Your unconscious reaction to this will vary. But can easily be detected by your actions, by what you do, and are doing.
I am taking a course on udemy while I munch on a chickenburger with Espresso coffee. I am learning how to use Python with TensorFlow to do Deep Learning - any of these topics should grab your attention.
Udemy is one of many online courses that will teach you anything. You want to know about Sex? Put Tab A in Slot B.
Those who can program, and those who cannot.
I am serious about this. This difference keeps striking me all the time. And it probably does you too, even if you try your hardest to ignore it.
We have to become more like computers, whether we want to or not.
This is not hard, there are many online courses that will teach you how to code anything. All you have to do is want to learn.
Most people have learned something that defeats this: they have learned how to not learn and get away with it. This can be done, and be done easily.
And, as the Community of Christ, it is less than nothing.
I have a cousin who accepted the task of "Finding a Mission for the Temple." The Temple is the strange-looking building the Church built in Independence, Mo.
I went to church in Washington, DC, where she is the Pastor. And attended the first service of the day, which was devoted to asking for this Mission. We held hands and stood silently in a circle, waiting for an answer. None came, but the experience felt good.
The biggest damage the Church did, was making us feel is was important. When I realized this deception, I dropped out. The only one in my family.
The latest one is the smartphone, which provides everything for its user. Whose brain becomes part of the global Cloud.
"The Global Cloud?" You may say, "There is no such thing!"
You are right, and you are wrong. There is no universal medium, such as the Eather that was assumed to pervade all space.
But there are many cryptocurrencies that are driving the world nuts. Facebook, which has one of these things, was grilled for five hours by a congressional committee and ordered to stop work on it. He did not.
Yesterday, this complex was brought home to me. I bought a special hamburger, that I am eating for breakfast this morning, along with some espresso coffee.
I sat down next to a woman, who thought I was interested in her. I wasn't and she immediately got absorbed in looking at her Phone. Her brain and the brain of her Phone became one.
She was saved from knowing how ugly she was, but she lost her mind.
Because they were not needed, since the Computer could do almost everything they could, and do it better.
Recently, however Computer companies (such as Microsoft) are now realizing the advantages of emotions in computing, and are incorporating this capability into their products (especially their Cloud products). This is a difficult transition and is far from complete.
People were eliminated, but we now want them back (suitably modified of course).
We need a strange mixture of machines and animals which have not been invented yet.
And we need them now.
When did our technology start? That's an easier question.
Sometime in the 16th Century with the invention of the Printing Press. And for 1000 years this was our dominant technology.
We were a scatted bunch of British states along the Atlantic seaboard, but we were writing to each other, and to anyone who could read. Our Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, in his beautiful handwriting.
We were lucky and had France for an ally. When the French Fleet blockaded American ports, our war with England was over.
We looked at our situation, realized it had to be improved, and set about improving it - with a Constitutional Convention. The first of its kind. This resulted in many debates, held in secret. And the printing of many papers, in the open, where different people set forth their views. These Constitutional Papers are still studied today, to figure out what was on their minds.
Eventually, it was ratified by enough States and it became Law, with George Washington as our first President. When he retired to his farm, this set a valuable precedent.
The next 200 years were an age of rapid changes and many innovations. Mainly with the invention of Electricity and Photography. Collectively known as Industrialization.
The Steam Engine was invented, which made possible the Railroads and the Steamships. which were powered by Coal and then Oil.
All this had a huge effect on our Religions and our Religious wars which became the worst ever.
Mathew Brady photographed the Civil War.
When I start thinking about this, I start thinking about my cousin Al, who had a rough experience working in an Office, in Ohio.
He graduated from college as a Social Worker, and as a married man, with children. How he arrived at this state, I do not know, but it did not last, because he could not stand his job.
This is a common situation, there are many people who do not like their jobs, but put up with them anyway. Al's reaction was extreme, and he had to quit work, much to his wife's disgust, who took the children and left him.
He was a failure, at an early age, and it's a wonder he was not locked up in an insane asylum.
But he had a sister, and her husband, who invited him to live with them, in Northern Virginia, while he got his life straightened out.
He enrolled in Adult Education courses which gave him tests, to see what kind of work he was suited for. These indicated he could work as a surveyor. So he took surveying classes and got a job as a surveyor.
He remarried, and with his new wife, acquired a fine house. He was a success!
When I visited him, several years later, He told me his story, which amazed me. But I was also amazed by his refusal to understand how he got to where he was!
He is a Good American, who enjoys the good life without thinking about it.
