Simple Utah Mormon Politics

How many times have we said something that, the minute it left our mouths, we wished we could take it back? I reached such a precipice twice in the past few days, but somehow I was able to step back from the brink.  Had I said what I felt like saying, reputations and friendships might well have been destroyed. Call it luck.  Call it whatever you will, but in both instances I didn't say what I was thinking, and because of that I have a completely new perspective on just how much of a blessing patience can really be.

In light of the monumental monstrosity that, rather than solving the health insurance problem for millions of Americans, will much more likely bankrupt our country, I have been asked to provide a description of how I would provide health insurance to the uninsured.  Here is a stream-of-consciousness list that I put together off the top of my head. How did I do?

Operation Millennium Challenge, perhaps the most lavish war gaming exercise in U.S. military history, was conducted in late 2002.  The enemy in this war game was a rogue commander in the Middle East.  Even more interesting is the date when the plans for Millennium Challenge were hatched. Seven years after the invasion of Iraq, we're still there. It seems clear that an attack on Iraq was planned well before America was attacked on 9/11. It also seems clear that anyone with any influence on the operation ignored all the warning signs of failure.

There is a segment of our population which claims that man's activities have brought us near a climatic tipping point , after which abrupt and unalterably negative changes to our climate will occur.  There is no evidence of this--only fear and prognostication. Ironically, with so much misplaced attention focused on our natural climate, we ignore clear evidence of a real tipping point--the collapse of the United States economic climate. We are stupid to focus so much effort on the wrong problem.

We were reading in the Book of Mormon last night with our extended family, and something that I had taken for granted was something that many of my family members did not know.  That is that Book of Mormon prophets had prophesied about Columbus, the Pilgrims and Puritans, and the success of the American colonists in the war for independence.

I always thought we hated Hitler more than Stalin because there was more documentary, pictorial, and videographic evidence of Hitler's atrocities, and that Stalin did a better job of covering up his and his country's crimes. That may be a partial explanation, but in reading The Anti-Communist Manifestos , I have discovered another, much more substantial reason.

As a movie, Avatar is a cinematic masterpiece.  As propaganda, it is a "masterpiece" as well.  How Freudianly ironic that director James Cameron ascribes in real life to the same militaristic mobilization tactics to achieve his purposes as are ascribed in his movie to Colonel Miles Quaritch , Avatar's uber-villain.

For the last couple of weeks I have been teaching a Citizenship in the Nation merit badge to the Boy Scouts in my LDS Stake.  Here are some of the fundamentals that we have talked about regarding the United States Constitution.