Ironhold

Point of note - Circa 2005, one of the "shock jock" types that Air America Radio had as a host did a skit in which she played gunfire sound effects on top of a recording of Dubya speaking. Cue the Secret Service paying her a visit. So the historical threshold for Secret Service involvement actually is quite low.

To follow up my comments - If a person is dealing with poor mental health issues or is neurodivergent, it can be very hard for them to feel the Spirit, or anything else positive for that matter. In extreme instances, such as if a person has been subjected to spiritual or emotional abuse, they might even be convinced that they don't deserve to have Heavenly Father act on their behalf, or that Heavenly Father has somehow abandoned them. Someone who is in such a state will have an emotional void inside of them, and they're going to try and fill it. Thing is, a person who is down so far that they have such an emotional void is more often than not going to be in a negative spiral where they don't entirely know how to handle social interactions, get rejected by society because they don't entirely know how to handle social interactions, feel that void widen, try again to engage with society, and so forth. If a person finds themself completely socially isolated because of their repeated failures, or that void otherwise crosses a metaphorical event horizon of some kind, then that person is going to seek for anything that will help at least take the edge off of the pain that void has left them, let alone actually fill it. If the void is in any part the result of a lack of social interaction and personal companionship, then odds are the person will seek to fill it through artificial companionship like anime girl figures, AI "girlfriend" programs, adult content, and/or other such methods. Even the whole "talking to strangers on the internet" will help suffice them, but only to a certain point. Thing is, society has a very bad habit of looking at people who are down this far, declaring that they are the cause of their own misfortune, and walking away instead of actually trying to regard these individuals *as* individuals and trying to determine how best to intervene. This is a massive part of why so many young men are going over to the Alt Right, the Tate Brothers, and other such alarming sources of influence, as these sources of influence are among the few places that will openly accept them as they are and they're so grateful for any level of acceptance that they're not asking questions. Cue the Democrats and "progressive" groups further subjecting these individuals to social othering, inadvertently reinforcing the person's decision to become affiliated with these groups and movements. This generation doesn't really have a Fred Rogers or Bob Ross to serve as a positive mass-media unifying source of self-affirmation and socialization instruction, and the people like myself who do try to compensate for this often have a comparatively limited reach. Plus, we're trying to do what we're doing on top of our own issues. If the Democrats want to stem the influence of these various groups, they need to drop the whole "men are evil!" and "men don't need help" mantras from their party platforms and instead focus on social intervention to help people who are on the fringes or experiencing poor mental health get the help they need.

Oh, it's still going on. In fact, a few years ago a "feminist" publication actually featured a "think piece" in which the author argued that all men should be forcibly relocated to concentration camps for the "safety" of women the world over. Or last year a group of internet feminists started a meme about how if they had to choose between being lost in the woods with a man or lost in the woods with a bear they'd choose the bear because they believed that they'd be safer with the bear than with a random man, only for both genders to bombard them with retaliatory memes showing either men having to console the bears after being alone with those internet feminists or the internet feminists discovering the hard way why men were traditionally the protectors of society. Meanwhile, that anime girl figure is always going to greet you with a smile, is always going to listen when you need to express your feelings, will never use anything you say in confidence against you, will never say you aren't good enough, and will never abandon you of her own accord. Hence why a lot of guys - and even some women - are choosing the arm of PVC over the arm of flesh when it comes to companionship.

It's become a punchline, even among women, how feminists will declare that men are the cause of all of society's ills, demand that men be forcibly segregated away from women so that women can be "protected", and then get upset because men are no longer participating in society. As I've mentioned before, this is a big part of why a lot of dudes would rather plunk down $30 for an anime girl statue if they want companionship than try their local dating scene.

