NeuroTypical

If you haven't seen this stuff yet, then it's time to see this stuff. Teenagers in their parent's basements can make stuff like this now: https://www.facebook.com/derek.karnes/videos/934725205366224/

Ah. So, your claim is a @Traveler original. Fair enough.

Could you cite a source for that claim? I'd love a link.

I can think of two things. First, being a member isn't the automatic-suspicion-oh-crap-this-guy-is-in-a-cult that it used to be. We're fairly respected now as honest, hard working, good people. Some folks want to be a part of the community and avail themselves of the blessings of having automatic friends wherever you go, that they just pretend in order to be a part. Sometimes this is nefarious, sometimes it's driven from longing or loneliness. Second, some folks are trying to run an outright scam. The "Con" in conman stands for 'confidence', where the scammer buddies up with their target and builds trust/relationship/affiliation, in order to make it more likely that the scam will be successful. I've got two bits of personal experience. One was a family of scammers who got themselves deeply into church fast offerings pockets, before they were found out and the money stopped flowing. Another was a homeless guy during covid who tried to live on church grounds out of his car. He busted into every shed we had, and almost gained entry to the ward building by following me in, but I didn't allow it. After the cops got involved, he played his "I'm a member of [so-and-so stake], just passing through" card, and the church didn't press charges for the property destruction. The second group of people often have no problem getting baptized, because it helps with the con. So I'm guessing maybe your folks are most likely falling into the first category?

That's an awful lot of yelling there @JohnsonJones... I can't really hear you over all the yelling.

In the battle of competing wise sayings, I've found this one is much more powerful and accurate: "You get what you pay for." The more money you pour into single mother families, the more single mother families you'll get. The more you pour into homelessness, the more homelessness you'll get. Yes, we can carefully craft programs tied to metrics like work, or completing rehab or counseling. So there are ways to actually reduce the problem instead of growing it. Fun story: I've been a finance clerk for 5 bishops now, and helped each one of them administer fast offerings to our needy folks. 4 of them have been your standard bishops following the program. The fifth was one of the most giving caring people on earth. He spent a lot of energy finding the financial needs in his ward, and offering church assistance to folks. Four of the bishops, I write maybe a check or two a month. One bishop, I'd do 2-5 checks weekly. Dude was helping people make car payments. We were paying rent for several people. We were paying for a teenager's iPhone bill so he could "look for work and stuff". Probably half a dozen or more folks with constant needs lasting 6 months or longer. In my dozen years of finance clerking, I've only seen one case of fraud - and it was at the hands of this charitable bishop. A family of professional scammers sniffed him out, and now they're all mormon, and somehow they never have the correct paperwork, but the bishop wanted to help so badly he'd always approve an exception. That bishop presided during a period that wasn't marked by recession or hard times or high unemployment or anything like that. He just got what he paid for. Word got out that the purse strings were open with no strings and no judgment, and suddenly I'm the busiest finance clerk in 5 stakes. The next bishop showed up, and it all dried up. He talked with me about teen with the cell phone. He told me he took this take: "One of our older sisters lives on a fixed income, and literally goes without food so she can afford to pay her fast offerings. She lives in the subsidized apartments. She has to plan carefully for every single dollar. Can you look me in the eye and tell me that paying for your cell phone is the best use of the funds she consecrates to the Lord for supporting the needy?" "Well, um, no, I guess not." I assume he had similar discussions with others, because within 3-4 months, I was back to my usual check-writing cadence of a couple times a month. It's like word got out the new bishop was a tightwad, and suddenly all the "needs" dried up. Or some folks got forced to live within their means. Yeah, you get what you pay for. Local beats federal. Private beats government. And tying aid to hoops that must be jumped through is critical to ensure you're not just growing the problem. You can tell your people I said so.

"Strongest values to emphasize are families and freedom" As I thought about it, it dawned on me this needed a serious response. What do you think "families" mean to the presenter and everything in the room? Ten bucks says if you had asked for clarification, you would not have heard "oh, we're referring to the traditional nuclear family of two married and committed parents and their children". It would be more like "a family is a small group of people who are committed to each other and share living expenses". If you asked why a single person living alone was being excluded by the definition, I'm guessing maybe a 50% chance they'd include a single person living alone in the definition of family. In other words, the only person on the left interested in reducing poverty by increasing the number of 2 parent households is you (and maybe or maybe not you). I mean, tell me if you disagree. Anyone, please tell me if anyone disagrees.

