That would be “Bitchy Literary Criticism”. John & I were having a conversation about good books and the concept of “strong female characters”, as a reason I might want to explore the Sabriel series. My response was that I had been recommended Miyazaki’s manga/movies for the same reason, that the author writes “strong female characters”, […]

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So Freedom Sunday has come and gone. I didn’t hear anything on the news this morning about whether or not major changes are in the works, but I’d like to hear from the MoF crowd about this. Should churches be tax exempt or free to use their spiritual influence to exert political influence (and pay […]

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Microfinance is the lending and borrowing of (relatively) small amounts of money. Generally, the lender is a (relatively) rich Westerner and the borrower a poor citizen of a developing country. And I don’t mean relatively poor; I mean abject poverty, where $25 to buy a goat means the difference between being able to feed your […]

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I’ve always said that a few years abroad should be required for Americans. But recently, I’ve been meeting people who’ve spent those few years abroad but who remain remarkably closed-minded, and provincial. Maybe it’s mitigated by the years abroad, maybe the years abroad did nothing and they would have ended up this way anyway, or […]

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*desperately trying to avoid typing “theoCRAZY!”*
I missed this discussion at school, but have been seeing flyers for a forum on asylum law that state:
HOW IMPORTANT IS YOUR
FREEDOM OF RELIGION?
[…]
Come hear [asylum professionals] discuss asylum law and practice. In particular, they will discuss the plight of Christian converts in Iran and their attempt to get asylum […]

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I haven’t yet seen WALL•E, but here is an article I found interesting discussing the genders of the two main robots. It is an interesting discussion of the perceived genders we apply to the characters based on our cultural assumptions. It is also interesting, however, how we can work beyond them.
hat tip

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As a voting member of a “third” party, I am often annoyed by the assumptions of non-third party voters. First, I’d like to take issue with “third”. In general, yes, this is a two-party system. But “Green” is not synonymous with “Third”. Especially since there are some really whacked-out “thirds” that deserve to be called […]

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We make sense of the world and our relation to it through the stories we tell.  Back in my young and wild Mormon days (riding bikes with the gang down the street of Japan, doing drive by conversions), I told the story of Joseph Smith to anyone who would listen.  The cool thing was that […]

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One of my sisters (#4) has been known to wax poetic about the fact that, in this current day and age, people are obsessed with themselves. Hence, “i-” products (iPod, iLife, iBrator, iWannaCookie, &c.). When I heard about Apple’s migration of .Mac to MobileMe, I couldn’t conceive of telling her (myname@me.com just sounds so pretentious). […]

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I did some bad things during my stint as a Mormon missionary in Japan.  I’d like to repent of one of them right now.
Some of my Japanese friends confided deep, personal spiritual experiences with me.  In several cases I coopted their experiences for my own ends, and using my words, contorted them so that they […]

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