The Nehor

Pretty good rundown. I like how he acknowledges the argument that the “new and everlasting covenant” can be spun to be about monogamous sealings or serial sealings with only one wife alive at a time but is clear that that is not how it would be taken by John Taylor or other people at the time and the clues are that it doesn’t mean that. The argument that ancient prophets/sages/mystics/whatever spoke in coded truths whose meaning has been lost goes back to at least Stoicism and heavily influenced how Christians dealt with the Old Testament. It is weird seeing arguments in real time that God was communicating to John Taylor but that John Taylor misunderstood it or hid the truth for some reason. It is silly. It also suggests that God is really really bad at communicating…..which actually would explain a lot.

“Is it possible” is the way you start leading questions that want you to believe that aliens built the pyramids. Who caught and revealed the problem? A government agency. Who falsified the data that led to approval? Private contractors. Blaming this on the government is patently ridiculous. This story is pretty much a perfect case study on why more regulation and government fact-checking is needed yet someone is spinning it as a government problem? This is the best they got?

Possible, but I would expect a more targeted message if this was deliberate. This looks like bots just doing their thing.

A little hard to do. The 1886 revelation implies that plural marriage is mandatory for exaltation. I take a bit of issue with the 1886 revelation: “Have I not given my word in great plainness on this subject?” No, not really God. Even in this revelation you are talking around the subject and speaking in what seem to be euphemisms for plural marriage. In Section 132 you talk around the subject forever before getting to the point so that people think the whole thing isn’t about plural marriage despite you explicitly saying it is at the start. Need to work on that plainness thing really.

Also just capping all users on how many threads a day they can start would make this more difficult for the bots. Does anyone start more than one or two threads a day here?

I have mostly soured on the whole mandatory reporting thing. We are focusing too much on detection and surveillance when effort would be better spent hitting at many of the root causes. Also mandatory reporting with penalties for not reporting lead to a surplus of reports. Mandatory reporters have to report to avoid penalties even if that report is dubious so resources are wasted. The sad truth is that reporting a problem does not mean it gets fixed. In some cases it gets worse. We are doing it wrong.

I don’t believe anything anyone in the Engelhart family says. They ran their vegan restaurants in an almost cult-like way and then were caught not being vegan. Now their restaurants are serving meat or something. Also regenerative farming is a mix of some agricultural practices and some witchy woo woo nonsense that they claim will do almost magical things that science doesn’t support. The whole ‘distant bureaucracies are evil’ thing is rhetorical nonsense. The farmer has a profit motive to cut costs and sell substandard food if they can get away with it. The bureaucracy that maintains food standards has the motive to make sure food is safe. And we aren’t going to be able to go back to a model where we use personal relationships with individual farmers as a form of social shaming to avoid this. She wants to go back to subsistence agriculture where farmers still did try to cheat others? Raw milk often carries dangerous diseases. Yes, the United States is okay with too much toxic crap in our food. People in the EU are shocked by our low standards. The solution isn’t to make more dangerous things legal to sell. The introduction of pasteurization saved and continues to save millions of lives. Going backwards on this is a really dumb move akin to deciding vaccines aren’t necessary. We will not learn from history so why not bring back tuberculosis, typhoid fever, measles, and polio because we are unfamiliar with how horrible they can be? Ugh………. The American family farm is dying and will be dead soon. Most of the family farms now are legal fictions owned by agri-corps trying to suck up that sweet agricultural subsidy money. Also some of the few surviving family farms are going under since DOGE just cut all kinds of agricultural supports and cancelled reimbursements for eco-friendly improvements many farmers had already paid for so more will be going under. Also the recent tariff debacle has convinced many international buyers to buy crops elsewhere so that won’t help either.

Chevron deference is gone. They’re not that good at running “their” industries themselves and if unregulated many would risk or directly inflict harm on others. He is doing everything the industries he is supposed to curtail would want. He is slashing apart all the regulatory agencies that make sure medication meets standards or that food isn’t poisonous. He doesn’t have a few nutjob opinions. He is talking about how vitamins can cure measles resulting in cases of vitamin toxicity trying to follow his pseudoscientific nonsense. He just stocked vaccine agencies with vaccine deniers. Bringing measles and polio back BABY! He isn’t some maverick defying industry. He is a lickspittle stepping back and letting them do exactly what they want. Scientists and doctors are afraid of him. Industry execs either love him or hate him based on his opinion of what they do. He isn’t respected by anyone of consequence. He is a friend to snake oil salesmen. The almost completely unregulated untested supplement industry loves him. His solution to my medical problem is to ship me off as slave labor to a rehabilitation farm. Regulators (i.e. the bureaucracies) aren’t that partisan. There is little incentive to be. I don’t believe in the ‘privately or publicly owned good, government bad’ binary. Each should be evaluated on its own merits. These kinds of lazy shortcuts may make things simpler to make sense of but they don’t lead to better outcomes.

