NeuroTypical

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Aaaand here we are in October. First case argued in front of the new SCOTUS. Here’s a TikTok with a halfway decent content creator about it. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRmTpBcp/

(Spotted on Twitter, telling me that the gospel is being received by younger generations in meaningful ways.)

I'm absolutely going to be reviewing that talk. Still quite a powerful thing to hear.

Like it or loathe it, we are incorporating some thing out of woke activism. Elder C’s strong message of inclusion and diversity:

Wow - for the first time ever (I think), someone giving a General Conference talk has called out their own parents for abusing them. There are folks out there who saw this as a powerful thing.

Elder Oaks rocks, and our charitable efforts across the planet rocks. Our IT department does not rock. President Uchdorf needs to yell at the IT department. He just told the whole world that an updated For the Strength of Youth pamphlet is available, and anyone who goes to the church website and searches for it, only finds the old one. This is as embarrassing as when Bill Gates was rolling out the next version of windows to the whole world and got the blue screen of death.

Wasn't Anatess from Jacksonville? @Grunt, I think I heard somewhere that you still talk to her - do you know if she's OK?

Holy crap! Here's my power/gas averages for the last few years, for a single family in a home here in Colorado. (It's an annual average of the monthly bills.) The electric bump over the last year is due to having another structure to heat. The gas increases were not due to anything we did. I'd also get periodic notices that my home used more energy than the average, but never any threats. Just an offer to do a free energy audit to see where the air leaks are, and suggest some fixes.

Yep, powerful and sobering. A worthy way to spent 10 minutes. Did Peterson coin the term "anti-truth"? I first heard it from him. Very interesting term - sort of like the intellectual secular version of anti-Christ.

This shows the changing value of retirement savings for Mr. and Mrs. Typical. Vertical bars indicate presidential election. For the first time since I started keeping track in 2007, that value has gone DOWN under any president. Yeesh.

I'm gratified to see some of the younger generation starting to realize that some folks are just plain pushing the social agenda a bit too hard. The latest meme:

Tips for what? How to spot/avoid them? How to change their opinions about things? I haven't been preached to by a born again person in a couple decades. But I did have an immensely enjoyable 3 hour long conversation with an atheist last month. Both of us talking 100 miles an hour, totally respectful. We managed to solve pretty much all of the world's problems in that conversation, but neither of us budged a single inch on our beliefs about God.

She made a great Kai Wynn.

First priority: I should be able to clip my fingernails and have moles and warts and tumors and parasites removed. Bodily autonomy is a core foundation of liberty and freedom. Also First priority: Human beings, especially the weak and defenseless ones, must be protected by society and law. Humans get equal protection under the law - also a core foundation of liberty and freedom. So when does the reproductive cycle create a human, deserving of equal protection under the law? Pretty much nobody advocates extending the status of personhood to a sperm, or an egg. Few believe a fertilized egg or multicelled blastocyst is a human. As the thing grows and matures, more and more people cross the "okay it's a person now" line. Every stage crossed, brings more and more into the "it's a person" camp: A beating heart, the ability to feel pain, brain activity, indications of having a sleep pattern, reactions that indicate familiarity to certain sounds. By the time of viability (the ability to survive outside the womb), pretty much everyone has joined the camp. You can find some, here and there, who believe a woman should have a right to abort her born and independently living child, but probably in similar numbers as those who believe spilling seed is mass murder. There should be room for exceptions, like the 14 year old who escapes from her evil father, in the 3rd trimester carrying his child, a child that will not survive for long and will likely kill the mother during birth. God drops hints that can be interpreted in various ways. He doesn't settle the matter for us. The church does what it always does in the lack of clear and unambiguous revelation - it's best. In such a situation, it makes sense to let the states (or the people), make up their own minds. Folks of similar views can go live amongst others of similar stripes, if it's that important to them. So let Cali and Colorado be on the late end of things, and let Georgia and Mississippi be on the early end of things, and everyone else can argue about weeks, and yell in all caps, and crowbar as much emotion or reason into their arguments as they wish. And they can vote in their states, and the strongest voices will win in that state. And folks can argue about jumping states for abortions. That's better than the federal government telling everyone what to do.