Timothy Hyrum Donaldson

2009-08-26T15:59:00.002-04:00

Fifty Miler Memories, Part 2: Lassen Volcanic National ParkIn 1994 or 1995 or something like that, when I was an early teenager, I went on my second and final 50 mile hike Boy Scouts trip. I did not get lost overnight on this one. The most memorable part of this one was the hike up the Cinder Cone, an aerial view of which is above.
I was still too young and dumb to appreciate properly the scenery. Above you can see Mount Lassen off in the distance. It erupted in 1915 to some great carnage, I believe. I was also still closer to a pudgy elementary school kid than to a big high school athlete, so I bemoaned the all day week-long hiking.

This "ramp" is the start of the unique hike up the Cinder Cone. The top of this volcano, this pile of leftover ash, is 700 feet higher than the surrounding ground. There is some debate as to when it was created, I think they established it was around 1635.

The trail winds up pretty steep, the biggest challenge to the hike is that you are stepping on volcanic ash, basically, and you slide down about 6 inches for every foot you step forward. It is challenging but short and worthwhile.

The above picture shows what it looks like when you look sideways halfway up the hike.

Above, an aerial shot. Below, 2 random unknown kids- the key is, that is what it looks like when you get on top and look down inside the volcano. We went all the way down into the middle of it.

2009-08-26T15:42:00.003-04:00

Fifty Miler Memories, Part 1, Mount Langley & Mount Whitney In about 1993, when I was about 12 years old, I went on my first of two fifty milers. These were the highlights of my failed Boy Scouts career. This trip was to the highest places in the continental United States, in central California.
Being an idiot little 12 year old, I didn't appreciate the scenery half so much as I bitched about the hike. We hiked for 7 days straight, for the full day, carrying our heavy backpacks, and camped at night. We took New Army Pass on the worst day of those hikes, ascending up to over 13,000 feet in elevation. The trail is 13 miles long and rises 6100 feet in elevation, apparently, so it wasn't easy. I have some old printed photos somewhere from that trip, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can get better quality and better shots to help tell the story.

I got lost overnight along with Greg Schindler (who later was an All-Pac-10 Offensive Lineman at Stanford and played for the 49ers, but bawled like a baby that night) and Doug Dickey (who did not cry) on one of those nights. They sent a helicopter for us the next morning. My parents are probably glad that happened in the days before cell phones.

Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet, is the highest point in the continental US. Interestingly, it is only 76 miles away from the lowest point in the United States, which is 282 feet below sea level, in Death Valley. In his book 'Age of Gold' about the California Gold Rush, Texas History professor HW Brands described the geological cause of such crumpling of that part of the Earth, like 2 pieces of paper hitting each other. Brands also tells of the people who tried to go to California this way instead of over Donner Pass to reach the gold fields in 1849. They didn't fare any better than the Donner Party- as you could imagine, if you had to go up and down such dramatic distances repeatedly in the 19th Century.

We went to Mount Langley, which, as you can see here, is on the same big formation with Mount Whitney and Mount Muir.

2009-05-27T14:08:00.002-04:00

If I Were A Senator, I Would Vote Against Sotomayor

One factor that always pushes me towards voting for the Republicans is in judicial appointments. I don't see anything good about J. Sotomayor. Not that she is the devil or anything like that, but there is nothing to speak for her. Great, so she is Latina and female (I guess that is redundant, so I can just say "Great, she is Latina" or even "Great-Latina.")

What else is there? She is a rags to riches Bronx story. That is nice. She has been overturned a ton. She thinks she is a better judge because she is female and latin, as she said in 2001 “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

She was part of that stupid firefighter ruling that is about to be overturned by the Supreme Court. She has gone around telling law students that "the federal appeals courts are where policy is made in America."

Well, it shouldn't be.

2008-10-17T13:35:00.002-04:00

Why Vote For This Man?

