortionist might see them and have sadz. But of course, not all conservatives are agreeing to detain and deport all illegals, either. Mass shootings--especially school shootings--are a tiny minority of the overall shootings in this country. Progressives may tell us they don't actually want all of our guns; but there are two problems here: Progressives have a habit of lying about what they want until they're in a position to actually get it [e.g. government benefits, citizenship, and voting for illegal immigrants; gay marriage; unlimited elective abortion; transgender recruitment and porn in schools; racial quotas in school admissions and hiring; leveraging law enforcement authority to impose news blackouts on private media companies; coordination of prosecutions with friendly political campaigns; etc]; and this particular lie ("We'll stop when we get all the assault weapons. Honest!") is a flagrantly unbelievable lie; because if a progressive wants to address the one-hundred-odd mass shooting deaths per year, then of course he'll also want to address the tens of thousands of non-mass shootings done by non-assault-weapons per year (because, what kind of monster wouldn't ?). Both of which were gun-free zones. At Sutherland Springs, the "good guy with the gun" was not inside the church; he attacked the shooter as the shooter exited. (As I understand it, Texas law designated churches as gun-free zones until it was changed in 2019; so Willeford may have been exposing himself to legal liability had he entered the church to engage the murderer.) If you haven't read Larry Correia's MonsterHunterNation.com post about gun control, I highly recommend it. He's kind of a potty-mouth, so I won't link to it here; but he does engage with the "reloading" scenario. Google and ye shall find.

And before that, Biden. But Swift’s appalling taste in men has always been part of her charm.

The older I get, the more apropos it seems to compare the marital relationship to the relationship between the Church membership and the Q15. My relationship with spouse is important, even salvational. Truth is important, even salvational. Sometimes my spouse is wrong and I am right. Sometimes she is right and I am wrong. I don’t usually know when I am wrong while I am in the act of being wrong. Even when I am quite sure my spouse is wrong—there are times when it’s important she knows she’s wrong, and there’s are times it’s not important. *How* I tell my spouse she’s wrong, matters a great deal. I can do immense harm to our relationship if I go about it in the wrong way. Just because I may need to tell my spouse she’s wrong, doesn’t necessarily mean I need to tell third parties that she’s wrong. How I talk about my spouse to third parties, again, matters enormously. I can do immense harm to our relationship if I go about it in the wrong way. With regard to points 4-8: I need to be really careful to think about what my own motivations are in these cases. What am I trying to accomplish? Am I trying to use guilt or shame in furtherance of some personal agenda? As with the relationship between me and my spouse: so with the relationship between me and the Church leadership. With regard to the intra-Church Brigham-hate, I think most of it comes from three distinct camps: A. Libertines who, on behalf of themselves or out of some warped notion of “love for others”, want to bring the Sexual Revolution into the church; but realize they can only do so by undermining the historical underpinnings of the current leadership’s moral authority. These people deserve contempt. B. Trauma-dumpers. Generally victims of abuse or infidelity (or very close to such victims), who as a coping/survival mechanism have adopted broad caricatures about the sort of people who perpetrate these misdeeds. These folks tend to get (and I don’t mean this pejoratively) triggered by superficial similarities between alleged conduct of JS/BY. Detailed arguments justifying JS/BY and explaining how their conduct and motives differed from actual predators, demands a re-opening and re-processing of old wounds and a certain embrace of empathy and nuance that many of these folks just aren’t willing (or, perhaps, therapeutically able) to undertake. They deserve pity (but to the extent that they perpetuate historical falsehoods, those must still be refuted). C. Populist-conservatives who have for various reasons (especially COVID) developed a new streak of anti-institutionalism and are still trying to reconcile that with the fastidious obedience (and often, brittle black-and-white thinking) that they’ve traditionally offered to the Church (eg, “Why would a prophet who can never be wrong demand that my family to take this 100% Satanic vaccine?”). I think a certain amount of historic-church-hate like this tends to soothe a lot of their concerns (“prophets CAN be wrong and things will still come out ok in the long run”); but I don’t think such people have really thought through the full ramifications of the historical allegations they’ve accepted as true, and I think that over time that mentality to some degree becomes a spiritual bandage that conceals tissue that is festering rather than healing. And I really don’t know how to deal with people in that mindset.

“Another”?

