Gulp

Yesterday, I read a news release saying that computer vendors would include upgrade coupons for the new Vista operating system. So, I decided to take the plunge and buy a new laptop. I ended up going with Dell. This will be my first Dell.

I hope to set up the Zend Studio, PHP and MySQL on the computer, so I went with the XP Professional and tricked out the computer with 2GB memory. The computer includes MS Word as I will be helping someone edit a book in the upcoming months.

As for my old laptop. The laptop is vintage 1998. It was the display model at Circuit City for a year before I bought it (meaning it was always quirky). The computer has a growing problem with bad sectors. Both the keyboard and mouse are broken. The real kicker is that I had purchased a wireless card some years back, and the card seems to have disappeared. I want to use the computer on the road, but a new wireless card costs more than I could get if I tried selling the computer. If it was not for the bad sectors and the missing wireless card, I would probably be happy with the old computer.

My expensive ($993 buck-a-roos) laptop is in the Dell plant being assembled as I write. Now, I have to figure out how to pay for it. Maybe I could get a squeegie and hurl myself infront of cars and threaten to clean their window if the driver doesn't pay me off.

Political Thoughts

I wish we had a Democrat in the White House.

If we did the press would be reporting about how the war in Iraq was going swimmingly. We might even hear an occasional tidbit of news about how the economy is going gangbusters. Do you remember when Clinton was president, and the press was more than willing to report good news to help bolster the regime of their man in the White House? The press was even willing to ignore the growing financial scandals and poor numbers posted by companies to keep the hype in the market high; so that small investors wouldn't pull their money from the Clinton stock bubble.

In this day where the press is driven by an overriding collective hatred of George Bush, I find myself wishing that we had a Democratic president ... just so we can start hearing some positive spin on news.

Hear is the problem. The midterm elections doesn't provide us an opportunity to vote out the president. It is about Congress.

I was watching a newscast a few weeks ago. While the reports were slinging their snarl words and trying to find clever ways to spin their Bush-hatred in a seemingly objective style (ie, snarl words), one of the news casters turned to his cohort and said "If the Democrats lose in 2006, they are going to have to sit down between now and 2008, and completely rethink their strategy."

This thought has been stirring in my mind since.

If the Democrats lose in 2006, two things will end up happening: Most important, the Democrats might end up changing their core tactics and message. The second is that the Republicans will spend the next two years trying to distance themselves from Bush.

If the Democrats win in 2006, they will simply up the amplitude of their hate-Bush message, and will simply spend the next two years making life miserable.

I usually simply want the best candidate to win (parties be damned). My hope now is that the Republicans win in 2006. It seems to me that if the Republicans win in 2006, the next two years could be years where both Democrats and Republicans engage in discourse. If not, it will be a prolonged election where the primary issue is simply hatred of George Bush.

Hating George Bush is okay. Making political decisions based solely on Bush hatred is a bad idea. Regardless of the outcome of 2006, Bush will be a lame duck in 2006-2008. He cannot run for office again. The real question for 2006 is how the parties position themselves for 2008 ... which is the important election.

If the Democrats fail to win in 2006, there is a really big chance that both parties will change significantly in upcoming two years. If they win, we will see both parties retrenching, and politics becoming even uglier.

Fillmore, Utah

I just added a gallery for Fillmore, Utah. Fillmore is the county seat of Millard County. It was the Territorial Capitol in 1852. One page I read said that the territory was called Deseret and included good chunks of Colorado, and Nevada along with the missing corner of Utah that is now in Wyoming. I knew that the territory was larger, I did not know that it was called Deseret. Brigham Young had wanted to call his empire Deseret.

Fillmore of Millard County was named for President Millard Fillmore who was sympathetic to the Mormon cause and gave money to help build the state house. If you are traveling on I15, I think it is a much better place to stop than Scipio. While in Fillmore, I stayed at the Capitol Motel which only cost $20.00. I love a good clean cheap motel.

I visited my site from a computer with a better monitor (I have a 15" LCD monitor). I decided that the pictures were too small. Since I now have a little bit more diskspace and bandwidth to play with, I made the pictures 700 pixels wide. I am happy with the result.

