Church Video Was 62nd Most Watched on YouTube

Last weekend, the new Mormon Messages YouTube channel was identified as the #62 most-watched YouTube channel. This occurred largely because of the response to President Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s inspiring video "Create."

The new video for this week is from Elder Gary J. Coleman "Are We Christians?"

Obama Politics: Socialism, Marxism, Communism

We Surround Them

From glennbeck.com,

The Nine Principles

1. America is good.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

12 Values

• Honesty
• Reverence
• Hope
• Thrift
• Humility
• Charity
• Sincerity
• Moderation
• Hard Work
• Courage
• Personal Responsibility
• Friendship

Babies and SIDS

Studies show that when babies are sleeping in a room warmer than 70 degrees, having a fan in the room reduced the probability of SIDS by 94%. As babies breathe in and out, it forms little pockets of CO2 and the fan moves the air to dissipate the CO2.

Americans Pick Obama as Personal Hero; Jesus Comes Second

A new poll has found that President Barack Obama's popularity as a hero overwhelms that of Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, and Mother Teresa.

The Christian Post reports that the Harris Poll was conducted on 2,634 U.S. adults from January 12-19, 2009, just ahead of President Obama's inauguration. In the poll, adults (aged 18+) named Obama as the person they admire enough to call their hero. The poll did not provide a list for those surveyed to pick from or choose between.

The complete top ten list of people Americans admired and would call their hero is as follows:
1. Barack Obama
2. Jesus Christ
3. Martin Luther King
4. Ronald Reagan
5. George W. Bush
6. Abraham Lincoln
7. John McCain
8. John F. Kennedy
9. Chesley Sullenberger
10. Mother Teresa

Changing Tires Can be Dangerous

Soccer Flip Shot

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Surgeon Helping Children

Reader's Digest just posted an article about a high school friend of mine, plastic surgeon Geoff Williams, and his full-time philanthropic work in correcting facial deformities in children. He has performed almost 1,000 operations in 12 countries.

Learn more about his International Children's Surgical Foundation.

Stimulus Bill T-Shirts

Improv Everywhere

Improv Everywhere is a group that organizes interesting and funnny public pranks. See the Improv Everywhere site for a list of their pranks. My favorites are the following. (Somewhere on each page, you'll find a video of the pranks.)

• Food Court Musical


• Slow Motion Home Depot


• Frozen Grand Central


• Orlando City Freeze Walk


• Identical Twins on NYC Subway


• Free Snowcones

More Improv Everywhere videos are available on YouTube.

Buy Songs Online for 8 Cents

I just found WeRmp3, a site with some songs for $0.08 each.

Church Growth by Stake

Watch this video that shows the growth of stakes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1830 to 2007.

You can also download your own copy of the video.

Availability of Credit

Hopefully the government’s plan to loosen up the availability of credit will allow people to borrow enough money so they can get completely out of debt!

The Cost of Illegal Immigration

Consider what US taxpayers are spending on the following:

1. $11-22 Billion on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments. Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77


2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html


3. $12 Billion dollars a year on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally. Verify at:http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html


4. $17 Billion dollars a year for education for the children of illegal aliens born in the USA, known as anchor babies. Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html


5. $3 Million dollars a DAY to incarcerate illegal aliens. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html


6. 30% percent of all federal prison inmates are illegal aliens. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html


7. $90 Billion dollars a year on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by American taxpayers. Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html


8. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by illegal aliens. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html


9. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the USA. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt..01.html


10. During the year of 2005 there were 4-10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our southern border, including as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from terrorist countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana crossed into the U.S. from the southern border. Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht


11. The National policy Institute estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion, or an average cost of $41-$46 billion annually over a five year period. Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf


12. In 2006, illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.
    Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm


13. The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly one million sex crimes committed by illegal immigrants in the United States. Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml

Just these 14 items are costing us a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION dollars a year.

Men Just Make Sense

NICKNAMES

• If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Kate and Sarah.


• If Mike , Dave and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla and Four-eyes.

EATING OUT

• When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave, and John will each throw in $20, even though it's only for $32.50. None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.


• When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

MONEY

• A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.


• A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need but it's on sale.

BATHROOMS

• A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel.


• The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337. A man would not be able to identify more than 20 of these items.

ARGUMENTS

• A woman has the last word in any argument.


• Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

FUTURE

• A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.


• A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

SUCCESS

• A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.


• A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

MARRIAGE

• A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.


• A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does.

DRESSING UP

• A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the trash, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail.


• A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.

