Ironhold

"Hard times create hard men. Hard men create soft times. Soft times create soft men. Soft men create hard times." People who have experienced hardship and adversity generally do not want others to experience what they have experienced. As a result, if given the chance they'll do what they can to make things easier for those that come after them. However, if they make it too easy, and if they do too good a job of protecting the next generation, that generation can grow up without an understanding of what the situation they enjoy cost the previous generation, what it takes to maintain that situation, or what "hardship" actually entails. As we've seen so often in the Bible, Book of Mormon, and so forth, when a generation reaches the point that they take what they have for granted or get offended by things other generations bore with patience, it's only a matter of time before the society collapses. Now, are we in a down point? That depends upon who you talk to. Ask one group of people and they'll scream about how anyone to the right of Chairman Mao is a "Nazi" and should be brutally murdered in the streets. Ask another group of people and they'll scream about how anyone to the left of Robert E. Lee is a "communist" who should be brutally murdered in the streets. Et cetera. In many ways, we're doing better than in other generations. For example, our modern methods of communication allow for us to more readily share information and ideas. But in other ways, we're in a critical period of time. For example, we've got people running around who talk about how awesome they'd be if they were back in 1945 yet are so weak of body, weak of mind, weak of character, or some combination thereof that they wouldn't have lasted a week in 1985. As a nation, we need another Great Enlightenment, one that's focused on teaching classical values and getting people to step outside of their personal bubbles so they can gain a broader set of experiences and a better understanding of one another.

Actually... they kinda did. If you look at the world of popular music, you'll see a great many examples of the Ship of Theseus question in action, including the "two competing ships" aspect. Some bands find themselves in a situation to where they shift the line-up a bit, and this changes things up enough that they decide to completely reform themselves. This is how, for example, we have The Yardbirds -> The New Yardbirds -> Led Zepplin, or Joy Division -> New Order. Other bands experience significant lineup changes, but because there's still at least one single member in the mix there's continuity and so they keep using the same name. Examples include Whitesnake (David Coverdale), Rainbow (Richie Blackmore), and Loudness (Akira Takasaki). Meanwhile, we have "hired guns" like Doug Aldrich who can regularly find work with other musicians on their projects and as members of other groups in addition to their own individual efforts. Then, however, we have bands to where there are no original members left, but some mechanism is allowing the band to persist. For example, boy band Menudo actually had a policy in place where members would be forcibly expelled from the band upon turning 16. Or we have Lynyrd Skynyrd, where the death of Gary Rossington has resulted in the band having no original members left. We've also got situations to where members of the same band recruited new line-ups and toured opposite each other. For example, Judas Priest members KK Downing and Ripper Owens forming rival group K.K.'s Priest, or Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony forming The Other Half as a counterprogram for Van Halen. Yes, these situations can and will wind up in court, such as when the surviving members of the band RATT went to court in order to determine which band member had legal right to use the name; if memory serves, this was triggered by Juan Croucier and Bobby Blotzer both touring at the same time under the name. We've also had "imposter" bands where musicians formed or were assembled to impersonate existing groups. The Zombies and Fleetwood Mac are among the two groups that unscrupulous promoters / managers have produced imposters of. So yes, there is in fact a real-life application for the Ship of Theseus conundrum.

A number of sports teams and entertainment-related companies are still making the switch, but it is indeed far less than before. Likewise, those stores that are carrying pride-themed merchandise have been stocking smaller quantities than before. That being said, I'm starting to see individual companies recognize that June is *also* Men's Mental Health Awareness Month, with the crew behind the video game Rainbow Six Siege even making a major posting about it on social media as part of an honest, legit campaign - As you can imagine, the fact that people are pushing to acknowledge this has led to scattered reports of pride month supporters being outraged in the mistaken belief that this is somehow crowding out discussion of pride month, with one report alleging that the moderators for a Reddit forum dedicated to a *different* game banned someone for mentioning it. I don't think that pride month will completely go away, but I would imagine that in a few years it will be functionally irrelevant beyond a few performative references and merchandise releases.

To be brutally honest, under Trudeau the nation of Canada was dangerously close to becoming a fascistic state. This isn't hyperbole, as the government was indeed frequently moving to suppress alternate points of view and penalize anyone who stepped out of line. Not helping matters any is that the CBC is essentially a propaganda outlet these days, with Lunar Archivist and a few other watchdogs (yes, I know the former through social media) having actually caught them establishing narratives & engaging in other unprofessional conduct instead of simply telling the news. There was a great hope that this most recent election would lead to a socially conservative or reformist group taking charge, but Trump's social media commentary and tariff efforts led to a hardcore liberal being elected instead as the government and CBC ginned up a bizarre nationalist movement premised on people raising their elbows in the air as if they were doing the Funky Chicken. A *lot* of Canadians are looking to leave the country for the United States, wherever it is they can find shelter, and this has been ongoing for a few years now. It's not surprising that Alberta, which is a fairly socially & theologically conservative part of Canada, is presently in a degree of turmoil and questioning its future in light of how Canada as a nation has been going. It's also not surprising that the Canadian government is basically attempting to suppress it.

