dprh

It is surreal to think I am already at the age of having the privilege and opportunity to listen to my oldest give a talk after serving a full-time mission. Sadly, I haven't been sick all this year and the first time I am sick is the Sunday he is speaking. Fortunately, there is a Zoom meeting I will still be able to view and listen to him.
I am looking forward to hearing the increase the Lord has given my son by the power of his Holy Spirit. I hope that he will continue to cherish the experiences and personal revelation he has received, and that he will continue to remain faithful to the Lord.

I’ve been preaching about the danger South Carolina posed to the church for years now

Because they were fresh before they were frozen???  

Costco has a huge (surprise, right?) bag of popcorn that I love!  We don't go to Costco often, but it's the first thing I say when my wife asks what we need there.
Of course, I can't find it on their website now, but below is the same bag through instacart.
https://www.instacart.com/landing?product_id=16462122&retailer_id=5&region_id=1130124559&utm_medium=sem_shopping&utm_source=instacart_google&utm_campaign=ad_demand_shopping_rp_july-4&utm_content=accountid-8145171519_campaignid-13618159377_adgroupid-124781678355_device-c&gclid=Cj0KCQjw0emHBhC1ARIsAL1QGNfW49NBzNHymTqKdyPXn-KSHcLFztBB_RGucHYte0PbHjTwl6jjiPwaAjMZEALw_wcB
 

I haven’t finished the book yet, but I had this insight in a portion of the book I read this morming
 
The common logic behind suicide is “there is nothing more to expect from life except pain” (I recognize this is a gross over simplification, I am not trying to reduce feelings of suicide to just this) When we switch the internal dialogue and ask “what does life expect of me”, it offers further strength. It turns you from a victim into a hero. 
 
This reminds me of a man I went to church with. He shared with us in a meeting that he felt that the church had given him everything it could. He has read the scriptures through multiple time, had learned the lessons found in serving a mission, and was married in the temple. He felt lost, there there was nothing left for him to gain from being a member. Over the next few months we watched through the eyes of his wife and daughter, who had grown close to my wife, him leave the church and get a divorce. It wasn’t till later that I made the connection of what had happened. 
 
In Luke 22:32, Christ says to Peter “when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.” Doctrine and Covenants 84:106 reads “And if any man among you be strong in the Spirit, let him take with him him that is weak, that he may be edified in all meekness, that he may become strong also.” There are two phases we go through when we find a passion or something that gives us meaning. First, there is this expectation that we will be converted. Secondly, we are expected to take that knowledge and give it to others, to strengthen them. Men and women are not content in selfishness, nor in feeling like a victim. Only in realizing life’s and God’s (the Universe’s, Ala’s, future you, Flying Spaghetti Monster’s or any other higher meaning you find) expectation for you can we pull ourselves out of that despair. It takes a higher view of ourselves and a desire to help those around us. 
 
The difference between (1) feeling crushed by the world because we are falling short and failing, and (2) feeling energized by the struggles of life and striving to grow so we can be the rock for others who are struggling is simple. It takes realizing who your truly are and what future roles God (or whatever higher being you believe in) has in store for you.
 
Though it is a simple shift, it can be hard. Like sitting on a dining chair on tile floor. You want to shift the chair, but it is stuck on a lip. Sometimes you have to get off of the chair completely to get that small shift you want.

What are some of your favorite snacks.  I will admit that this summer I have become totally addicted to frozen grapes.  I'm going to hate when they are no longer in season.
Plus I have fallen in love with watermelon and cantaloupe sprinkled with Tajin.  I LOVE it.  
It has been a good fruit summer so far.

