It looks more and more like Mitt Romney will be the Republican candidate.  There is a still a chance that Herman Cain may surge, but he doesn’t have much money, so I would bet against him.   Don’t take my word for it:  Intrade has Romney at almost a 70 percent chance of winning.

I was a big Romney supporter in 2008.  If it is Romney vs. Obama, I will be voting for Romney.  But I will make a prediction:  the vast majority of people reading this will be disappointed in a Romney presidency four years from now.  They will feel like Romney was the best of a lot of bad choices.  Overall, not much hope and not much change.

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On my Facebook page, I have had a lot of fun at the expense of the Occupy Wall Street folks.  If you think they are white knights, I would encourage you to read this description of what the protesters are actually doing (Caution:  graphic photos).  In addition, you might want to look at some of their ridiculous demands, which will hurt the poor much more than help them.

But there are people in the Occupy groups who have many decent points, especially from a Mormon perspective.  Our economic woes today can be traced directly to a series of secret combinations that have restricted liberty and hurt communitarian interests.  To the extent that the Occupy movement focuses on these things, they are doing a very good thing.

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Please add your thoughts on General Conference talks.

From “The Way of the Intellectuals,” an essay in “An Approach to the Book of Mormon,”  pp. 375-376.

One thing the Book of Mormon illustrates is that there is no compromise possible with those who attack the gospel on what they call intellectual grounds.  The church flourished mightily when it got rid of them, but suffered gravely while they were in its midst.  No men spent more time with Jesus than the Scribes and Pharisees; they questioned him constantly, and he always answered them — yet there is no instance of his ever converting one of them.  The doctors talked his language, they studied the scriptures day and night, they heard him preach, and they held long discussions with him, yet though he converted dockworkers and bankers, farmers and women of the streets, tax-collectors and soldiers, he never converted the doctors.  It was they who planned his death.

After all, no man can learn enough in his lifetime to count for very much, and no one knows that better than the man who diligently seeks knowledge — that is the lesson of Faust.  How then can any honest man believe that his modicum of knowledge can supersede revelation and supplant the authority of the priesthood?

Discuss.

Any parent who has watched kids play has watched while one kid will do something incredibly unfair and then appeal to the parents to impose his sense of fairness.  For example, at Joe’s birthday party, Mike will immediately take Joe’s brand-new toy, and when the toy is returned to Joe, Mike will say, “that’s not fair!”

Appealing to “fairness” is silly and childish because fairness is by its very nature subjective.  What you perceive as fair, another doesn’t.   Throughout history, kings thought it was “fair” for them to own most of the land because they organized armies to protect the country.  Slaveowners thought it was “fair” for them to buy and sell human beings.  Stalin thought it was “fair” to send millions of counterrevolutionaries to the gulags to protect the Soviet system.

It should seem self-evident that we don’t base society on subjective goals of fairness.

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