You almost had me, but then I looked closer: Only commies use macs. This is widely known. I bet the owner also speaks out against God's favorite pizza topping, the pineapple.

I totally get every point about fractured and toxic marriages. I have zero judgment when folks get divorced. And yet, every study I see, across decades, give the same clear link between poverty and 'broken home'. From what I can tell (and I'm always willing to read more), it's good defense against poverty to keep even the broken and toxic together. Kids who grow up in an intact 2 parent home continue, across decades, to have lower rates of the bad stuff like alcoholism, teen pregnancy, incarceration, drug abuse, experiencing abuse. And higher rates of the good stuff like life expectancy, lifetime income, high school/college graduation, not experiencing poverty, staying out of prison, etc. Again, I have no judgment to offer someone who divorces. But my parents fell into the category of toxic/borderline abusive. But they stayed together, because that's what the WWII generation did. My dad was on his 3rd wife by the time my mom came along, and my older half-sister's family absolutely has poverty/education/mental health issues that I don't. A blunt way to put it: Looking at the big picture of demographics, it's better for kids if their parents stay together even though there's toxic or horrible happening that never gets resolved. It feels like my dad's generation was the last one to say that out loud. My generation might be the last to think it. You're right - no shortage of conservatives or anyone else who divorce earlier and more often than older generations. It's just that if you want to put a dent in poverty levels, there's a way to do it. It's a valid place to ask "yeah, but at what cost?"

Dreams are cool. I used to have incredibly vivid, incredibly impactful dreams all the time. It was like dreaming in pure convicted emotion. One dream involved Jupiter leaving it's orbit and coming to say hi. We were standing out in an open field, with the entire sky totally dominated from horizon to horizon by Jupiter. It was obvious this was the end of all life on earth. I was with my family. For some reason the approach of Jupiter caused a radical change in Earth gravity, and everything collapsed at once. I heard the most incredibly detailed sound of this happening possible. I now know what it sounds like to have every house, car, fence, bridge, and blade of grass instantaneously crush itself down into the Earth because gravity had exponentially increased in a heartbeat. As I stood there with my family, it was amazing to watch our house flatten like a pancake. The dream ended with the realization that we were in the house when it happened, but our spirits were ok, and together, there on the other end of the field. Out of the hundreds or thousands of incredibly impactful dreams I've had, I'm thinking only one could qualify as a vision given by the Lord. I have to be light on the specifics, but the dream was about some relatives were doing as we all went through some difficult times. I believe the Lord gave me insight into how they were feeling, and some understanding of the spirit that was in the room running the show. The dream helped me understand and love them, while also confirming that my wife and I had made the correct decision regarding the difficult times.

Yep - and although I'm not privy to many of the conversations between complainer and bishop, I'm guessing maybe 95% of them end up with the same conclusion.

