I finished reading Paul Johnson's Intellectuals. The book does a great job examining the personality cults built around intellectuals. The cults are anything but open societies. Many of the great intellectuals of the past might better be described as bullies than as thinkers.

It is very interesting the way that supposed thinkers mark territory with ideas. The class between Wittgenstein and Popper was as animalistic as elk vying for mating rights in the woods.

Unfortunately, the end of the book concludes the problems are with ideas. The problem is with elitism and closed societies. Anyway, I will be adding notes on y-intercept.com.

I finally went to see the Lord of the Rings. I put a review of Salt Lake's Megaplex Theatre on my site. We had about 18 inches of snow, so getting to the theatre was a big challenge.

Once again this production of the LOTR triology lived up to expectations. Of course there is the disappointment that the movie did not have time to deal with the Diminishing of the Shire and the great battle to drive Saruman from the Shire. Of course, 3 hours and 30 minutes pushes a movie to its limit.

The one episode that the movie really missed was that in the second to last confrontation between Gollum and Frodo, Frodo used the ring to place a curse on Gollum that if ever Gollum tried to take the ring again, Frodo would cast him into Mount Doom. This curse is important because essentially the ring destroyed itself. I suspect that Tolkien would have been interested in the reflexive paradox which was one of the great issues of his day.

Forgot to mention...I made a page of things you can order online at the last minute.

Proud Uncle Again

Colleen and Bert completed the adoption procedures for the three new young Stolps in the household. The procedings took place at the Scott Matheson Courthouse.

Lawyers were out protesting IHC's force arbitration clause which threatens to seriously erode the fees that lawyers will get for malpractice cases. I have mixed feelings on the issue. I prefer arbitration to litigation, but force litigation by an organization that controls the market share of the industry is likely to lead to abuse.

Tha Pat Cutting book ended with no bids and only 4 page views. I will relist the book one more time. Never ask me to be in charge of a marketing campaign. You will get zero response.

My first go at selling Pat Cutting's book at ebay was a bust. There was a total of 6 page views...4 of them were me. I will give it a second shot: ebay auction.

I haven't been able to post to Blogger. Let's see if this on takes.

I decided to remove the math book reviews from Descriptive Mathematics and put them on linksalive. That way I have only one cyber bookstore to deal with.

There's a large number of interesting new titles on the market. So I will need to do a lot of work here. This is why there is zero chances of me making it as an internet marketer. I insist on reading a book and liking the book before it goes into the store. That means an empty store.

Well, I am about to touch the publish button. Here goes. The last three times I tried this it failed and I lost my post.

Several months ago, Pat Morrison gave me ten copies of her book A Saga: Choosing Yourself...

To date, I have managed to sell a grand total of zero copies. Hmmm, I was unable to help sell any copies of my sister's book either. My web site for Ryan Hiller has yet to see a sale either. Hmmm, I seem to be very good at not selling stuff.

Anyway, I thought I would take a stab at an ebay auction. I need to pay Pat $7.50 for each book. Being unemployed, I decided to start the auction at what I need to pay her. The only eBaby autions I ever actually sold were penny auctions. I usually ended up selling the work for a penny.

dup

I vote for the new e-voting system.
I vote for the new e-voting system.
I vote for the new e-voting system

...

for (i=1; i < 10000; i++) {

  system.out("I vote for the new e-voting system\n");

}

There, I did my part in bringing on the brave new chad free world.

I am happy to hear that Bush removed the tarriffs on steel.

The fact that he did listen to international pressure on the issue is very positive. That it the way the international community works. The US doesn't need to be a stick in the mud 100% of the time. The US was setting a bad example by ignoring international concerns on far too many issues. The Iraq war would have been avoided if Hussein had made a better show of going along with international arms inspectors.

As for steel and other raw materials industries, the weak dollar gives these industries a competive edge. How much more incentive does big unionized steel really need?

Yesterday was a nephew's b-day party. Today the nephew, mom and a niece flew off to Disneyland. Wow, that is quite a treat.

I am finally getting near the end of the program for maintaining a dictionary for roots of sound rational thinking. Man, I am slowing down in my old age. The program is fairly simple with very easy to define relations between terms, but it taking forever to get up the desire to write the program.

Yikes, I hadn't looked at the treasury's debt to the penny page for awhile. Man, the Bush Administration plowed through the $6 billion dollar mark quickly. Here's November's numbers: 11/28/2003 $6,925,065,499,881.34. I thought we had elected a Republican to the White House. Now that the Republicans have become democrats, I wonder who we are to vote for if we want lower government spending.

My attempt to stimulate the economy is a small x-mas gift page. As it stands, I did not make enough money this year to pay taxes. If the page makes sales, I might someday start helping pay my $23,000 dollar share of the deficit.