• My thoughts on The Grey
• My thoughts on any of the many TV series I’ve watched over the past year — there are quite a few
• My current reading queue, which has changed quite a bit since the last update
• My thoughts regarding having worked for the US Army for the past two years*, sans top-secret information
• A basic economics lesson: how wealth is created
• Frances the Mute deserves a post
• Why voting is silly
• Why you should vote for me when I run for _______
• And I really need to put together a prominent disclaimer for people who stumble onto this site that they should be wary to take anything I say or write too seriously

* My first day on the job was 16 Feb 2010.

Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.

The same full-length quote was then restated in the LDS General Conference six months later by Elder D. Todd Christofferson, one of the Tweleve Apostles in the LDS church.

Does that mean I can now consider the other writings of Dr. Williams scripture?

“Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.”

Well, here’s how it works, in detail. And here’s my simplification: You come up with an issue you think the White House should address, you enter the details in their online system, then you try to get 25,000 people to sign onto your idea. If it reaches 25,000 people, the White House has said they’ll respond to your petition.

As we all know, Chris Dodd is a douchebag moron hack corrupt individual (in regards to his involvement with the RIAA/MPAA), so somebody thought, “Let’s have the White House open up an investigation on this guy!” The petition easily got the 25,000 necessary “signatures,” and this is how the White House responded:

The White House declines to comment on this petition because it requests a specific law enforcement action.

What am I missing? Isn’t the point of the Executive branch to enforce laws?

Oh well. Hope and change.

This term arises out of Rev. 12:7 and refers to the conflict that took place in the premortal existence among the spirit children of God. The war was primarily over how and in what manner the plan of salvation would be administered to the forthcoming human family upon the earth. The issues involved such things as agency, how to gain salvation, and who should be the Redeemer. The war broke out because one-third of the spirits refused to accept the appointment of Jesus Christ as the Savior. Such a refusal was a rebellion against the Father’s plan of redemption. It was evident that if given agency, some persons would fall short of complete salvation; Lucifer and his followers wanted salvation to come automatically to all who passed through mortality, without regard to individual preference, agency, or voluntary dedication. The spirits who thus rebelled and persisted were thrust out of heaven and cast down to the earth without mortal bodies, “and thus came the devil and his angels.”

The story we teach children and that missionaries teach people investigating the church is a little simpler…

Before any of us were born, God presented a plan for us to come to Earth, away from his direct influence, where we could make our own choices and learn from the consequences. Think of it as college life for God’s spirit children. So we’d live here for a while, learn from our various life experiences, then we’d die and return to God, having grown and progressed through what we experienced and learned.

Well, Satan heard this plan (he was called Lucifer back then), and he thought it was terrible that people would be given the option to make bad choices. I guess he didn’t understand the notion that “you learn from your mistakes.” So he suggested that God change the plan to force everyone to only make good choices.

Jesus then jumped into the argument and rallied support back toward the original plan. The “War” was just the great debate between the two sides. God and Jesus’ side obviously “won,” as there are now billions of people living on the earth.

Now, if the Mormon crowd reading this is paying attention, they’re probably going, “Wait, Brandon! You missed an important part! On top of Satan wanting to take away agency/choice from people, he also wanted God’s glory!”

Except I didn’t miss that part, as I’ll now explain.

When I talk to neophytes and children about the War in Heaven, they always emphasize what was emphasized to them — that Satan wanted God’s glory, and they might remember the bit about agency. But they only understand the simple meaning of the term glory — they just think that Satan wanted to become God. And there’s some truth to that, but I think it’s missing the real point. The glory of God, as we read in Moses 1:39, is to bring about eternal life for his children, which can only be done if we are free to choose and we make good choices. The real glory of God, in the context of the War in Heaven, is the gift of free agency.

I propose to my fellow Latter-day Saints that when we teach people about the War in Heaven, we de-emphasize Satan’s glory-seeking and emphasize God’s Plan and the fundamentally necessary element of the Plan — the freedom to choose.