Seriously, unless you put party blinding glasses on, you don't see Teddy Roosevelt anymore, you see obnoxious, self-righteous, drunken sailor tough guy. He has, as George Will says, been running for President for 10 years now. He has said nothing positive about the 8 or 25 years of Republican rule since Minnesota. He has been running against Barack Obama so ineffectively that Obama is about to absolutely clean his clock on election day. He does not defend capitalism at all, merely defending his own bizarre tax and health insurance schemes. He has somehow managed not to talk about foreign policy for 6 months now. I think the polls which presume a 2 way race will be surprised to see 2, 3, maybe 5% of voters on the right go for 3rd party guys like Bob Barr and write ins for Ron Paul.

2008-10-12T21:36:00.004-04:00

Snow

This delightful piece of furniture I got Brittany when we went to Gardner Village for her birthday yesterday. Gardner Village is wonderful this time if year. The cushions on "The Delightful Thing" flip over as needed and function like a coffee table!
As Jerry Seinfeld said "The Ottoman. An entire empire based on the concept of putting your feet up!"
Then, to make sure I never have to go upstairs, and so that I can spend many happy moments perusing the collection from my spot, I got permission to move my bookcases (well, the 4 that match anyway) into the living room.
The Delightful Thing (that is its name) holds remote controls, blankets, XBox 360 wireless controllers, Rock Star microphones, pens, books, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Lord of the Rings, and Madden 2008 XBox games, and lots of other stuff under the cushions! Convenient, clean, nice.

2008-10-10T14:00:00.002-04:00

BREAKING NEWS (October 10, 2008- SLC, UT)- Tim News Services, Inc. Has Called the Election in Favor of Barack Obama, in the biggest landslide in 2 decades.

I used to think there was a chance that once Obama would become President- then the economy would go south, maybe the foreign threats to the US would become more menacing because he was a "sing kumbaya" liberal who didn't know how to call something evil and bomb it, etc.

But I would like to say, right now, that it is now literally impossible for Obama to fail as President. He is starting with America at the bottom of the Ocean. The stock market is in absolute free fall like hasn't been seen in any of our lifetimes. The S&P 500 is down 46% and counting in the past 366 days. If you put $1 in the S&P 500, less risky that many investment choices, on October 9, 2007- it is worth 54 cents today. Less than 50 cents if you count inflation. There have been 10 Bear Markets (down 20% at least in the S&P 500) since the Depression. Only 2 of them approached 50%, and those were 2000-02 and 1973-74. Both of those were due to 1 big event and 1 cycle (9/11 and the Tech Bubblle deflating, and OPEC basically) and both of which were receovered from relatively quickly. This is different.

When Obama takes over, in the midst of a Depression, in the midst of an 8 year war in Afghanistan that hasn't made progress I can name in 7 years, and in the midst of a 6 year war in Iraq that is waiting for Iraqi 3 year olds to stand up and start taking care of themselves by age 40, with a government that has debt of 11 trillions, in a country that is "out of ammunition" in every single sense- tiny military that is trying to be a global empire, negative savings rate, unemployment heading towards at least 12% as the latest consensus, what can he possibly do to fail?

Seriously, unless Pakistan conquers America, an Obama Presidency cannot fail. There is nowhere to go but up. And he will have a huge mandate, and a unified Congress, and something akin to emergency powers in the atmosphere- especially after the Republicans just socialized America's capital.

And where is the reasonable voice of conservatism? Not with McCain, who is running to Obama's left on economic issues with class warfare righteous rhetoric to make one cringe. Not with Wall Street, which is acting like one gigantic corporate lobbyist. Not with Bush, who is still certain that a marginal tax rate of 35% on the super rich, as opposed to 40% on the super rich, is what makes an economy go. Not with Bush, who resembles Woodrow Wilson in Iraq and Afghanistan and in his '04 inauguration speech, and who encouraged us to run up credit card debt after 9/11. Not with Bush, who tripled the national debt to test out John Maynard Keyes statement many decades ago that, in the long run, we'd all be dead.

