Some of you may have seen the TV series “Jericho.” If you have not, and you don’t like spoilers, don’t read on (we have some very sensitive readers when it comes to spoilers on this blog).

“Jericho” is a TV show that explores what happens in a small town in Kansas named Jericho after nuclear weapons destroy multiple cities in the U.S. There’s love, and evil, and food storage issues, and some very intriguing stories dealing with how people struggle without a government.

I really like the series “Jericho,” but it has a huge, and I mean HUGE, fault, which is: there are no major religious figures, nobody really talks about going to church at all, and no church plays any important roll in the town. We are talking about small-town Kansas here. Have none of the writers of “Jericho” actually been to Kansas? In every town in Kansas, local pastors play a central and crucial role.

I live in small-town Colorado, which pretty similar to small-town Kansas. Our ward (we have one ward for the town and surrounding farms) is central to the community. No big community event gets planned without the Mormons playing a part. So, if many nuclear weapons were to hit the U.S., I can confidently say that, at least in my small town, the Church would take a central role.

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M* readers in the Utah area are invited to the first-ever M* meet and greet on Aug. 15, 2011 at 5 p.m. We will be meeting at a private home in the Lehi area. For those of you like me who don’t know where Lehi is, it is in the Salt Lake City area about half-way between Sandy and Provo (I think). This is your chance to meet the world-famous team of M* bloggers and commenters.

Please send me an e-mail at geoff@millennialstar.org if you would like to join the fun.

Mitt Romney is being criticized for comments in Iowa today in which he said the following:

Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings my friend.”

This statement was met by jeers from the low-forehead types in the crowd. You can see the video on the above link.

Mitt is right. Corporations ARE people. If they are not people, what are they?

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I simply can’t understand why any religious person — or even somebody neutral about relgion — should be concerned that Rick Perry, quite possibly our next president, attended a prayer rally. Apparently there were about 30,000 people at the rally. Perry spoke as well as a number of ministers.

Here is Rick Perry speaking at the rally:

Here are some of the things he did.

–He prayed for President Obama.
–He said God’s “agenda is not a political agenda. His agenda is a salvation agenda.”
–He said God is “wise enough not to be affiliated with any political party.”
–Perry spent a lot of time talking about salvation and God.

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Well, it looks like we may have a debt ceiling “deal.” Can we all breathe a sigh of relief? The stock market will respond well today, so on the surface people will be happier. Everybody likes compromise, and this deal makes both sides unhappy, so that’s a great compromise, right?

Well, if your idea of a compromise is getting herpes rather than AIDS, I guess that’s alright. Frankly, I’d prefer neither, and the graph at the top explains why.
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