A front-page article in today's LA Times provides fodder for today's blog.  The front-page headline is innocuous:  "A bid to shake up Utah's liquor laws."  On an interior page, blazing across all six columns:  "Tearing down the Zion curtain?"
 
Now, the article is more balanced than the headlines would have one believe.  In fact, if anything, it supports the current Utah liquor laws.  It might be hard to see that, given the incendiary backpage headline and the article's continual reminder that the "politically powerful Mormon Church" controls things in Utah.  But even if I weren't in support of Utah's liquor laws, it would be tough for me to rush to change them because (gasp) they "stymie Salt Lake City's otherwise flourishing culinary scene and slow the growth of the state's $7.4 billion tourism industry."  Or, how about this:  "'It's silly--ridiculous'" that a restauranteur has the aesthetic of his restaurant hurt, or that a bartender has to pour drinks out of view of his patrons.

OMIGOSH!  LET'S TEAR DOWN THE ZION CURTAIN!!!!

Utah is being compared to the former Soviet bloc in a front-page article of the Times--and why?  It's liquor laws are different from California's?  And there is a sinister undertone in the "grandfatherly" voice of Apostle D. Todd Chistopherson because--why?  The Mormon Church favors limiting alcohol consumption?

This one, I confess, is a little easier to follow than some others from this week.  Hollywood has been in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, and when Hollywood can't get its drinks the way it wants them, heads will roll.  The Times is merely helping to roll the heads.

Along these same lines, I wonder why in the world I was led to believe that the Sochi Olympics were going to be the worst since Berlin in 1936.  Or what is so political about climate variations?  Or why, in the midst of the worst drought in 500 years, California doesn't just desalinate water from the largest ocean on earth?  There's a reason for everything, and it usually has nothing at all to do with such mundane things as the Olympics or climate variation or water.  It's usually tied in with someone's financial or emotional or political investments, and the only reason we are supposed to believe that contemporary Russia is worse than the former Soviet Union, or climate change means to vote for one candidate and not another, or there's something wrong with desalinated water (other than the tastelessness) is because somebody somewhere probably has a finger in some pot of money.