I absolutely agree that it’s hard to know in detail who to trust and what to believe.  Many of the standard “authorities” have not exactly covered themselves in glory here.
That said, I think we know enough to paint some broad pictures, as follows:
1). COVID is responsible for a large number of particularly unpleasant deaths, which are occurring in hospitals whose occupancy rates are significantly higher than they were pre-COVID and whose staffs are getting burned out.
2).  The average US life expectancy has significantly declined over the past year, and there seem to be no plausible candidates causing such a decline except for COVID.
3). The vaccines were developed around a series of scientific theories about how the virus, and the human immune system, function.  When it comes to protecting against the COVID strains for which they were designed, the vaccines appear to be functioning more-or-less as-anticipated—the theory does work in real life.
4). We don’t know a lot—yet—about side-effects.  That said:  My understanding is that the majority of what has been observed, are similar to the effects that a COVID infection itself would produce in the body (which, as I understand it, is not terribly surprising).  I have yet to see a strong case being made that a substantial number of individuals who allegedly died because of the vaccine, had healthy immune systems that would have withstood a full-fledged COVID infection.
5).  As it pertains to the young lady at issue here:  her excuse note was written by a D.O.—an osteopath—who by definition and training focuses on more naturalistic approaches to medicine, and is neither as confident in or as fully trained regarding synthetic medications.  BYUH apparently consulted an MD who took a more nuanced approach about the mechanics of the various vaccines and how each one, individually, could affect persons with the young lady’s condition; whereas the young lady’s doctor was predisposed to—and did—generate a canned bleating about “Big Pharma Bad”.
In this context, with regard to the question about why low vaccination rates are a BYUH student’s problem:  Legally, I would say they aren’t; because individual liberties and “it’s my body, darn it!”  I would certainly argue against a vaccination mandate that was enforced by threat of fine or imprisonment.  (Society’s right, collectively and/or as individuals, to draw back from a nonconformer/perceived threat, is a hairier issue—of course, “banishment” was a thing in colonial America . . .)
But, given all of the above as well as the factor cited in BYUH’s exemption denial letter, I think it’s well within BYUH’s prerogative to say “we feel we have a responsibility to our broader community to play ball here, and we’re going to make this a condition of attendance.”  And at that point, it does become the BYUH student’s problem; just as the facts that per the Honor Code *other* people’s inability to drink responsibly, or sit through a class while a female present is showing excessive skin, or to get a meaningful education without cheating on test scores, all similarly become the student’s own problem.

https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2021/07/49-people-who-were-fully-vaccinated-have-died-of-covid-in-nj-heres-what-we-know.html

I was simply extrapolating the data from earlier provided by the article on NJ numbers from Carb.  The death rates for vaccinated is 0.0009% and for non-vaccinated is 0.27%.  It was more an exercise in demonstrating how an seemingly insignificant change in percentages like that can have large impacts. It wasn't meant to be infallible. 

“What a piece of man is Carborendum”, said Mrs. Carborendum 😁

What a piece of work is man.

