Recognizing revelation

Link.

I was about to state my own take on the subject and then realized that I would just be repeating Brigham Young almost word-for-word.

"If I do not know the will of my Father, and what He requires of me in a certain transaction, if I ask Him to give me wisdom concerning any requirement in my life, or in regard to my own course, or that of my friends, my family, my children, or those that I preside over, and get no answer from Him, and then do the very best that my judgement will teach me, He is bound to own and honor that transaction, and He will do so to all intents and purposes." -Brigham Young

Also, I think Elder Bednar says something really important at 5:16.

-Max

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If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Apple/FBI controversy

I found this an interesting offer from John McAfee:

"So here is my offer to the FBI. I will, free of charge, decrypt the information on the San Bernardino phone, with my team. We will primarily use social engineering, and it will take us three weeks. If you accept my offer, then you will not need to ask Apple to place a back door in its product, which will be the beginning of the end of America."

http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mcafee-ill-decrypt-san-bernardino-phone-for-free-2016-2

-Max

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If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Workers and robots

Providing gainful employment for everyone is the defining economic challenge of the 21st century. I do not believe the answer lies in capitalism, communism, or socialism. The only feasible answer I know of lies in widespread voluntary obedience to the Law of Consecration.

So, that's the solution. The below excerpt from this article tells you a bit more about the problem.

Vardi insisted that even if machines make life easier, humanity will face an existential challenge.

"I do not find this a promising future, as I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing," he said. "I believe that work is essential to human wellbeing."

*snip*

Last year, the consultant company McKinsey published research about which jobs are at risk thanks to intelligent machines, and found that some jobs – or at least well-paid careers like doctors and hedge fund managers – are better protected than others. Less intuitively, the researchers also concluded that some low-paying jobs, including landscapers and health aides, are also less likely to be changed than others.

In contrast, they concluded that 20% of a CEO's working time could be automated with existing technologies, and nearly 80% of a file clerk's job could be automated. Their research dovetails with Vardi's worst-case scenario predictions, however; they argued that as much as 45% of the work people are paid to do could be automated by existing technology.

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Road From Republic To Empire

A truly insightful article. Selected excerpts below but I recommend the whole thing. -Max


There is in the Anglo-American tradition a clear precedent for the executive's power to suspend the law. Under the royal "prerogative of suspension," the British monarch could summarily "suspend" the operation of any law at any time. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 did away with that power. And as we know from the records of the Philadelphia Convention, the original Constitution carefully circumscribed the veto precisely in order to ensure that the president would never exercise such a power. So how far does this newfound suspension power go? Think about the business-mandate penalty in Obamacare: Unless you're a small company, you have to offer health insurance to your employees or pay a $3,000 tax. The tax liability is created by operation of law, but Obama announced that it wouldn't be collected for several years, and — abracadabra — the liability vanished from financial statements across the land.

So if Obama can eliminate statutory tax obligations by the stroke of a pen, would a future Republican president be able to eliminate taxes that he doesn't like, such as the capital-gains or corporate-income tax? Obama was asked that question in a 60 Minutes interview, and he answered simply, "No." He didn't explain why not, but the reason is not hard to divine: There was public support for both the immigration order and the business-mandate suspension, whereas a unilateral suspension of the capital-gains tax would probably be deeply unpopular. Thus, the only constraint on this newfound suspension power is political, not constitutional. That's in harmony with the view of left-wing law professors such as Adrian Vermeule and Eric Posner, who believe that Congress could delegate all legislative authority to the president, without concern for the Constitution's separation of powers, because political constraints will be enough to prevent the establishment of a dictatorship. One wonders if Vermeule and Posner are having second thoughts now. "Shame is our most powerful restraint on politicians who would find success through demagoguery," wrote Ezra Klein at Vox. But of course that's no restraint at all for a demagogue, which was the point of constitutional limits. 

Most Americans probably don't realize that only a small fraction of our laws are passed by Congress. The vast majority are enacted as "rulemaking" by regulatory agencies in the executive branch, pursuant to congressional delegations of legislative authority. The Obama administration has been particularly virulent in this respect, with executive agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency enacting transformative regulations that would never pass in any Congress. In the case of Yakus v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court decided that it didn't need to worry about Congress's delegation of legislative authority to the executive branch, because both Congress and the federal courts were in a position to police what the executive does with those delegations. This rationale has been abundantly refuted in the decades since. Congress is never in a position to block an agency rule, except in the rare circumstance that the president's own party rebels against him. And the Court uses the pose of "deference" to justify letting the political branches do exactly as they please, concerned most of all with preserving the Court's own popular legitimacy.

The Congress that wrote the Clean Air Act would never have imagined that the EPA would one day use it to seize control of America's electricity generation from the states, as its Clean Power Plan envisions. Yet now, even a large majority of Congress can't stop the rule. Normally, a two-thirds majority is required to pass a bill over a presidential veto, but delegation flips that obstacle upside down: In the case of agency rules, a two-thirds majority is required to block a regulation over the president's veto. Through a clever delegation, any president can collude with Congress to impose law on future Congresses. That is exactly the purpose of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Dodd-Frank. The CFPB will be creating law and adjudicating on autopilot, with its own revenue stream, subject to no political control whatsoever, until a president and a congressional supermajority can combine to kill it.