OPEC will try to see that we are all dead, when they meet in Europe next month to try to stop this recent "drop" in oil prices.

I guess it helps that Iraq isn't in OPEC anymore and has no quota??

2008-10-02T13:44:00.003-04:00

A Bubble Bursts

As you know, I work in school trust lands, and so a lot of what I do has to do with Utah real estate development- joint ventures with Ivory Homes, that kind of thing. I have been working through some projections and historical data, as this whole housing crisis seems to finally be arriving here, and some of it was kind of interesting.

Between 1963 and 2004, the median price of a home has risen by 6.6% per year. That means that the average home price doubles every 11 years.

But, keep in mind, that doesn’t mean that a given house, if you follow it for decades, appreciates so rapidly. What happens is that builders add to the top end almost exclusively, they have built newer, bigger, better homes for decades now, and as more and more of those are built, it stretches the median price up. The ordinary house in the ordinary city, say an average home in Murray, Utah, built in 1960, for example; it hasn’t appreciated as much, it probably has risen 3 or 4% a year, doubling maybe every 25 years- maybe almost keeping up with inflation. Something that was mid to high end in 1995 is not mid to high end anymore by a long shot.

Utah real estate has tended to be at or above the national average, but 2 years behind on trends. So, for example, when my parents bought a house in Utah in 1996, the nationwide median home sale price that year was $115,800. In Utah, the median that year was also $115.

By 1998, the national average was $128K, but in Utah it was $150K.

Around the time I finished at Westminster, Utah was in a real economic slump, and prices here- median $175- were below the national- median $185. In 2005, Utah’s median was down to $173- and the national median was up to $219.

Then Utah real estate shot up, to a median of $232 in 2007, above the national average of $217.

The real estate bubble has burst pretty bad the last couple years. Sacramento has taken it worse than anywhere else in the nation, down 40% in 2 years. Ouch! I have family there, and that is awful. Sacramento’s median was $356K in the 2nd quarter of 2007, and it was $229K in the 2nd quarter of 2008. In other words, a hypothetical person who bought for $400K in Sacramento 2 years ago, or who could’ve got an appraisal of $400K 2 years ago, their house is now worth $240K. 2/3 of Sacramento home sales are foreclosures right now.

For most of the country, housing is down 20% in 2 years. Texas has pretty much been immune, because Texas real estate is practically free to begin with, which is why I decided it was a better place to do law school than LA (down from $593K to $417K, wow, in case you are wondering).

This is going to be coming to the Salt Lake Valley, maybe as bad as Sacramento. The first sign was the insane climb it made in 2 or 3 years there. The second sign was the fact that there are zillions of $300-$500K houses, nothing but brand new 3000-5000 square foot things, all over the place- in this state of low wages, an average household income of $53,000, lots of kids, and tithing. Then, the 3rd sign, this Summer, was for sale signs on about 2/3 of the houses in the state- with absurd asking prices. The 4th sign was that none of them sold.

For the next 2 years, if anyone actually wants to sell their house, they will have to start lowering prices, fairly dramatically.

And consider this- houses aren't going to be an average of 7000 square feet in 2042. The marginal utility of square footage starts dramatically falling at a given point- depending on family size I'd bet. For 2-4 people, maybe it is 2500 square feet. For 6-9 people, maybe it is 3500 or 4000 square feet.

I think residential real estate as an investment is vastly overrated. People should buy houses if they want for stability, for retirement savings, for the tax benefits that the government has no business giving, because they like to play Bob the Builder on it, etc. They should not be bought as investments.

2008-09-27T19:29:00.005-04:00

A Saturday Picnic and Hike in Provo Canyon

2008-09-27T19:12:00.004-04:00

A Friday Night of Baseball
I keep telling him that curveball needs to be lower in the zone

A groundball took a funny hop and hit him in the head

Benji joined us when we decidedto take it to the park so we could bring out the bats
We were intentionally walking him

Grant jammed him here with a nice 2 seam fastball

Grant took a pitch to the belly right here. Benji said he was crowding the plate

Water break

He calls it his Carney Lansford stance

2008-09-27T12:33:00.002-04:00

Obama 84, McCain 3

I have never seen anyone have as bad of a debate as McCain had last night. I guess smirking giggling smart-ass who misstates Obama's views is what he was aiming for.