NATURAL

• Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.


• Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

OFFSPRING

• Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams.


• A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

A married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people remembering the same thing!

Church Videos for Blogs and Web Sites

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has established three official Church channels on YouTube to help share gospel messages. Find great videos to watch and share them with others You can also embed them in your blogs and Web sites.

• The Mormon Messages YouTube channel provides a simple way to watch and share brief, gospel-centered videos. The channel will be updated each week with new videos that teach basic beliefs of the LDS (”Mormon”) Church, including stories of hope and inspiration. This week’s video features Elder Jeffrey R. Holland talking about how to love other people. This is a nice message to think about with Valentine’s Day coming up on Saturday.
• The YouTube channel LDS Public Affairs features video clips posted by the Public Affairs office of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
• The Mormon New Era Messages YouTube channel features videos from the New Era, a magazine for Mormon teens. Watch video messages based on New Era MormonAds, like the new one “Wish You Were Here.”

Learn about more sites with LDS videos.

Where Are All the Moderates and Conservatives?

Why aren't moderate and conservative people more active in trying to change American politics?

We don't want to fundamentally change America, so we don't tend to get as involved as liberal activists do. Some of them are unhappy in their lives and they believe they can achieve happiness if they can fundamentally change America.

We like America the way it is. That's why we're not as noticable as liberals. But now, with America heading toward socialism/marxism, we're going to have to get more involved.

Paraphrased from Bill Bennett's Morning in America radio show, 11/29/08

Tithing

Now That's a Hunter

Cap and Trade Policy

I just read a great definition of the ridiculous “cap and trade” policy which government is ramming down our throats to save the planet:

"Here’s how it works: the federal government sets a limit on carbon emissions…state and local emitters buy permits to emit…if an emitter emits too much, it can buy more emission permits from another emitter who didn’t use all of its emissions. The key to all of this ingenuity is that the emission cap will be set so low, and permit prices set so high, that emitters will have to reduce emissions dramatically or go out of business. Global warming problem solved. Well, at least any global warming that sits over Utah. We don’t really have any say about the bustling economies of China or India or any of our enemy countries who don’t give one emission about global warming. But at least we’ll be doing our part.

"Okay, so this is where we all say, “You’ve got to be kidding me!!” This is the sum total of the New Green Economy? Cap and Trade? This is our economic future – buying and selling carbon credits. You know, that was a bad idea the first time we saw it on Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome."

The whole piece worth reading: The Greening of Utah. It shows the shallowness of this "economic development plan" to save the planet.

Back Side of Mount Rushmore

Limited Government

I think the US government has expanded way beyond what is good for us. Politicians think they should step in and solve every problem and be involved in every aspect of our lives. I believe that people should seek to solve their own problems and when they need help, the local community should begin to help in limited ways. Seldom is the best solution a national, bureaucratic solution with all its overhead, lack of perspective, and waste.

I believe in limited, constitutional government. I support public policies that limit government spending, limit the role of government programs in our lives, limit the authority we delegate to governments, and limit the physical and legal expansion of governmental presence.

Join me in signing the Commitment to Limited Government if you believe in the following:

• That local government closest to the people is best-suited to make decisions of the people


• Personal responsibility


• An essential balance between self-reliance and charitable giving


• A humane rule of law


• Stable and autonomous families


• The maintenance and integrity of private enterprise and community organizations


• The interdependent fabric of social community.


• Protecting the integrity of the free market.

The commitment states that "the primary role and function of state and local governments are to provide a just and orderly system of laws that allow maximum freedom for individuals and communities to safely intersect, effectively interact, and honestly transact with one another. State and local governments should defer action to the private sector whenever possible, and should only be a last resort in providing direct benefits."

You may also be interested to read the governing principles of the Sutherland Institute

Government Spending Out of Control

The Obama "stimulus" plan has little to do with stimulating the economy. It is the way for him and congress to fund all their pet projects.

Approved in 2008: $750 billion. This was handed to the Treasury Secretary to spend however he wanted, with no accountability. They can't even say where a lot of the money went. However, the bigger problem is that this was just the down payment. According to Bloomberg, the federal government made commitments worth a total of $8.5 trillion in the bailouts of 2008. That includes actual expenditures as well as loan and asset guarantees. Bianco Research puts the total value of the 2008 bailouts at $8.7 trillion.

Currently being considered by congress: another $900 billion. Do you have any idea how much $900 billion is?

