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This hurts.
Denver was a dream for me, just like Los Angeles was, one of those places the whole world knows about, and sees in movies, but never gets to see in person, let alone live and work in.
But I did.
When I arrived in Denver back in June of 2009, every day after work, and on the weekends, I would drive all around, just taking it all in. The most I ever saw of most of the places I've ever lived has been the road between work and home. I didn't want that to happen to me there.
It was so much smaller than L.A., so different. I'll never forget the 16th Street Mall, or Flossy McGrew's, even though I never so much as looked inside.
I was delighted to see other friends there who had also just moved from Santa Clarita.
I still have good friends there.
My kids have best friends there.
We lived within easy walking distance of the temple, making it easy for my junior to become a temple-worker there.
It was a formative time for our whole family, and, I think I can say, it still feels like home to all of us.
It turned out to be a good thing for me that I made those excursions, too. While I technically lived there nine years, longer than any other locale I've ever lived in, except for Germany, I was actually only physically present in Denver for four of those nine years, my consulting career often requiring me to work far from home.
I miss it.
But ...
There's something wrong there, and you all know it.
These kinds of things happen far too often there.
I pray that Denver is healed, if only for my friends' sakes.
But how can that healing come?
I really think they need to start organizing weekly fasts and prayers for Denver in our chapels.
If that doesn't work, there's always Indianapolis. I love it here, too.
God bless you all, my friends: Randy, Barney, Toby, Doug, Jim (RIP), Dewayne (RIP), Mark, Dennis, Bob, Dale, ... all of you.
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HOLY COW!
Ready to put your John le Carré hat on? Good! 'Cause you gotta hear this!
Comey is in deep kimchi!
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Ready to diet?
We're going to be praying for some global warming before this is done.
You see, among the many, many things our grandparents knew, but we no longer learn, is that it only takes one day of the wrong weather ... flood, frost, hail ... and an entire year's crop is lost.
The funny thing is that the same is not true of a day, or even a week, of heat or dry. Crops will survive that. But not too much water and/or cold.
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FRAUD!
Imagine that! More scientific fraud. (@ 2:08)
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ALBEDO
Since they brought it up at 2:55 in that video above, it's worth mentioning why those cosmic rays and reflectivity are mentioned there.
Mention cosmic rays almost anywhere, and most people start filing everything else you say in their science fiction folder. But cosmic rays, as over-used as the term may have been in 1950s and 60s scifi, are a very real, and very present concern as the earth's magnetosphere weakens, allowing more of them in.
Like I said, we'll be praying for some global warming.
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Another Twofer!
The Nazis are still up to their old tricks, this time disguised as aid. At least they're learning something from history.
Joseph Mengele would be so proud.
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Epiphany!
I've long said that the left began shifting the burden of their sins onto the shoulders of the right, even before the end of WWII, just as our own Democrats began shifting the blame for racism and slavery onto the shoulders of the Republicans almost before Lincoln was buried. In fact, the left may have gotten that tactic from our own Democrats.
But, just how did they do this?
War
The fog of war can create quite a smokescreen. Hugh Nibley even used to say that WWII was just a smokescreen for the greatest robbery in history. Who, exactly, created the smokescreen, he never said. What, exactly, was stolen, he also never said, as far as I know. As I've said before, and as we're seeing now, what newspapers of the day printed is more likely propaganda. What figures of the day said publicly was part propaganda, and part code. I've learned that one can't really get an accurate feel for motivations and ambitions that way. But, actions and outcomes ... they will give you a very accurate picture of what was going on. Sadly, so many years after the fact, so much has been written, forgotten, discovered, that even that trail has been obscured. So, we no longer really know much of the details, but what we think we know now, is that Hitler, deprived of financing once available to him, and wanting to deprive his enemies of their financing, went for the gold in the banks. You don't hear much about that, but, when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately for him, everyone else anticipated that, and smuggled all their gold out of the country. When Hitler arrived in Paris, he took a group of men, and headed straight for the main bank in Paris, only to find it empty. Hitler went berserk after that. This is where a lot of analysts lose their way. It's obvious to any schoolchild that, had Hitler contented himself with Austria, Holland, even Poland, the rest of the world might not have declared him Public Enemy #1. But, what those analysts don't understand, or don't know about, is the financing. Even back then, no country could mount the kind of military and warfare Hitler needed all by itself. And getting at those extra resources required money or finance in some form. A Hitler was not a man to be stopped by his parents cutting off his credit cards.
Unable to lay his hands on financing, Hitler simply decided to pull off an armed robbery. After all, his thugs had lots of experience at similar tasks. But, when the cash registers were found to be empty, he took whatever else looked like he could either pawn it off, or hold it ransom. And that meant every painting, statue, ornament, or baubel that could be taken, even if it had to be cut out of the wall of a stone building. It was just a few years ago that an apartment in Paris was discoverd in which, I think it was dozens, of paintings and other works of art had been stored that had been missing since the war.
And why all this?
Because Hitler felt robbed by those who promised support, but then withdrew it.
But that's not what he told the German people. He told them that they had been robbed by the Treaty of Versailles. And that was true enough, and all most Germans needed to persuade them to support the war.
Somehow, Germany had been blamed for WWI, which no one really thinks about today, but which was a big deal back then, partially because it took so much propaganda to get everyone to forget how the war actually bagan: Communists.
Or Socialists. Or whatever particular twist on Marx-Engels they were hiding under. That, too, was only a smoke-screen for their own ambitions. The Nazis themselves were Socialists, adding that they were no mere Socialists, but actually National Socialists. Because, of course, there's a great deal of difference between one tyranny and another. Or, as Hitler once put it in a magazine interview (paraphrasing): "With Socialism, you get Lenin; with National Socialism, you get me."
But, FDR, and the unions he so empowered, were really just another shade of Marxist ideology, too. (And, by the way, one which terrified the church leaders, prompting them to stage a counterpush. This effort is what gave us prophet after prophet, adamantly denouncing all such notions, culminating, I suppose, in Ezra Taft Benson.)
Like I said, they were really splitting hairs, these purveyors of flavors of tyranny.
Now, you're probably lost, right? Did I take a turn, and leave you behind? It was deliberate. That's my point, right there: The fog of war. Everyone gets lost. And, pretty soon, all the opinion-makers get busy, each with their own perspective, some even officially sanctioned for the purpose of, once again, shaping public opinion. Aka, propaganda.
And the victors write the opinion pieces. Because one can hardly call them history books any more.
Out of that fog emerges an entirely new idea.
Our own Civil War gradually evolved into Republican racism, the Democrats having magically adopted as their own the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, even going as far as to float the idea that the two parties has somehow switched sides, hanging their hopes on Nixon's Southern Strategy, which, by the way, wasn't much, and failed, since he lost there.
After WWII, the leftists redeployed that same strategy. The fog of war, not the southern strategy. The idea was, "Who knows?" "There was so much going on, ... BUT ... what we do know is that HITLER was from the EXTREME RIGHT!"
No. He wasn't. Everything about Hitler, those who succumbed to his message, even the Zeitegeist, was Marxist in nature. And by Marxist, I don't mean grass-roots communalism, such as we saw in this country in Joseph Smith's time and place. I mean Jacobinism, a new, French-style revolution, or rather a new Russian-style revolution, but in Germany, and led by Hitler.
Truth, it has been said, is the first casualty of war.
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