First of all, it's SO NICE to be able to just have a plain old civil conversation with the other side of the fence. So much polarization and anger and fear and ignorance from all sides, and we just end up shouting past each other. I am not blameless, and my favored side is certainly not blameless, but it's cool we can do something better here. So thank you @Phoenix_person for holding up your end of the civility deal. Your posting style makes it easier for me to hold up my end. Anyway, your question I believe illustrates one of the foundational differences between right and left, or maybe progressive and conservative. Me and mine do not believe in social change through government policy. At it's most harmless, it's a liberty-reducing and expensive way to unfairly enrich a tiny select few while corruption rules the day. At it's worst, when everyone is trying their best to use government to force change, we end up with stuff like Stalin's purges and millions of dead Ukrainians and consequences from China's one child policy and the Khmer Rouge killing fields and the Mormon settlers almost going to war with the US over polygamy. For me and my house, the church basically co-leads all of Christianity with a pro family message. And we're having to drag some pretty reluctant denominations, and fight some all-out resistant ones. We're out trying to baptize the whole world as fast as they'll allow it. Probably the best solution (although probably not gonna happen any time soon) to both fatherlessness and poverty, is to have everyone willingly consent to becoming a Mormon. Our welfare system is second to none. You think it might be a worthy endeavor of government to promote intact family units? In the past we tried structuring the tax code to favor married couples with children. The left loathes it because it "forces single parent households to remain in poverty". Our institutions like the Public Broadcasting Service and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have been similarly neutered for similar reasons. How to approach this from a policy standpoint? I guess if you, a leftie, find value in having both parents in the home, I suppose your best course of action would be to clean up your own backyard. We're all just a google away from an endless tsunami of leftist activism trying to redefine the family, or make the word redundant. Quick and easy example: The Atlantic's 2020 article "The Nuclear Family was a Mistake". There are literally millions of other examples, from all segments of left-of-center thought. The Black Lives Matter website as the riots started had 'eliminate the colonizer's patriarchical family structure' as one of it's stated tenets. That bullet point came off the website as they started making money, because it was an obstacle to making more. Kendi's How to be an Anti-racist book is utterly silent on the problem. So before you can even think about government policy, it's looks from here, that your first task is to retool leftist thought on the matter. So what can you do? I learned allyship and messaging and social change strategies from you folks. You tell me - how can you make the left no longer so anti-marriage, anti-nuclear family, anti-husband, and anti-man? If you've got something I can do to help, let me know. Just understand that I'll tend to be skeptical of a government solution, as long as I can follow my principles.

Some of the best bishops I've seen, will take the complainers and put them in charge of what ever they're complaining about. Or at least offer them the calling. Kind of hard to do with new meetinghouse construction, but it works wonders for people ticked off that the Young Women's program isn't good enough, or when people gripe about how badly the last social activity went.

Here's what makes an enduring difference in lowering poverty rates, across history: Instead of advocating for taxing the rich and pouring money down the eternal hole, you should be advocating for people to get married before having kids. As a bonus, if you're big on the problems of historically marginalized peoples, you can even be happy that such advocacy would have a disproportionately larger positive impact on those communities:

The argument: We've been consistently doing it since the '60's, and yet the poverty rate has bounced between 10-15% no matter how much we spend. Yeah, the Great Society/New Deal stuff was replaced by the War on Poverty in the '60's, with it's Medicare, medicaid, food stamps/SNAP, and growing emphasis on improving education and job training. Result: Spending grew, poverty rate bounced between 10-15%. In the 1990's, The War on Poverty morphed into Welfare reform, which did things like replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) coupled with work requirements and time limits on benefits. Result: Spending grew, poverty rate bounced between 10-15%. Now in the 21st century, lots of initiatives like the Earned Income Tax credit, job training, and trying to link benefits to work. We're now 20 years into the third major shift you describe. Result: Spending grew, poverty rate bounced between 10-15%. @Phoenix_person, if 40 years of shifting to social support and work placement while spending more and more money hasn't dented the poverty rate yet, isn't it time to start drawing some conclusions? At the very least, can you understand why folks might be opposed to the next latest-and-greatest plan to increase the tax burden of our wealthiest citizens to improve access to health care and affordable housing for our poorest citizens? It's a noble goal, and one that government has utterly failed at for 6 decades, no matter what we try. Agreed on all counts. And no matter how much the government pours into healthcare, including the generation-inspiring Obamacare/ACA, the government has utterly failed for 6 decades to make a dent in the poverty rate. Agreed. And the government has utterly failed to dent poverty in 60 years, despite changing/growing/evolving into new and better programs, and increasing the amount of money poured into those programs. At what point can we conclude that government isn't going to be a solution? At what point does @LDSGator's oft-repeated wise definition of insanity finally apply?

Tell that to Harris and Walz please. From that first interview, at least half of their platform is 'no need for greed or hunger', and they need your vote to do it. Oof. Every boomer hippie and half the gen-x ones just winced inwardly at how off-track you children of their legacy have gone. For the whole '90's, we all just assumed the internet had been invented solely to fight over this song. Half the people who smoked pot in the '60's and '70's remember when Lennon performed this song at Woodstock, man. On their behalf, they wanted me to remind you and yours that Imagine is the soul of the liberal/progressive movement, and Mr. Unabomber was a right wing Rush Limbaugh dittohead, thank you very much.