Corruption is a problem but regulation is not how corruption is usually implemented. There are cases where it is but that is not where corruption flourishes. In the current age of open and blatant corruption being publicly performed and announced without even the pretext of following the law I can’t get upset over regulations. Especially since with the axing of huge portions of the federal government many regulations will be unenforced anyways.

Because to be human is to be curious and to want to know the truth of things.

Not sure about that. Eventually seeing through an illusion of misery would be a relief. Seeing that happiness is an illusion would be much more crushing.

Happiness is an illusion.

Yeah, sorry, I was out of it when I responded. Going through medication withdrawal. I barely remember posting it. Sorry, kind of dumb of me.

Now we are told we have to make America great again like it was before Reagan by *checks notes* Reaganing harder???

Reagan sure loved beating up strawmen. Also kind of contradictory when you say this when you are in the government. Like that governor recently telling people not to trust the government. “YOU ARE THE GOVERNMENT!!!!!!”

So did Jesus preach to the Watchers before or after he went to the mortal dead?

Ummmm……no. Non-profit organizations are not usually staffed by volunteers and/or the independently wealthy.

Depends on how badly they want to prosecute you. Authoritarian states as a rule aren’t big on limiting the impact of their laws.

Read up on this. The ruling doesn’t have any far-reaching implications. Wisconsin can legislatively repeal their religious exemption to employment taxes. What they can’t do is have a religious exemption and then decide which religious organizational goals do and do not fall under this role. You couldn’t use this ruling to opt out of paying taxes in general as a general right. It is about not discriminating based on which of a religious organization’s goals are ‘worthy’ of being exempt under existing legislation.

I was very specific so technically you’re wrong. Also generally wrong.

I didn’t say the numbers of minors being trafficked are low. I said that abduction is rarely used to acquire human trafficking victims. You don’t combat human trafficking by being paranoid about abductions. Using physical force is rare. Psychological manipulation is the favored method. I remember that case. It was exceptional. Not normal. A lot of trafficking is done by the minor’s own family. They often come from marginalized communities. They are often manipulated into it. It would be nice to believe that the average human trafficking victim is a white upper-middle class teenager with loving parents. Catch the bad guy, free the teen, problem solved. There is a reason you can remember that case. It got reported on and not because it was typical. Tim Ballard’s special forces photo ops provide a nice solution for this rare type but it just almost never happens. Dealing with the reality of human trafficking is much messier and a real effort to end it would require us to confront flaws within our own society and try to fix them. So no, convincing people their kids are likely to be abducted is spreading paranoia. Yeah, it might happen. It does occasionally. The vast majority of trafficking and kidnapping of minors involve people the victim knows, often family.

How about coming up with a way to get them homes? I am, that was a good game. Insular communities are good at hiding mental health problems. Praising the authoritarian Christian co-ops and complaining that everyone you dislike is a secret commie? Ummmm…..okay.

The excellent mental health facilities of the 1970s and 1980s that Reagan shut down? I don’t think I would describe those as “excellent”. I am not denying there is a problem with a lack of access to mental health care but wanting back the asylums of the past is silly. The Hutterite growth rate is pretty marginal. Commissars? What?

Most human trafficking doesn’t involve child abductees. That is mischaracterizing how human trafficking works. I remember when I was a teenager adults confidently talking about how (white) children were being abducted and trafficked by sexual predators. That is just not how it works in practice and casting this as a threat scares people unnecessarily and leads people to look for the wrong solutions to the problem.

It is not false though. The child abduction and satanic panic (with the fear of child sacrifice or sex slavery) were blown out of all proportion by bad actors. The solution isn’t to indulge those who fell for it. It is to correct the misperceptions. Law enforcement is not lax. It is incredibly overfunded. Its competence can be questioned but there is no lack of funding. Better mental health access would be helpful. We don’t need a bunch of pseudoprisons though. We are already over incarcerated. What do replacement birth rates have to do with this?