With Congress powerless to stop what the president does with delegated authorities, the last line of defense is the federal courts. That, alas, has proved to be no defense at all. In the case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), the Supreme Court ruled that an executive agency's interpretation of its own enabling statute is due broad deference, if there is any "rational basis" at all for that interpretation. Incredibly, the Chevron rule even applies to agency determinations regarding the scope of their own powers. Many Americans would be embarrassed to learn (as I was in law school) the contortions of sophistry and solipsism that federal courts are willing to perform in order to let agencies escape the limits in their enabling statutes. Chevron contains another lesson, too: It was hailed at the time as a victory for Ronald Reagan against crusading environmentalists, because political short-sightedness afflicts us all. The Supreme Court dealt the EPA's clean-power plan a potentially fatal blow this week, when it decided to delay implementation of the rule until the legal challenges have run their course, but that is a function of Obama's appetite for testing the high court's deference to the limit.

*snip*

The progressive cookbook is full of recipes for the dictator of the future. Take, for example, Obama's masterful use of regulatory uncertainty to achieve his goals, in defiance not just of Congress but of the federal courts. In the months after the Gulf oil spill, Obama imposed a moratorium on all offshore drilling, despite the fact that most of those operations were at stages of drilling in which there was virtually no chance of a spill. When one court tossed the moratorium out, the Obama administration came back with a modified version that actually expanded the moratorium; and by the time that one was tossed out, Obama simply slow-walked the needed permits. He had achieved his objective, which was to chase most of the Gulf's deep-sea drilling rigs to other parts of the world.

Obama has demonstrated a willingness to use his constitutional powers against political opponents, as shown by the IRS persecution of tea-party groups, and by selective prosecutions — for example, targeting Senator Bob Menendez for accepting favors in connection with official duties, but not Hillary Clinton; or General David Petraeus for misuse of classified information, but not Hillary Clinton. Only Obama's forbearance and wisdom, such as they are, have kept him from taking the approach of Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez and overtly intimidating critics by threatening their economic interests. With that in mind, consider Donald Trump's attempt, before a recent Fox News GOP debate, to get anchor Megyn Kelly fired, or at least withdrawn from moderating the debate, as a condition of his participation. Imagine what he might do once armed with the powers of Obama's post-constitutional presidency.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431135/donald-trump-dictatorship-american-style

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If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

On Racism in America

Suddenly I understand why Ta-Nehisi Coates has fans. So THAT's what Critical Race Theory is!

From comments on http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/02/03/antiracism/

'In truth the Golden Calf of AR which is now worshiped, fatted calf and all, has little to do with actual Racism ("The belief that all members of a given race possess characteristics specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior") and much to do, instead, with Progressively Mythological Racism or, by another name, Critical Race Theory. This, of course, would be the sacred & unquestioned belief that every social/political/economic/cultural structure within Western Civilization (particularly as expressed within the United States) is fatally flawed/infected with Anti-Blackism.'

-B.C.

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

On Race and IQ

[Originally posted on Facebook]

Look, here's a quick lesson on race, what it is and isn't:

Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQ on the planet of any distinct ethnic group. They average a full standard deviation above the human average; the average Ashkenazi is in the top 32% of the human race intellectually.

The Wilson family is a lot smarter than that. Probably a full standard deviation above the Ashkenazi, as a whole.

There are other families out there who are smarter than the Wilsons. Many of them are Ashkenazi. But none of these families constitute a recognized ethnic group, so they don't count as "races." "Race" is ultimately a social construct built on hereditary genetic reality--genes are real, but society dictates when you get to call a family a "race" or not.*

Any given Ashkenazi is probably smarter than the average person. Any given Wilson (or Pesin, or Cochran, or Hunter, or whomever) is probably smarter than the average Ashkenazi. Any given person who is smarter than a Wilson/Pesin/Cochran/Hunter is disproportionately likely to be an Ashkenazi; but most people smarter than Wilsons/Pesins/Cochrans/Hunters are not Ashkenazi, because they're still a tiny minority.

"Race" tells you something, but it's not as specific as family, and specific data always tells you more than broad generalizations. (See what I did there? "Always.") The most specific data comes from studying the specific individual.

* Of course, you don't have to listen to society. In my own head, I can legitimately consider myself the founder of a race of Wilsons, even if there's only one of us so far.

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If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Ethical science

You may find this inspirational:

It's a natural byproduct of science conducted as a public good. Normal people really appreciate good science that's done in their interest...  I am very concerned about the culture of academia in this country and the perverse incentives that are given to young faculty. The pressures to get funding are just extraordinary. We're all on this hedonistic treadmill — pursuing funding, pursuing fame, pursuing h-index — and the idea of science as a public good is being lost.

This is something that I'm upset about deeply. I've kind of dedicated my career to try to raise awareness about this. I'm losing a lot of friends. People don't want to hear this. But we have to get this fixed, and fixed fast, or else we are going to lose this symbiotic relationship with the public. They will stop supporting us.

-Max

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If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

D&D clerics

Dante,

Look at this.

This post nails exactly why I hate D&D clerics. They're antithetical to my personality and I could not play one effectively, because I can't respect them intellectually:

Clerics were (and always have been!) the comic fanboys of their nations.

They gather in comic book shop temples, gather at huge comic-cons to worship, and war endlessly online with members of other faiths. Can Superman beat Batman? Is the new DC line awesome or terrible? Will the newnew DC line be terrible or awesome? (Protip: Don't get hopes up.)

People have always been talking and telling stories about characters that are greater then men are. Is a god popular? Then his legend changes, with a heel/face turn, or perhaps the opposite when they fall out of fashion.

[snip]

That's what the cleric is doing. He's reading the latest issue and arguing over it with the other members of the clergy. The higher ups are crafting new stories and tales and altering the old ones for new people in changing times.

The interaction with the pantheon is much the same. A fan of Captain America doesn't disbelieve in Thor. Thor and Cap hang out together all the time. Sometimes they are on the same side, and sometimes they fight. What's important is that you're a fan of Marvel and not those [crummy] DC heroes.

Insightful, no?

-Max

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If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.