mirkwood

The president and matron of that temple spoke at my recent stake conference. They don't know when it will open. 😞

Taylorsville, Utah.  There is gonna be an open temple there soon.  Just mark my words.

I agree that this probably comes down to Tim not believing he crossed the line (abuse of 'name' and relationship) and the Church believing he did. The message was communicated clearly though--don't even come close to abusing the church or its leaders for personal gain. No hint or whiff of that will be tolerated. 

I don't think it takes an outside view to have this impression. It's mine as well.
I believe Tim Ballard name dropped anecdotally. I believe that was perceived by Elder Ballard as name dropping for gain. I think it's irresponsible of the church to condemn him publicly like they did though. Assuming the other allegations are false, they may have entirely destroyed his career. Someone should have called him and asked him to not use Elder Ballard's name any more. He probably (from my best understanding...which may be way off), would have complied -- even apologized.
But by publicly "denouncing" him, if all he made was a rather innocent mistake of telling what he felt was an interesting anecdote, not good.
I think, maybe, why I feel this way is I can see anyone in Tim Ballard's position doing the same. If I was working on a project and one of the prophets or apostles said, even in passing, "You're doing great!" or anything akin to that, I might well share that and get myself into trouble too. Which, you know.... lesson to learn I suppose.
Of course there may be things that went on that I'm unaware of. I only know that Tim Ballard stated that he never used Elder Ballard's name to self promote, and I believe that he believes that.

The Church’s response to Vice is legit; the Deseret News published the full statement. There are those suggesting that the author of the statement (LDS media relations director Doug Anderson) has somehow gone rogue; but the statement is now six days old and every day it goes unretracted/ unrebutted/ unsupplemented by the Church  (and, every day that Anderson keeps his job) seems to bolster the conclusion that the statement said substantially what the Church leadership wanted it to say.  

Which is what makes me suspicious...well that and it is Vice.  
 
Even @NeuroTypical's link to the Deseret News does not have a direct connection to the Newsroom site which I find very strange.

Cannot wait for Halloween, it is by far my favourite time of year. 

I threw him in the river.

What exactly do you think Putin can do to materially help Trump in the election? And what exactly (or even approximately) do you think Trump would be willing to do to help Putin win a wildly unpopular war?

That's not the horrifying thing.   The horrifying thing is that the leader of the free world had some rando staffer just butt in to announce that the president was done and the event was over, while the president was still speaking.  Then another rando staffer cut his mike and turned up the music.
Watch it again.
You tell me - if you're happily working away at the university doing research on a normal day, and your teammates just up and decide you're done, and they take your keyboard away from you as you are typing and turn off your computer, what would you think?

The way I see it....any dent is a good dent.

In other news, this is kind of scary and horrifying:
 
https://x.com/grahamallen_1/status/1700909287608913974?s=46&t=X5qcMifsD8E7ppEtCxaqJw

Sorry - this was a rant about an unpleasant family situation I'm in the middle of. I shouldn't really have posted it.

I finally showed our LDS volunteers this website and my role as a non-LDS moderator. The introduction was the question: Does the term "third hour" mean anything to you? They said it used to. So, I mentioned that some LDS folk wanted a third hour to discuss the gospel and other topics, and so LDSTalk was renamed. While they said they had never heard of the site they seemed impressed. They expressed appreciation, so who knows, we may see a bit of uptick in our traffic. 🙂

Example: 
When COVID hit, Mexico actually secured it's own borders and took a lead in preventing the flow of migrants, legal and illegal.  We also closed the borders, and one presidential press briefing had some random person from some agency nobody had ever heard of before, talking about how zero non-Americans were crossing.  Nobody had any questions.  The ACLU and pro undocumented workers crowd howled a little, but nobody ran with it.  Nobody seemed to notice that historic low numbers of people were attempting to cross in the first place.  Mexico was doing something to stop the flow from their cities to the border.   A pretty impressive feat, since populations fleeing plagues to better places is something humans have done forever.
Other news at the time: The entire oil industry slammed to a crashing halt as the world went into lockdown, demand plummeted, quarantine meant oil tankers were piling up on coasts, unable to get their oil into America.  The price of oil actually went negative for a while there, as oil companies started offering to pay people down the pipeline to take their oil, because it would be cheaper than continuing to hold it where it was.   A week later, Trump crowed publicly about how he forced OPEC and the oil producing world to radically cut back on production in order to deal with the impacts of COVID.   Everyone cut production except Mexico.  Nobody really said why.  Nobody asked.  Nobody talked about it.  Mexico pumping barely hit the news at all - paragraph 5 in a 6 paragraph news story about oil.
Seems pretty obvious to me that Orange man had one of his Art of the Deal discussions with President Obrador (or the cartels or whoever really controls oil production in Mexico.)  You secure the border during covid, and I'll make sure you can keep pumping oil.  

Geopolitical players realize that messenging to various audiences is merely one tiny part of the whole picture.  World leaders already know any nation's leader will speak whatever words to their own people that will help secure their reelection and party's power.  Deals with such foreign leaders involve actions and behavior that often don't make it to the media.  
Putin doesn't care what the American president says to his own people.  And vice versa.  Deals don't depend on such things.  If they did, deals would never get made.

I am of the opinion that there'd be no war in the Ukraine if Trump had won a 2nd term.
We all saw the war coming.  If the bombastic orange dealmaker had been there at the time, he would have made a deal with Putin to keep it from happening.  Eastward NATO expansion was becoming intolerable to Russia.  So Trump would have worked a deal where Putin didn't go to war, Russia would get some NATO expansion curtailing treaty or deal or something, and both of 'em would get some mutually beneficial deal regarding Russian oil exporting and Ukrainian grain.
And he would have been all loud and self righteous about it on Twitter every step of the way.  Shaming NATO member nations into paying more, crowing about how he owned Russia, shaming the Biden pay-for-access family mafia over their involvement with the corrupt Ukraine, basically taking really loud credit for every bit of good to come out of him leading the free world, while at the same time publicly humiliating his opponents and enemies.   And we would have all hated him for it.  And there would be no war in Ukraine right now.