My CMS The View from a New City

Last night I watched a movie on Primevideo called Kurara about the daughter of a famous Japanese artist. It reminded me of a statement Dwight King made to me a long time ago. He said, “artists see things that others do not see.”

The concept of a bucket list is something to think about. One obvious purpose for life is to gain experience. However, I have my doubts about the ability of human beings to judge which experiences are valuable. What is it that we should spend time and life on? Take for example those persons who already have more money than they can spend in a lifetime. Many of them continue to play the game of accumulating more of what they already have too much of. From time to time, I have reflected on the case of the California congressman who took bribes to buy a large house and a fancy car. I wondered if he ever thought about how impressed people would be with him and his beautiful home and fancy car once they discovered he took bribes to pay for them. Christmas gifts are another example of things that promise more happiness than they provide.

Perhaps the most valuable experiences are those those that come to us, unsought, from the mortal conditions of life: not new landscapes but seeing itself; not success but struggle; both pleasure and pain; love, fascination, loneliness and boredom; fear and anguish; and many other ordinary experiences you can’t get in a state of immortal bliss.

Maybe Eve had it right after all. Maybe we all shouted for joy in the pre-mortal council, because we weren’t going to spend our lives in the Garden of Eden. We knew we were going to get to pull a few weeds.

About ten days ago I watched a Ted Talk by a paleo-anthropologist named Melanie Chang. In her talk she said that she and her colleagues draw their conclusions about human evolution from a small set of hard-to-find data and in the face of a sea of unknowns. She said that almost every new discovery causes the profession to alter its conclusions. She used a quote from Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of State, which contained the phrases , “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”, unknown unknowns being things we don’t even know we don’t know. She said that the conclusions of paleo-anthropologists’ experience revolutionary “perturbations” with every discovery from the realm of the previously unknown unknowns.

To keep this short, and not belabor the obvious, I want to jump right to my advice to my grandchildren: You are, or soon will be, making some of the most important decisions of your life and you will necessarily make those decisions based on a small set of data-points and in the face of a whole sea of unknowns, both known and unknown. If you make those decisions with faith, hope and charity, you will be much happier and come much closer to the truth than if you make those decisions with skepticism, fear and anger. That is my advice and my experience.

I have recently become addicted to Korean language soap operas on Netflix, starting with Crash Landing on You, then It’s OK Not to be OK, and and others, and ending yesterday with Inheritors. I have been thinking about why these multi-hours long tv shows are so interesting for me. Firstly, there is no nudity or sex scenes, at least in the ones I have watched. Secondly, the well developed characters portrayed are varied: both good and evil, young and old, serious and funny, wise and foolish, profound and ridiculous, healthy and psychotic. And, finally, the issues around which these shows revolve, include but are not limited to, romance, good and evil, honesty and deceitfulness, success and failure, myth and literature, life and death, but more importantly for me, parent-child relationships and sin and redemption. There are even occasions of great philosophy and believable portrayals of a variety of professions. It is also interesting to me to have a look into the quasi-American culture which has developed in South Korea. I recommend them to anyone with time on their hands and the ability to rapidly read the subtitles.

Man may think of himself as an animal living among animals, by the day, or he may think of himself as a member of a family, or society, or a nation that lives for centuries. Or he may find himself obliged (because his reason drives him irresistibly to it) to regard himself as a part of an infinite universe, living in infinite time. And, therefore, in respect of the infinitely small phenomena of life that influence his behaviour, a rational person must do what in mathematics is called integration: that is, establish a relation to the immediate issues of life, a relation to the entire infinite universe in time and space, conceiving of it as a whole. And the relationship established by man to that whole, of which he feels himself a part and from which he draws guidance for his behaviour, is that which has been, and is called religion. And therefore religion has always been, and cannot cease to be, an essential and indisposable condition of the life of rational humanity. A confession and Other Religious Writings, page 87; Leo Tolstoy

From time to time I read articles discussing how the growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has slowed or stopped. I think when I read these things that the popularity of the Church bears no relation to its truthfulness. If it is God’s Church, he can make it succeed or fail, at his whim. But I have just realized that the amazing progress of the Church is proof of the divinity of the Book of Mormon and the truthfulness of the prophecies contained therein.

