Though environmental orthodoxy holds that Third World deforestation is caused by rapacious clear-cutters and ruthless cattle barons, penniless peasants seeking fuel wood may be the greatest threat to our forests.

How many times have you bought something thinking it would make you happy, and found it does not?

I think professional sports, football, to use it as an example, it's fundamentally a form of entertainment.

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.

I'm working seven days a week in the fall. I couldn't possibly keep that up. This is only for the fall. In the last couple of years I've tended to do most of my serious writing in the winter, when there's nothing going on with football.

The only reason runaway global warming seems unstoppable is that we have not yet tried to stop it.

Now, for pure bloggers, for individual people who are just posting their own thoughts, they would still run the same risk of saying something wrong or embarrassing, but they wouldn't harm their institutions by doing so.

Count your blessings for selfish reasons! Psychological studies show that people who are aware of their blessings and feel grateful for them live longer than non-grateful people, have fewer medical problems such as hypertension, earn more and achieve longer marriages.

Stereotypes involving Christian identity, Christian persecution is so far back in history now that no one fears it being revived, unless you live in China, I guess.

Instant-doomsday hyperbole caused the world's attention to focus on the hypothetical threat of global warming to the exclusion of environmental menaces that are real, palpable, and awful right now.

Everyone needs a certain amount of money. Beyond that, we pursue money because we know how to obtain it. We don't necessarily know how to obtain happiness.

Set aside the many competing explanations of the big bang something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization - that something transcendent started it all - which has hard-science types... using terms like miracle.

Autumn truly is what summer pretends to be: the best of all seasons. It is as glorious as summer is tedious as subtle as summer is obvious as refreshing as summer is wearying. Autumn seems like paradise.

If our goal in legislating against carbon releases is not simply punishing the West and its power companies but truly trying to reduce the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the main event will be in the developing world. We must use the smartest possible economics, and that means investing in China and India.

When television producers say it is the parents obligation to keep children away from the tube, they reach the self satire point of warning that their own product is unsuitable for consumption

Peace on earth and mercy mild are still possible. On Christmas Eve, all things are possible.