Ironhold

As I've noted before, I work for a family of small local-level newspapers. Because of how short-handed we are, I have to help with circulation in addition to my duties as a writer. What this means is that for about 90 - 120 minutes every Thursday night it's just me, the radio, and the road. If all goes well, then this is time for me to reflect, reconsider, and get my head in order. On a good week, I can make significant progress in some fashion, even if it's only another entry for my weekly op/ed column. I think this speaks to an issue many people have, that their schedules make it hard for them to carve out time to just *be* and allow themselves to think.

Nowadays, it's considered wise to have a trusted third-party mechanic evaluate any used vehicles ahead of purchase. Is there a member of your ward, or even stake, who is a certified and reputable mechanic? If so, call on them to see if they'd be willing to come with when your son goes to look for a vehicle. They can offer insight on whether or not a car is a wise purchase, and since it's a professional opinion your son might be more inclined to listen.

If one takes the gift of tongues more broadly, one can see that, in real life, there are people who have a knack for quickly picking up foreign languages. These individuals are often able to find work as translators or even in diplomatic fields, helping folks across the world to better communicate with each other.

Thanks to social media, I know a number of people who live in Canada. Several of them have told me that they're not keen on Trudeau, and feel that his tenure has brought failure and shame on the country. They actually see this tariff fight as potentially being a good thing in the long run if it does in fact force Trudeau to resign.

Right now, I'm reading a book written by Lee Iacocca. A year or so back I read Grant Tinker's autobiography. Next up is Dave Thomas' autobiography. I've also read The Peter Principle & other such works by Lawrence J. Peters, "Who Moved My Cheese?", and several other works on business, management, and leadership. This is on top of several celebrity biographies and autobiographies. Some authors deal in platitudes and hyperbole, as if they were reciting nursery rhymes to children. I often find these works to be, in the long run, a waste of time. In contrast, authors that openly level with the reader, cite examples, and recount their tragedies alongside their triumphs tend to present something for people to actually grasp onto. Tinker and Iacocca, for example, both have entire chapters in which they say "Here's where I made such-and-such screwup, here's *why* I made it, and here's what I feel I should have done differently with the power of hindsight". For example, Iacocca spends an entire chapter talking about how Chrysler allowed select employees to take cars home with them for personal use; while this allowed for real-world testing that frequently led to these employees discovering problems that didn't come through in Chrysler's in-house testing (such as a make & model of van where taking a left turn risked stalling the engine), several vehicles that were sent out for this purpose were returned in a state where they never should have been put back into the assortment of cars going to dealerships (including one that was in an accident); the company should have done a better job of screening these vehicles and reclassed any vehicles in unsatisfactory state as being corporate fleet vehicles instead of just patching & cleaning them up and sending them out. Or we have TV show host Kairi Byron's autobiography, which she consciously formatted like a textbook. Each chapter is her recounting some pivotal part of her life, including risks she took and decisions she made, and then at the end she has questions to help the reader think about their own lives and proposals for things people can do to try and change anything they aren't keen on. These types of works are the ones I prefer.

The edition I had was not as kindly, with Covey blaming the friend for not fully making himself heard.

The actual book itself included a sequence where one of Covey's friends, a small business owner, was about to be priced out of his storefront by an impending rent increase. Covey blamed his friend for this, declaring that if the friend had sincerely tried to explain his plight the friend and the property owner would have come to an agreement on the matter. That's when I decided the book was functionally worthless as a tome and would be gotten rid of once I'd completed the motions of attempting to read the rest of it.

Speaking as a Texan? There were a *lot* of irregularities in regards to not just the raid, but the aftermath. Things were so bad that many of the agents who raided the facility and at least one prosecutor could have themselves gone to jail. Yes, prosecutor. Past a certain point at least one prosecutor *literally* just drew up a boilerplate list of charges and used a word processing document to swap out the names of the adults being charged. This was dangerously close to "I'm accusing you of these crimes simply for your religious membership", something that is very much frowned upon by the Constitution. The whole matter was so badly botched that Jeffs could have potentially gotten the whole thing tossed if he'd have gotten an aggressive enough lawyer. Even some non-members I knew at the time were forced to admit how horribly sideways the matter had gotten.