Our economic policy is no less contradictory. It’s fair to say that even with all the good intentions of the Members, the planned welfare state has been a complete and miserable failure. For the most part, the programs achieve exactly opposite results from those sought. There is a limit to how long the economy can tolerate these insults before we all suffer from the severe consequences. What we say and do are in conflict with each other. We talk boldly of balanced budgets, full employment, prosperity, low interest rates, and no inflation. So we either do not believe, as a body, what we say, or we are inept in our ability to pursue and achieve the goals that we seek. Either way, the results remain the same.

The economic contradictions are numerous. Conservatives, for years, preached balanced budgets — until in charge — then the deficits soared to $200 billion per year. Liberal big spenders who led the way to runaway spending quickly excoriate conservative deficits and nothing happens; the deficit financing continues and accelerates.

Campaigns are won on promising tax cuts; some are given, but are quickly canceled out by numerous tax increases associated with accelerated federal spending.

Congress and the administration are quick to blame the Federal Reserve System for high interest rates and do nothing about the huge deficits. Congress totally ignores their responsibility in maintaining the integrity of the money and refuses to exert their rightful authority over the Federal Reserve. We routinely preach about helping the poor, then plunder the working class to subsidize foreign socialist dictators and the welfare rich through abusive taxation and inflation.

Our government pursues a policy of currency debasement, causing steadily rising prices, and blindly treats only the symptoms while punishing, through regulations and taxation, those capable and willing to take care of themselves.

Vocal support for free trade is routinely heard, as protectionist measures march on. The steel, sugar, textile, shoe, copper, and automobile industries all come for help, and we do nothing to remove the burden of taxation, inflation, high interest rates and labor laws that put our companies at a competitive disadvantage. Our protectionist measures then hurt our trade partners, precipitating our need to send them more foreign aid to help out their weak economies and to relieve their debt burden.

Archconservatives champion tobacco subsidies, which are criticized by archconservatives who champion milk subsidies. Government then spends millions of dollars to regulate the tobacco industry and points out the hazards of smoking.

A liberal champion of the peace movement and disarmament pushes for the B-1 bomber as a reasonable alternative — and because it’s good for the economy — the bomber, by coincidence, to be built in the Senator’s home state.

The well-intentioned do-gooder legislates minimum wage laws to help the poor and minorities, causing higher unemployment in the precise groups who were intended to be the beneficiaries.

We learned nothing from the Depression years and continue to pay farmers to raise crops not needed, then pay them to stop planting. Our policies drive prices of commodities down, so we prop up the prices and buy up the surpluses. The consumer suffers, the farmer suffers, the country suffers, but our policies never change; we just legislate more of the same programs that cause the problems in the first place.

Our steel plants are closing down, so we pursue protectionism and stupidly continue to subsidize the building of steel plants throughout the world through our foreign-aid projects.

We pay for bridges and harbors throughout the world and neglect our own. If we feel compulsion to spend and waste money, it would make more sense at least to waste it at home. We build highways around the world, raise gasoline taxes here, and routinely dodge potholes on our own highways.

Why do we cut funding for day-care centers and Head Start programs before cutting aid to the Communists, Socialists, and international bankers?

A substantial number of businessmen demand the rigors of the free market for their competitors, and socialism/fascism for themselves.

Economic interventionism, a philosophy in itself and not a compromise with anything, is the cause of all these contradictions in the economy. Rejection of government planning, controlled by the powerful special interests, at the expense of the general welfare is necessary, and even inevitable, for that system will fall under its own weight. The question that remains is whether or not it will be replaced with a precise philosophy of the free market, rejecting all special interests and fiat money, or with a philosophy of socialism. The choice when the time comes should not be difficult, but freedom lovers have no reason for complacency or optimism.

Ron Paul has been preaching the same thing for the past 30+ years. I don’t think these words reflect the opinion of a greedy, selfish capitalist, but of a caring, bleeding heart libertarian.