Somehow, he claimed ownership of the GOP "My House Republicans" while uniformly defining himself against Bush and against his party and against the past 8 years and against his last 26 years.

He told jokes which you had to rewind back and play again to be like, "Oh, that was a joke. $3 million to study bears DNA in Montana, criminal or paternal? That was a funny."

Obama talks about America doing poorly on veteran care- and McCain says 'I love them. Their mine. I'll take care of them." What?

Obama was assertive without being aggressive, serious, somber, reasonable, respectful, and nuanced. McCain- uh, he thinks he can run on change and against Bush. good luck with that.

Obama talks about farm bills and the like and McCain says "You know, there were farms in Vietnam, too." Okay, he didn't say that one.

But, having failed to rescue the universe when he "put politics aside to put America first", he had a horrible debate. Obama won a poll of women 59-31.

2008-09-25T23:28:00.001-04:00

Here's One Reason Obama Deserves to Be Elected

He has campaigned in Elko, Nevada, population 2000, 3 times!!

2008-09-24T13:10:00.003-04:00

Ron Paul Gets What is Wrong With All of This

I May Actually Have to Vote For This Guy

(CNN) -- Many Americans today are asking themselves how the economy got to be in such a bad spot.
For years they thought the economy was booming, growth was up, job numbers and productivity were increasing. Yet now we find ourselves in what is shaping up to be one of the most severe economic downturns since the Great Depression.
Unfortunately, the government's preferred solution to the crisis is the very thing that got us into this mess in the first place: government intervention.
Ever since the 1930s, the federal government has involved itself deeply in housing policy and developed numerous programs to encourage homebuilding and homeownership.
Government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to obtain a monopoly position in the mortgage market, especially the mortgage-backed securities market, because of the advantages bestowed upon them by the federal government.Laws passed by Congress such as the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to make loans to previously underserved segments of their communities, thus forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks.
These governmental measures, combined with the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy, led to an unsustainable housing boom. The key measure by which the Fed caused this boom was through the manipulation of interest rates, and the open market operations that accompany this lowering.
When interest rates are lowered to below what the market rate would normally be, as the Federal Reserve has done numerous times throughout this decade, it becomes much cheaper to borrow money. Longer-term and more capital-intensive projects, projects that would be unprofitable at a high interest rate, suddenly become profitable.
Because the boom comes about from an increase in the supply of money and not from demand from consumers, the result is malinvestment, a misallocation of resources into sectors in which there is insufficient demand.
In this case, this manifested itself in overbuilding in real estate. When builders realize they have overbuilt and have too many houses to sell, too many apartments to rent, or too much commercial real estate to lease, they seek to recoup as much of their money as possible, even if it means lowering prices drastically.
This lowering of prices brings the economy back into balance, equalizing supply and demand. This economic adjustment means, however that there are some winners -- in this case, those who can again find affordable housing without the need for creative mortgage products, and some losers -- builders and other sectors connected to real estate that suffer setbacks.
The government doesn't like this, however, and undertakes measures to keep prices artificially inflated. This was why the Great Depression was as long and drawn out in this country as it was.
I am afraid that policymakers today have not learned the lesson that prices must adjust to economic reality. The bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the purchase of AIG, and the latest multi-hundred billion dollar Treasury scheme all have one thing in common: They seek to prevent the liquidation of bad debt and worthless assets at market prices, and instead try to prop up those markets and keep those assets trading at prices far in excess of what any buyer would be willing to pay.
Additionally, the government's actions encourage moral hazard of the worst sort. Now that the precedent has been set, the likelihood of financial institutions to engage in riskier investment schemes is increased, because they now know that an investment position so overextended as to threaten the stability of the financial system will result in a government bailout and purchase of worthless, illiquid assets.
Using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to purchase illusory short-term security, the government is actually ensuring even greater instability in the financial system in the long term.
The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.
It is time this process is put to an end. But the government cannot just sit back idly and let the bust occur. It must actively roll back stifling laws and regulations that allowed the boom to form in the first place.
The government must divorce itself of the albatross of Fannie and Freddie, balance and drastically decrease the size of the federal budget, and reduce onerous regulations on banks and credit unions that lead to structural rigidity in the financial sector.
Until the big-government apologists realize the error of their ways, and until vocal free-market advocates act in a manner which buttresses their rhetoric, I am afraid we are headed for a rough ride.

