Ironhold

As I mentioned before, I spent a decade helping to support a YSA branch. The branch was created because we had about 400 YSA in the stake according to the membership records. Nobody actually bothered to confirm how many were still within the stake, a critical step as we're supporting a major military base where people come and go all the time. As a result, we actually had less than 100 people still within the stake, and there were Sundays where as few as 20 people actually showed up.

Look up the controversies around the show's creator, Vivziepop, and you'll see that the show very nearly didn't happen. Let's just say that Vivziepop sounds like someone who doesn't exactly have it all together.

The US military, and a few other militaries, are facing similar issues. To put it simply, the same demographic groups most likely to encourage their children to consider the military as an option are the same groups most likely to be frustrated and appalled by the efforts to make the military more "woke", and so they're no longer actually encouraging service. Couple this with the events of the last 20+ years, and people no longer see the military as a "three hots and a cot" proposition they can fall back on when they're in financial need. Parents and other groups are also *discouraging* outdoor athletic activity due to a variety of factors, and so we have large numbers of younger individuals who are no longer physically fit enough to pass muster. And the same "woke" nonsense means that even if someone is physically fit enough there's no guarantee that they're mentally or morally fit. Western society has been poisoned by "woke" and we need to purge that poison. Worst case scenario? We have to start going back to conscription to meet our defense requirements, possibly including conscripting women.

Those four are also the songs on the album that get the most airplay, with the second side being almost completely ignored. And that's *with* "Vital Signs" being one of the actual singles. So no, it's not just you.

There are three plays on the title that appear on the album cover, especially if you see the *full* image. 1. Workers are transporting paintings. They are... moving pictures. 2. The onlookers are growing emotional over the images being displayed. They... find the pictures to be moving. 3. In the full-size version of the image, a film crew is recording the proceedings. They are... taking a "moving picture".

Not entirely. Only the first two books are in the public domain; the rest are still under copyright, and Disney's original characters (et al) are still protected for a while yet.

The Associated Press officially maintains a similar stipulation in their AP Style Guide, however, I'm constantly seeing AP writers violate this. In particular, Brady McCombs was so poor about their handling of matters relating to the church that I basically had to get a red grading pen whenever I saw their name in a byline. We're talking "Jarvis In A Mazda" - level nonsense columns here. https://apnews.com/jarvis-in-a-mazda-takes-pole-in-star-studded-rolex-24-field-6eca51364f83411faa307688bcdcfd65 ^ See that? Imagine if it was a religion column. That was the level of McCombs' output on the church.

As I've mentioned before, two of the most hateful, bigoted, and willfully ignorant people I have ever had the misfortune of encountering had doctoral degrees in their chosen fields. One was an avowed atheist with a degree in the social sciences. The other was a minister with a theological degree. Both of them regarded their doctorate as a shield of invulnerability. In their eyes, that they had a doctorate meant that they were all-knowing and all-powerful. In their eyes, anyone who lacked a college degree had no right to speak to them unless it was to kiss their ring or serve them somehow... and even then, no one with anything less than a graduate degree had any right to ask them questions. Their incredible arrogance meant that they actually only had a handful of stock arguments and "evidences" for their various positions on different topics, and they kept going right back to them no matter how many times those arguments and "evidences" were debunked; after all, they reasoned, someone who was "below" them was doing it and so how could that person be correct? When they were backed into a corner and shown how, in ways they could not deny, they were wrong, they inevitably threw a childish temper tantrum, often involving expletives. After all, they had a doctorate, so how could they be wrong? They failed to understand that "evolve or die" is a critical part of academia, and part of that evolution means admitting when one is wrong so that one can fix that flaw.

A few things I've noted that critics of the church tend to overlook - 1. The Extermination Order wasn't officially repealed until 1976 2. The last European power didn't relinquish its last colonial claim in Africa until early 1978 Could it be that, simply put, these two things needed to happen first before humanity was ready for it all to happen?