As I've noted before, I've worked in the newspaper industry since 2009, and have had my own movie review & op-ed column since 2013. For about 15+ years now, our stake public affairs group has been virtually non-functional. I was called to be an assistant stake public affairs person due to my working for a local newspaper, but was never elevated to being the main stake public affairs person no matter how many times the position turned over. Finally I was told that my services were no longer needed, at which point stake largely forgot I even existed, let alone that I worked for a newspaper. During this time the stake presidency was actually a *stumbling block* to my efforts, in that one particular stake presidency demanded that I submit to them any op-ed or review I wrote that mentioned the church but would then dawdle on giving me feedback. In one incident, it took them three weeks to finally respond to a single column, leaving me a mere 72 hours to create a replacement; when I told them of the situation they had put me in through their delay, the stake president at the time tried to order me to produce a puff piece about an upcoming Choir event. More stake public affair reps have come and gone since, with each one doing very, very little to actually get it done. All the while I'm getting roasted for things not making it into the newspaper I work for despite the fact that I was never given anything to give to the newspaper. Either nobody would think to tell me about an event in enough time, or I would just be told "It's on the ward / stake Facebook page!" when those pages were privated as per official church instruction. Well... as of today's stake conference we have yet another stake public affairs representative. I met with him after conference, and he promised to keep in touch as he gets things fixed. For those of you whose stakes have stake public affairs representatives, how's that been going for you?

If what this individual is saying is correct, then odds are that Comey will be made to surrender the device he used for that photo and that social media posting so that digital forensics can be enacted. This will give the authorities access to everything on that device.

As I've noted elsewhere, during the late 1990s and most of the 2000s the stake leadership in my stake were *fixated* on the idea that all male members of the church were obligated to serve a two-year proselytizing mission, no excuses, and that a failure to do so made one of questionable value to the church. This fixation caused a great many young men, and I think a few young women, to leave the area to escape it, if not leave the church. It also hindered the efforts of those of us like myself who were beginning to see the internet as an avenue for missionary work, raising the question of how much more we could have done if we'd have had proper support. To this day I loathe attending stake priesthood meetings and stake conference adult sessions *because* of everything I went through and was forced to listen to back then, especially since the need to attend to family concerns kept me back. Fast forward a few years. Salt Lake has authorized a young single adult branch because the records say we have enough YSA members for an entire ward. It turns out that most of those members only existed on paper, having either left the area some time ago with the military, with college, out of a desire to avoid various pressures, or aren't even active members anymore if they still do see themselves as members. It's a struggle to keep the branch functional, and when we do finally get going a narcissistic elder's quorum president winds up alienating a number of people who do come because he can't put his own ego aside long enough to help others. There was cheering when he got assigned to another duty station, but by then the damage had already been done and the branch was shuttered after less than a decade. So yeah, I've seen what can happen when incompetent or inattentive leaders are in charge.

If you'll recall, back in 2014 / 2015 Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian were before the United Nations crying their crocodile tears about how their poor life choices and online sociopolitical activism had backfired spectacularly, leading to negative consequences... or as they put it, an organized cyber-bullying campaign ostensibly based on their being involved in video games despite being female. They were demanding reparations under the guise of seeking funding for their various organizations, and weren't going to leave without it. Meanwhile, I'd spent the past 15 years dealing with the anti-Mormon contingent on the internet, with things being far worse in both scope and magnitude than what they were getting at the time and in the case of the anti-Mormon contingent it legitimately was simply because we existed. Cue me wondering how much I could soak the UN for if I was to plead my case accordingly, or if only certain types of people could have that platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall#Plot The original album is a *lot* different, with Pink hallucinating that he's a fascist leader after having been forced out of his hotel room and given drugs so that he could perform, leading to a meltdown on stage. The movie is a lot more surreal in nature, leading to a lot of what the album was trying to say being inadvertently lost in translation.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/david-hogg-vice-chair-vote-dnc-democrats/ Young Democrats voted twenty-something gun control advocate David Hogg into a senior leadership position in the hopes that he would reform the party from within by forcing it to listen to younger voices. Older Democrats have now made it clear they intend to void his election due to a "procedural error" in what I'm already seeing some people speculate is retaliation for his efforts to upset the current order. Yeah, I'm thinking that 2026 isn't going to go as the Democrats want.

