Saturday night (Aug 28), UFC 118 was here in Boston at the TD Garden. Its was tons of fun. My wife, her brother, her sister-in-law, and I all had a great time.

I’m an unlikely UFC fan. I don’t like sports in general. Sure, I passively follow Boston teams. I’ll admit that I still feel connected to the Redskins from growing up in Washington, DC. And occasionally I do watch the post-season match ups. Yet I lack an active interest in sports and sport teams. I just can’t muster that much enthusiasm.

But I love UFC and its mixed martial arts (MMA) style of fighting. Other sports are highly contrived affairs: one doesn’t accidentally find oneself engaged in a baseball, soccer, or football game. Not even boxing, with all of its rules, occurs on accident. But anyone can end up in a fight, and everyone understands whats at stake when you win or lose.

UFC events have great production values, and whether you go to see them live or watch them on pay-per-view you’ll see very high quality and well put-together sporting event. My observances, in no particular order of interest or significance, are as follows:
Read more »

Our very own annegb and a random john have written two incredible descriptions of what went on at Banner of Heaven on The Bloggernacle Times’ ongoing retrospective on the 5-year anniversary of Banner of Heaven.

Here’s a random john’s post.

Here’s annegb’s post.

These posts are worth reading even if you’re not terribly interested in Banner of Heaven, because of the insights that they both bring to bear on the bloggernacle itself.

Rumor has it that Father’s Day is the biggest day of the year for collect calls — presumably children calling their fathers. Whether that is literally true or not, this rumor seems to capture something inescapably stereotypical about fatherhood.

A recent poll by Rasmussen Reports found that,

The majority (71%) of American Adults continue to believe that being a father is one of the most important roles a man can fill in today’s world, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Twelve percent (12%) disagree, and 17% are not sure.

An interesting related fact:

Sixty-four percent (64%) think that being a mother is the most important role for a woman to fill in today’s world.

It’s tempting to conclude from this that the options open to women in today’s world include more roles that trump parenthood than the options open to men.

Of course, plenty of famous people were never fathers. Jesus and George Washington come to mind.
Read more »

I apologize it took so long to get this up.

This year’s 2010 MHA Conference in Independence, MO was sensational — the best I can remember. It was well attended, and loads of fun. If you haven’t made plans to attend the upcoming conference for the John Whitmer Historical Society in Amboy, Illinois this year, I urge you to do so. And please plan to attend next year’s MHA conference over Memorial Day weekend — you won’t regret it.

As always, there were too many excellent papers presented to see everything one wanted to see.
Read more »

I joined Scott B for this week’s Zeitcast to discuss the fake Mormon blog “Banner of Heaven” and my role as Miranda Park Jones, the feminist housewife from Lewiston, ID whose husband worked the night shift in a toilet paper factory. Overall it’s a fairly straightforward, casual, and informative discussion of the blog and Miranda Park Jones’ role in it.

Click here for the thread at Bloggernacle Times on the podcast, which features both direct play of the audio and a link to the Zeitcast page of iTunes music store.

In a nutshell, here is the deal with Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, how her groundbreaking biography of Joseph Smith raised him out of obscurity, why all Mormons owe Fawn Brodie a huge debt of gratitude, and why few Mormon’s understand any of it:

Read more »

Just a quick apology for mindlessly posting a link designed to optimize search results for another, unrelated site. I’d always hoped that if I had to delete a post, it would be as interesting as Kaimi’s Babe’s in Blogland. Oh, well.

We’re proud to announce an exciting new addition to our perma-blogger roster: bbell. bbell is a well known bloggernacle participant and frequent guest permablogger. We’re quite proud that he’s chosen Mormon Mentality as his blogging home.

bbell is married with 5 kids, he went on his mission to South Africa, and he runs his own successful small business. In the church, he has 15 years of YM experience and he considers his own views to be pretty close to current mainstream LDS thought.

Please join us in giving bbell a warm welcome!

If you want to avoid the tsunami-like wave of comments, and prefer an easier, cozier environment in which to discuss today’s conference session, then this is the place.

Tonight from 6 to 8 PM MDT the men and young men of the church will have the opportunity to enjoy the Priesthood Session of General Conference at their local meeting houses. Here at Mormon Mentality, ESO and annegb have worked tirelessly to successfully implemented a security system on this thread that guarantees that any woman who tries to read this thread will bring a curse upon herself and upon her family unto the 4th generation. (Nice work, annegb and ESO!)

So, my priesthood brethren, get your smart phones ready and set them for Mormon Mentality, because this is the place to blog during the priesthood session.

Mormon leaders who say, “Where much is given, much is expected” are usually referring to others to whom comparatively little has been given, while those who believe that the LDS church is a meritocracy are typically referring to themselves. Shame on them. Exploiting the church and church-oriented service opportunities so that they become sources of personal validation and aggrandizement perverts the gospel into an instrument for worldly gain. The Book of Mormon refers to this practice as priestcraft.
Read more »

Why are Mormons so willing to attack Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and those who enjoy it? Not just willing, but eager? I don’t know how it is outside of Mormondom, because I’ve never seen it come up. But I’ve frequently observed Mormons attacking other Mormons — their brothers and sisters in Christ — for reading these books. Why is this?

I’ve been made fun of for what I read. A lot. In college, I read the Illiad on a road trip to a rowing regatta in Madison, WI — not because it was assigned, but because there was a new translation that promised to be the first since Lattimore’s that was worthy of Homer. Once I was reading War and Peace on a beach on Cape Cod. They had a lot of fun with that one. I shrugged and mumbled something to the effect of, “Sorry. It’s just too good to put down.” I don’t really know what to say when this happens. They expect me to bring literature that is merely a diversion, like a James Bond novel. A low-brow, unsophisticated page-turner. I love James Bond novels, the original ones by Ian Flemming. Funny thing: Nobody’s ever made fun of me for reading one of those.

