Ironhold

Past a certain point, the Klingons represented the USSR. "The Undiscovered Country" was *literally* a response to Chernobyl and the overall end of the Cold War, which is why they had the Klingon home world heavily damaged by an apocalyptic event as a precursor to the Klingons finally suing for peace.

I seem to recall an episode of The Original Series where Kirk commented that a redshirt had "earned [his] wages for the month" as a compliment after they came up with a solution to a problem, suggesting that money was still a thing in the Federation and people were still getting wages and benefits based on their jobs.

It's human nature to be fearful of the unknown and apprehensive of significant changes in society and the larger world. It's a protective measure from way back when.

A few days ago, tabletop gaming company Troll Lord Games issued an official statement saying that they were going to be publicly non-political as a company, instead focusing entirely on gaming. They were doing this because they themselves saw gaming as an escape from real life and knew that their customers did so as well. In response, they got broadsided by political activists who basically accused them of siding with the "oppressors" in society because such-and-such different group needed the company to stand up for them and actively denounce oppression. Cue members of those same groups - and others - telling the activists to go be quiet and that they agreed with what Troll Lord Games was saying and doing. This all happened at about the same time someone declared that creating tabletop games that used twenty-sided dice was "gatekeeping" in spite of the fact that Wal-Mart, Target, and several other department stores now sell gaming dice sets - d20 and all - in their card, board, and tabletop games section, often for a fairly low price. Cue that person getting buried under responses telling them as much.

I'm actually a moderator on a Discord server that's themed around STEM topics like meteorology and communications. I posted an invite to the server a few months ago so people could get a feel for Discord as a controlled trial.

Before we seek to help others, we need to first ensure that we ourselves have a strong foundation. I say this from personal experience with dealing with enemies of the church. Make sure that you have read the scriptures cover to cover. Make sure that you have studied not just church history but world history for yourself. Make sure that you are actually a participant in the world and not just an observer. Make sure that you're prepared to have your faith, your patience, and your hope for humanity tested.

Spend any time around a military base, and you'll eventually hear members who are serving in the military talking about the circumstances under which they may have had to do the sacrament while deployed, such as using the crackers from their rations in lieu of bread or something similar. It's situations like this where the lack of a fixed requirement for the tokens comes into the fore, where people just don't have bread or anything else nice handy and having to make do with what's there or else they wouldn't be able to have sacrament at all.

Some gas pumps now have little TV sets built into them. For example, one local gas station here has the TV sets programmed to play a canned series of advertisements followed by canned programming from "alternative" news outlet Cheddar.

Conversation I've had with a few people. One relatively popular Japanese series from the past decade-plus is the sword & sorcery - type fantasy series "Spice and Wolf". In the series, Holo, a female wolf spirit, has spent the past 500 years as the harvest deity for a remote farming region. But with fewer and fewer people paying homage to her, and what is essentially Christianity spreading throughout the land, she's decided to call it a day. She originally hails from lands far to the north, and has decided it's time to return home. When travelling merchant Kraft Lawrence comes to the region with his annual load of preserving salt to sell, she decides to hitch a ride in his wagon. They eventually make a deal to where if she assists his business ventures, he'll take her as far north as he can go. The pair slowly fall in love along the trek, to the point that Holo actually admits she has become jealous of other women. Most of the story arcs in the series involve money and finance, with Kraft and Holo scheming to put one over on the corrupt and greedy. For example, in one story arc Holo's sharp hearing provides Kraft with a vital clue to indicate that a kingdom is lowering the silver content in its coins when they've been falsely claiming to be raising the silver content, allowing Kraft to set in motion a plan that makes them a huge profit at the expense of the kingdom's money-changers. The manga (re: comic / graphic novel) adaptation of the original novel series comes shrink-wrapped and with a warning that it's not intended for younger readers. This is because Holo, as a wolf spirit, is a shape-shifter who can go between appearing as a young woman (with wolf ears and a wolf tail) and appearing as a dire wolf the size of a school bus. As per many classic mythological tales of shape-shifters (like the selkies), however, Holo cannot transform while wearing clothing and so is depicted in some state of undress at least once per volume. In fact, when the pair first meet Kraft assumes her to be a prostitute because she has just transformed into human form and hadn't put any clothing on yet. Anyone with clear eyesight could see that the book series is not intended for children. Why do I bring this up? Remember the to-do over various politicians and school boards here in Texas wanting to ban certain books from school libraries? One of the books that triggered it was a graphic novel that featured a fully uncensored gay sex scene. This book was found in a middle school library, where kids had open access to it. Everyone I've spoken with about this has been floored, asking how it is that a book with such content was considered safe and appropriate for a school setting when the publishers of the former have gone out of their way to ensure a book with lesser content was known to be unsuited. This, folks, is why you need to keep an eye on what your kids are reading and watching. Far too many people who should be serving as gate-keepers regarding content appropriateness for minors aren't doing their jobs and may even be allowing inappropriate content in to where kids can see it because they believe that the material is for some reason "important" or "diverse" enough to where the inappropriate material is worth overlooking.