For those who have missed it - The camera set up to monitor the chimney at the Vatican spotted a family of seagulls camped out on the roof, including a baby. There are now memes in circulation regarding these seagulls, ranging from "they're just waiting for the announcement as well" to "one of the seagulls just got selected pope". Most of the ones I've seen so far have been rather good-natured and silly.

About 20 years ago I was trying to join a Transformers fan forum. It was a very large, very popular forum at the time, and had also been around for a while. Cue me discovering the hard way that most of the usernames I'd been using on other forums were already taken. In a fit of frustration, I picked a character from some fan fiction I'd been writing at the time. It worked. Some of the users there were also on a few other forums I was going to at the time, so I kept the same username across each forum. As far as the picture goes, it was one of several dozen pre-prepared images on one forum I went to a long, long time ago that we could use as our avatars. It was so long ago that I don't even remember the forum I got it from, and said forum likely doesn't exist anymore anyway.

In all seriousness, the town I live in is relatively peaceful. In a normal year, we have 1 - 2 homicides, and the police generally crack the case within a reasonable amount of time. In 2020, we had 6+ homicides. ...With most of the deaths coming from a family annihilation. ...That has been attributed to the lockdown. That's what is going to stick with me more than anything else, the fact that the stress caused by the lockdown led to an entire family no longer being alive.

Trust me - there are people who remember.

High-Functioning Autistic: unless you're with a group of people who know that you're autistic and accept you for who you are you can burn so much mental energy pretending to be "normal" that you're left mentally and perhaps even emotionally exhausted by the time the night's over. This rather blurs the introvert / extrovert definitions, in that people who are high-functioning can take great delight in social interactions provided they're free to be themselves, but far too often they aren't and so this has led to the overall misconception that those with autism are naturally introverted.

There are also unanswered questions as to whether or not China knew about Covid-19's spread sooner than they let on and whether or not they tried to cover it up for the sake of appearances. That a Chinese news reporter tried to make the WHO discuss Taiwan instead of Covid-19 during an infamous interview didn't help matters any.

That goes back to what I've noted before about how the "gifted" label was often a cursed gift. A great many of us who were called "gifted" back in the day were in fact high-functioning autistic. Parents were encouraged to hold us "gifted" kids to often impossibly high standards, with autistic tics, autistic tells, and signs of autistic burnout all being regarded as personal failings on the part of the "gifted" kid who was, clearly, slacking off and not living up to their potential. Cue a great many "gifted" kids burning out completely in their twenties and thirties, to the point that a few years ago one could find "Gifted Kid Burnout Bingo" cards floating around online as a way for people to retroactively recognize how much damage the label had done to them.

The stake supports a major US military base. Due in part to its influence, a number of the young men from my generation felt called to serve *in the military*, while others saw the military as a stepping stone towards bigger and better things in life (such as how the G.I. Bill could help them pay for college). However, the whole "All young men must serve missions, and all young women must regard all young men who didn't serve as unfit for marriage" mantra put these young men in a difficult spot. This is part of why so many of them either left the area or quit being active. But yeah, things were *bad* here, to the point that we actually once had a stake speaker go on a tangent about how as far as he was concerned anyone who didn't serve a mission was "of no worth" to the church... and he very much meant a witnessing mission. Things like this are why I am trying to caution people that they need to take the rhetoric down a notch and recognize that everyone is different and the whole "best two years" bit might not be the best option for them to serve. Edit - If it tells you anything about what I personally went through? My birthday is in November. One day, a member of the bishopric asked those of us who were priests where we expected to be on our 19th birthdays. Well, I figured that since I was going to graduate in May, I wasn't exactly going to be sitting around for several months twiddling my thumbs. Logically, I could squeeze in a semester or two of college and get that in place by the time my 19th birthday rolled around. *Then* I could put in my paperwork if going was still an option, as things were getting a bit hairy with my maternal grandmother and my parents were needing more effort on my part to help take care of her. So, I said "finishing my first semester of college". He matter-of-factly, zero emotion whatsoever, shot back with "Why are you putting the world before God?". It turns out that he was expecting all of us to automatically state that we would be spending our 19th birthday putting in our paperwork, and had forgotten that I was born late enough in the year for it to be a bit of a complication. It took him an entire week to remember this, at which point he fired off a quick apology the next time he saw me in church. That's how unthinking and knee-jerk everything was, that they just expected all of us to have our paperwork ready to go, no exceptions.