2008-09-21T23:56:00.004-04:00

A Long, Boring, Sunday Afternoon Drive

Last Sunday we went up Provo Canyon, stopping at Bridal Veil Falls, and all the way back to Tabiona. The School Children's Trust owns a lot of land up there. The pancakes before Church at 11 weren't keeping the kids content forever, and the drive lingered and lingered, as we meandered our way back down the Duchesne River, so we stopped for dinner in Park City about 730. A 224 mile loop.

2008-09-19T11:50:00.008-04:00

The People's Republic of America

The name of the game is, of course, "privatize the profit, socialize the risk." Such a formula is so horrible, so unjust, so wrong, that it ends up being basically exactly what we do here in the United States. Liberals subconsciously want to socialize things, and they consciously want to "act" and "have plans" and "create 5 million new Green Collar jobs" and all that kind of nonsense you heard at the Denver convention, so they agree to the latter part. Liberals are kind of idiots economically anyway, which is why in July, back when oil was $147 a barrel, I had education people passionately insisting to me “The Bushies want gas at $7 a gallon before Obama can come in and put price controls on!!” I tried to say “You have more than 18 things wrong in that 18 word sentence, but to no avail.

Conservatives are basically chasing dollars in any and everyway possible, including corrupt and crooked ways, and so socializing the risk sounds good to them too. They can keep winning elections based off American fear that there are gay people in San Francisco, and Boyd K Packer’s insistence that us tolerating them is proof we are worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.

Poilitics is therefore almost always concerned with the first part, ie, how much profit should be privatized, what taxes should be, etc.

But now, for once, amidst giddy media hysteria and government overreaction, the world is, for a rare second, looking at risk being socialized. For an hour this morning I hear NPR cheerleading on economic catastrophe- they are overjoyed at the prospect.

There were literally tens of thousands of Wall Street "experts", at least, underwriters making $1.5 million commissions a year on repacking and flipping mortgage backed securities, hedge fund managers making billions off the low interest rates creating margins to play with- who made multiple millions as they drove this current mess. I can’t really blame them- if I were in such a spot and could just legally make bazooka bucks off such schemes, I probably would too. They aren’t supposed to be looking out for the greater good.

But the people who are supposed to be looking out for the greater good, protecting people’s property, etc. well, where were they? Government financial policy drove the housing bubble and drove and drove it. Interest rates have been too low for about 5 years now. Inflation is coming, monster inflation... what am I saying, it has been at 12-13% the past few months, it is already here.
And so now, a government running on a $600 billion+ a year deficit, with $10 trillion debt (which was $4.7 trillion and shrinking when W took over), is looking to add 50% to the deficit with Henry Poulson's "bold plan" to spend hundreds of billions to make every American a partial owner of the collapsing house of cards such Wall Street experts drove. Oh, and the national debt probably goes up to $15 trillion when you factor the takeover of Freddie and Fannie in. And that isn’t 4.3% TBill debt that old widows living off Social Security hold on to for a rainy day, that is the $350,000 mortgage on House #12 that my old landlords in Suncrest speculated on and then couldn’t flip. That is soon possibly the hundreds of millions that Zion's Bank lost when they financed the whole Suncrest development.