Here are a few lines from 3rd Nephi chapter 20:

“I say unto you that when the Lord shall see fit, in his wisdom, that these sayings shall come unto the Gentiles according to his word, then ye may know that the covenant which the Father hath made with the children of Israel, … is already beginning to be fulfilled…. And when ye shall see these sayings coming forth among you, then ye need not any longer spurn at the doings of the Lord, ….yea, wo unto him that shall deny the revelations of the Lord, and that shall say the Lord no longer worketh by revelation, or by prophecy, or by gifts, or by tongues, or by healings, or by the power of the Holy Ghost!”

When Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery penned these lines they had no earthly reason to believe that anyone, other than their close friends and family, would ever read them. They were totally isolated and cut off from the centers of influence in the world. They needed to have a friend bring them potatoes to keep them from starving to death. The fact that the Book of Mormon is now distributed by the millions and that people are gathering to the Church from the four corners of the world in the millions is fulfilment of the foregoing prophetic words contained in that Book, and that, against all odds and massive persecutions and opposition. If this unlikely prophecy has come to pass, then the other propositions, and promises contained in that marvelous book are also true.

This week has been glorious beyond belief. Our youngest son, Brent, married Kylee Shrader in the Draper Temple. They are now in Hawaii on a two month honeymoon. That is one of the advantages of waiting to get married. Brent is 39 and Kylee is 27. One of the few. Although we had the only rain storm we have had in two months during our outdoor wedding dinner, the guests made it inside the house, after the lightning but before the rain, and the close quarters made for a very conversational evening.

For the last two months, I have been working on a project for one of Brent’s clients. It has nothing to do with the law. I am enjoying myself thoroughly. I get up, make my bed and go to programming in my pajamas. I am learning HTML, Javascript and Docker. I also was featured on a podcast of a well known, German programming guru named Adam Bien. The program aired on July 9th and was called “A Soldering, Agile, Geek Lawyer using Java and Quarkus.”

From Salon

“However, pervasive as it has become throughout our culture, the story of the selfish gene is based on fundamental misconceptions. In recent decades, researchers in evolutionary biology have overturned virtually every significant assumption in the selfish gene account. In its place, they have developed a far more sophisticated conception of how evolution works, revealing the rich tapestry of nature’s dynamic interconnectedness. Rather than evolution being driven by competition, it turns out that cooperation has played a far more important role in producing the great transitions that led to Earth’s current breathtaking state of diversity and beauty.

The trouble with the selfish gene story is not just that it is scientifically flawed; it’s also that it presents such an impoverished view of life’s dazzling magnificence. The discoveries of modern researchers showing how life evolved to its current state of lavish abundance reveal a spectacle of awe-inspiring complexity, mind-boggling dynamic feedback loops, and infinitely subtle interconnections.”

Yesterday I participated in an Adam Bien video class on programming architectures. Adam Bien lives in Munich, Germany, so the class started at 3:00 a.m. and lasted until 11:00 a.m., Utah time. As a result of what I learned at the class, I have decided to retool my juristec.com web site to a more monolithic format. I have come to the conclusion that the only utility for this exercise is my own education. Why am I staying on the bleeding edge, you ask. I am not sure, but I will let you know if I find out.

Also, I completed a 64.5 hour, water only fast yesterday afternoon. got down to 209 lbs.

I recently wrote a project in Elm-lang. During my researches, I learned about the importance of “a single source of truth” in programming. I am wondering how that applies more generally. Here are two possible examples:

We have just recovered from four disastrous years of political misrule. In the 19th century, the Latter-day Saints learned that democracy can sometimes mean tyranny by the majority. When all recourse to the established governmental authority failed them, they established what has been called The Council of Fifty as an alternative remedy. This council functioned under the proposition that a theocracy would be a superior form of government. This is, of course, true, if you have access to the word of God on such matters and if the people have faith in the prophet and a willingness to obey his revelations.

It occurs to me that, if the leader is truly inspired and not functioning under any manner of self interest, other difficult issues could safely be entrusted to him. One such issue, which is currently troubling society is: what constitutes a family. Granting the inspired, good faith leader discretion to order such personal arrangements to best fit and benefit the individuals involved would be superior to the current solution of trusting legislatures and courts to set arbitrary, one size fits all parameters. Once again, however, the success of such a solution depends on actual access to the word of God on such matters and a willingness to implement the solutions received.

I have learned from experience that the policy of allowing the good bishop to distribute available welfare resources to those in need according to his best judgment is superior to distributing goods and money according to the firmly established rules and regulations of a governmental welfare system.

None-the-less, no system can successfully regulate human affairs when people, both leaders and followers, act only from crass self-interest without inspiration, self-discipline or regard for the general welfare.