Ironhold

Priest came in the top 5 of the fan vote a few years ago, but the Hall proper didn't agree and picked some hotshot who was only on their first year of eligibility. The Dolls, Devo, and Dionne Warwick have also been nominated before, only to not get in.

https://www.billboard.com/music/awards/rock-roll-hall-fame-2022-nominees-1235026206/ The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced this year's nominees and opened the fan vote up. Nominees include Carly Simon, the New York Dolls, Judas Priest, Dionne Warwick, Pat Benetar, and Duran Duran. Note that while you can vote once a day, you need either a Hall of Fame account, a Google account, or an Amazon account so that they can prevent spamming of votes. Yes, Dolls drummer Arthur "Killer" Kane did indeed join the church before he died.

The younger and more impressionable someone is, the more likely they are to seek the approval of a given social circle - friends, parents, society, et cetra - and thus act based on what this circle stipulates. They don't understand that past a certain point, they need to put themselves first and not care about what others say if they wish to get ahead.

Suppose, for a moment, that we confirm sentient alien life. We make first contact with them. Maybe they look just like us, give or take a few odd features (like Spock's ears). Maybe it's clear that they evolved from another critter, like a fox instead of a monkey. Maybe they're three-story tall transforming robots. Either way, it's now undeniable that there is life on other worlds. How would you handle it? How do you think the people in your belief system would handle it?

The minute she went on her "basket of deplorables" rant, I stuck a fork in her campaign. It was the same mistake Romney made with his remarks about people on financial assistance.

Hillary ran a terrible campaign. Nothing more, nothing less. She appeared as physically frail, mentally out of touch, incredibly arrogant, and elitist. Trump, in contrast, appeared to be keen, energetic, and willing to listen to the public.

What I've heard is that something along the lines of 20 Democrats in Congress have all announced plans to retire or seek office elsewhere. If the reports are true (I've been busy trying to keep up with news specifically in my field, entertainment), then this indicates that the Democrats know they're going to lose the midterms by a wide margin and people are getting out while they can still do so with dignity. As it is, a full blow-out in the midterms will likely mean that Biden won't get his first few choices for replacement through as he won't have a raw majority to ram-rod them in place. We might even see Breyer's seat be vacant until the next President is in office.

As far as cars go - My 1990 Buick Skylark was designed in such a fashion that if you couldn't reach a component just by popping the hood and reaching down, you could get to it by jacking the car up and going from underneath. My 2006 Dodge Stratus is such a horror story you have to pull the left front tire just to replace the battery and pull the right front tire just to check the belts. I hate working on my Stratus for the simple fact that it's such a knuckle-buster, and I credit one of my three blown vertebrae to trying to crawl underneath it and do work with inadequate floor jacks.

So many people in my stake are sick that the stake presidency asked us not to have second hour this past weekend. I normally go to the YSA branch despite being too old simply because they so often need extra priesthood to help out, and it was practically deserted. The branch president actually had to be the speaker because the other people who were supposed to show up were absent.

There's also the internet gutter brawls of the 2000s, where minister after minister and author after author were exposed for what they truly were. People would read one or two hostile works, assume this was all they needed, and get completely demolished, either forcing them to actually *investigate* what they'd been told or resulting in them going mad from the realization that their entire world view was based on incorrect information. This in turn would usually result in ministers, authors, and other higher-up counter-cult figures getting tagged in, and they would almost inevitably embarrass themselves through their own misconduct. I think after a while, most people in the Christian counter-cult finally caught on to the fact that we - and others - were more than willing to push back, ask questions of our own, and bring our own evidences into play. A lot of the old games don't get played anymore except by the truly desperate, and a lot of the old authors seem to be falling out of favor.

I've had similar experiences as well. During various debates and discussions I've had, I encountered more than a few people who - either literally or figuratively - declared that we had "declared war on" traditional mainstream Christianity and so we "deserve" every bad thing that happens to us, individually and collectively. They don't understand why anything that they're doing is wrong.

That's the thing... they refuse to consider other world views. The best guess I can give is that somewhere, at some point, someone they trusted filled their head with notions about different groups and they never thought to question what they were being told as doing so would force them to question who told it to them. Rather, they just take it for granted that these groups need third parties to intervene.

If you'll note, I said "a lot", not "all". That is, it's a recurring theme among many of the people I speak with.