There are portraits of him, which were not made of him, in my opinion.
Photography was being invented, and there are photographs of nearly every important person of his time (such as Abraham Lincoln) but not him.
Evidently, he didn't want any made. This was one of the strange quirks of his complicated nature.
WWII, which created Noth America, bypassed little Costa Rica, who wondered why Germany was not buying their coffee.
It has a fine Opera House, but Wagner is not performed there.
And people react violently to this.
The people around him, had no idea of what he was either.
Once we learned to talk (a massive achievement only we have been capable of) there was no need to also be truthful.
And this was encoded in our laws. Finding the truth is a hard job, and is usually incomplete.
This is the advantage of using a Computer. If I say a=1, it remains 1, until I change it.
We can make a truthful Computer (a Functional Computet) but we but we have to make it that way. A computer that can change its mind easily is more useful for us. But it has to be tested frequently to see if it is giving us thr right answers.
There is even a technology now called Deep Learning where the Compter learns how to program itself! We don't know how this works, but everytime we use Google Translate, we are putting it to work.
You use a complicated headset to do this, with all kinds of wires sticking out of it.
This puts a screen in front of your eyes, then as you move your head, it moves the image on the screen to make it seem to not move. Got that?
It also claims to move the image 360 degrees, but I have not seen that yet. Learning how to use it will be a challenge.
Doing all this is difficult and requires exotic and expensive hardware and software. And is used mainly for gaiming (nothing useful).
The Oculus Rift S Headset I use costs $399. But needs a high-end laptop that costs $599! It only runs on Windows.
This is extreme, but I think an extreme view is necessary now. All we have to is look around us, and see what is going on
It's easy enough to see people who are doing something useful, but we also have to see the vast number who are not.
At this point, we have to do something ourselves. Maybe not a lot, but something.
I hope you never have to see this for yourself. It is not a pretty sight.
I was married to a beautiful, but crazy young woman for five years in the Sixties. Her craziness kept gettng worse, and she was locked up in a psych ward in the County hospital for Santa Barbara, California.
Their operating procedure was simple: they gave an incoming patient a shot of an antipsychotic drug that knocked them out. They went to sleep for a day or two - and when they woke up they were a different person!
When Beth woke up, she was no longer the loving wife. She informed me, quite calmly, tht she wanted a divorce.
I left her, and wenr to a new job in Denver. Two years later, Beth killed herself.
Why am I interested in this. Something so advanced, I can hardly understand it?
Because it makes me a spectator to an enormous group interaction. I can sit in front of my laptop, with a fast Internet connection, and watch the guts of the world create a new reality. That may or may not be a better one.
Where someone like me, who only knows a little, can rub shoulders with the extremely bright.
I hesitate to say this because most people are saying "everything is working, as good as can be expected, under the circumstances, and we should not try to make it better."
I am pessimistic, they are optimistic.
That first phrase "most people" is a tough one, It includes a lot of people and a lot of relationships.
I first wrote "many" instead of "most" but that didn't sound realistic.
Consider the phrase "not working". This seems clear enough, until you look at it carefully, when all of a sudden, it reverses itself!
You begin to wonder about your sanity.
I have been suffering from depression lately and have been wondering why.
I have always assumed the more information the better. But I have realized there is a limit to how much information I can use. Going beyond this limit has serious consequences.
As a practical matter, I had purchased the Oculus Rift S (for $399), was reading its description on Wikipedia, and feeling overwhelmed. Oculus was riding the VR wave and making its products better and better. And more complicated and expensive.
I had sprung a trap, without realizing it. One that Oculus (and the company who bought it, Facebook) had cleverly designed.
I start with some Espresso Coffee, made in my Espresso machine. This is powerful stuff made with steam at high pressure.
Then I add some Splenda to sweeten it.
Then I add some Baileey's Irish Cream.
Not bad!
These two countries were allies then, and WWII was fought mainly in the Snow and Mud of the USSR (dependining on the time of year) - the worst weather in the world.
The USSR War mterial was supplied (in abundance) by the US - via Alaska, which was very close
The US made its planes in Southern California and Arizona, then few them into battle in two directions: to the East, and Europe - and to the West, and the USSR.
The US had a special Air Force manned by women pilots, who flew them to Alaska. Over the worst flying terrian in the world. They landed them at a Soviet airport in Nome, Alaska - and then flew home. Many of them didn't make it, and were forgotten.
I know this because I lived on this airport when it was part of a Gold mining company in the Fifties. The Russian signs were still over the doors.
I worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. And rook plenty home to the U of Illinois, where I was an Engineeringg student.
Plenty of animals are social, but only a few take this to extremes, mainly people and their dogs.
Who make possession (of many things) a personal matter - one they will kill to get and consume.
These new Realities have been with us for a while - beginning with the Movies. an advanced application of Photography and Electricity. Which arrived in the middle of the 19th Century.
They introduced us to the Magic Screen, where wonderful things appeared to be happening. A New Reality.
These Movies were produced by Jewish Producers in Hollywood. Who were not adverse to producing films for the Nazis. - who loved the things.
The Movies were superceeded by Television (in the Fifties). Movies you could watch at home, for free! Which not only showed you what to buy, but how to live. Heaven had arrived, at last!
A Heaven, however where People ceased to exist. They were only Spectators and Consumers, where everything was provided for them.
The next arrival was profound, but not noticed. TV was replaced by the Computer! A New Reality that operated in the background, unnoticed.
People could now be manipulated, as never before.
Microsoft has put a lot of work into its .NET Framework, and is Visual Studio (or VS Code) IDEs. It wants Software Developers to get in bed with them - and stay there. This is easy if you use the Windows 10 OS.
Google also wants these Developers, and gives them plenty of free stuff also - including the Chrome OS.
I have the best of two worlds: a Windows laptop (with a customized Visual Studio) and a Chromebook.
I was working as a Tech Writer in 1979. I shared an office with another writer, who kept saying how much he wanted to attend a group. I got tired of this and told him if he would find people for a group, I would find a place for it to meet.
He got really busy advertising for a new group in the new-age newspapers and soon we had plenty of people. Where to meet? I had a nice new apartment, and it was the obvious choice. It had a large living room, and we sat on the floor, in a big circle.
We had only one rule: only one person could talk at a time, for a long as he liked, about anything he liked. Strangely enough, this worked! My friend, who wanted the group in the first place, never showed up.
Everything was fine until I lost my job, and could not get another one. So I made the move all the way to Silicon Valley, where I got involved with Computers.
They are Super People (Ubermensch) or Machines of some kind. The 19th Century was a rime of immense change and many inventions, and the rise of the Industrial Revolution. This produced a new kind of person.
I want to examine the kind of person I grew up with (i was born in 1936, in Ft. Madison, Iowa). I am critical of these people, as you will see.
My family were RLDS. a branch of Mormonism. And I am critical of that also.
What kind of person were they? I have asked myself this many times, and I am not sure of the answer. But I can say what they were not: they were not people, as far as they were concerned. They were much better than that.
This better being is better in many ways, and I am dependent on them in many practical ways. I had some seizures, that rendered me helpless, but Ray, who owns the house I live in. and owns a car, came to my rescue.
Sometime in my busy past (I don't remember exactly when) I got hooked on VR. It was the Wave of the future, and was going to transform everything, I was told.
I just got a VR Headset (for $399) I am ashamed to say. It had better be good. It certainly looks weird enough.
It's an Oculus Rift S, that Facebook bought because it knows a sure thing when it sees it.
Wikipedia has a long article on her.
She is one smart, tough gal, who married into British Royalty.
I saw this when I was married to a woman whose childhood was worse than mine - quite a bit worse. She ended up killing herself, I moved to Costa Rica, but am still alive.
When I was back in Silicon Valley, in the Nineties, we were obsessed with two things: Computers and Therapy. We had therapists of all kinds, and a new kind was invented every month.
I had a therapist who considered the severity of my childhood (my Berkely therapist) but most of them were not aware that this kind of problem existed.
If you want to know about Brazil (and you really should) read this.
It's a big subject, but this article covers it nicely.
This Gap worries me, but evidently, no one else.
Software people do not think this is a problem. There are plenty of young people, who can understand Computers and Software - why worry about the rest?
I worry because the rest is most of the world's population, who are part of the Computer Economy but do not understand it. These are two worlds: and they are not communicating.
We can see this most clearly in our Shopping Centers, which anyone can see clearly enough - and the Computer Cloud which no one can see, but everything depends on.
And the Corona Virus, which we cannot see either, but is devastating us.
In either case, a lack of understanding is killing us.
These two worlds operate on different time schedules. In one we are animals, with an animal's complicated bodies and minds. that operate in milliseconds. In the other, we are Silicon, which operates in microseconds.