Read more »

Last week, a whistle-blower leaked emails that show leading climate change alarmists destroying scientific data because it refutes their global warming theories, strategizing to suppress and silence and subvert disagreeable scientists and scientific data, privately acknowledging that no global warming has occurred since 1998 (more than a decade), and strategizing on how to use propaganda to avoid having to admit that climate data universally refutes warming-prediction models. (If you haven’t heard about it, look here.) Basically, the most acclaimed scientists in all of the climate change establishment have been caught red-handed twisting the world’s most prestigious, peer-reviewed, scientific journals into tools to to advance their fraudulent conclusions and silence dissent.
Read more »

Attention Readers: If you enjoy mormon-themed posts on blogs or visiting restoration historical sites, then you should attend the JWHA Conference, the MHA Conference, or the Restoration Studies Symposium. You’ll love it. Ask Mel Selcho and Randy Butterfield, two well-known bloggernacle participants who attended the JWHA for the first time just this year. It was great to see them there, and best I could tell, they had a blast. Here’s the schedule for next year’s events:

Set aside the time and make the plans now.

I had a great time attending my favorite historical conference, the John Whitmer Historical Association annual meeting. As usual, attending it was an amazing experience.

The conference began with a screening of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, the groundbreaking documentary on African Americans in the LDS church by Darius Gray and Margaret Young (reviewed on this blog by Devyn S). I’ve seen it several times before, but never with an audience like the one at the JWHA. Connell O’Donovan described how Jane Manning James was forced to stand outside the Salt Lake City temple while she was sealed by proxy to the family of as Eternal Servitor of Joseph Smith. Linda King Newell described doing the temple work for Jane Manning James that had been denied her by LDS church leaders when she was still alive.
Read more »

KUED-Channel 7 will be airing Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, the groundbreaking new documentary on the history of African Americans in the LDS church by Margaret Young and Darius Gray. (Reviewed on this blog by Devyn S.)

KUED HD:

Wed, Oct 7 at 9:00 PM MDT
Sun, Oct 11th at 4:00 PM MDT

KUED World Channel

Thu Oct 8th, 2008 at 7:00 PM MDT

KUED-Channel 7 is the television station of The University of Utah. It is a PBS member station that broadcasts to the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. Major regional cable providers carry KUED-Channel 7, so check your cable provider for channel information and listings.

Don’t miss this exciting opportunity to see this outstanding documentary that has been years in the making. Please spread the word to friends and family in the area.

Irving Kristol died yesterday of lung cancer at 89. A titan of political and social theory, he invented neoconservatism. He was, by the accounts of everyone who knew him, an absolute prince of a man. And he had among the most vigorous minds in American political thought, as he made obvious whenever he wrote or spoke.

Among his accomplishments, aptly summarized by Wikipedia, are the following:

He was an editor and then the managing editor of Commentary magazine from 1947 to 1952; co-founder (with Stephen Spender) of the British-based Encounter from 1953 to 1958; editor of The Reporter from 1959 to 1960; executive vice-president of the publishing house Basic Books from 1961 to 1969; Henry Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University from 1969 to 1987; co-founder and co-editor (first with Daniel Bell and then Nathan Glazer) of The Public Interest from 1965 to 2002;. These were originally liberal publications. He was the founder and publisher of The National Interest from 1985 to 2002.

Kristol was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute (having been an associate fellow from 1972, a senior fellow from 1977 and the John M. Olin Distinguished Fellow from 1988 to 1999). As a member of the board of contributors of the Wall Street Journal, he contributed a monthly column from 1972 to 1997. He served on the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1972 to 1977.

In July 2002, he received from President George W. Bush the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Kristol was married in 1942 to the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. They had two children, Elizabeth Nelson and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard. His family dog, Sniffy, was said to be the inspiration for Snoopy, which was created by his then neighbor Charles M. Schulz.

I am not, myself, a neoconservative. My own conservatism tends to be an economically-focussed version of traditional conservatism with a hint of libertarian conservatism — probably best described as American Thatcherism. But on a gut level, I’ve always felt a strong sympathy for the neoconservative outlook, and I’ve always admired Kristol’s transformation from a radical liberal into a conservative who helped other liberals to make the same transformation and helped to shape American foreign and domestic policy for decades.

We’re proud to announce an exciting new addition to our perma-blogger roster: Burgess. Burgess is well known for bringing us his poetic musings, as well as his unique point of view to such topics as BYU Grounds Crew Poetry, the BYU Standards Office. More recently, he’s posted an interesting analysis of the 2009 Burma Trespassing incident against Aung San Suu Kyi. He is a welcome addition to our blog.

The anticipation is over, and that day that we’ve been waiting for all year long has finally arrived. I wish you and your loved ones a happy International Bacon Day.

For those of you who doubt that crack is not as addictive as bacon, this little video will set you straight.

Paul Krugman’s recent analysis of anti-Obamacare protests makes Philip Kennicott’s idiotic piece in the Washington post look like the work of a genius. Krugman’s reasoning is so baffling, that it won’t do to simply summarize it; one must read it for herself:

Read more »

Philip Kennicott’s piece in today’s Washington post offers a far-fetched explanation of why the Obama/Joker posters are racist. Other writers have simply inferred racism from the color of the makeup, as though it were not dictated by the character juxtaposed with the President’s face. Kennicott tries to extrapolate racism by equating the Joker with racist fears of the inner city, even trying to use the anonymity of its author as evidence of racism.
Read more »