Yesterday morning, while astronauts were outside working on a solar array, space station computers that control life support malfunctioned. Fortunately, no word about any difficulties with opening the pod bay doors.
According to Rasmussen, Harry Reid, Senate Majority leader, has a 19 percent favorable rating.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now viewed favorably by 19% of American voters and unfavorably by 45%. Just 3% have a Very Favorable opinion while 22% hold a Very Unfavorable views.
Harry loves to hate President Bush and VP Dick Cheney, but they have favorable ratings in the 30s, significantly better than Reid.
But Harry can rest easy. His favorable rating is tied with one public figure: Scooter Libby.
Perhaps the most important priesthood restoration document is one that doesn’t even show up in Brian Cannon’s list of 70 due to his cutoff date of 1850, when the last of the first hand witnesses to the angelic ministrations died. Addison Everett visited Joseph Smith while Joseph was preparing his plurality of gods sermon as a response to William Law’s renunciations. Hyrum Smith was present as were five or six brethren when a missionary’s report of an encounter of Oliver Cowdery came into their Mansion House meeting place.
Suppose there were an established cure for diabetes that required embryonic stem cells. Suppose the couple hundred million people worldwide with diabetes could be cured at the cost of destroying a couple million 5-day-old blastocysts which had been created in vitro. What then?
Suppose there were a diabetes curing stem cell therapy available, but that the stem cells required a bit of differentiation. Suppose standard embryonic stem cells were insufficiently differentiated to work, and adult stem cells were overly specialized. Suppose the cells that would work were those from 28-day-old embryos grown in utero. Suppose extraction and destruction of twenty million such embryos would provide the material to cure diabetes. What then?
One of my favorite stories from living in Brazil is the one about the thousands of Brazilians who regularly made the most amazing temple trek I know of. There are actually a lot of members (more than 60,000, according to the Church) who live in Manaus, Brazil, which is a city of more than 1 million people in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
There were no permanent roads to Manaus, so members would take a boat downriver to Belem. The boat took two to three days. Then, they would take a bus from Belem along the coast of Brazil all the way to Sao Paulo. The bus took about a week. Total travel time: 9-10 days by boat and bus.
These people are our modern-day pioneers.
New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye produced an essay on “one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.” (link) The paper, by Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University, indicates that in 100 billion years much of the observational information required for our present cosmological understanding will be unavailable. Due to dark energy induced inflation of the universe, the only remaining observable celestial objects will be the six galaxies of our local group, which due to mutual gravity will coalesce rather than expand away from one another. So the red shift will be unknown. Also, Big Band Bang background radiation will have moved from the microwave spectrum into a range that is drowned out by radio frequencies within our galaxy.
A view to such a future carries with it the implication that all possible information is likely not available presently either. Toward the end of the piece Mr. Overbye suggests “It’s not too late to start thinking about sending out the robot probes that could drift down through alien skies eons from now with, if not us or our DNA, at least a few nuggets of wisdom — that the world is made of atoms and that it started with a bang.” He doesn’t state that without comtemporary corroboration such a message from the present will be only a myth.
Add this story to the long list of evidences that there were pre-Columbus trips to the Americas.
Key graf:
“There is increasing evidence of multiple contacts with the Americas,” she said, “based on linguistic evidence and similarities in fish hook styles.” Physical evidence of human DNA from Polynesia has yet to be found in South America, she added.
I still remember a teacher in high school saying all of the native Americans came across the Bering Strait. For many years, this was one of my main objections to the Book of Mormon. And of course the fact that Polynesians were clearly in the Americas but there is apparently no Polynesian DNA is an interesting twist.
A Rudy Giuliani campaign official is trying to focus more attention (presumably negative) about Romney’s Mormon faith by directing media to the SL Tribune story on Romney’s supposed link to the “White Horse Prophecy.” See here for the story.
I personally don’t think these types of tactics will work, and they reflect badly on candidates trying to use them.
Meanwhile, McCain has raised a much more interesting and thought-provoking questions regarding Romney’s immigration policies. I wish the candidates would concentrate on real issues like these rather than on garbage regarding candidates’ religion.
UPDATE: The Giuliani campaign has apologized to Mitt.
I am always interested to read the results of polls like these. They are truly a measure of where we are as a society. I am linking this mostly for informational purposes. I agree with the consensus view of American society on many issues, but disagree on many others (I think the death penalty is morally wrong, for example, but that is one of the issues that most Americans think is morally justified). How do we think the Prophet would respond to this poll? Just wondering.
April, May, and June of 1829 are arguably the busiest months in Mormon history. Moroni appeared a total of seven times and was seen by five people as he transported and demonstrated the plates to witnesses. John Welch estimates, in his essay in Opening the Heavens that there were 63 working days used to translate all but a few pages of the Book of Mormon at an 8 page per day clip. Joseph Smith received revelations that accounted for 12 1/2 sections of the Doctrine and Covenants and at least five additional revelatory experiences that didn’t result in an canonical text (not counting the Melchizedek Priesthood content in sections 27 and 128). This on top of some long distances traveled and all the missionary activity and baptisms. My main interest is to propose a tight chronology that does justice to the major primary sources and while allowing the Melchizedek priesthood to be restored in the midst of all that activity.
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