Have you seen the George Foreman biopic? It depicts the Rumble as a pivotal point in Foreman's life, and so near as I can recall they choreographed it as accurately as they could under the circumstances.

There's also the fact that due to the extreme heat in Kinshasa that day the ropes were incredibly loose; Ali's manager had actually *tightened* the ropes just hours before the match and they were still loose due to the heat having softened the materials. This made rope-a-dope even more effective as the sagging ropes took even more of the force than anyone expected them to.

The problem with doing this is that nowadays people spend more time going over these images for oddities that whatever AI program you were using managed to muster up. For example, in your top right picture Bigfoot is there in the background to the left of everyone. I'm guessing that whatever AI program you were using scraped that infamous image as one of its references for a wilderness situation.

Story time. When I was in high school, Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry were required courses. Everyone had to take them. I did quite well in Geometry, but had middling grades in Algebra I and actually came close to failing Algebra II. It should have been clear that despite my "gifted" label math was not my forte and I should not seriously consider any math classes going forward unless they were specific courses like the "Math and Money" course the high school was offering. One of my brothers, who was in graduate school, convinced my mom to sign me up for Pre-Calculus. The Pre-Calculus teacher would take 30 minutes of each 90 minute class to go desk by desk and grade our papers right then and there so that she didn't have to do any grading at home. As a result, we almost never got through the day's material and she could never understand how that kept happening. Instead, we were just supposed to attend before-school and after-school tutoring, which was almost always packed with students who needed the help and so it was rare to get any one-on-one assistance. My parents initially just blamed me for not keeping up, but fortunately in my depression I'd saved a copy of a paper where she wrote a message inviting me to leave the class. This was enough to trigger a parent-teacher conference with myself, my dad, the teacher, and the assistant principal. Suffice to say that the assistant principal was mortified by what he found out during that conference. I was switched to a different class entirely (a single-semester introduction to psychology course) for the spring semester, but the Pre-Calculus class damaged my GPA so much that I missed the top 10% by six slots... and with it the tens of thousands of dollars in state-level financial assistance I would have gotten because the state of Texas pays full tuition for all graduates of public in-state high schools who attend public in-state colleges. So yeah, because my parents listened to my brother instead of me, and because the teacher was too lazy to do anything at home, my life was altered for the worst. I think everyone here can understand why I do not like math despite being a business major, and instead chose to focus on marketing.

As I've mentioned before, I have a number of health issues that prevent me from traveling long distances even when the option arises. But I still take full advantage of what is at my disposal to learn of the world around me and try new things. For example, my local Wal-Mart has a display of $1 "trial"-size bottles of various sauces and seasoning blends. That's a cheap way to make my meals a little different while exploring a touch. Folks, we live in a day where most of us have a digital device that fits in our pockets but can literally help us tune in radio stations or see images from all across the world. There's very little excuse for us to not spend some time expanding our reach a little.

In general, the more narrow someone's existence is, the harder it can be for them to imagine any other way of life. For example, a few years ago there was a to-do on Twitter because someone with a degree of prominence claimed that they could never see themselves living anywhere other than their major coastal city... because they legitimately believed that bodegas only existed inside of that city. They legitimately refused to believe it when people said that bodegas and larger convenience stores existed across much of the United States, and that if this was their only objection to traveling then it wasn't much of an objection. Technology, travel, and population patterns are, metaphorically speaking, shrinking the world in the sense that people have more opportunities to interact with others outside of their own group. This is something we all need to take advantage of as we prepare the Earth for the Second Coming.

Battletech has continuously been a thing, although the IP has changed hands a few times and this has caused a variety of complications for both the game itself and the fiction of the game. Your local Target might actually still have a few of the most recent starter box, which is premised on Solaris VII. Note that while Iron Winds Metal does still make a small amount of metal gaming miniatures, the game has largely gone over to plastic since it's a lot cheaper. Car Wars is being revived, with brand new miniatures and other materials to go with them. Ogre, though, doesn't seem to be very popular, at least not locally.