My personal life experiences, observations and spiritual insights have led me to the realization of how miserable we are without God as a guiding influence for good.
Without God’s influence, we are incapable of progressing. To hear that stated is one thing, but to internalize and see it as reality is another. 
We are selfish by nature. Our ability to progress beyond our selfish nature hangs in a delicate balance managed and made only possible by God.  When it comes to progressing beyond what we are, we are fragile. Push us too much, and we will fall apart. Don’t push us enough, and we will remain incapable of loving others.
How did we exist in the premortal life as “intelligences”? The noun would suggest we had intellectual capacity. Maybe we had ability to discern to some degree. But what we didn’t have was the ability to love or at least not to the extent made possible with a mortal, earthly experience.
We did not care for our neighbors, we did not understand the importance of empathy, we were not our brother’s keeper, we did not sacrifice anything that wasn’t for our own benefit; we were incapable of understanding or even being motivated in that fashion.  We were self-serving.  That is our true nature absent of God.
We give glory to God because despite us being miserably hopeless on our own, it was His wisdom and intervention that made possible our progression.  He is our Eternal Anchor of Hope, our Heavenly North Star, and our only hope for rising above a state of nothingness; that is why we must or eventually be compelled to give glory to God, for anything we become beyond nothing is due to Him.
For God to have organized us and created this vacuum where mankind has survived and thrived for as long as it has requires the greatest delicate touch beyond what we could imagine. 
Left to our own devices, we would have self-imploded and destroyed ourselves long ago. How do I know this? Because mankind has barely been able to survive this long even with God being as present as He is.
Our self-sabotaging nature continues to spawn wars, murder, prostitution, sex trafficking, genocide, corruption, and abuse in all forms.  These acts are evidence of our self-serving nature, a nature that even the most righteous among us is susceptible to.  Our inherent nature of selfishness is just as alive today as it always has been even though the world’s landscape may appear to have changed over time. 
Selfishness is apparent on many levels even outside the common examples we would think of like theft or greed.  Loving only those within your inner circles or those who provide some type of benefit in return for your love is selfish. Primarily focusing your life efforts on building a nest egg for solely you and your family is selfish if not shortsighted at best.
Should we feel guilt for not being more advanced in our ability to love?  I don’t think so. How developed we are in our ability to love is merely a snapshot of where we are on our individual journeys. Some may arrive to certain levels faster than others, but God didn’t design it to be a race; He designed it as a plan to give us all the best chance at developing love.
It’s a monumental task for us to overcome our nature and learn to love, but we have to start somewhere.  That is why God designed our learning in baby-step format.  God created the format of life involving spouses and families as a step in the right direction for our advancement to learn to love others.
Is it wrong to work hard to build a life for you and your family? No. But that alone isn’t the end goal of what God wants us to achieve. The goal is to learn to love, not just yourself, not just those within your inner circles, but to truly love all unconditionally as God loves us. That means putting others’ needs before your own including those who have no direct connection to you other than being a fellow child of God.
Ever since Adam and Eve, God has been coaxing us along to learn to love.  Through history we’ve seen how progress oftentimes takes multiple generations to build upon, just as chaos can trickle down and negatively affect multiple generations to come.  How parents raise their children will influence that generation’s ability to love.
How advanced should we become by the end of this life regarding our ability to love?  As much as we can.  The thing is, God never set a threshold because the purpose of this life never was perfection. The purpose of life is progress towards learning to love.
God’s design of this life is what we need for the greatest chance of us succeeding in learning to love.  God did not design our nature; He designed this life around our nature to provide us with the best platform possible for our success. 
If you think about how God designed the world for the benefit of our nature and development to learn to love, it extends itself to many insights of why this world is designed the way it is.  For me, the family unit makes much more sense as to why it’s the exclusive unit it is instead of us attempting to love everyone equally.  The exclusivity of the family unit concerned me before as it seemed selfish in principle as so many in this world are left unloved by a family of their own. I previously resented the clicks we form, but now I understand them to be necessary steppingstones for our progress in learning to love.  We are far too infantile in our current state to attempt loving everyone equally.
The fragility of our development of learning to love can also be related to our slow progression towards technological advancements.  It’s taken thousands of years just for us to reach this digital age we now find ourselves in.  Could the technology we see today have been achieved earlier?  Absolutely.  But we hindered and destroyed each other’s creations and progress due to our selfish nature.  Had mankind not sought chaos and instead always embraced living in harmony with one another, we would be lightyears ahead of where we are today and basic problems like world hunger would not exist. But our nature is not harmonious.
With the grace of God, we are swimming upstream trying to overcome our natural tendencies. May we trust in Him and His plan, and that what may seem like an insurmountable task ahead of us may seem possible to achieve with the hope He gives us, remembering that this life is nothing but baby steps in our progression of learning to love, that achieving perfection in this life never was the goal, and that God will guide us by the hand.

As I understand it, Hawaii is currently a shade over 53% vaccinated, which of course is nowhere near “herd immunity” and I doubt isn’t close even if we count recovered cases.
But, the thought process above seems to reduce to “we shouldn’t incentivize people to get vaccinated until almost everyone has already been vaccinated”, which frankly is a little hard for me to follow.  Am I misunderstanding?

Dude is so old he could have been a waiter at the last supper. 

