As the old saying goes, “You can’t fool Mother Nature.”  Likewise, despite the fantasies of many politicians and demagogues, you can’t really fool the laws of economics.   Which illustrates the fact that — to use a slogan made popular, I think, by the late great Milton Friedman — “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”   You may think that all of the zoning and environmental regulations heaped upon homebuilders over the past few decades are a… Read more

    “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)   Posted from Boston, Massachusetts     Read more

    I got a kick out of this.  Perhaps you will, too:     Some say that it doesn’t really demonstrate that monkeys have a sense of fairness or justice.  I’m inclined to think that it does.  In any event, it’s both interesting and funny.   Posted from Boston, Massachusetts     Read more

    This is an interesting list:   Best General Conference Talks of All Time: An Unofficial Study   How would yours differ?  (I’m assuming, if only as a matter of probability, that your personal list won’t be identical.)   Posted from Boston, Massachusetts     Read more

    The latest installment of the biweekly Hamblin-Peterson column for the Deseret News has appeared, to the consternation of decent and rational people everywhere (to the very limited extent that they pay attention):   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865681678/How-reading-the-Bible-changed-in-the-early-16th-century-during-the-Reformation.html   Posted from Boston, Massachusetts     Read more

    What this article argues is absolutely essential to understand.  Especially for those who are terrified at the sheer thought of shari‘a.   How anti-Shariah marches mistake Muslim concepts of state and religious law   Posted from Boston, Massachusetts     Read more

    It’s just yet another of life’s injustices.  But why?   Nobody quite knows, but here are some informed suggestions:   http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/why-men-dont-live-as-long-as-women   Posted from Boston, Massachusetts     Read more

    Dr. Stanford Carmack continues his fascinating studies of the language of the English Book of Mormon in a new article published in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture:   How Joseph Smith’s Grammar Differed from Book of Mormon Grammar: Evidence from the 1832 History   Posted from Boston, Massachusetts     Read more

    “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)   I would caution, though, that Emerson, a local boy, wasn’t just talking about thoughts that merely “cross our minds.”  He had in view the thoughts that we allow to linger, that we come back to over and over again, that we nourish our daydreams.   We can’t easily control what simply flits across our mental radar screen.  But we can deny lodging in… Read more

    Some braying, in an article in a conservative magazine to which I was a charter subscriber — it has lately wandered too far into Trumpism for my taste — from a jackass named Eric Peters:   Utah Has Just Become Drier     I fully understand that Mormons and Mormonism will be an unavoidable part of any reasonably competent story about Utah laws and alcohol consumption.  But it seems to me that Mr. Peters went beyond that into genuine religious… Read more