5E never impressed me, and the scandals out of WOTC over the last few years have been such that I've basically noped out of D&D for right now unless it's an older edition. That being said, I recently acquired the Anime 5E manual, and find that to be a far better balance of all-ages & compelling to play. I just need to carve time out to get a group together.

https://www.heb.com/ In much of Texas, there's a chain called H-E-B (named for the initials of its founder). H-E-B pursues a *very* aggressive "low-cost leader" strategy that includes both store brands and in-store coupons. Central to this is the "meal deal", where if you purchase a main course you'll get 2 - 4 sides and a beverage for free. For example, a few weeks ago they had it that if you bought two bags of store-brand chicken nuggets, you'd get a deluxe-sized box of store-brand macaroni & cheese, a bag of broccoli, a box of snack crackers, and a bottle of Italian-style soda for free. Most H-E-Bs have a dedicated end cap display with refrigerated unit and nearby wire racks where they keep the coupons and components to keep them all together. This is helping ease the burden, but prices are still creeping up to the point that it's hurting. What you see in this photo here? I got this a few years ago for $10. It was a prototype for a charitable "Thanksgiving in a basket" plan I was organizing, where people would assemble enough for a proper Thanksgiving dinner, minus the refrigerated items, and donate the whole assemblage to a local food bank. There's literally no way for me to put this together for $10 anymore; this is more like $20 now, especially as that brand of chili has been discontinued.

Another thing to remember is just how contrarian people can be. Make sure you have your own firm knowledge and faith in case they try to challenge you at some point, but don't be the aggressor as they'll take that as being attacked.

The senior officials with the Democrats don't understand that Biden and his cabinet have generated such confusion and ill will that there is a real danger a strong candidate would defeat them. Instead, not only are they insisting upon running him, at least one primary has confirmed that nobody *but* Biden will be on the ballot for President. This is causing people opposed to Biden to have a variety of negative sentiments, including taking this as "proof" of Biden being the puppet of a nefarious third party. Thus, these individuals are largely going over to Trump, who is seen as both the rightful President and the only person who can defeat Biden in a fair election.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/teachings-george-albert-smith/chapter-21?lang=eng Going with a story about President George Albert Smith.

It's my unfortunate experience that things like DEI, Privilege Theory, and so on tend to be embraced largely by academics or people who otherwise have little real-world experience outside of academia. This is why, for example, they fail to understand that most people define "privilege" on the basis of "wealth, power, and prestige" and so don't understand why people respond to their rants about "white privilege" the way people tend to do. I *literally* had one person I tried to explain this to snap at me and tell me that it's not *their* job to educate the public on the different definitions and that the public needed to just educate itself.

I happened to have this open because someone elsewhere just tried to drop a canned list of "citations" on me (most of which were from non-canonical sources) - https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-principles/chapter-41-the-postmortal-spirit-world?lang=eng What most of mainstream Christianity knows as "Heaven" and "Hell" we identify as "Paradise" and "Prison", areas where people will be *temporarily* assigned to based on their actions and knowledge in life. While there, these individuals will be taught in full and brought to a complete recollection of what they did while alive, leaving them to understand what they did both based on what they knew and compared to what should have been. It's only after a person has this understanding that they will be judged.

"Miracle Man" by Ozzy Osbourne was him mocking Swaggart over his troubles, but since the song merely references "Little Jimmy Sinner" it could actually apply to both men. The video depicts swine wandering through a chapel while a man in a mask melodramatically begs forgiveness.

Just for the sake of clarity, which translation of the Bible are you using? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses the KJV as the standard English-language translation, so I would recommend locating a parallel Bible if your regular version is not the KJV. Otherwise, you can reference the scriptures off of the church's website - https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures?lang=eng&platform=web - during the conversation.