Posts Tagged ‘ politics ’

The headline is clear. Community of Christ will provide sacramental ordinances of marriage, commitment ceremonies, and ordination independent of sexual orientation in the USA. Specifically, after two days of discussion, the USA National Conference formally approved by a required 2/3rds majority the following recommendations to the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve: The 2013 USA [...]

North Korea wants to show its strength despite its small size by launching missiles to intimidate China.  Napolean was said to suffer from “short man” inferiority complex, resulting in his military invasions all over Europe.  Some sources say Hitler felt inferior because his absent father was a Jew, not Aryan.  In the Wizard of Oz, the “wizard” [...]

Have you ever received a call to buy insurance from someone who could only have gotten your information from the ward directory?  Been asked on a date by someone you don’t really know personally but have seen at church? Members are asked to use the ward directory only on ward business.  How have you used [...]

Mystery guest number 1 was never a practicing Catholic. Mystery guest number 2 never believed in Temple rites. Now, there’s a good conspiracy theory. Sometimes a conspiracy theory turns out to be true. There is even a class of crime for which people go to jail that starts out “conspiracy to commit…”. But the conspiracy theories [...]

Marie Antoinette couldn’t get her head around the concept that peasants might resent a lack of bread. I mean, look at her bedroom! So, eventually, her head was forced to observe the resentment in a more detached manner. The Versailles life-style was unsustainable, even if the people living in Versailles thought they could stall the [...]

We are down to crunch time.  I can’t believe that our Congress is so dysfunctional.  There’s plenty of blame to go around.  Where should I start? Let’s start with everyone in the photograph!  D&C 38:27 “I say unto you, be aone; and if ye are not one ye are not mine.” Obviously, they’re not handling this [...]

On Dec 23, Idaho Senator Mike Crapo was arrested (on Sunday no less) for DUI. He had been driving erratically in Virginia at approximately 12:45 am.  Crapo previously served as bishop of an LDS ward at age 31.  (He is now 61 years old.) The good news for him is that he is not up [...]

The response to trauma is instinctual, even if our instinctual responses are wired individually. God evolved our species’ instincts to do something fast –flee, fight, or freeze — because the lethal nature of most of the dangers that killed humans throughout history is immediately perceptible and requires immediate response. Instincts don’t do as well when [...]

Well, not really. However, with recent reports that the US birthrate has fallen to a level not seen since 1920, one starts to speculate. As Pew’s research organization reports: “The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the [...]

For me, as a conservative Mormon guy living in Washington state, the 2012 elections were rough in a number of ways, starting from the top down: Romney lost the election.  I had spent a year volunteering for his campaign and truly thought he had a good chance of winning.  He nearly pulled it off, but [...]

Mitt Romney and President Obama spoke at Al Smith’s dinner a few weeks ago, put aside politics for a night and told some jokes.  Mitt brought some pretty good Mormon jokes to the dinner.  I thought I would share a few, as well as a Sesame Street joke immediately after. “Of course this isn’t a [...]

In case you thought that Mitt Romney had unanimous support in Utah, you may be surprised to find out that Ron Paul was given rock star treatment at Utah Valley University a few weeks ago.  KSL noted that Ron Paul supporters turn out in droves for speech at UVU. You may wonder why I attended [...]

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 [...]

“Many laws permit or even promote abortion, but to us this is a great evil,” Elder Oaks said in Saturday afternoon’s session of General Conference.  Oaks is just one of many religious leaders that call abortion evil, but are there more effective ways to curb abortions than to simply stand on a soapbox?  A recent [...]

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 [...]

I have been personally (and later professionally) interested in the extent to which mathematics could help forecast historical trends ever since I read the fiction of Isaac Asimov way back in the 1960′s. When I shared my first office at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory with a staff meteorologist working on air quality dispersion [...]

Are online and offline worlds separate, or can what we do online (on blogs, etc.,) inspire offline action?

“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 [...]

Peter Pan was a wonderful story for me as a six-year old when the Broadway show was first televised by NBC to help market the new-fangled color TVs. Even though we didn’t have the money for color TV, seeing pirates and flying children cavort above the stage even in black-and-white made the program then the [...]