I've been online 20+ years at this point, and have dealt with a wide cross-section of people in that time. What I've frequently encountered is that the more "woke" a person claims to be, the more likely they are to presume that women, members of certain racial groups, and members of other groups, are "completely and permanently incapable" of overcoming whatever they feel as bias in the system. Thus, they presume, these groups need their help. That "completely and permanently incapable" part? Dig into it, and you'll basically see that these individuals legitimately believe that members of these groups are helpless, with no resources or natural talent available to them. Yeah. A lot of these folks basically think that unless they intervene then the people they believe they're intervening on behalf of will never be able to succeed. ...Unless of course that person succeeds outside of the "allowed" parameters (re: with help from the "woke" people) or calls out the "woke" person for their latent bigotry, in which case the "woke" type starts accusing the individual of being a traitor to their group identity or even presuming that the person is a "sock puppet" account for a white person. It's as ugly as it is foolish and based on ignorance.

Nutshell: I've basically had training in psychological warfare. When a person goes out of their way to signal to the world how good they are, it's often a smokescreen meant to make sure that people don't probe or ask questions. This is because if people did probe and ask questions, they'd quickly find whatever skeletons the person is hiding. The harder they sell their inherent virtues, the bigger the pile of skeletons. For example, consider D. J. Nelson, who at one point was a leading critic of the church. Nelson loudly boasted about his doctorate in Egyptology, even giving a laundry list of high-profile projects he supposedly worked on whenever anyone tried to question his credentials. Well... authors Robert & Rosemary Brown decided to ignore the hype and actually investigate. Nelson's doctorate was from a diploma mill, and they couldn't find any evidence of a lower degree, let alone a lower degree in Egyptology. His laundry list? The Browns contacted everyone responsible for the projects. Of those people who got back to them, *none* admitted to knowing who Nelson was. When the Browns published their findings, Nelson's career was destroyed. "Lying about one's credentials" is a mortal sin in academia, and every single thing he'd ever written and done was now tainted.

It goes back to the basics of "The harder someone tries to signal their virtue, the less likely they are to have any virtue at all."

The 355. Plot contrivance after plot contrivance, followed by pandering and real-life politics. There's nothing redeeming about it.

Ironically, they're often some of the most racist people you'll ever meet because they use it to justify holding patronizing and often backwards views.

For fun - You're tasked with helping to stock a brand-new library that will be open to the public. The usual items - an encyclopedia set, a dictionary, a thesaurus, local newspapers, holy books, and such - are already taken care of. What's the first book you order to put in there?

Finished re-watching "After The Sunset", this time for review purposes. The US military periodically relocates people between duty stations as needed, and will pay for their relocation provided that the total weight of their household goods is below a certain amount; they have to pay for anything over it. Because of this, it's quite common to see people unloading books, DVDs, CDs, and the like cheaply where I live. When I was in college, I started a plan wherein I would buy what I could find, sell whatever was still brand new or slightly used, and then donate what I didn't want to keep. This backfired spectacularly, leaving me with a large quantity of DVDs I have yet to unload. So, I'm going through them one at a time for purposes of writing "retro" reviews for my column. This one was awful the first time I watched it, and remained awful thereafter. Pierce Brosnan plays a master thief who tries to retire after he's nearly killed during a major caper, only for the FBI agent who nearly killed him to entice him into one last job. It's slow, often boring, and deliberately uses female nudity and sexual content to distract from this.

"American Underdog" Kurt Warner and his wife Brenda were producers on their own bio pic, so of course it's fairly accurate even if they did have to trim a few things out (like his short stint playing football in Europe) for expediency.

Disney is dealing with a fair bit of legal drama concerning the Spider-Man character. Not only do they still have to share the movie rights with Sony, the estate of Steve Ditko has announced its intention to sue for partial control of all characters Ditko created or co-created, which will mean Disney would have to pay royalties for their use and possibly have to submit certain things to the Ditko estate for approval. The movie, to put it bluntly, was Disney realizing that as popular and lucrative as the character is, he was now something of a liability and they needed to sideline him until the legal stuff was all taken care of.

It was. It's supposed to explain how the Kingsmen organization is first developed and why. As far as the second movie goes, you're better off not watching it. It ended in such a fashion that there's no real way forward for the franchise, hence the prequel.

"The King's Man" We have a film that got a double whammy in terms of "being a prequel and so had to fit with what came after" and "film that is set in a fixed historical period and so had to fill in the gaps", the end result being that we have a movie which was smothered under its own premise.

This year, we had a stake activity in which the youth were gathering food and care supplies for local food banks. The first Sunday they had anything up at my chapel to collect, it was literally just myself and one other person who donated, and we both donated a lot. This seemed to light a fire under everyone else, at which point the next Sunday saw people flood the bins with product.