2000s. The Seven Habits is a hot topic. My mom reads a story about how a particular restaurant chain won't hire anyone who hasn't read it. This convinces my mom that I need to read it, too. We're at the Borders that used to be in the local shopping mall. Mom pitches a fit right then and there in the middle of the store about how I need to buy that book if I want to succeed. I buy it to keep the situation from turning into a spectacle. I go online that same day to manage my E-Bay / Half dot Com account and discover that people are flooding the two sites with copies; I could have gotten a copy for dirt cheap even after shipping if she hadn't pitched that fit. I read the book. It's pure quackery. It's actually insulting to my intelligence, and I find myself questioning the intelligence of anyone who takes it seriously. I sit mom down for a talk and explain all of this to her. She relents. I go to list the book. Turns out that so many more people have listed their copies that the going rate is now $0.75 apiece, the minimum that Half was allowing us to charge for any given item at the time. So I'm now out about $20 and several hours of my time. So near as I can tell the book has disappeared into the aether of forgotten management tomes, and if you ask me we'd all be better off if it stayed there.

Remember, we have a temple in San Antonio, and one is being constructed in Austin. The I-35 Corridor is *very* surprisingly active when it comes to members of the church, as are a few of the border communities. A few weeks ago someone posted online a county-by-county breakdown showing members of the church by percentage of population, and there were a few places in Texas, like Coryell and Maverick counties, that were above the 2% threshold needed to be noted. Sadly, I didn't bookmark it, but it shouldn't be too hard to find.

This past week has been very trying for my parents and I IRL, culminating in a major freak-out yesterday when dad nearly got some malware on the computer. For obvious reasons, we've been doing a lot of praying. Over the past few weeks, as I've prayed I've asked to know how I should proceed with the situation in the opening post. Last night, while at work, once everyone else was gone I felt compelled to say some prayers again. This time, I asked that Heavenly Father would help her find the person who could support her and give her what she needed, even if it wasn't me. With everything she's had going, she deserves at least that much. I was running deliveries when a single phrase came to mind, almost as if out of nowhere: "she found you". Not sure if this is indeed the answer or not (let's face it, with the life I've had, some days I just don't know anymore), but if it is then I've got a lot of work to do getting where I need to be for her sake.

Back around the time of the Vice Presidential debate last year my cable provider (I have an all-in-one cable / internet / landline phone package) did some work to "upgrade" the 5G service in my town, and since then the 5G has been slower and less reliable than my 2G, which in turn is also periodically dropping out now. Because we're able to reliably access the 5G on our mobile devices my parents don't want to make waves, but it tends to make a hash of things when I'm on the desktop.

Over the past few days there have been instances where I'll successfully pull up Third Hour, read it, post, and then an hour or two later go to check on a conversation I was in only to find that Third Hour either won't connect or won't load. These outages seem to be sporadic, but have a higher chance of happening in the evening US time. Is anyone else having spotty connectivity with Third Hour? Trying to figure out what's me and what's what. Thanks.

This is something that, it turns out, a lot of members of the church don't know about, let alone non-members. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mormon-mill-colony Before Joseph Smith's death, he was looking to send a scouting party to Texas to see if it was suitable for settlement in case the church needed to leave Illinois. Joseph's death and the forced flight to Utah meant that the main body of the church wouldn't arrive in the state for some time, but an offshoot group did in fact set up camp in Texas. Their colony was located near the present-day city of Marble Falls, and in fact Mormon Mill Road is a rural road running through a part of that region. Yes, there is now a chapel in Marble Falls, and it's actually not that far from where the road runs. To me, this is something of a curious what-if scenario. Suppose, for a second, that Joseph had in fact lived long enough to order the church to start colonizing Texas. How might that have played out? The most pressing thing I can think of is the Civil War. The church largely managed to sit it out due to Utah being strategically unimportant and neither side really pushing for the members to join up, but Texas went for the Confederacy and suffered some significant losses accordingly.

