The Mormon Diaries, Part Five: Beer And Boozing In Provo, Utah

The Mormon bartender is scared.

Picture the hang-dog faced cast of Napoleon Dynamite. Try to remember the frumpier extras in the back. Now try to imagine the pudgier ones who didn’t make final cut. And you have the scared Mormon bartender.

He doesn’t have the cast’s awkward, goofy charm. He has a mullet, a gift for awkward silences, a name tag that reads Tyler. So he wasn’t in Napoleon Dynamite. He is the scared Mormon bartender at Outback Steakhouse.

Tyler doesn’t know much about alcohol. But he doesn’t have the social grace for reception up front, either. So management sticks him in the back. At the bar. With less lighting and, this being Provo, Utah, with few to no drinking customers.

Except tonight. Tonight I am hosting a senior sales manager from France.

And the Mormon bartender is scared.

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America’s Prison System Is An International Embarrassment

The Article: America’s Prison System Is An International Embarrassment by Dylan Ratigan in Business Insider.

The Text: Friends,

In life there are some clear paths that we can walk down today to reach a better place, while others are less clear, dangerous even, yet no less important for us to travel.
Beyond my work with jobs, food and vets, few things keep me up more than the disastrous functionality of our prison system.

It is, after all, no secret that the U.S. houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates, while representing a mere 5 percent of the world’s population.

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For-Profit Prisons Admit To Corruption Without Consequence

Corrections Corporation of America recently admitted to falsifying the hours of 4,800 employees in Idaho’s largest prison, thus increasing the amount of money the state–aka taxpayers–paid them…for nothing. In spite of this obvious corruption, there is little being done to punish the institution.

A Vision Of Our Economy

But the Keystone Pipeline will create jobs, man…

Tomas Young’s Fuck-You Letter To Bush And Cheney

The Article: in Dangerous Minds.

The Text:

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

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