• It is more than all the cash in the United States.
• It is more than we spent on all major U.S. wars, including the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
• This one bill would increase the total national debt by almost 10%. (As of January 27, 2009, the total National Debt is $10.7 trillion.) In Fiscal Year 2008, the U. S. Government spent $412 billion of your money on interest payments. See www.federalbudget.com.

Problems: The stimulus bill won't work. Japan tried it and it didn't work. Roosevelt tried it, but the New Deal just extended the Great Depression.

My 3 favorite parts of the stimulus package:

• $4,190 million to ACORN--the organization responsible for stuffing ballot boxes with "ballots" from thousands of dead people. The more than four billion (yes, that's four thousand million) will be used for “neighborhood stabilization activities.”
• $246 million for investors in big-budget Hollywood movies that don't necessarily qualify for incentives currently. This in spite of the fact that movies brought in a record $1 billion in January 2009--more than any other January in history.
• Hundreds of millions of dollars for Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion business. What does this have to do with stimulating the economy or creating jobs? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explained that family planning services reduce costs by reducing the number of children, and therefore, the financial cost of children's health and education. Great plan: let's prevent contraception and/or kill unborn children so we don't have to pay for them. Since pro-life advocates came unglued about this part of the bill, it may not make it in the final version, but we'll see.

All this pork-barrell spending is interesting in light of the fact that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged on national television that under the Obama administration there would be no pork barrel spending.

Seems to me that the people who stand to gain the most from this "stimulus" package are the three groups who were the most influencial in voting Obama into office: labor unions, liberal media types, and those who are not working or contributing economically.

Details About the Draper LDS Temple

I just learned that once the temple is dedicated March 20, patrons will be required to call ahead and set up an appointment in order to attend a session or perform baptisms. This is because the Draper Temple has seats for only 50 people per session. (The Jordan River Temple seats 120 per session.) They don't want too many people to show up at one time and have to wait to get into a session.

Learn more with this MormonTimes article.

Restroom Sign

More funny translations from engrishfunny.com

The White House Fence

Three contractors are bidding to fix a broken fence at the White House in Washington, DC.

One is from Illinois, another is from Tennessee and the third, is from Florida. All three go with a White House official to examine the fence.



The Florida contractor takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil. "Well," he says, "I figure the job will run about $900: $400 for materials, $400 for my crew and $100 profit for me."



The Tennessee contractor also does some measuring and figuring, then says, "I can do this job for $700: $300 for materials, $300 for my crew and $100 profit for me."



The Illinois contractor doesn't measure or figure, but leans over to the White House official and whispers, "$2,700." The official, incredulous, says, "You didn't even measure like the other guys! How did you come up with such a high figure?" The Illinois contractor whispers back, "$1000 for me, $1000 for you, and we hire the guy from Tennessee to fix the fence." "Done!" replies the government official.



And that, my friends, is how government contracting works!

What brought down the plane in the Hudson River

How to be Miserable

Daily, constantly, we choose by our desires, our thoughts, and our actions whether we want to be blessed or cursed, happy or miserable. ~Ezra Taft Benson

Excellent advice from a blogger:

1. Believe That Things Will Never Change.
Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change. ~Norman Vincent Peale
Tough times never last, but tough people do! ~Robert Schuller

2. Think About Your Problems
Everyone can be discontented if he ignores his blessings and looks only at his burdens. ~Thomas S. Monson

3. Worry About Things You Can't Control
He who worries about calamities suffers them twice over. ~Og Mandino


4. Complain About Your Blessings or compare them against things you have sacrificed.
I complained because I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet. ~Sign in a shoe shop


5. Think About Yourself
Generally speaking, the most miserable people I know are those who are obsessed with themselves: the happiest people I know are those who lose themselves in the service of others. ~Gordon B. Hinckley


6. Put Yourself Down (and/or Compare Yourself To Others "Better Off")
Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win... ~William Shakespeare


7. Hold Onto Grudges, Don't forgive, Don't give people chances to change
There is no peace in the nursing of a grudge. There is no happiness in living for the day when you can "get even." ~Gordon B. Hinckley


8. Put Deadlines On Your Happiness (i.e. "I won't be happy until __ happens.")
Happiness is a decision, not a destination. It's an attitude, not an event! ~John Bytheway


9. Always Want More
Remember that in the end, surely God will be looking only for clean hands, not full ones. ~Jeffrey R. Holland


10. Postpone Prayer
Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. ~ Matthew 7:7


11. Recycle Regrets
The past is behind; learn from it. The future is ahead; prepare for it. The present is here; live in it! ~Thomas S. Monson