The 2024 Olympics actually brought this attention to the fore. A boxer who was in the women's boxing competition was actually *banned* from at least one previous event because their testosterone levels (et al) were too high, but the Olympics allowed the boxer to compete. This person hit so hard that one of their opponents actually surrendered a few seconds into the match for fear that if it continued they'd be seriously injured. This comes *on top of* years of people pointing out instances in which people who had been middling competitors as male athletes declared that they were now transgender and started dominating the female divisions of the sports they were in, raising questions about how many were sincere. It's a very complicated issue, but too many people want to sweep it under that metaphorical rug.

The human brain is hardwired to seek for patterns, and will even begin assembling patterns where none exists. In this case, there's enough in the way of controversial and horrific incidents involving LGBT individuals and children to where even a reasonable person could start forming a pattern. For example, for the past few years there have been incidents where drag shows not only invited young children (re: pre-teen and younger) to be audience but where these shows even had such young children *as performers*. Or we had the bit where the people in charge of Drag Queen Story Time for the Houston, Texas public library system didn't actually run proper background checks and so a convicted offender was able to work with the kids for about six months. Or we've had media that was clearly inappropriate for children being aimed at children. Et cetera. That's *on top of* a group of LGBT individuals who made a viral video in which they sang a song called "We're Coming For Your Children". Most people who are LGBT just want to live in peace, and are just as horrified about these events. But so long as they keep happening, they'll be a metaphorical bloody shirt.

There's a full video clip of it in context. He uses his hand to cover his heart, then gestures with it, producing the odd angle. So yeah, looks like an overly emotive gesture.

Official statement made by the ADL on their Twitter feed. It seems that the ADL is writing this one off as him perhaps awkwardly waving to or gesturing at some people, and so they're letting it go until anything further emerges to suggest otherwise.

IRL, there are days where I barely even get to the newspaper because of how much running around I do; the only paper I read when it comes out is the flagship for my columns, and even then I sometimes only have enough time to glance at them & make sure they ran and were the ones I'd scheduled *to* run that day. I literally don't remember the last time I looked at any of the church magazines...

For those who don't know, there's a long-running syndicated comic strip called "Curtis". The series is about the titular 10-year-old from the big city. He's very bright, very curious, and has already decided what he wants to do when he grows up (write & direct horror movies, which he's a fan of). But like most kids his age, he can't help but fall into misadventure and doesn't entirely understand how sitting in school for several hours a day will get him towards his goal. The strip that ran on 19 January 2025 (sorry, King Features Syndicate's Comics Kingdom website limits how many strips a person can view without a subscription) has Curtis meeting with the minister of the church his family goes to. As part of it, Curtis asks what to him is an important question: How do we know that we're actually, presently, living in reality? His concern is whether or not it's possible for a person to "die" but find themselves existing in a reality akin to the one they were living as a sort of afterlife in and of itself. In the strip, the minister shoves him out the door without even attempting to answer the question. To me, though, it does raise a point that I would imagine many individuals are indeed curious about: when a person dies, what tells them that they've passed on and that they need to accept that they are in the afterlife? What does everyone here think?

But yeah - Everyone needs to find a tempo, a rhythm they can live their life around. This will help keep you active without going too fast for your own good. If the beat's too intense, that means it's time to slow it down a notch, even if it means sacrificing something in life to do so.

I keep trying to make peace with my past, but all too often something crops up that forces me to revisit parts of it. Problem is, half the time I try to explain "A led to B, which is why I'm now struggling with C", someone freaks out and either offers a forced mea culpa or tells me that if I'd truly "forgiven" them I wouldn't ever bring the issue up again.

