Margaret Young wrote to tell me that on her recent trip to China, she discovered how ubiquitous pirated DVDs are in China. Everything in American theaters is available — even Mormon Cinema movies.

She suggested that this is part of God’s plan: “We get the Chinese people to steal LDS DVDs and sell them to each other, and voila! We’re in!”

In this spirit, she suggested the following poll:

 Loading …

Read more »

 Loading …

Hat tip: Margaret Young

The Mormon Mentality servers have the honor of hosting the voting for the Niblets this year, and the voting has now commenced. Please do not lose your opportunity to vote in them.

The link to the voting page is here. Of course, we expect all of our loyal readers to vote early and vote often for Mormon Mentality and its permabloggers.

Congratulations go to the following Mormon Mentality participants:

• Devyn S, who was nominated for Best Blogger and whose post “Mormon Grad Students on Welfare” was nominated for best post.
• Brian Gibson, whose “My Heavy Boat” post was nominated for Best Post.
• annedb, who was nominated for best commenter
• all the commenters and bloggers who have helped to make this a great blog, so that Mormon Mentality was nominated for best blog and best large blog

Incidentally, I was contacted anonymously by Trash Calls to help with the Niblets voting. If I were to have gone with a survey site (like Survey Monkey or Free Online Surveys), then we’d either have to tolerate limitations or pay for an unlimited survey. I wanted a good survey, and I already pay to have my own server to host Mormon Mentality and LDSelect. So I just installed Lime Survey, an open source survey engine, and I set up the Niblets survey at no additional cost.

If anyone wants to conduct a survey, let me know. Now that the software is installed and running, I’m happy to put it to good use for anyone who can use it.

In my last post I called the King James Bible “crap”, partly because of its poor English, and partly because its translators do violence of the underlying text, so that their translation destroys whatever literary or poetic structure was present in the original language.

There seems to be some remaining misunderstanding about this. At least a few commenters claimed that the alleged literalness of the KJV somehow preserves rather than destroys the structure of the biblical texts and their accompanying nuances. To illustrate that this claim is mistaken, let’s look at the first chapter of the Epistle of James, which I’ve included at the bottom of this post in a parallel presentation of the King James and the New Revised Standard Versions.
Read more »

The King James Version of the Bible (hereafter KJV) is crap. It’s a sketchy translation from an era in which scholars were largely ignorant of the nuances of ancient languages and understood little of the provenance of major biblical texts. To be sure, the KJV has (brief) moments of unsurpassed eloquence, but on the whole its Jacobean English is ham-fisted and at times it is altogether unintelligible.

The popular myth is that the language is brilliant, but archaisms make the text difficult for the modern reader. In other words, if one doesn’t enjoy reading it, it’s her fault. Read more »

Joseph Addison at Trash Calls is hosting The Niblets this year. For those of you who don’t know, The Niblets are the Oscars/People’s Choice Awards of the Bloggernacle.

Obituaries already abound for William F. Buckley, dead today at 82, and he’s well-known and well-remembered enough that there’s not a lot more that can be said about his life and his achievements than is already being said about him by the mainstream press, by his associates, and by his friends.

I was 10 when I first learned of William F. Buckley, sitting with my father in front of a television watching Firing Line, his PBS talk show. My first reaction to him was, “Holy Crap!”

Read more »

john f is one of the founding perma-bloggers here at Mormon Mentality, so it is with sorrow that we announce that he is being released from his responsibilities here to become a perma-blogger at By Common Consent, where he will continue to make valuable, challenging, and insightful contributions to the Bloggernacle. He remains an emeritus blogger, and his posts here can still be accessed from the sidebar with the eponymous link under that category.

We’re grateful for the contribution that john f made to Mormon Mentality, and we wish john f the best wherever he blogs.

 Loading …

Gentlemen of the bloggernacle, would you make love to this man?

Just when you thought it was safe to forget about the poor guy, Congress finally gets around to officially punishing Larry Craig, the Senator from Idaho. According to Roll Call, he received an “official rebuke,” whatever that means.

Read more »

There’s a holiday for pancakes, and it’s today. So take some time out today. Relax. Kick back. Have a smoke and a pancake. You know, a cigarette and a flapjack. A cigar and a waffle. A pipe and a crepe. A bong and a blintz.

Happy National Pancake Day!

Spoiler alert: If you want to wait to find out what’s going to happen to the GOP between now and the convention, do not read the following post.