1. Speaking as a NeverTrumper: Drudge was never a Trump fan (I remember him being pretty pro-Romney back in the day), and I’m not on his site much. But from what I’ve seen it’s not just personal discomfort with Trump. Drudge’s substantive values seem to have changed; he highlights stories advocating (or giving fawning coverage to) positions and institutions he’d have subjected to criticism 20 years ago. 2. I am reasonably confident that if pushed, within 24 hours I could produce at least 5 people who had contemporaneous knowledge of my after-high-school job as a dishwasher/line cook at a family-owned restaurant in the mid-1990s. I am—perhaps not perfectly confident, but more confident than not—that somewhere in the IRS, a copy of my W-2 from that restaurant for the years I worked there remains on file; and that POTUS really wanted to do me a favor, he could get them for me. And I’m 100% sure that if you checked my state bar application, you’d find that as part of the application process I had been required to list every single job I had ever had—including that high school job, and going all the way back to the paper route I had in the 6th grade. Maybe Kamala’s waiting for Trump to dig in a bit more before embarrassing him by releasing her proof that she really did work at McDonald’s. Or maybe she never actually worked there. If she hasn’t released proof by the night before Election Day, I’ll assume it’s the latter.

. . . And if humans make such a shambles of the idea of one Heavenly Mother, what might they do if it turns out that God is a polygamist and that we don’t all necessarily share the same Heavenly Mother? In a parallel vein: God the Father is a real person; we learn of His existence through the testimony of others who have experienced Him and eventually, at some level, experience Him ourselves. Whereas—outside the Church—a divine feminine is entirely a man-made construct. People don’t presume to worship a goddess because a female divine being has revealed herself to them. They worship a goddess because it’s a means of rejecting/ rebelling against/ proclaiming the insufficiency of the male divine being who has revealed Himself to them.

As a kid I grew up wearing crew-neck undershirts, and that has been my preference for garment tops as well. I bought a couple of “crew neck” tops a month or two ago and was surprised to see that they had more of a scoop neck. Did a little checking and it sounds like the Church made a point of lowering the neckline on “crew-neck” garments a couple of years ago. I have typically thought that in a professional context, when wearing a button-down shirt with the top button open, it looked a little cleaner/sharper if a bit of crew-necked white undershirt was visible rather than having a bit of the wearer’s chest (hair) be on display. But apparently the Brethren disagree . . .

That reminds me of the fanfic—did the author call it “Rome Sweet Rome?”—about a US Marine brigade in Afghanistan that finds itself randomly transported (with all its equipment) to the outskirts of first-century Rome.

As a state employee/future retiree who’s very sensitive to the possibility of a government default (my CA neighbor growing up was a firefighter who took a huge haircut on his pension when his city declared bankruptcy): I console myself with the belief that if even fiscally prudent states like mine wind up insolvent, then the fed government will likely have collapsed and there will have been such a breakdown in law and order that any other form of investment will have similarly seen its value evaporate. We may all be on the Titanic here; but some of you drips will be going into the water long before I will be.

If many/most professionals can’t consistently beat the market, I’m certainly not smart enough to do it either. Most of my retirement is a state defined-benefit pension (yay!), but the portion that is defined-contribution (the investment of which, I am allowed to direct) is in an S&P 500 index fund. I will say candidly that I done see how the stock market can grow indefinitely when birth rates (and hence the labor force and, over the intermediate term, the pool of investors) seem to be in decline. But so long as the Church isn’t completely jumping out of the market, I suppose there’s no call for me to jump out either.

They quail before the furor of my strongly-worded legal filings.

Just like you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, sometimes you have to break a few line cooks to create one decent chef.

