A Curious Instrument

Recent shootings and fearful yet angry pushes to eliminate the tools of power (aka guns) will force everyone give up what little power they may have over their lives. I don't know the deeper purposes of institutional agents. I know a high school football coach gets to keep his job if his teams wins. I know a corporate leader gets to keep her position if profits rise. I know many people want to be influential or wealthy and usually both, and our society is quite willing to exempt such people from higher standards of behavior in hopes that you or I might also enjoy the by-product "perks" of being rich and famous. Many activities speak more to the power and money desired by the individual actors, no matter the rhetoric being employed or some altruistic-sounding cause being espoused. I don't know the deeper motivations of these people, but that may not really matter in the end. It will likely become a simple grab for money and acclaim and the realization that our soc...

Do you remember this quote? You have been weighed , you have been measured , and you have been found wanting . That is classic Count Adhemar from the memorable A Knight's Tale movie. This film was actually in contention to be a "Sunday" movie, a distinction in our family that the subject matter of a film made it appropriate for Sabbath viewing. It never made it to the third drawer (where Sunday movies live), but I find myself pondering the theme of the movie on a Sunday morning. It reminds me that God gives us standards upon which we will ultimately be judged. I did an essay on this subject a while back.  The movie quote is actually adapted from Daniel 5 :27, where the Jewish prophet Daniel interpreted a divine message of doom to the final Babylonian king. God judged the king and he will also judge each of us through something like a weighing and a measuring.  I suppose a good question is this: Will you be "found wanting"? In the movie, William Thatcher...

I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak with you this morning on the topic of Memorial Day. I hope not to take too long because you would rather hear from Joshua on some of his missionary experiences. I recall a tradition in my mother's family of decorating the graves of those family members who had passed on. Although the holiday was established to honor those who died in war, I have no recollection that any of my recent family died in military service. The Church's FamilySearch website lets me know on a regular basis that I have distant cousins that lived in Mexico, crossed the plains with the Mormon Exodus from Nauvoo, and various other events that were well-recorded, so I am certain that someone connected to me will show up one day on some record of US war dead. Although I hope we can settle our national disputes with others off of the warfield, I honor those who give their lives so that our country and our liberty and our own lives can continue. It brings to mind...

I return again to my "gleaning" from recent scripture study. And now, Zerahemnah, I command you, in the name of that all-powerful God, who has strengthened our arms that we have gained power over you, by our faith, by our religion, and by our rites of worship, and by our church, and by the sacred support which we owe to our wives and our children, by that liberty which binds us to our lands and our country ; yea, and also by the maintenance of the sacred word of God, to which we owe all our happiness; and by all that is most dear unto us— ( Alma 44:5 ) It seems that Moroni, who speaks here, finds that liberty binds up to our lands and country. With the recent spate of immigration away from Syria and toward Western Europe, it is a principle that we see in our own day. Where there is little liberty, there is little loyalty. Again, It is liberty that binds us to our lands and our country . As social engineers formulate restrictions to individual, family, and group liberti...

After reading some of my posts, I'm sure some people think I am a dirty rotten bigot, a homophobe, a transphobe, racist, and a bad cook. All I can do in response is shrug. I imagine if a cross-dressing gay dude was pointing a gun at me, I would indeed be in fear of him. I do avoid folk that say I don't deserve to draw breath for one reason or another - I don't want any trouble that way. If I do have some sort of "privilege", I guess I have a trailer-trash "can't get ahead" way of not using it.  People must be pretty brilliant in comparison to me - they seem to know far more about me than I have been able to figure out about myself. Apparently, their brainpower gives them the right to legislate and police people like me or ideas like mine out of existence.  I say as I have always done - live and let live. I have finally gotten to that settled place where I can write what I think. If I think people are being silly in public, I tend to say so these da...

There has been yet another school shooting and the media is hard at work to blame guns for this violence. Again, as I have said previously, one solution for these sorts of tragedies is a family decision to keep children away from systemically dangerous "targets" like schools. Lisa and I made a choice early in our marriage to school our children ourselves as much as we could contrive. Part of our reason to live in the frontiers of New Mexico is the strong homeschooling tradition here and the "hands-off" approach the state government is forced to have about a parent's educational choices for their own children. We were able to take advantage of wonderfully "alternative" schooling opportunities, such as The Learning Center at House Schools, that we were able to find close by. We made conscious choices about the lives of our children and I feel these have paid off enormously. Please, alongside the mass call for turning schools and communities into gun...

There is great power in copyright and its licensing. Careful that your chosen license doesn't take over your life! I am a BSD or Berkeley Software Distribution license devotee. I am also a classical liberal that just wants to be left alone most of the time. I know, I have met RMS and much of my recent living has been made from Linux , but the BSD license is the license that is most likely to allow me to be creative without fretting licensing defense. Some attempt to say that their work has been "dedicated to the public domain " to gain peace in the creative act. I enjoy public domain works, but there is no ready way to dedicate something to the public domain now that the Berne Convention insinuates copyright at the time of production. Public domain says there is no copyright, no owner, and therefore no one can grant its lack of license. Public domain work can only be expired from a previous copyright, or a product of the US Government , which was established as a ...