Remember the whole "Great American Melting Pot" bit from School House Rock? What's happening in Europe is that the UK, Sweden, and several other countries are host to large immigrant communities who have *refused* to meld into the overall public body. Rather, these communities are setting up enclaves in which they're basically trying to reconstruct the countries they left behind while still having the resources and privileges of the European nation they're in. The vast majority of incidents people are getting upset about are happening in these enclaves, but it's causing broad anti-immigrant hysteria across the board, especially given how loathe the local governments are to actually do anything about these enclaves. ...Hence why groups like Germany's AFD are seeing a surge in votes and support, and why people are now calling for the heads of several governments to resign. The more horror stories that emerge about what is or isn't happening in these enclaves, the more frenzied the overall anti-immigrant sentiment will likely become, as even legal immigrants who have melted into society are now finding themselves feeling the heat. Yes, I said "hysteria". I'm emphasizing that to make sure everyone understands what I'm talking about.

My oldest brother absolutely *insisted* that I take pre-calculus as a preparation for college. I pointed out that I had trouble in algebra because I kept getting the formulas confused, I had met all of my mathematics requirements so didn't need to take another math class anyway, and even if they *were* concerned about me needing another math class to stay focused there was a math & money course that should help me on my plan for an eventual business major. Mom sided with my brother. The end result was life-altering, and not in a good way. Classes were 90 minutes every other day. The pre-calculus teacher would take the first 30 minutes of those 90 minutes to go desk by desk and grade our homework on the spot so she didn't have to take any of it home. This ensured that she *never* finished discussing the chapter during the assigned lesson period, but she also *never* understood why that kept happening. Instead, we were just to finish reading the chapter and do the assigned homework accordingly. If we had problems we could come to before-school and after-school tutoring time, but her classroom was always packed. It took her writing a note inviting me to leave the class for my parents to *finally* understand that I wasn't lying to them about what it was like in there. But I didn't get moved into another class until semester break, by which point this class had *badly* damaged my GPA. You see, I'm in Texas. At the time I was in high school, if you graduated within the top 10% of your class, you could get free tuition to any in-state college courtesy of the state. This utter nonsense drama with the pre-calculus class meant that I missed the top 10% by six slots, something like 0.07 of a grade point. Cue me and my parents having to struggle to pay for me to go to college, which I caught eight different flavors of flak for by the very same parents who doomed me to this existence when they listened to my brother instead of me in the first place.

To add to this - I grew up high-functioning autistic in a time and place where most people only had "Rain Man" as their frame of reference for high-functioning autism, and I'll spare people the popular term that was used at the time to describe such individuals. I did well enough in school that I was classed as "gifted", which initially just meant being given extra assignments in school and spending a measured amount of time each week in what was supposed to be a specialized educational program. Problem was, as I got older a lot started going on in my life. I had a serious medical episode at 8 that had life-altering consequences, and I was only just barely getting out of that particular tailspin before other things started to hit me. Whenever I began showing the negative traits of autism, however, people treated it like it was some personal failing on my part and that I needed to get myself together & stop slacking off. Past a certain point so much was going on that I was just expected to be some better-than-perfect being who could do anything and everything under his own power and without any assistance so that everyone else could focus on their things. Failure was *never* an option in their eyes, never mind the fact that by the time I graduated high school I had basically been raised by a mix of anime, heavy metal, and "escapist" fiction because few adults in my life were making time for me and my autism was wildly out of control because I didn't have the methods in place to deal with it. I basically lost 20 years of my life to untreated mental health issues. One thing I've had to learn was to set a rhythm for my life. This list of things needed to be done in a given day at a pace that I could maintain without being overwhelmed, this list of things would be nice to get done but weren't mandatory, and this list of things could wait a while. That's how I finally even halfway started to get by.