We often cannot Understand
The Ways of Life and Death,
And therefore, in our Human-ness
We Fuss and Fume and Fret,
We try to Pierce the Dark Unknown
With eyes that cannot see;
And strive to push aside the Veil
To glimpse Eternity,
We cannot wait with patient Hope
For God's Revealing Plan,
But rush so fast we fail to Grasp
His Outstretched Hand,
We search for Truth and grasp for Light
And cry "Where art thou, Lord?"
While Time prepares us, Step by Step,
For Life's Sweet Reward.
From my Cousin Betty's Diary, 1972
I was surfing the Web when I picked this up. I was so impressed I bought his book Hit Refresh.
Notice his clothing: he is wearing a business suit jacket and white shirt - but no tie. He talks like a real person. And he is the CEO of Microsoft, that has gone thru a huge change - for the better.
He did not ser out to reform its business practices, he set out to make it more human.
What is a nice person like me writing about such crap?
Because I want a nice person like you to know about this nasty stuff.
The Internet was invented with the best of intentions. But to the surprise of no one, some nasties came creeping out of the woodwork. And their cleverness has been surprising.
Human nature has not changed, and as you know, some of it is not the best. Virgin territory, such as the Internet, is attractive to them.
I have been reading This is not Propaganda, having no idea what it was talking about.
Finally, its message hit me - it's about Social Media (such as Facebook) that I have not been using or thinking about.
But is changing the world I am living in. And changing it in a big way, that few are aware of.
The best way of understanding this is to read the book, but you can also look Social Media up on Wikipedia.
The book starts off in the Philippines, a horrible place no one is going to, but millions are trying to get out of.
It describes a few who are adapting to it and changing it.
This review of the book is the best, if you have the time to read it.
It tells us what we already know - that Trump is a mess, but he may be elected again, anyway.
This coincided with the Rise and Fall of Joseph Smith III, the son of Joseph Smith the Prophet.
He was only a boy when his father was murdered, and his mother never bothered to inform him of the many controversies going on (including Polygamy).
He grew up and got married in Nauvoo, Illinois, but had no money.
There was a church already formed of LDS members, which called itself the RLDS church, and it needed religious leaders. The obvious choice was the sons of the Prophet. who were available, because they had no other jobs.
To make a long story short, with their mother's encouragement, they joined the RLDS church and became its employees (they took its money) bur stayed in Nauvoo, with their families.
They intended to convert LDS members in Utah but could convert a single one. The RLDS church insisted they move to their headquarters in Plano, Illinois (close to Chicago).
This church (consisting mostly of farmers) bought farmland in Southen Iowa, and built a town on it they called Lamoni.
Where the church remained for many years and Joseph Smith III made it his church, with more members and income. The statistics for this growth, however, are not available.
The Church then moved to Independence, Mo, where it built the Stone Church and the Auditorium, where huge meetings could be held.
I left the Church when I graduated from college in 1959, and was not aware of the changes going one there.
It became The Community of Christ with the Presidency of Veazy, of which I know nothing.
She is a woman in the most masculine of the arts, and an Arab—an Iraqi, no less—with fiery political views of her own and a family history steeped in Iraqi politics. She has never been a natural fit, to put it mildly, with the clubby male establishmentarians who dole out the money to put up major buildings. And yet Zaha Hadid Architects is building them.
Perhaps it was a lucky coincidence that computer-aided design tools came along at precisely the right moment in Hadid’s evolution—around 1990, when her language was fully formed but her projects were widely judged to be unbuildable. Or maybe she was a prophet of what has come to be known as digital architecture. In any case, the computer was only a tool that helped her realize a preëxisting vision; it did not create her aesthetic.
Hadid was born into a wealthy family in Baghdad, in 1950, and she grew up at a time when Iraq’s capital was a secular, cosmopolitan, progressive city, full of new ideas and cultural experiments.
Hadid’s parents remained in the country, but Zaha was sent to boarding schools in England and Switzerland when she was sixteen. Her two brothers, Foulath and Haytham, who were older by twelve and fifteen years, had both gone to Cambridge University, and she spent a lot of time with them in London. “It was the nineteen-sixties, and I was becoming aware of all the new identity issues, and the political changes, and all the dreams of nation-building,” she told me. She would return to Baghdad for holidays. “It was a great place, and I often thought of it. I still do,” she said. But she hasn’t been back since 1980; the house she grew up in is still standing, boarded up.
As part of their work on the Russian avant-garde, Hadid’s unit studied Suprematism, the abstract movement founded by the painter Kazimir Malevich.
You take a bus northward from Orosi, for a short distance. then you get out and use a walkway to get around the bridge, which is being rebuilt.