When it comes to talking about "incels", the simple truth is that the term has become over-used because of "woke" types assuming that anyone who is critical of their "approved" depictions of women in media must be a young male incel... sometimes to the point of refusing to believe it when the person being critical demonstrates that they're married or that they're female. The overuse of the label also creates situations where people who do have legitimate complaints are ignored and passed over, leaving them vulnerable to being scouted by the radicals and recruited in under the guise of fellowship. This is why it's important to actually listen to people rather than assign labels.

Wind chills were below freezing in my part of Texas (I'm by Fort Hood) during the overnight hours and into Friday morning and this morning. But we're going to be slowly warming up now, as last night was supposed to be the worst of it.

Whether anyone wants to admit it, Musk *did* expose how corrupt individuals within the FBI and other departments manipulated sympathetic or ignorant Twitter employees into censoring material inconvenient to the Biden campaign (now administration) and other groups. Musk also restored the accounts of numerous individuals whose accounts were terminated under questionable circumstances while making it clear that "journalists" like Taylor Lorenz and other bad actors would be held accountable for their misdeeds. This alone did a pretty good job of disrupting the status quo, although how long the effects will remain in place is unknown.

From my Twitter feed:

Posted to YouTube by Hasbro, the official IP owner: Joe team K9 handler Mutt is dealing with some seasonal blues and so skips out on Christmas dinner. This leaves him in a position to spot a group of enemy commandos who have infiltrated the base, throwing a massive wrench in the works.

About 15 years ago, the stake I'm in petitioned Salt Lake for the purpose of creating a young single adult (18 - 30) branch. The reason for this is because according to official stake records we had over 400 young single adults living within the stake. What the stake officials failed to consider is that this stake is wrapped around an Army base, and the US military reserves the right to transition people between facilities as it sees fit... often with little notice. Because of this, most of those 400 plus records were of individuals who had left the area without being able to request that their records be transferred with them. In reality, we likely only had about 50 at most, and some of these individuals lacked reliable transportation to get them to the site of a single YSA branch instead of their home wards. Making matters worse is that we had an individual at one point who was the very definition of "toxic". He was an Army officer in a career field recently made popular by a controversial movie, and he let it go to his head. In hindsight it's clear he was called to be elder's quorum president because he needed to learn humility, and he never did. Instead, his arrogance and insensitivity to the needs of others drove quite a few people away from the branch, never to return. These two issues were such that even though I aged out a long time ago, I kept coming in order to help out as there were Sundays the branch didn't have enough priesthood to even do Sacrament without me. Well, it's officially been announced that the branch will be dissolved after the new year. There will be two final Sundays (the 1st and the 8th), then everyone will be going back to their home ward or branch. I guess it was determined that the branch was simply no longer viable. I'm not entirely surprised, as by all rights the branch should have been dissolved a long time ago. But at the same time, I find its dissolution rather sudden.

