I'm going to try to express this thought as unoffending as I can. I haven't talked about religious topics a lot in the past but I have been thinking a lot about something today and want to express it with my other thoughts.

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (known by many as mormons or LDS) I find it strange sometimes how people react once they know you are a "mormon" and you are talking about religious topics. Their first reaction is "Oh man....he's going to try to convert me now" and while it is true that I would love to share the gospel with anyone who will listen, I respect everyone's right to worship as they wish. That's one of the things that makes America so great.

Well if I can get beyond that first reaction with someone and continue a religious discussion about anything, they are usually so sure that we don't believe in the same things, when most of the time we do. What has really surprised me over the last few years is peoples astonishment at the fact that I and many other millions of members believe that we have a prophet here on this earth today and that Christ's church has been restored on this earth just as is prophesied in the bible.

I guess the reason why it surprises me so much is that when I am talking to anyone who truly believes in Christ and the bible, then they also believe and understand that prophets have been on the earth since the creation and through all time until after Christ's life and all the apostles had all died. In my mind it is hard to imagine that there would be no need for prophets anymore since they were part of so much of our history.

A lot of people are so afraid of being "converted" as if it was a disease and was contagious that they refuse to even have an open mind to find the truth themselves and find it outrageous that I could believe in something like that. What I see is just history repeating itself again and again. There are many scritural accounts of people refusing to believe in prophets when they are still alive, but after they are long gone, people find it much easier to believe in them because their prophecies have become truths.

While surfing some of the military blogs out there, I discovered a site called beerforsoldiers.com and although I don't drink alcohol or provide a way for others to drink, I found it just as frustrating as many drinkers when I found that the military made the soldiers shut down the site.

The site asked for donations so these soldiers could have some drinks while they were on R&R and to fund a large party when the unit returned from Iraq. They said they received about 200-300 a month for their cause. The whole reason it was shut down was because someone of higher rank in the military didn't like the site and the message it sent about soldiers so they got lawyers involved and quickly brought up the fact that the military is not allowed to solicit anything from the public and said the site had to shut down.

The reason this frustrates me so much is that I feel the military is very hypocritical at times. For example, the Iraqi people are very good at downloading and making copies of DVDs and movies and making illegal copies. From what I understand, in an Iraqi market, a DVD which sometimes contains two movies on it only costs $1 and a lot of the time it looks just like the original and is a perfect copy.

Although it is illegal I don't think there are any copyright laws in Iraq so there isn't anything that can be done about Iraqi open markets, but many of the US bases in Iraq have markets on base where Iraqis come in and sell their products. Many bases allow these DVDs to be sold and since they are for Americans, they usually go for $5 a DVD since we will pay much more and usually not haggle for prices.

On top of that, during redeployment customs briefings soldiers are told that they are only allowed a certain amount of copies of each title to take home with them (sometimes I hear 1, sometimes I hear 3). That means you can have as many illegal movies as you want as long as you don't have multiple copies of each title. Now keep in mind, these are illegal copies and even having one is technically wrong.

My point obviously is that in a round about way, the US military is saying pirate movies are ok by allowing the sale of the movies on the bases and allowing soldiers to take them back into the US when they go home. There is a very similar situation over in Korea because of lack of copyright laws, but I can't speak from experience.

Usually what it comes down to is what offends the senior military commander in the area and I guess beerforsoldiers.com is wrong in someone's eyes, but illegal copies of movies is not.

By the way, I have not purchased any of these movies.

Is this really fair?

Now I don't like spam any better than any other person in the world, but it doesn't harm me in any way either. I can't believe this guy received 9 years in prison for sending out spam. 9 years! Now that is more than most rapists get. Did this guy really do something worse than rape? I'd personally rather see rapists and other criminals do longer and harder time, but when the court system get so backwards that we punish trivial crimes worse than violent crimes, something is really wrong.

Another good example is Martha Stuart. She got sentenced with a fine and her time in prison, yet one of the people that helped in the process to leak the information to Martha only got a fine. Now who really should have known better? If you had a lot of money invested in coca cola and your broker called you and said "coca cola is going belly up tomorrow, you should probably sell" what are you going to do? And if you did sell, did you do something worse than the person who's job it is to do investing and should definitely know better and was the one who seeked and offered the information in the first place?

I wish we could get our punishment system balanced out and additionally stop stupid lawsuits that reward people for their obvious ignorance. (i.e. The burglar suing the homeowner because they got hurt in their house while burglarizing it)

I guess this is just my rant for the day. The lesson is "Don't Spam! It's a serious crime."

Yea!

I'm sure I'm one of many bloggers who is cheering that this election is over and there is now a clear winner, President Bush! I woke up this morning and turned on the news and they were just beginning the argument about OHIO and I was pretty confident at that time that the President would win, but I was ready to see what would happen throughout the day since no winner was declared. I was also so glad that he won the popular vote too so that people who don't understand the purpose of the electoral process couldn't complain. I'm now very interested to see what will happen over the next year with many issues.

I Can't Wait For Tomorrow!!!

I am so excited to get this election over. It will be interesting to see what scandals come out in the news about the voting process. I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion on it for a while no matter who wins. I have watched this video several times making fun of the Florida voting scandals and it makes me laugh every time even though I am for Bush. If you want to watch it, right mouse click on the link and choose "save target as". I'm not saying it is ok, but there has been a lot of focus on voting fraud this year and the concerns of electronic voting machines and even if it happens this year, I'm sure it is happening no more than it has in past years. Who ever does lose this election, I sure hope they are humble about it.