I'm a latecomer here, and the discussion is too extensive for me to use the mutli-quote function; but I'd like to respond to a couple of what I understand to be @JohnsonJones's points/allegations: The Church isn't protecting children as much as the BSA because, inter alia, it doesn't subject those working with youth to background checks and it doesn't require as-frequent renewal of Youth Protection Training. In addition to the question that the FAIR article addresses as to what would even show up on a background check (commercially-available checks in the US would be limited to criminal history; often just criminal convictions. I can assure you that they won't include CPS history--at least, not in the State of Utah)--I think one dynamic that gets missed here is that in the Church, if you waltz into a new ward and say "I want to work with the children. Please do not give me any calling unless it puts me in close proximity to the children"--that's a red flag; because we have a strong ethic of not aspiring to any calling and instead, as @LDSGator eloquently relates, serving where we are asked to serve. By contrast, in the BSA everyone is there because they want to work with kids; and such statements don't trigger any "creepy alarms". So it's entirely appropriate that BSA "volunteers" should be subjected to a more rigorous vetting process than LDS (pardon the term) "conscripts". Another dynamic that gets missed is that the burden of proof for getting a notation put on your LDS membership record, is lower than the burden of proof for getting a conviction put on your criminal record. The new LDS youth program is toothless because, inter alia, youth are not excluded for failure to comply with the terms of the program; and especially failure to live moral standards/failure to hold temple recommends/failure to attend the temple. Well, yeah. The BSA is fundamentally a social club and can exclude anyone it wants to with no spiritual/eternal ramifications. The Church doesn't have that luxury; we can't kick kids out of the youth program (whatever it may be) just because they wouldn't buy the uniforms or badges or manuals or camping gear or whatnot. And I suspect that if the Church did start kicking out youth who couldn't qualify for a temple recommend, the hue and cry of protest would arise from many quarters of the Church--possibly even including my good friend, JohnsonJones. LDS youth protections are inferior because the BSA will immediately kick out violators of, eg, the "two deep policy", whereas the LDS Church won't. I have a couple of family members involved in non-LDS BSA troops (not in Utah), and they are desperately strapped for adult leadership. Barring additional creepiness, an adult violator of the two-deep policy would not be immediately kicked out; (s)he would be counseled and given a couple of warnings. BSA national may talk a tough game in order to give themselves legal cover (and of course, BSA national is not exactly known for their honesty, which is one reason the LDS Church bailed on them). But while the LDS policy recommending two-deep leadership may sound softer, it more honestly reflects what's realistically attainable at the grass-roots level. The LDS policy requiring those working with youth to report disclosures of abuse is toothless because there is no universal proscribed punishment for those who fail to comply with it. Such as . . . what? It's not enough that we instruct our people to render unto Caesar; we now have to do Caesar's work for him by launching inquisitions as to which Church members have failed to obey the policy and then revoke their temple covenants as punishment? The Church's inferior youth protection policies are what will render it more vulnerable to future litigation than the BSA. I think that's dubious. It is the Church's publicly-known, vastly deeper pockets that render it a more attractive target. If you look at most of the publicized LDS sex abuse litigation over the past ten years, precious little of it comes from two-deep leadership violations by bishops or youth leaders who perped on children themselves. Rather, the claims come from a) children who were victimized by a family acquaintance who happened to hold an LDS priesthood office, which tort lawyers then seized upon to try to establish respondeat superior; or b) bishops who heard a disclosure of abuse by a perpetrator or victim in a confessional context and encouraged the member to make a confession/report to law enforcement but felt unauthorized to make their own independent report. Additionally, right now there's sort of a blood-in-the-water mentality because of what happened to the BSA. Also, I think there's been an assumption that we basically did what the Catholics had done--assumed for theological reasons that our clergy were not subject to civil law, and deliberately shuffled pedophiles around and put them in new positions of authority from which they could strike again. But the majority of the high-profile cases lately have ended in legal victories for the Church; and I think the personal injury bar is finally starting to realize that the Church's approach was not nearly so outrageous. A college employee's professional associations with college students is an appropriate model of the desirable dynamic to be established within the LDS Church. Strongly disagree. The Church is specifically trying to build a trust-based, Zion society. That may or may not be attainable as broader secular socio-political conditions evolve; but I don't think the ideal should be thrown overboard just because our critics (many of whom resent the Church for providing a socio-theological framework that reinforces the choice of many LDS youth to be remain chaste and otherwise immune from critics' advances, exploitation, or other influence) make unquantified accusations about how harmful it supposedly is to children. This quote: There may have been individual leaders and congregational cultures that, reflecting (along with the BSA) the broader culture in which they found themselves, preferred to seek resolutions "in house" (I find it ironic that under the standards of the time in question, by documenting the identities and complaints against the perpetrators and then drumming the perps out of the organization, the BSA was actually doing *more* to combat child abuse than many other groups; but then those same records resulted