Exactly!   Or, in other words:   4.1 million global deaths related to coronoavirus.  We all guess at how many in that number were actually caused by 'rona, but it's impossible to claim that 'rona isn't killing a crapton of people who would otherwise be alive.  Someone looks at that and says "4.1 million?  Holy crap, gimme the vaccine."   Someone else says "99.5% survival?  Not convincing enough for me to get jabbed."   
Here's a good question:  How many millions dead would it take, before you figure it's serious enough to get the vaccine?
And here's the same question put differently:  How low does the % survivability need to drop, before it's low enough to change your mind?
Other new news: Our global life expectancy has gone down a little because of 'rona and it's imact:

They're guessing maybe 3/4ths of that drop is due to 'rona deaths, and the rest is impacts of quarantines/shutdowns/disruption in people's lives.  
A 1 year drop or so, isn't the end of the world.  We're still living longer than we did in the '90's.  But we also haven't felt the full long-term effects of shutdown in terms of skipped cancer screenings, increased diabetes, and whatnot.  But still, it's hard to just explain away the results as "aw, that's nothing"
 
 

Carb's article and Neurotypical's post indicates NJ's unvaccinated survival rate would be 1-0.0027, so 99.73%.  Survival rate of vaccinated people is 99.9991%.  Yes, it seems like a small difference but like I said before, it's degrees of magnitude in difference.
Edit: Just a little more maths.  I took the difference of the rates.  It's 0.26911%.  Multiply that by the estimated world population of 7.5 Billion and it's 20,182,500.  If everyone on the planet got the virus (which seems inevitable) , the difference if everyone were vaccinated or unvaccinated would be over 20 million deaths.

I've seen a lot of members against the vaxx quote this.  But not many who do say that they've actually consulted with a competent medical professional. 
Edit: All 8 members of the FP and the 12 got it as soon as it was available to people over 70 years old.
https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/church-leaders-covid-19-vaccine

lol what do you mean, watching a YouTube video doesn't qualify as counsel with competent medical professionals?  Ya crackpot.

I heard recently (I wish I could remember where) that generally humans have a hard time comparing very large numbers and very small numbers.  Up front, most people don't see much difference between 10,000 and 10,000,000 or 1/10,000 and 1/10,000,000.  Even though they are degrees of magnitude separated.  

Holy crap, that is excellent news!   With around 60% of the state's 8.8million vaccinated, that makes the 'rona death rate of vaccinated NJians to be around 0.0009%.   Compared to NJ's unvaccinated 'rona death rate of 0.27%, what more undeniable, clear, transparently glorious and wonderful proof of the vaccine's effectiveness could there possibly be?  (I mean, the article doesn't make that clear, but people get it, right?)
Wanna reduce your chances of dying of 'rona by two-hundred and eighty times?  Get the vaccine.
Wanna increase your chances of dying of 'rona by 280X?  Don't get the vaccine.
Thanks Carb, for posting this wonderful news!  I'm seeing similar good reports everywhere.  Dang I'm glad we've got effective vaccines against this thing.  Now, only the most stubbornly blinder-wearing folks out there are able to cling to a false belief that the vaccine isn't effective.  I mean, folks can still say things like "it's not for me" or "I have the right to decide for myself" or "I'm concerned about possible long-term effects", or "0.27%?  I'll take my chances, thank you", or some such.  There remain several valid principled arguments against the vaccine.  But with the entire world's populations showing results similar to New Jersey, nobody can hope to say the vaccine isn't wildly effective against the virus, and hope to maintain a shred of credibility.  Denying the vaccine's effectiveness, in the face of several months of relevant data, is now tantamount to denying the earth is a sphere.  
I always figured these guys knew what they were doing.  Especially the superstar combination of medical doctor, former medical researcher, and prophet of the Lord.

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Okay. Stop playing the victim. I said twice that I’m honestly curious. Not asking to insult you. So there’s that. Which you ignored. Because you want to pretend I’m picking on you. Which I’m not. And I said it twice. Perhaps you are judging my intentions on what you would do in my place. 
 
Next, if I misunderstood your choice on vaccines and why you don’t take them, I’m truly sorry. 
 
