America

Today’s guest poster is Tatiana, a crazy-cat-lady engineer entrepreneur scientist flexitarian mom wildlife-sanctuarian public-healthian global-developer pro-nuke feminist liberal Mormon. Averting Human Extinction party platform: There are 15 key points. Energy: Work with utility companies to aggressively move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy including next-generation nuclear energy using reprocessed fuel. This will limit [...]

As  child, I always wondered what the bumpy image on the hymn book was.  I had never seen the tabernacle, and had no idea the image was organ pipes.  As I would make rubbings of the image with a crayon or press it with silly putty, I envisioned it being some sort of temple ruin [...]

Well, at least the election is over. No matter who you wanted to win, you couldn’t be sad that the robocalls, the TV and radio ads and the junk mail have stopped. If you were in a swing state up for grabs, it was non-stop, day and night. So, now what for the Mormon moment? [...]

How Americans voted in this election can be directly correlated to whom they trust more (or whom they distrust more):  business or government.  How did your trust and distrust impact the way you voted? Discuss.

After the election results were announced, I was surprised by the number of people posting doom and gloom.  I read comments about how the outcome showed that we had lost faith in God as a country.  People talked of Armageddon and the Mayan Calendar.  You would have thought the world was ending.  To me, it [...]

The blessed day has finally arrived!  The long awaited day after which we can stop caring about the election because it will be over, one way or another.  Which is eerily similar to what we thought in 2000 . . . Living abroad, I have been exposed to other countries’ voting practices.  In both Australia [...]

In the October General Conference, E. Cook cautioned against political extremism that supersedes and erodes testimony and commitment to the church: Many who are in a spiritual drought and lack commitment . . .  have made unwise choices. Some are casual in their observance of sacred covenants. Others spend most of their time giving first-class [...]

Let’s face it. Although morality profoundly impacts American’s political views — making political and election issues an inevitable topic of attention for a Mormon blog — the idea of a Mormon being elected President of the United States has animated discussion on this site much more than would a contest between Barack Obama and a [...]

Rumors of a widescale Mormon fast prior to the presidential debate were rampant on Facebook and even in some news articles.  I particularly enjoyed Pat Bagley’s cartoon on the topic.  In light of the much touted debate bounce that has resulted in a game-changer according to recent polling, I wonder if some of those faithful [...]

Rise and shout – this poll is for parents who are thinking about their kids’ college education.  Did you / would you send your kids to the Y?  Y or Y Not? Discuss.

Not the program you might think. Rather, the kind of program some people had in mind for Salman Rushdie when he pointed out the contradictions of “The Satanic Verses”. Or, perhaps that should be pogrom, since there are death penalties involved. Certainly, Mark Steyn is one who has had his proverbial skin in the game, [...]

We’re in the home stretch of the US Presidential elections.  Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to try to pursuade voters to vote one way or another.  We have a Mormon running for the first time against a first-time African-American president.  We have multiple issues – massive debt, economic problems, wars and rumors of wars [...]

Unable to sleep a few nights ago, I sought mind-deadening through cable TV. I chanced upon a movie I thought would do the job — a murder mystery set in a mountain abbey in 14th Century Italy. I didn’t get what I expected. Instead, the movie, The Name of the Rose, starring Sean Connery and [...]

My wife seldom takes me to a movie, and never to a documentary.  So I was truly amazed last Sunday when she impulsively bought tickets to the documentary 2016: Obama’s America for a showing less than three hours in the future. I was already familiar with the books on which the documentary was based, and hadn’t [...]

“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” The implications of this little dust-up over a few little words is the crux of this election’s economic debate and perhaps the key differentiator between the two candidates.  Does it take a village to be successful or not?  How do [...]

Did you know that there are 88.8 guns for every 100 people in the US?  As an American who has never owned one, I was pretty surprised by that statistic.  Living abroad, I’ve been asked by many people why Americans are prone to mass shootings.  It’s a great question, one that is difficult to answer. [...]

There has been much ado about the number of years of tax returns Mitt Romney should share as candidate for POTUS.  Critics on both sides of the political spectrum as well as the majority of Americans have called for him to release them, and yet he has refused, resulting in speculation that whatever is in [...]

Last night I had a dream about my wallet.  The external coin purse on my wallet has a zip closure, and in the dream, the zipper was broken in both directions, and I had no way to keep the coins inside.  And there were so many coins.  They were spilling everywhere, and I realized I [...]

In Mayor Bloomberg’s effort to crack down on obesity, NYC recently announced a ban on selling regular sodas in sizes larger than 16 oz. (big diet sodas are allowed, though). Discuss.

“There is but one Lord of the Ring, and he does not share power!” — Gandalf to Saruman. Hawkgrrrl recently summarized Jonathan Haidt’s thesis, expressed in The Righteous Mind, of how people develop pronounced liberal or conservative tendencies as a combination of both genetics and experience (see here). I also wrote about Haidt’s ideas about how [...]