The person who shot up that LGBT nightclub declared themselves to be non-binary or something like that, severely wrecking the official narrative about their possible motives.

There's a meme you'll see online in which people try to explain that "1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual". It's similar to the meme about "today scientists announced they have officially invented the Torment Nexus from the book 'Don't Invent The Torment Nexus.'"

Dee Snider has confirmed that next week's syndicated "The House of Hair with Dee Snider" will be his annual Christmas show, meaning 2 - 3 hours (depending upon which edition you tune into) of hard rock and heavy metal groups doing Christmas music, possibly capped off with Girlschool performing their take on "Auld Lang Syne".

The issue is that the information was: 1. Of a high-profile individual 2. Released with possible malicious intent 3. Had the potential to put them in danger Knowing what plane a person is on and where that plane is going can leave them vulnerable to some very, very bad things.

I work for a newspaper IRL. Over the last several years there have been a number of big issues regarding invasion of privacy, up to and including lawsuits. This includes the infamous lawsuit between Hulk Hogan w/ Peter Thiel versus Gawker Media. Generally speaking, making real-time information available regarding where celebrities, CEOs, politicians, and others of such caliber are is indeed putting them in danger as their high profile makes them high-profile targets. Thus, bits like Gawker's infamous "Gawker Stalker" where they were *paying* for this information was pretty broadly denounced even before the lawsuit. These reporters should have known better, and if memory serves some of these same reporters were aghast at similar privacy leaks regarding Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and others during the Gamergate bit in 2014 and 2015. That's what it all comes down to. So yeah, I'm with Musk on this one.

The issue is that Byte Dance, the owner of TikTok, is basically a wholly-owned subsidiary of the mainland Chinese government. There is concern that China could be using the app as a tool of espionage, accessing everything from GPS coordinates to personal information stored on whatever device it's being used on. The United States military has already prohibited service members from having or using it, and I think a number of contractors have already implemented similar bans. So I'm not initially surprised by this, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine A few months ago, I saw a lot of people whining about the abolition of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine. According to the pundits - including cartoonist Stephen Pastis of "Pearls Before Swine" - the Doctrine purportedly required that American networks broadcast the truth and only the truth. In reality, 1. Radio stations were required to give "equal time" to opposing sides in a controversy, not broadcast "the truth and only the truth" 2. Television stations were never under the same level of mandate, and are only required to give equal time to political candidates 3. Back when JFK and LBJ were in office the Democrats made it a point to weaponize the doctrine by having operatives identify stations that lacked the resources to fight "nuisance" FCC complaints and wait for them to violate the doctrine (that is, for them to air a right-wing or pro-GOP host without a left-wing or DNC host as counter-weight) 4. This tactic led to the decade-plus of legal action that caused the FCC to conduct an internal review in the mid-1980s, the same internal review which found that the FCC may not have had the actual legal authority to issue the mandate in the first place. Thus, because the Democrats were using it to suppress smaller, weaker radio stations, the Fairness Doctrine went away. Rush Limbaugh's show went national the very next year, and right-wing hosts would ultimately dominate talk radio within a decade. Oops...

Also... why was David back at the capitol when his people were at war? Back then, kings and queens typically led from fairly close to the front lines.

The simple truth of the matter is that people are putting weed, cannabis, and CBD oil in just about everything. A few weeks ago I was live-streaming some radio station from a good distance away (the station I listen to in Canada?) and there was an advertisement on where a CBD shop was advertising its wares. I remember that the offerings included CBD - based pet products and a number of other things.

Speaking as a former branch finance clerk? Under the old system, it was possible for someone to be flagged as being "exempt" from the requirement to tithe. I never had to put it through to make someone exempt, but the tithing settlement reporting window for the MLS computer software the church was using back then had that as one of the four options (full, partial, non, exempt). So... it's entirely possible that this could be a moot point here...