The problem I have is when people claim they like books, and then the conversation goes something like this — and mind you, I’ve had the following conversation several times (with some variation, of course)…

Other Person: “I like books!”

Brandon: “Really? I like books, too! What kinds of books do you like? Have you read anything good recently?”

OP: “I really like fantasy books.”

B: “Oh great, me too! Have you gotten through Lord of the Rings yet?”

OP: “Oh no, I started it once, but it’s so long. I loved Harry Potter, though. I’ve read them all three times. And I recently finished the Hunger Games series. Have you heard of that?”

B: *struck by sudden fear* “…um, yes. Have you read any of the Narnia books at least?”

OP: “Oh, I saw the movies.”

B: *realizing I need to quit talking to this person about books ASAP* “Well you should definitely try reading them some time. You could probably blaze through them in a few days. So, uh, are you excited about them making Hunger Games into a movie? Let’s talk about movies and TV.”

So the moral of the story: If you’re going to claim to be a book lover but your knowledge of the topic is confined to modern pop fiction for children, please be aware that you sound silly claiming that you are a book lover.

Or just throw out a caveat, and I’m more than willing to cut you some slack.

A couple days after MAGFest, I busted out the kanji flash cards I had made myself while I was living in Japan. To be considered fully literate in Japanese, you’re supposed to know close to 2,000 of these characters. On my mission, I tried to learn about five new ones every day. By the time I left, I could read about 1,800 and write around 500. Two weeks ago, the numbers were probably closer to 150 and 50, if I had to guess. Now I’m trying to speed-relearn them, so I’m going through 20 a day.

Here’s my method. I have four piles: Learning to read, learning to write, review weekly, review monthly. I put 20 new cards in the “learning to read” pile every day, and I just go over them until I have them all down. In the following days, I continue to review cards in the “learning to read” pile until I feel pretty confident the character is actually learned. So, some cards (the numbers, for instance) stayed in the pile for a day. Others have been there for over a week. Once I have the reading down for a card, I move it to the “learning to write” pile. I then work the card through the same process. Once I feel I can remember how to write the character, I move it into the “review weekly” pile. To make sure I’m not just keeping the readings and writings in my short term memory, I review all my “learned” cards every Sunday. I’ve only been doing this for about a week and a half, so only a handful of cards have made it to the “review monthly” pile so far. This whole process is pretty similar to how I studied kanji in Japan, though I didn’t emphasize writing nearly as much, and I took it a lot slower.

However, if I can keep up this pace, I should be back to my post-mission kanji level in 3-4 months. Then I’ll probably start reading some Japanese novels to relearn vocabulary and grammar. And then I won’t feel like a moron when I talk to Japanese people.

Wish me luck.

But now, I want to tell a quick story about my favorite game music composer — Yasunori Mitsuda — and share a few of my favorite songs he composed. (Non-video-game-nerds: You’ll still be cool even if you listen to the music (which is awesome, by the way))

Anyway, I found out last night that he’s on Facebook. And it’s not even a fan page or whatever. It’s Mitsuda’s actual Facebook account. So I friended him, and shortly after, he accepted. I wrote him a quick message wishing him happy birthday, and he wrote back. Granted, it was a short message and a short reply, but still, we’re talking about Yasunori-god-of-music-Mitsuda! It kind of made my night.

Mitsuda’s been actively making game music for nearly twenty years now, so he’s done quite a few games. In recent years he’s also put out some independent albums, which I really also like. But what first got me introduced and in love with his music were from games.

The first game he scored (and for which I initially developed a man-crush on him) was Chrono Trigger. Here’s the main theme.

The next two come from my favorite game, Xenogears.

And this next one is actually my favorite song of all time…

Here’s a live performance of the main theme from Chrono Cross.

And I’ll wrap this up with two tracks from Xenosaga Episode 1.

Acoustic guitars in this one are killer.

So, what’d you think???