IRL, I have an arrythmia, and I've also got the high blood pressure common to my dad's side of the family. My average *resting* systolic is about 125, a good 10 points higher than my cardiologist wants it, and when under extreme stress I can spike as high as 173. If it spikes anywhere near that high (say, starting around 150 or so) I'll actually feel the changes in my body well before I get to any sort of measuring device. Each time I had the shot I felt that same feeling, such that the manual labor I was asked to do around the house in the wake of the shot made me "redline" and functionally left me laid up for about 2 - 3 days... after which I had residual effects like swelling in my hands. This was 2021. In 2022, about a year after the vaccines, I faced an extreme-stress situation matched only by a severe medical episode I had in 1992. This situation effectively blew my heart out, to the point that my legs swelled so badly people were fearing I had edema. Cue me wondering how much of what happened was stress, how much was my pre-existing cardiovascular issues, and whether the vaccine had anything to do with it. I was starting to finally get sorted in August of 2024 when an extreme burst of IRL drama collided with dangerously high external temperatures to trigger a rather hardcore round of chest pains that, in hindsight, might have actually been a minor heart attack. That set me right back to square one with my legs and several other conditions that manifest in August 2022. Once again, cue me wondering what was stress, what was my pre-existing conditions, and what role the vaccine might have played. I did, indeed, have a strong feeling I shouldn't take the vaccines, but my hand was forced and now I'm going to spend the rest of my days wondering.

Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, everyone who got the Covid vaccines was a part of the test group due to how little testing the vaccines got ahead of being deployed. I myself had a very certain feeling, if not a certain witness, that something was massively wrong with the Covid vaccines and that I needed to stay well clear of them. Problem was, in 2021 I was presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that required vaccination to partake in, I suffered almost immediate negative health effects after getting the Moderna vaccine, and some of the health issues I've been facing since are in keeping with some of the suspected side effects *of* the Moderna vaccine that the mainstream media didn't finally admit were being investigated until months after I'd gotten it. If I had known, I could have pushed back on the requirement or gone for a different vaccine. But I didn't, and TBH I'll now be spending the rest of my life, however short it might be, wondering if I essentially poisoned myself. This is why I'm so furious that whoever was pulling Biden's strings wrote pre-emptive pardons for Fauci and several other key individuals.

I honestly don't think he truly considered the potential consequences of a lot of his proposals and policies before implementing them, and I suspect that a great many other politicians likewise fell down on the job in this regards. Folks, we have the obligation to carefully and prayerfully cast our ballots in order to ensure that people of character and wisdom are chosen for elected office. The Book of Mormon bears warning of what can happen to a nation when the leaders are unfit for their posts or turn from Heavenly Father's instruction.

Some years ago there was a to-do here in the United States when it was discovered that a law school was allowing students to avoid classes where the subject for the day was case law & legal precedents regarding rape cases; the school meant well in that they were trying to avoid triggering anyone for whom that was a sensitive topic, but a great many outside observers noted that *as* lawyers there was a chance they'd have to deal with such cases in the courtroom and so they needed to know this information in order to adequately serve the community. That's what's going on here on a larger scale, a refusal to talk about things that are difficult or hard to hear because certain parties lack either the mental, emotional, or moral fortitude to listen to what needs to be said. I understand, for example, that most people don't want to hear the fine details of a life-altering medical episode I had back in 1992. However, I've had to mention the broad strokes of what took place in order to explain to people why I have certain physical limitations IRL, as I was a victim of medical malpractice during the ordeal and the malpractice left me with permanent injuries.

This is why a lot of people, like myself, favor the "Marketplace of Ideas" concept, in which whatever stance you have must be able to compete against what else is out there. If you truly believe that your idea is superior to someone else's, you must be willing to defend your idea with logic and evidence as needed.

With what I'm dealing with, it seems that the vast majority of people - both stake presidency and subsequent public affairs reps - had no experience whatsoever in public affairs, let alone media, and so didn't understand just what it takes to make things happen. The problem is that instead of trusting me and others who had the knowledge and experience to get things done, we were either ignored & so didn't have what we needed or micromanaged to the point that we couldn't actually do what we needed to do.

What people forget is that Trump came up in the world of business at a time when bombast, aggression, and persistence were considered to be features rather than bugs. As part of it, there was a bit of a ritual you could sometimes observe in which people would come to the bargaining table, deliberately throw out ostentatious demands, and then "allow" themselves to be negotiated down to what they had actually wanted to achieve in the first place. This allowed both sides to claim victory by getting what they wanted *and* praise themselves for how awesome they were that they talked the other guy down the way they did. Something, perhaps the assassination attempts, led to Trump reverting back to this mindset. View what he's saying and doing through the lens of this business environment, apply a bit of game theory, and what he's doing makes a *lot* more sense, even in a rather screwball fashion.

People are protesting, but the politicians who are behind everything aren't listening. It's easier for them to, say, declare that everyone who wants an investigation into the rape gangs hiding out in the Pakistani enclaves is a "racist" than it is to actually conduct those investigations... and no, I'm not kidding, a politician actually accused a fellow politician of racism for demanding those investigations. What we're seeing now is part of an effort to ensure that people can't legally protest or call for those reforms in the first place.

Remember, the more "progressive" someone claims to be, the greater the odds that they want to see all of us who are members of the church genocided off the face of the planet because they think we're an impediment to their idea of a "progressive" society. It shouldn't be surprising that they hate other religions as well.

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.