Romney has “suspended” his campaign, Huckabee is not going away, and McCain has a choice to make for VP. What will happen, and what does all of this mean? The evolution of the campaign has introduced new uncertainties, and these new uncertainties mean that the time is ripe for me to move back into prediction mode.
Read more »

Ronald Reagan would have been 97 today.
Read more »

I’m a Mormon and a Republican — a lot of us are. But this may be an odder coupling than we imagine. A Gallop poll in February of 2007 found Republicans were 77% more likely to reject a candidate based on her Mormonism than Democrats (39% of Republicans vs. 23% of Democrats). If this poll is meaningful (and it may not be; a follow-up poll found 18% of each party), then it’s strange that the party wherein most Mormons find their home seems less hospitable to them than the party they oppose. Would this be analogous to a hypothetical situation in which 60% of gays voted Republican?
Read more »

Spoiler alert: If you want to wait to find out what’s going to happen to the GOP candidates tomorrow on Super Tuesday, do not read the following post.

Read more »

Dan Quayle, the 45th Vice President of the United States and the most maligned political figure of the late 20th century, is 61 today.

Back before Daily Kos, Dan Rather was the vitriol-spewing, hate-monger on the left. During his “news” broadcasts, Dan Rather made it a point to refer to Dan Quayle as “J. Danfort Quayle, III” in order to make Dan Quayle seem more like an out-of-touch elitist. Dan was named for his father’s army buddy, James Danforth, who died in combat in World War II. There were no other Quayles by with that name, but to this day, if you google “J. Danforth Quayle, III” you’ll find that Dan Rather’s lie has stuck.

(How many times did Dan Rather refer to Bill Clinton as “William Jefferson Clinton,” or even “W. Jefferson Clinton, III”?)
Read more »

Spoiler alert: If you want to wait to find out what’s going to happen in tonight’s Super Bowl LXII matchup between the Patriots and the Giants, do not read the following post.

I don’t normally engage in sports predictions, but Art Monk and Darrell Green made it into the NFL Hall of Fame yesterday. Not only does that mean that I’m in an unusually good mood, but it means that I’m feeling an enthusiasm for football that I haven’t felt since college — enough to overcome my sadness that Joe Gibbs resigned a few weeks ago. At any rate, here are my predictions:
Read more »

Spoiler alert: If you want to wait to find out what’s going to happen to the GOP candidates in the upcoming Florida primary, do not read the following post.
Read more »

In a last-ditch move to re-invigorate his failing campaign to win Florida, John McCain has started telling out-and-out lies about Mitt Romney.

This afternoon, McCain started claiming that Romney favored a “timetable for withdrawal” in Iraq. McCain said:

John McCain: If we surrender and wave a white flag, like Senator Clinton wants to do, and withdraw, as Governor Romney wanted to do, then there will be chaos, genocide, and the cost of American blood and treasure would be dramatically higher. (emphasis added).

McCain makes his claim about Romney based on the following quote from an interview Romney did with ABC News last April (which even the Associated Press says “didn’t show Romney making [McCain's alleged] comment”):

Mitt Romney: There’s no question that the president and (Iraqi) Prime Minister al-Maliki have to have a series of timetables and milestones that they speak about. But those shouldn’t be for public pronouncement. You don’t want the enemy to understand how long they have to wait in the weeds until you’re going to be gone.

Read more »

I apologize to everyone who’s been put out by LDSelect being offline for the past few days. It’s domain expired. I blame A2 Hosting. Their service is unreliable, and they tend to be hostile and snide when dealing with customers. That’s made things difficult. When I started that site and this, I hosted everything at A2 hosting, and they did a lousy job. They couldn’t throttle my usage effectively, so they asked me to move elsewhere because I was consuming too many resources. All they ended up handling was the registration of my domains, and they couldn’t even get that right. They ended up refusing to renew the domain altogether, though they’d just renewed Mormon Mentality a few weeks ago. In the end, I had to go to enom to make things work.

I’m also going to be doing some updates to it. I’ve also accumulated a large list of blogs that folks want me to add, and I’ll be adding those, too. In the meantime, continue to enjoy the most advanced and most retribution-free bloggernacle aggregator available!

And I also want to extend a very big “Thank You!” to everyone who has used LDSelect and has made it a viable aggregator! You all are the best.

Mike Huckabee responded to a debate question about whether he raised taxes in Arkansas by saying, “I raised hope.” He then went on to justify his tax record by pointing out that no bridges were collapsing in Arkansas. This prompts a few obvious observations:

1. Huckabee successfully transforms hope into the bane of taxpayers. Contra Emily Dickenson: this doesn’t float.
2. There is no end to the depths to which he’ll sink in order to justify himself, even leveraging another state’s tragedy to tout his own gubernatorial record in ways that are both transparently trivial and incorrect. At least 49 other governors can say the same thing. Does that justify their tax policies?
3. This link indicates that the bridge in Minnesota collapsed because of a design flaw, not due to poor maintenance and definitely not due to lack of taxes.

Mike Huckabee: Wrong on metaphysics. Wrong on ethics. Wrong on aesthetics. Wrong for America!

Seriously, this guy is a clown.