No Rest for Scipio

While traveling on I15 in Central Utah, I stumbled on an intriguing development. The Utah State Department of Transportation (UDOT) had closed Rest Stops along the freeway. In lieue of the traditional rest stops, Utah was advertising private/public rest stop partnerships. One of these rest stops was in Scipio, Utah. I decided to stop and see how a public/private partnership improved upon the traditional rest stop.


I pulled into Scipio to find out that the state had simply named a convenience store in the town a "Rest Stop". A "public/private" partnership means that one convenience store gets the title "Rest Stop." In the typical slap-in-the-face style politics that dominates Utah politics, someone had pushed a single green pinic table into a vacant lot. Travelers in need of rest will follow the blue highway signs to a single exposed table where they can wonder what is going wrong with this nation.

The US Interstate Rest Stop system was set up to address the safety concern of weary travelers driving on highways at high speed. In the past rest stops have been funded by the taxes placed on fuel (placing taxes on fuel has proven to be the most efficient way to collect the tolls needed to maintain roads. There is, after all, a direct relation between the fuel consumed by vehicles and the amount of damage that they do to roads.)

Rest stops are often filled with families letting their children release pent up energy or bleary-eyed truck drivers that would be a danger if they kept on truckin'. Refreshing naps and leg stretching are necessary but non-commercial activities.

The key to the rest stop system is that that rest stops are non-commercial. The stops allow people to conduct the necessary, non-commerical activities of travel (a rest break) in a relatively calm, pleasant environment. It is important that these stops have limited commercial activities. First, you can't really rest in a commercial environment. More importantly, state sponsored facilities should not be competing for revenue that would otherwise go to the large number of businesses that feed off interstate traffic.

The Scipio experiment of declaring one of the convenience stores in town an official Utah State sponsored Rest Stop has had two negative effects: The stop does not provide adequate facilities for drivers a break. People who stop at the convenience store and get another cup of coffee rather than taking a nap are still a danger on the road.

The second big negative of a state sanctioned convenience stores is that state sanctioning gives one convenience store an unfair competitive advantage over other stores. After visiting the state sanctioned convenience store, I decided to drive across the freeway and look at the non-state-sanctioned stores. It had no business and would most likely fail as a direct result of the actions of the Utah Department of Transportation.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am a fan of the free market. Utah State's effort to give one convenience store in town official state scantion as a "rest stop" is not free market. The effort destroys competition.

During my trip, the gas prices at this Utah-state-sponsored and preferred convenience store were 14 cents a gallon higher than the gas prices in the towns north and south of Scipio. News reports often site Scipio as having high gas prices.

If this is generally the case, then travelers who are duped by the "Rest Stop" signs on I15 near Scipio and who decide to buy gas at the officially Utah sanctioned convenience store are being ripped off!!!!!!!

FYI: I did some research. Apparently this Public/Private rest stop initiative was set up in 2003. It is possible that Scipio has plans for more than just an unsheltered green table for their public/private rest stop initiative ... though I doubt it. There is a nice public park about a mile off the freeway in Scipio.

In conclusion, if anyone is traveling on I15, I suggest filling up in either Fillmore or Nephi and avoiding Scipio.

Alpine Loop

I've been having a large number of technical difficulties of late. It seems that service at companies and the quality of products sold in stores has deteriorated in the last several years. There is no need to gripe about the things that are taking up all of my time.

Last week I took a drive along the Alpine Loop to grab some shots of fall folliage. The was a storm before the day I took the pictures (my car was in the shop.) The fact that I took the shots after a storm meant that both the trees and the ground was covered with leaves. I have a small boat load of other pictures to upload which I hope to do so in the upcoming weeks. (technical difficulties permitting).

Salt Lake Photographic Print Society

I crashed a meeting of the Salt Lake Photographic Print Society. This group promotes art photography. Their meetings feature a stream of the best photography in Salt Lake. This is the type of group that I like. It is filled with people intensely interested in the images around them. The meeting was in the Sugarhouse Park garden center. The speaker was a Mr. Tom Szalay who teaches at West High School and who has traveled the world as a photo journalist. I took a few shots of Highland High.