You just don't have enough imagination! You're the reason that every time we try to get Lennon's vision implemented, we end up with something we have to claim is "not what we mean by socialism"!

I blame those who were impressed with this song 50 years ago. They've had 50 years to implement their policies and solutions, and yet here we sit in the same imperfect world.

I was just thinking of the time we had more ward leadership at sacrament meeting in the tiny little town in a hunter's paradise, than we did in our ward building.

Yep. Our meetinghouses handle stuff like that pretty well, what with 1, 2, or even 3 overflows into the basketball courts available. Plus sound piped in to the RS rooms, foyers, and maybe other rooms as needed. Give us notice and we can probably find the old equipment that broadcasts across an AM band so you can hear it in your car.

A lot of tax avoidance isn't that complicated. It might be extra work, but it's not complicated. Paying as little tax as legally possible is a worthy endeavor, and I recommend everyone spend the energy to reduce their tax burden to the absolute minimum. Folks can even turn it negative and the govt will pay you taxes, but I'm not a fan of welfare in the form of refundable credits.

Here's a question I've never asked: What's a "fullness" and why should I care?

Yeah, I never understood the popular claim that as you moved right, you went republican/conservative, then far-right/alt-right, then full on nazi. They were pushing the notion that if I just ramped my conservatism up 200%, I'd be a fascist. It's just not true. If I were to strain so hard at conservatism that I burst a blood vessel, I'd end up a libertarian. The BLM riots is where we had masked violent people shutting down/attacking other viewpoints. America's version of the brownshirts wore blac block not brownshirts, and it was antifa not proud boys/boogaloos. They even tried their hand at forcing salutes, offering people violence if they didn't show their BLM support. I mean yes, Trump should have known better on Jan7. It was no Reichstag fire, but it certainly looked like one. Dude dang well better have learned his lesson. Sure would have been nice for the country if Twitter hadn't banned his concession speech. Instead, we had to wait 3 years for Musk to buy Twitter and unhide it.

I just read the transcript. Here are my hasty notes: Stuff she committed to doing: Child tax credit $6k in 1st year $25k tax credit for 1st time house buyers Q: Energy - you were going to ban fracking, now you're for it? A: I flipped in 2020. It's old news. I increased leases for fracking. Q: Immigration - Record #s of illegal crossings. WTH? A: I did good root causes work, and that helped businesses and immigrants reduced. We had a bill and Trump killed it. It would have put 1500 more agents on the border. I'll do that bill again. Q: In 2019 you said the border should be decriminalized. Still for it? A: Laws need to be followed and enforced and there should be consequences. I'm against TCOs. She'll put a republican in her cabinet. "I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion." Q: Israel? A: Unwavering in my commitment to Israel's defense and ability to defend itself. Remember O7. Remember hostages still there. Americans too. Ceasefire. "Get a deal done". 2 state solution. Q: Walz, you said you carried weapons in war. A: "my wife the English teacher told me my grammar’s not always correct." Q: How did Biden go? A: He called me during family dinner, and it was apparent he was going to support me. That was pretty much it. Positives: I'm happy to see the strong words on supporting Israel. It's nice to hear "diversity of opinion". It's nice to have a Dem pres candidate interview and not spend any time looking past the neurodegeneration and guessing at what he meant to say. Negatives: Meh. Standard friendly interview with a standard friendly politician and a standard friendly interviewer. She only committed to doing 2 things. Zero specifics on how she's going to lower the costs of things. Devil's always in those details. IMO, Trump simply has better answers.

One thing Trump is doing, is pretty much single-handedly dragging the Republican party into the 21st century by changing the “no abortions never ever ever ever ever“ mantra. He’s leading the charge to make it socially acceptable to be a right winger and talk openly about how exceptions for life of the mother and rape might not mean you’re going to burn in hell. You should vote for him, Phoenix. He will do more good for the world than Kamala will.