Lets look at recent economic history, by President.

Reagan "The stock market went up 231% in my 8 years. There was high unemployment and high inflation, I killed them both."
Clinton "The stock market went up 325% in my 8 years, and we started running surpluses."
Bush "I tripled the national debt in my 8 years, while the stock market is lower in September 2008 than it was in April 1999."

And so now our regrettable economic choices are:

McCain: Correctly saw Bush's tax cuts as fiscally irresponsible. He may not understand the Laffer Curve, but neither do those who tout it. A return to Clinton's top rate of 39.6%, instead of Bush's 35%? Wouldn't hurt the economy one bit, but McCain will oppose it- for now. He’s a Maverick- flip flop on Bush’s tax cuts when running as a Republican.

McCain has also repeatedly lied by claiming Obama's plan of only slightly raising taxes on $250,000 or more is going to raise taxes on people making $42,000.

And McCain would likely further increase US miliary spending- which- at an underestimated $711 billion in 2008, is 48% of the world's total, 2.5 times bigger than Europe combined. We, 5% of the world's population, spend as much as the rest of the world (95% of world's population) on military spending. Damn right, we are the City on the Hill, and nobody better F*** with our claim to that.

(This is where the Republican bed time story begins) …Yes, but the Gravina Island Bridge in Alaska is the problem!!! :) 350,000 people go to Ketchikan International Airport via the ferry every year, and that bridge was the quintessential pork. How much is pork barrel spending you ask?

“1-2% of the federal budget, a drop in the bucket compared to military spending-“ SHUT UP GODLESS LIBERALS!! WHO LET YOU IN HERE?

Pork is the entire problem.

“It is interconnected quite frequently with crumbling infrastructure (See New Orleans, Minnesota, etc.)”

SHUT UP LIBERALS. PORK IS THE PROBLEM!! Repeat it like a mantra until you believe it! Yes, yes. Republicans- you didn't lose in Nov. 2006 because Bush and Rumsfeld had their proverbial heads in the sand for 3 1/2 years on Iraq, no no. The sand isn’t the typical Republican location of one's head- no no no. It was because people were pissed about Alaskans no longer having to take a ferry to get to the airport. That is why Congress flipped, because of spending. People voted you out because you acted too much like Democrats. Americans voted for Pelosi in 2006 because they wanted you to be more pure. Go to bed now. (end of GOP bedtime story)

I'm still not done with McCain on economics- let's see, SEC Chief Christopher Cox and NY AG Andrew Cuomo make short-selling illegal (what is this, Russia??!! Whose idea was that? Gray Davis?) and McCain wants Cox fired for not doing enough!!?? McCain was green- no ANWR drilling, no off shore drilling, until the energy mess made being green not trendy any more, so now Maverick Man is Senator Drill Drill Drill.

Obama: The plan to create 5 million new "Green Collar jobs" says enough. Basically, if you think a government owned by the Chinese is good, then vote for a 3rd New Deal in the FDR-LBJ-BO continuum.

Regrettably Keynes once said that governments can just run up the credit cards eternally and it wouldn't ever hurt- "in the long run we'll all be dead", etc.. Well, imagine if TBills have to start paying higher interest rates because the Chinese decide that the US government isn't fiscally sound. Imagine if they have to pay a lot more because we have to borrow so darn much, the dollar goes weak, every bad company and bad mortgage becomes the government's responsibility, etc. etc. etc.

Conclusion: This is not a "crisis" yet, nor is it "the worst since the Great Depression" or anything else. But I am much more concerned that the policy makers all around seem to think that a little tough medicine should be avoided at all costs. Some companies go under, some financial high flyers crash into a few less millions, 1-2% of homeowners who behaved stupidly lose, while 1-2% of young maybe wannabe homeowners like me benefit from falling prices.