Pushed? People were being told "get the jab or lose your job". Large numbers of military service members were forcibly discharged from service for their refusal to get it... only for the Department of Defense to now beg these individuals to come back, with all sorts of ostensible promises that their careers will be reset back to where they were and their records expunged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen Alan Moore wrote it in the 1980s as a deconstruction of various "Golden Age" superheroes. He meant it to show how life would *really* be like if superheroes were real and actively involved in world drama. One of the heroes, Ozymandias, gets it in his head that the only way to stop World War III is to trick NATO and the USSR into thinking that there's an even bigger threat they have to unite in order to stop. To this end he uses his vast fortune to trick a group of disaffected, disgruntled, and / or distressed luminaries from the creative arts into believing that they're working on an elaborate alien invasion movie when in reality he's going to destroy New York City and make it look like a disastrous first contact. Problem is, another hero, The Comedian, inadvertently discovers a part of the plan and so Ozymandias decides to silence him. ...Never mind the fact that The Comedian was a slobbering drunk at this point due to decades of alcoholism and so everyone else would have ignored what he had to say *if* Ozymandias hadn't killed him. Now that he's dead, vigilante hero Rorschach tries his best to convince the other heroes to investigate. Cue Ozymandias having to pop smoke while also pretending to be "helping" the investigation. It was as pivotal to the history of comic books as it was massively shocking, but unfortunately far too many comic creators these days got it into their heads that "dark, edgy, and deconstructive" is how all comics are "supposed" to be.

In the original 1980s "Watchmen" graphic novel, it's revealed that a company has been selling an "all natural" cancer cure made using apricot pits. Rorschach discovers that one of his long-time villains has been taking it out of desperation after developing cancer, neither man realizing that Ozymandias deliberately exposed several people who had been around Doctor Manhattan with dangerous doses of radiation in order to trick Doctor Manhattan into thinking that he was a walking hazmat site & leaving the Earth. So even though you were likely meaning it as a joke, it actually has an odd place in pop culture history. As part of a tabletop role-playing game campaign I'm creating, I have it that a key NPC has ownership stake in a local TV station that operates in the "adventure city" the party will be based in. The station gives a few hours a week to public access programming, and a regular part of this is a conspiracy theorist who gets half an hour every Sunday evening right before the network switches to bartered content from a third-party shop-at-home service ("We'll pay you X per hour that you let us air plus Y percentage of whatever sales we make to addresses that are in your viewing area.") The twist is that the conspiracy theorist is actually "controlled opposition" in that they are deliberately working with that key NPC to push or bury various stories and theories.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-business-denmark-public-health-health-453163d8f93618fde90c06d3474921a0 Note the date on this article. While Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark were all putting various restrictions on the use of the Moderna vaccine so they could investigate reports of cardiovascular side effects, the US government was swearing on a stack of Communist Manifestos that the Moderna vaccine was 100% safe for people of all ages. So yes, there were investigations. They were just inconveniently timed, however.

