On “Mormon Outpost” I’ll disagree with you. Here’s an interesting analysis of Facebook users. The author looked at who your Facebook friends were by geography. And, sure enough there was a “Mormon” Utah to Idaho type: [link]

The natural tendency is to not want to have a small group/type that only represents such a smaller population than some of the other groups. However, if that group is distinctive enough, it makes sense to let the group bubble up.

There are solutions to this. Code Mormons as Evangelical and the message you might be crafting would work equally well for both groups – socially conservative, strict sex roles, etc. However, Mormons are better educated, more successful than many Evangelicals are so depending on the purpose of your grouping, it might not make sense to combine them with Evangelicals.

Separately, “Mormon Outpost” seems like a pretty small, narrow basis for assigning a national identity. There just aren’t that many Mormons.

John Floyd
Republican for Council
5th Ward

Yes, in the appendix of Patchwork Nation that lays out the some of the methodology for the assignment of counties to categories, there’s an acknowledgment of Broomfield [p. 220]: “New counties do occasionally emerge, for instance Broomfield, Colorado, and some disappear through consolidation, but this a rare occurrence.” The idea is that the authors wanted to base the analysis on something that’s relatively, even if not perfectly stable.

I wasn’t able to attend the Pat Murphy talk (the LWV scheduled a conflict that night), but did attend the recent talk by Nicole Foss [link], as did Mr. Bean. She touched on peak oil and energy issues but also on some very thought-provoking points about the world money supply and the likelihood of deflation. As she said in only one subtle allusion to chaos theory, it is an example of complexity.

More important, I find it hard to take Bean as a serious candidate for mayor. His website, which I will not link to [good luck finding it in a normal Google search], still has this tidbit on it less than a month away from the election:

Thanks for being an engaged citizen and learning about my candidacy. I’ll be adding more information for your consideration over the coming weeks prior to the general election in November, so check back for issue statements and more.

There is a link to his experience but no platform. Instead, we can click through all of his media links to see what his views are; his plans for the city; etc.