This is a ordeal for me, with my week legs, and a friendly man (fornished by the bus company) has to help me make the trip.
Then you get on another bus to Cartago.
I used this to make pancakes for breakfast this morning. Yum, Yum!
The only problem I had was finding Jam at the local stores. This is not used much down here.
It's called the 02 Curve Mask. I like its advanced features, my glasses do not fit with it very well, but good enough.
But Ray took an instant dislike to it. His face and my face are too different to compare easily. He can easily use a traditional mask with his glasses, I cannot.
Getting a mask is a social process, that will not satisfy everyone.
The people who actually make software (software desisigners) will ask "What kind of Software?" Because there are many kinds. The answer is, of course, the successful kind. And these are easy to see.
Biut these cannot be determined in advance - you have to give it a try, and see if it works - and probably several tries.
And even then, it is not easy to tell which kind is best. You have to ask "Besr for what?"
I got it from Amazon, and I tried chatting with them about it since it had no instructions with it. As a result, the chat failed. And no one can figure out how to use it.
Ii has no headphones, so audio is impossible
I lost $37.95, which wasn't too bad.
You can see this here
Here I sit, in my pajamas in front of my laptop, trying (not very successfully) to deal with the Information pouring out of it.
It is telling me "You want to be a success? Be like me! You can do this, plenty of other people have."
What does this have to do with Ray, the guy who took me (and his dog) to Cartago yesterday in his car? This will take some explaining, which will be hard because you were not there, as Ray's car struggled up the back roads to Cartago. Fighting other cars every step of the way.
I came home with a bag full of stuff I could not believe. Now it is sitting there, on my kitchen floor, demanding that I open it. One of the things in the bag is a Virtual Reality Viewer, which is demanding the loudest.
But in the back of my mind, I still wonder why Ray can help me ( and certainly does) but cannot help himself. He has problems he cannot begin to solve.
One of these problems is the one concerning his father, what happened to him? My father was not very impressive, but he was there.
I also knew a family once, a mother and two daughters. Their father was missing and their mother was crazy, but the girls were doing fine. How on earth did this happen?
I am forced to conclude that it is largely a matter of chance. Some people luck out, and some people do not.
And if you are one of the unfortunates, you have problems you may, or may not solve.
I am eating Garbanzos con Carne de Cerdo (Pork and Beans) with some high-strength Coffee. It goes down easily.
I am also reading "Is Russian Meddling as Dangerous as We Think?" A think-piece that is getting little exposure, I am sure, because it is hard reading.
Both come in over the Intenet, which accepts any content as equal, just as Print used to do.
We now have both, which stretches our minds quite a bit.
This was a revelation, in the form of a song, received when the Church was in Lamoni. It was a popular hymn, and was in the Saints Hymnal at one time.
It was probably removed because it was too rhythmical.
I wish I knew more about it.
When I was a young tad (in the Fifties, perhaps) the Saints looked forward to the most important event of the year for them - Reunion!
This was usually held early in the summer, before it got too hot. Later, when it got hot and humid, it was enough to turn you into a puddle of sweat.
The last Sunday of Reunion (that lasted for a week) the Faithful expected something Extra-Special, probably a Prophecy of some kind. It was easy to tell if these were genuine, because the whole body would shake violently.
There was always one man there, with his severely disabled daughter, who stood in the back of the room, started shaking all over, and then spoke in tongues.
Everyone listened respectfully, but did nothing.
My sister Linda adds this comment:
The world has been dominated by men for as long as anyone can remember. But we are beginning to wonder if that is the best situation.
Women are half of the world's population and doing without their brain-power does not make much sense.
You will probably reply that I, as a man, am not making much sense. Power is everything, and why give it away?
You can reply that power is not everything, and is only part of the equation. which we are just beginning to understand.
We are living in a great turning point. Which way will we go?
I asked myself this as I dragged myself out of bed this morning. When the answer hit me in the face - because what's going on there is so dramatic!
All the Big Money (the Computer manufacturers) are fighting each other to get the Users to get in bed with them. And then stay there.
The Products being offered are so diverse, no one with a limited budget. can buy them.
I can sit here, in my pajamas in Costa Rica, and watch all this warfare going on, from a safe distance.
I might even do some Programming myself, just to keep myself amused.
These are all around us, and can easily be detected by their distain for the facts.
As they see it, these can easily be dispensed with as unnecessary, and can be replaced with whatever they like.
An example is President Trump, who is adored by his fellow Rebublicans. Thay perceive, correctly, that the world is theirs for the taking - and they are helping themselves to it.