In my personal case? At the end of February 2021, I got really sick for a few days. I'd just had to put my cat of 16+ years down due to cancer, I'd had to pet-sit the surviving family cat while my parents were out of state, we'd just survived three days without power due to the grid shutting down in Texas, et cetera. I didn't know what I was dealing with, just that it was knocking me for a loop. I was just fine and dandy on Wednesday when we got power back, and Thursday I was suddenly so sick that I had to call for help to finish handling the incoming newspapers that week. That's how rapidly it got me. I wasn't able to simply sit back and do nothing, however, as a day or so later dad got a far more wicked version of whatever I was dealing with, to the point that I had to crawl up off of the couch to give him a blessing. I have no idea what that was, just that for about a week after I was sensitive to the amount of salt that was in the food I was eating and my stomach was queasy. It could have been Covid, it could have been a consequence of smoke inhalation or something else relating to the blizzard and loss of power. Well, August 2021 was Bell County Comic-Con in Belton, Texas. A childhood hero was going to be one of the guests and I wanted more than anything to go. However, my car was already beginning to have mechanical issues of the kind that wouldn't have allowed me to make the trip on my own, and so I needed to use the family truck. Given how sick dad and I were in February, mom basically pressured dad into saying that I couldn't use it unless I got the jab. I go to the local Wal-Mart pharmacy. I tell them I have an arrythmia. They have to look it up to see if they can give me the Moderna vaccine. They find nothing to indicate that there are problems with giving the jab to someone who has arrythmia. I get the first shot. I'm almost immediately as low as I was back when I got sick that February. We go to Comic-Con, during which she goes into hysterics demanding that I wear a cloth mask for the entire duration minus celebrity photos despite knowing full well my sinuses are so screwed up from old injury that I need to breathe through my mouth. I stumble through everything, get back to the family truck, take that cloth mask off, and there's an instant shower of blood from my nose as the strain of trying to breath through those damaged sinuses was too much. It literally takes the sight of my shirt and the seatbelt covered in my own blood for mom to realize that she should have listened to me. A few weeks later I'm due for the booster. Well, dad didn't read the calendar. He's building a brick shed out back, just brought home a 400+ pound front door for the shed that he welded together from scrap iron at work, and I have to help him move it the same day I'm due for my booster because he scheduled a load of gravel (which you have to mix in with the concrete mix he bought) to be delivered and the door plus the truck it's in the bed of are in the driveway where the gravel needs to go. By the time everything is said and done I can feel my blood pressure throughout my entire body, and I'm low for even longer than that mystery sickness left me. I tell mom I'm not getting any more shots. That October, the Associated Press runs a story noting that the medical boards of Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have put various restrictions on the use of the Moderna vaccine while they investigate reports of cardiovascular side effects in patients who received it, this at the same time as the FDA here in the US is swearing on a stack of Communist Manifestos that the Moderna vaccine is perfectly safe for children. I make it very, very clear that there will be no more Covid vaccines, and that as far as I'm concerned I just got poison in my veins. It's four years later, I've had a slew of stress-induced cardiovascular health episodes to include what may or may not have been an actual heart attack, and mom is still trying to defend her decision to coerce me into getting the jab even though she's gone with me to several cardiology appointments. Yeah... Is it any wonder I'm one of the great many people who want a full investigation into the Covid vaccines and is taking the blanket pardons issued during the final days of the Biden regime as retroactive proof that the government did us all dirty?

...Except, now I'm wondering what the safety numbers are for other traditional vaccines...

When it comes to the anti-vax side of things, they got a significant boost from the controversies over the Covid vaccines. The rollout of the Covid vaccines quickly went from "we know they didn't have proper medical trials, but there's no time for that" to "get the shots or we'll destroy your life". As part of it, initial reports of side effects or adverse incidents were forcibly suppressed by various social media platforms; even licensed and credentialed medical doctors found themselves silenced when they tried to tell the public that something was wrong. But by then, the US government and several other governments had already passed legislation that shielded the pharma companies from legal consequences. It wasn't until 2021 / 2022 that anyone realized the Covid vaccines were far less safe than we were assured, that an untold number of people were looking at a lifetime of compromised health, and that the lives of people who refused the shots or tried to blow the whistle were destroyed for nothing. I've even seen ex-members cite the church's support of the vaccines as part of the reason why they left, feeling that the church leadership should have known that the vaccines were dangerous. This has so utterly, totally, and completely destroyed trust in *all* vaccines that the anti-vax movement seemed logical in hindsight, hence why we now have a measles epidemic in West Texas.