in their being publicly pilloried for failure to protect children). But I'd be very surprised if you were able to point to a single directive from Church leadership in SLC urging a general policy of concealment of child sex abuse from the legal authorities. And as for the hotline: the phone number for that hotline was actually concealed from lay Church members until the last ten years or so. It was not something that existed to help the Church bigwigs identify and hush up allegations of abuse. It was intended as a resource for lay clergy. I've corresponded with you before about legal issues, JohnsonJones; and you are savvy enough to know what clerical privilege is, who holds it, and that the circumstances under which it can be waived vary from state to state. The FAIR article cited by @mordorbund offers inaccurate numbers. For example, it wrongly "extrapolates" a 30% figure. It sounds like maybe you didn't read the article very carefully, and went into it wanting to reject the optimistic picture it presented. The 30% figure comes from the fact that the Church paid 30% of the settlement pot; and the article then goes on to reject any suggestion that because the Church paid 30% of the fund it was the origin for 30% of the abuse cases. You then retreat into a sort of factual nihilism by claiming that "numbers vary depending on the source", but the numbers in the FAIR article--and the methodology--seem clear: the authors went into the LA Times database of the Ineligible Volunteer files (which spanned the last 80 years), threw out the cases where no religious affiliation of a troop could be identified, and then isolated the remaining cases where there was demonstrable affiliation with the LDS Church (a process that would result in the Church's being over-represented). And even so, only 5.16% of the abusers were LDS-affiliated. You link to an article quoting one of the victim attorneys in the BSA bankruptcy, Tim Kosnoff, claiming that the figure was more like 15-20%; but Kosnoff had the same data the FAIR authors had. The simple fact is: Kosnoff lied. (If you've been following the bankruptcy or the ScouterForum discussions, Kosnoff was determined to drag the Church into the proceeding and milk it for everything it had. He had a novel theory that since the Church had delegates at BSA National, BSA National's policies were the Church's fault and that all victims, LDS or not, ought to be able to hold the Church jointly and severally liable. Even a number of the victims ultimately concluded that Kosnoff was something of a snake.) One can muddy the waters about how many LDS Scouts, and troops there were over the last 8 decades, but the simple fact is that no one in this discussion has offered any basis for claiming that LDS abusers or LDS troops were over-represented in the documented BSA sex abuse cases--not in the total number of cases, not in any decade, not in any one year. Nor has any statistical basis been offered to contest the claim that, troop for troop, a scout was statistically safer in a random LDS unit than he was pretty much anywhere else in the BSA. The Church's current youth program is vague and being applied inconsistently and, in most cases, poorly. We would have been better off sticking with the BSA. I agree with the first part. I thought we'd have something much more structured and robust ready to go when we left the BSA--or, within a couple of years. I do see my son getting socialization and leadership experience and some outdoor activity in his deacon's quorum. Then again, it was surprising and disappointing when I took the Teachers' Quorum sailing a couple of weeks ago and asked one of them to tie a square not on a reefing line, and none of them knew how to do it. Then again--Gospel teaching was a much bigger priority on our sailing outing than in any BSA outdoor activity I'd ever done. The leaders did it in a way that was very inspirational, natural, and unobtrusive to the activity that we were doing. And that, in the end, is what's going to save my boy. As far as the Church goes: The BSA had its purpose. Then circumstances changed. The BSA may still be a good choice for individual families, but it is not a good choice for the Church. Its national leadership got taken over by people who bold-faced lied about where they planned to take the organization, and then shut the Church's representatives out of the decision-making process by subterfuge at a pivotal moment. It slowly became more sympathetic to social activists who want to pull the organization in direction where the Church cannot follow. Its financial demands on both individual boys and the chartering orgs were increasing by leaps and bounds and it insisted on treating the Church as a cash cow, even as it steadfastly refused to get its own fiscal house in order--and in hindsight, the Church extricated itself from the BSA just in time to avoid getting caught up in the collapse. I regret the Church's leaving the BSA, just like Lot regretted leaving Sodom and Gomorrah. But there are costs to spending too much time looking backwards . . .

This assumes that the poor generally can’t help being poor; and that a poor person who begins attending LDS services and otherwise applying LDS teachings to the person’s life is nonetheless likely to remain poor indefinitely. The Church devotes considerable resources to ensuring that the opposite takes place—to empowering the poor to move, over years and decades, into the middle and upper-middle class. I think the statistical data cited in the OP shows the fruits of that effort.

I don’t know if this is happening elsewhere, but our temple president (Saratoga Springs) had apparently asked stake presidents to have their wards quit organizing youth temple trips—they’re tying up all the reservation slots and blocking families from attending together.

I certainly agree with the principle that the more we needlessly share (or otherwise trivialize/sensationalize) our revelations, the fewer such revelations we are likely to get in the future. But it seems odd to me that we would be admonished to go into the temple specifically for the purpose of getting revelation to navigate the vicissitudes of day-to-day living, but would then be expected never to share the insights gained from those revelations with those with whom we share our lives and over whom the patriarchal order gives us some degree of stewardship