Prior to the meeting, I pointed the camera at Coco and got a few shots of her playing frisbee. I wish I could move as fast as a dog.

Big Cottonwood Canyon

I finished labeling the pictures I took from Big Cottonwood canyon. I had had major problems with servers last month which pretty much prevented me from labeling or making improvements on the site. I will be out taking new pictures this week. Hopefully, it won't take half a year to label the bad boys.

I would appreciate input on whether or not the galleries have too many pictures. My original idea was to take about dozen picture of a subject. A place like Big Cottonwood is filled with some many interesting subjects that I go snapshot happy. Of course, having multiple angles of a subject does provide information. Comments from people are always appreciated. (Comments from spambots are never appreciated.)

Roots of Radicalism

The word “radical” means digging down to the roots. As such, there will be a large number of different interpretations of the meaning radical. I read a few other sites vying for the keyword “radical.”

Many of the sites keying in on this word seem to be applying derivatives of Marx’s Material Dialectic to respective avenues of thought. The basic idea is that you use clever little tools like redefined terms and paradoxes to drill down to core conflicts of a subject.

The various things I read on radical education theory seem to be about raising class and political conscious so that the students will be more violent when they get older. Radical theories of labor want the workforce to become more violent. Radical Islam wants to magnify divisions between Islam and the West, etc..

This is in sharp contrast to what I think needs to be done. I think societies need to look at the core assumptions of their body politic and make sure that they are well defined and logically consistent.

When radicals look at the roots of a system, they want to find flames to fan so that they can ride the hot air into power.

Our great problem is that this modern approach to radicalism only knows how to tear down. It does not know how to build. Even worse, since radicals are trained to attack at the root level (the foundations) one can never even build any thing of substance on an idea, as the millions of termites trained in our Universities will exercise their dialectical skills to tear it down. Half way through any project, radicals will jump in and change the meaning of the terms in the debate.

This modern radicalism is one of our major problem of the day. Currently our education system teach methods on how to tear things down. (They call this critical thinking). Seems to me that the better approach is to teach people how things work, so that they can build on the stuff in place. In my opinion critical thinking starts by taking the effort to understand the people and processes currently in place. The critical thinker should then work to define those things that lead to benefit and those that do not, and should then work to preserve things that lead to benefit and find ways to mitigate problems.

In the classical view, critical thinking should be leading toward improvement. The modern radical definition of critical thinking (with all its paradoxes and conflicts) leads only to destruction. It is incapable of building, for any system half constructed on a system of paradox will be torn to the ground by the next avant-garde troop of thinkers.

Anyway, by digging down to the roots of radicalism, we might gain some clue to this strange process that is currently tearing the world apart.

Radicalizing Kith and Kin

It seems to me that Radical Christians and Radical Muslims can be as bad as each other. I used to fall of the idea that since the radical forms of these ideologies are bad, that there must be something inherently wrong with both the Christian and Muslim religion.

Today, I realize that the problem is with radicalization.

Modern radicalization seems to come from the Kantian/Hegelian train of transcendental philosophies. This methodology digs down into a tradition or philosophy and brings out the core conflicts and paradoxes of the ideology. Demagogs inflame the conflicts and rise the storm to power.

The kicker is that you can use these revolutionary techniques to create division and violence in almost any field. For example, radical environmentalist are willing to kill loggers to appease the conflicts faced by gaia. Socialism and communism will produce armies of thugs willing to beat people up, kill and rob in the name of economic justice.

Radicalization is the process of digging up conflict and making conflict the center of existence.

To get around the great conflicts that are tearing apart our society, we have to get back to the place where we can engage in real meaningful discourse. Unfortunately, most of us have been taught foundational systems of reasoning that magnify division.

I was trying to light on this issue of foundational systems based on paradox in the Critique of the Diagonal Method. Of course, I realized that in writing that work, I have never learned proper discourse myself. Modern mathematics is based on paradoxes and conflict, but I have no way other that petty little jabs to point out the problem. The jabs fall on deaf ears.

