Writer | Latter-Day Saint | Father of 6 | Infinity IQ
Right Here
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this is a copy and paste out of those old 90s chain emails.
Things you learn in Texas:
1. The guy in the F-150 is worth a lot more than the dude in a Mercedes.
2. The small business owner from a state school is smarter than the majority of Ivy League grads.
3. There’s more racism in Connecticut country clubs than in rural honky-tonks.
4. Rednecks are more honorable than investment bankers.
5. The man who looks like he can’t afford the tab could buy the building.
6. They don’t ask for a deck before the meeting.
7. Prep school is where they send the problem kids.
8. If he’s wearing dusty boots, a 2XL Magellan shirt, a gold Rolex, and has a bulletproof case on his iPhone 12, you’ve already lost the negotiation.
9. “How’s business?” is a real question. “What do you do?” is a New York question.
10. Tips are bigger and egos are smaller.
11. A handshake still closes deals that a term sheet would kill.
12. The wealth is in real estate, oil, or a company nobody in Manhattan has ever heard of.
13. Your wife or daughter will never struggle finding help to change a tire.
14. Nobody asks where you went to college.
15. A weekend invitation to their ranch makes you part of the family.
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I'm done theorizing about how we're supposed to interpret these changes or why they came about. I don't know.
I just know that the reality of it means that I can no longer look to many official church activities or background culture to support me anymore in living any supposed "higher law".
I have to generate that energy from my household and from similar minded friends. I have to explain why people who go to church seem to believe different doctrine.
The goal of the new FSY book:
"Mom and Dad now set customized standards with me based on broad principles!"
The reality of the new FSY book:
"Mom bought herself skimpy outfits, a few tattoos, and a nose stud. Dad got into sports betting."
Was the new FSY book an inspired change?
Revealing the Higher Law at Sinai was inspired. Instructing the Israelites, Nephites, and Jaredites to have no king was inspired. Instituting the United Order in Zion was inspired.
God often gives His people with guidance they will not collectively follow. With added flexibility comes added accountability, and new revelation, unheeded, brings condemnation (see Jacob 4).
I think we as a people are failing this test right now.
So what happens next?
Sometimes-- like in the scriptural examples above-- when His Saints reject His "higher and holier ways," the Lord withdraws that flexibility and goes back to proscriptive rules because that's the only way the people will listen.
But at other times, the Lord says "it doesn't matter-- the higher way is here to stay" (take the Sermon on the Mount, for example).
I think this is one of those cases. I expect we'll see more prophetic warnings and clarifications like Pres. @ChristoffDTodd and others have issued recently. But I don't think the Church will change its overall approach to standards.
The Kingdom of God can't crawl at the pace of its slowest members. At His Coming, the Lord will find-- ready to receive Him-- a base of mature, discerning, zealous disciples who see obedience as a quest, not an irritant, "and love to obey [His] command."
And what of the slothful stewards and foolish virgins who must be "commanded in all things?"
Well, we'll invite, we'll persuade, we'll preach, and we'll love, love, love. But for many, love and truth are far less appealing than the enticements of Babylon.
The Lord and His leaders know what half of the Church will sadly do with the extra rope they're giving us.
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Michael Perrone retweeted
The less households and wards produce for each other, the more families must surrender their capital to buy from the world. That demands more income, more work and credentialing, less time for household and community production and forces them to buy even more.
"The family was an organized and conducted unit of economic production. Today, most families are units of economic consumption, which do not require a high degree of family organization and cooperation."
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Michael Perrone retweeted
Twenty years from now, people may be surprised that elders quorums routinely helped families move. That sounds stupid now only because the norm is still alive. But social practices rarely vanish at once. The structure that reproduces them disappears first.
Then Oaks warns that homes become “boardinghouses” when people stop producing together and mostly consume. Yet we’ve built wards around the exact same pattern: show up, receive the sacrament, receive a lesson, then return to separate lives. We’re using the pathology as the model.
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Michael Perrone retweeted
In the future if you have an idea for a public education SaaS product Flock precogs will just come to your house & shoot you
“Your child’s assignment is in ParentVue. Have you checked Canvas? The homework is in EduSpot. The grades are available on Teacherly. I mentioned this in the WhatsApp group. It was literally sent to your comcast dot net email address. Canvas has it for you. It’s in Canvas.”
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I don't have any of those. Sorry you're going to have to call me.
“Your child’s assignment is in ParentVue. Have you checked Canvas? The homework is in EduSpot. The grades are available on Teacherly. I mentioned this in the WhatsApp group. It was literally sent to your comcast dot net email address. Canvas has it for you. It’s in Canvas.”
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Michael Perrone retweeted
>really into vicarious work for the dead
>unlimited funeral potatoes
Whose working on this!?
Made with AI
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Michael Perrone retweeted
Then Oaks warns that homes become “boardinghouses” when people stop producing together and mostly consume. Yet we’ve built wards around the exact same pattern: show up, receive the sacrament, receive a lesson, then return to separate lives. We’re using the pathology as the model.
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Michael Perrone retweeted
A colorized photograph of a young woman in rural Clogher, County Tyrone, Ireland, photographed by Rose Shaw in the early 20th century.
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You aren't nostalgic for a particular thing. It's more that you're nostalgic for what that thing enabled you to do with other people.
A lot of those things don't exist anymore and they weren't replaced.
It’s actually criminal how many of these are gone. Amazon and private equity killed so much of American life.
Community note
This video is AI generated. The Sears logo shown was intreoduced in 2004, not 1996. In 1996, Sears was spelled in all caps. The date overlay misspells the month DEC as DIC.
logos.fandom.com/wiki/Sears
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Michael Perrone retweeted
We appreciate whenever reputable organizations seek to truly understand our faith and commitment to Jesus Christ. Across the globe, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is experiencing a season of spiritual vitality and growth.
Official Church records show consistent worldwide increases in both membership and participation. We are encouraged by increased participation among our children, youth and young adults in the United States over the past decade. Further evidence of this growth also includes the historic announcement that 90,000 full-time missionaries are currently serving around the world.
We invite people who are curious to know more about our Church not only to consult official data concerning the entire Church membership, but also to come and see for themselves. The truest measure of the Church’s growth is found in the increased joy and purpose reflected in the daily lives of its members.
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My most controversial smartphone opinion is not that no teenager should have one, nor is it that adults don’t need one, but that the Windows Phone was better.
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Michael Perrone retweeted
In the 80s and 90s, we saw images like these and worried that the mall had replaced the church. The irony is that what once looked like the secularization of a common culture now looks in 2026 like evidence that a common culture still existed.
Decades ago, even that commercial Christmas depended on a remarkable degree of cultural cohesion. The mall could secularize Christmas because nearly everyone still understood it as the common season. So the decorations, music, crowds, school vacations, family rituals, and shopping calendar all rested on some broadly shared Christian inheritance. Most Americans were then, in some loose sense, Christian: practicing, lapsed, or simply cultural.
Whats changed since then is deeper than commercialization. The shared ethnocultural ground itself has changed. America is more ethnically and religiously plural, while the older Christian inheritance is less universal. Christmas is losing its place as an unquestioned common cultural language. Even the commercial version now exists in a society with less agreement about why late December should be set apart at all, even as something merely culturally sacred.
It’s actually criminal how many of these are gone. Amazon and private equity killed so much of American life.
Community note
This video is AI generated. The Sears logo shown was intreoduced in 2004, not 1996. In 1996, Sears was spelled in all caps. The date overlay misspells the month DEC as DIC.
logos.fandom.com/wiki/Sears
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