And maybe, just maybe, if I was confused by your stance it’s because you weren’t clear. Just maybe. But you know me @Carborendum, I’m really stupid. 
 
And finally, yes, I do think most people who claim “medical exceptions” aren’t telling us the entire truth. Reality is that less than 1% have a legit claim to that. If you are that one percent, I truly feel bad for you because it’s a dangerous life.
 
However, I’ve met so many people who claim that that yes, I’m cynical about it. It’s like meeting people who claim to be Navy SEALS or at a famous football game where their team won the championship. 

Whether you’re religious, not religious, or kind of religious, I’m convinced this is the purpose of life for all:   To learn to love.   We start off in life, hopefully, with a good set of parents who give us their unconditional love as an example of how to love others.   We progress to love those in our immediate circles be it family, friends, or someone you love for the love they share with you. We have kids of our own and love them as our parents loved us.   And from there a few of us advance beyond to love those outside our inner circles who don’t provide us with anything in return other than the sense of joy that can come from service.   Regardless of how advanced we are along the path of learning to love, whether we’re still crawling as an infant or at a light jog, we are all learning and hopefully increasing our ability to love step by step.   Personally, I feel like I’m barely learning how to walk when it comes to loving others outside my inner circles without expecting anything in return. I have, however, been fortunate enough to cross paths with a few exceptional people in my life that exude love. These people I think of often and hold in high regard as examples I look up to.   Being someone who believes in God, I believe our life experiences are designed to allow us to develop empathy for one another and help us advance from a state of self-interest to selflessness. And even if you don’t believe in God, you might agree life has a way of molding us in this regard if we allow it to.   Why is mankind prone to limit its love to its own inner circles? We often reserve love for family and friends only, exclusive to our little empires.   For one, all of us are in the process of learning to love, and no one in this life, besides Jesus Christ, has ever mastered love. We need to start with the inner circles we have as building blocks preparing us for further advancement.   We need to start somewhere and hopefully someday be able to begin walking in the Savior’s footprints He left as an example to us, and embrace a higher way to love.   To those who have set a lasting impression on me of this type of love in my own life, thank you for showing me it’s possible. It inspires me to do the same even in my own limited, finite ability.   Love is connection we all seek and transcends any one specific culture, religion, or ideology.   Mark 22:37-39   “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”   John 13:34-35   “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

If this were the case then introverts like me are doomed to outer darkness. 😃
I don't know if I would say learning to love is the one sole purpose of life. There are things like gaining bodies and learning to master them. But love surely does encompass a great deal of our purpose here including the motivation behind our obedience to all of the commandments so in that respect I think you have a good case to make.

That is sad.  I admit that I and my family could do better at studying CFM throughout the week.  But we do read from the sections almost every day as a family.  And I don't think we need to, or are even asked to do any or all the extra little things in the manual.  The intro says we should use the manual for our needs, in any way that is helpful to us.  So we need to walk a fine line of encouraging people to do better at studying without overwhelming or discouraging them by asking too much. 
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/come-follow-me-for-individuals-and-families-doctrine-and-covenants-2021/using?lang=eng
I just got called as a gospel doctrine teacher (my first calling since being baptized again!)  and I'm hoping that my class will be doing at least some reading.  I'll try to figure out the best ways to encourage them to do more.  My first lesson went very well last week on section 76  

That is sad.  I admit that I and my family could do better at studying CFM throughout the week.  But we do read from the sections almost every day as a family.  And I don't think we need to, or are even asked to do any or all the extra little things in the manual.  The intro says we should use the manual for our needs, in any way that is helpful to us.  So we need to walk a fine line of encouraging people to do better at studying without overwhelming or discouraging them by asking too much. 
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/come-follow-me-for-individuals-and-families-doctrine-and-covenants-2021/using?lang=eng
I just got called as a gospel doctrine teacher (my first calling since being baptized again!)  and I'm hoping that my class will be doing at least some reading.  I'll try to figure out the best ways to encourage them to do more.  My first lesson went very well last week on section 76