In school, and the business world, I been taught that reasoning is futile. What you have to do is form alliances and take cheap shots at your enemies. Cheap shot discourse leads to nothing. It magnifies the conflicts of radicalism and does not lead to the optimum solutions that we would have if we had discourse. The cheap shot style of discourse that we engage in today leads to a situation where the worst people get in power. Even worse, those in power start to disengage from the people.

I agree that Muslim, Christian and other forms of radicals pose a threat. Unfortunately, the cheap shot style discourse of today that we think will wave off the radicalization simply feeds the process.

I understand the stink du jour is that Rosie O’Donnell noted that radical Christians can be as bad as radical Islam. Ms. O’Donnell is partially right with this statement; however, I suspect that she was putting the emphasis on the wrong word. If Ms. O’Donnell was educated in the same public school system as me, she probably learned that religion is the greatest threat to humankind. As such, she was probably repeating the left wing mantra that Christianity is as bad and that the only way to have prosperity is to wipe Christianity, Islam and other religions out of existence.

Now, I say that Ms. O’Donnell’s statement is also partially true. The key to her sentence is not Christianity or Islam, but radicalism. Anything that it radicalized poses a great threat to society.

Radicalization is not restricted to religion. The world has suffered from philosophies that have radicalized economic class, ethnic group, education systems and religion.

Different groups are more susceptible to radicalization. In this regard, it may be fair to say that Islam (at least in this point in time) is more susceptible to radicalization than Christianity. For example, when Pat Robertson suggested doing in Hugo Chavez, Christians were first in line to censure the idiot.

Sometimes the force that radicalizes a group comes from the outside of the group. In the case of Communism, workers were radicalized by “avant guard” members of the intelligentsia. That is, communists were trained in the Universities and other elite institutions, then they went into the workforce to raise people in revolution.

In the case of Nazism and Fascism, a core pagan cult managed to raise the nationalistic pride and religious pride to the point where a very large portion Italy and Germany were radicalized. Here it is important to note that not all Christians fell for the bull spouted by the intelligentsia. A great deal of the intellectual class fell for it.

There is a large number of people, some working in the university, some playing the role of pundits, etc.., who would love to be part of that catalyzing, revolutionary force. These are the people who I fear most.

It seems to me that the faddish side of American culture is that part of our country that is most susceptible to radicalization at this moment. Christian culture (with its strong emphasis on truth, tradition and individual morality) is a tad less susceptible. In WWII people from the Christian tradition were radicalized, however, I think that bad experience made they wary of other radicalization movements. I’ve met many people who claim to be Communists. They want to be the avant garde of the next revolution. They spend time trying to figure out ways to radicalize people to turn people away from Christianity. This leads me to think that, despite its many faults, Christianity might be a stabilizing force.

I admit, I’ve wonder if the bizarre logic of Mormonism and its hierarchical structure make it more susceptible to radicalization. However, I think the struggles of the last decades to stifle Mormon fundamentalism makes the group a little less susceptible to radicalization.

Ms. O’Donnell is right in saying that radical Christians can be as big and nasty a threat as radical Muslims. The radicalized Hutus killed Tutsis by the hundreds of thousands, radicalized immigrants could pose a threat to the US. A radicalized education system could pose a threat to the well being of this nation. Radicalization is the problem and not base stable philosophies or religions.

Dictionary.com lists two definitions for radical. The first means going back to its roots. A second definition means “marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional.” Radicalization generally has elements of both. Radicalization usually starts when a small group claiming to bringing an idea back to its roots. The radicals end up leading people in a completely different direction from their tradition. People wanting to maintain civil discourse and civil order do need to be wary or radicalization efforts.

Some philosophical ideologies have division at it core. A large number of the transcendental style of thinking that popped up in the post Kant world do just this. In most cases, however, the division is created by the process of radicalization.

I think I will expand this thought in a different post.

As for the case of Ms. O'Donnell, the furor over her comment highlights the dangers that exist when you attack people, as opposed to attacking the processes that turn people to extremism. We need ways to talk about the dangers that we see around us.

I am suddenly thinking back to Bush's use of the words "Islamic Fascist." This juxtaposition of the term Islam with the western term "fascist" does a great job of noting that the extremist philosophy held in the middle east is not uniquely Islam. Extremism is a danger faced by both the west and middle east.