With the coming of the Coming of the Computer, we now have an Information Economy, we are told. And no one argues with that. Altho this is sometimes referred to as Data.
This is nothing new, the Greeks invented History a few thousand years ago.
We now have the Social Media (including Twitter) with many kinds of Misinformation being feed to us constantly.
It's no wonder that our minds have become defective. Garbage in, Gaebage out. (Sometimes referred to as neuroplasticity).
The Prophet distinguishes Mormonism from other Religions - altho his he exists in Islam as well.
The first Mormon Prophet was Joseph Smith who acquired this title from his followers after he published the Book of Mormon in 1830.
The Prophet has the ability to receive direct revelations from God, which his followers then write down and publish as the Word of God.
The Prophet has always been a man, altho in the practice of Glossolalia (speaking in tongues) both sexes can participate.
Hymns can also be received, the most famous of which is "Come, come ye Saints" received by Brigham Young, the second Prophet of Mormonism.
I am taking a course in Marketing on Coursera, presented by the U of Illinois. And I am finding the situation distressful. Why?
Probably because of my experience working at Adaptec in Silicon Valley in the Nineties. I am struggling to explain what eas going on there. But I can summarize it, by saying it was one of many companies who thought they were wonderful, but had no idea what was going on.
They thought they could cover this up by telling the world they were a Computer Company and because of this, they could do no wrong.
Over the next 30 years, they ceased to exist, and no one found this unusual, because so much of this was going on.
The computer companies who were left: Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, were making so much money - the loss of the hundreds of companies who dropped out was not noticed.
Trump was elected instead, because he promised to make America great again.
More Marketing.
These still exist, but they have been badly battered.
Many Church Members left the Church when it became the Community of Christ. Many formed new churches.
Many (if not most) are not sure what they are, or how they relate to Mormonism in general.
Please, please give me your comments by clicking on the Comments button.
Java is a lot of things, as I found out when I started learning it.
It was the system that started the dotcom boom in the Nineties, which I can remember well.
Everyone went crazy over it, and everyone said they were using it when they had no idea what they were talking about.
There were hundreds of Computer companies then, but now there are only five. And all of them are busy giving money (or apps) away. They knew how to Program the Computer, the others did not.
What is JVM (Java Virtual Machine)? You may ask. I asked the same thing myself, and the answer I got was amazing - it's the stuff every Computer company is adding to their stuff to make it Java compatible.
If we are antisocial (as I frequently am) we can honestly say we got this from our mother in utero.
This historical relationship is one the Mormons themselves are extremely adverse to. It implies that Mormonism was caused by Social and Technical events of its time. Not a revelation of God's Will in History.
This is probably true of any Religion, and Mormonism was definitely a Religion. In fact, we have to start with that observation: Mormonism was (and is) a Religion.
It did not start out that way but quickly became one, because the people of its time wanted it that way.
It began when Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830. In 1844, he was the leader of a large and growing church but was killed by an angry mob.
I keep referring to the book Kingdom of Nauvoo, which does an excellent job of describing these events. But doesn't spend much time describing the situation they occur in, in the Illinois of its time.
The Mormons frequently traveled to the Nations Capital, as did Abraham Lincoln, but the two never crossed paths. How did this happen?
This probably happened because of the layout of the Railroads of the time. While many converts were traveling up the Mississippi River.
Poot recordkeeping of the time makes it impossible to determine the accuracy of this possibility.
This is a strange kind of expertise but is very common, and highly approved of.
I keep sending my siblings' clever emails, and they keep sending me stupid replies, or no replies at all.
When will I ever learn that they are Nothing, and will remain that way?
They have plenty of company: most of the people in the world, who are satisfied with being Nothing - spiced up with frequent sex, of course.
And that is why he was killed.
I am still reading Kingdom of Nauvoo, and have reached the point where he was shot (many times) by an angry mob, many from nearby Warsaw.
Smith made the fatal mistake of not paying attention to what his neighbors thought of him.
These came from different places and will end up in different places. The South desperately wants to catch up with the North, but it never will, and shouldn't even try.
If someone wants to advance, himself or herself, she will have to live up North and absorb the culture gradually and be aware that this what she is doing. Most likely, she will find these Northern skills will not be acceptable in the South.
She will have to have two personalities. This is not easy, but it is possible.
I now live in Costa Rica and I can see how this country has taken to the Smart Phone, as a kind of toy. But it could make it (and the Laptop) part of Globalization, and advance, as a country, very quickly.