Americans who bought $400,000, 4000 square foot, brand new houses- people who work off commission sales incomes-why on Earth do we need to keep them afloat? They go under and have to move into apartments and start over. Sorry, McCain, they aren't "hard working Americans who played by the rules", for the most part. I know- I have lived next to and around them and rented from them for a couple years now. I am a good neighbor and listen as people commiserate or ask if we'd be willing to rent from them while they move into an apartment for awhile. They are real estate agents and salesmen and construction people and the like, people who don't have stable incomes and bought high and can't afford to sell low, but aren't rolling in good time money anymore. I have no idea what idiot banks were doing giving them $400,000 loans at low interest on "stated incomes" for anyway, especially when they put $0 down or something nominal like $3000 down. I mean, it sucks, I see these people and I am friends with them, but God can either decide to let the good times roll forever, or else we have to make sensible decisions and cut losses. Unemployment goes up a little for a bit, inflation falls, kinks get worked out. Dummies who said "Yes, Utah should build 500,000 brand new homes that are all 4000 square feet and $300K-$500K, because people here in the land of $53,000 median household income can afford that" should be the ones who lose. All I ask is that the system let that happen. In the grand scheme of things, NO BIG DEAL.

If, instead, the government tries to put in the Bill of Rights "A homeowner's right to a housing market eternally climbing by 20% a year shall not be infringed upon", and continues to run a tax policy of "no billionaire left behind", only then will high inflation and imperial overreach combine to send us towards some bad stuff.

Where is Ayn Rand when you need her?

2008-09-19T11:50:00.001-04:00

Reason 784 That We Are The Most Interesting Church Ever

"On Lincoln's 100th birthday in 1909, former apostle Matthias F. Cowley participated as proxy in a Salt Lake Temple sealing for President Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd. Lincoln was then sealed to his former sweetheart, Ann Mayes Rutledge, too. Rutledge's untimely death from a typhoid fever in 1835 at age 22 broke Lincoln's heart." -Mormon Times

Who can compete with stuff like that?

2008-09-18T19:11:00.003-04:00

Benjamin's Baptism

Saturday, September 13, 2008

2008-09-13T13:25:00.006-04:00

The Best of the Past Month

2008-09-05T14:59:00.000-04:00

Wisdom Tooth Adventures!

I just got a wisdom tooth pulled!

It was fun. I called around on my toothache, which I have had for about 7 months, and everyone is closed Fridays. Finally I got a nice guy who was leaving at 12, and he told me at 1130 that he was leaving and 12 but he’d see me if I ran over there.

So I did. He said I needed to get the bottom left wisdom tooth out. So he went in to do it, and the top cracked and shattered on him. So he drilled it in half, then had to cut part of a bone- then he said “You are tough-guying this, aren’t you? I have more Novocain. Tell me if it hurts.”

At which point I said “Uh, yeahhhhh!!! This has been the worst pain of my life for about 15 minutes, but I thought it came with the territory.” Of course, I said it slobbery and with the words mushed and my eyes closed. Of course, as Natalie says, this is what I get for not going on a mission.

About 15 minutes later it was finally done. He gave me Loritab prescriptions, so I need to get home and enjoy a weekend of Mormon acid trips- that is what happened to me the only other time I have ever been on Loritab- I was in communion with the universe, I was seeing people, I was laughing for 10 minutes about the philosophical question of whether there is water under Einstein-Rosenberg bridges.

So I am off- enjoy the weekend.

2008-09-04T14:07:00.002-04:00

Tim's American Politics 101

Liberalism, in the modern sense, not at all the classical sense, which is its antonym, is basically the belief that people need to be saved from themselves by the government. Government needs to take people’s money and agency and make choices for them, because a grand central planner is better than the sum of individual choices. People are too dumb and irresponsible to save for or negotiate for retirement, so take 15% off what we would make, don’t generate any investment growth on it, and give it back to them later. Liberals are soft on crime- people are too vulnerable to their circumstances to be responsible for their actions.

Liberalism can basically measured by home much hope and faith people have in government’s ability to fix the fallen world. Conservatives have very little, liberals have much. Here’s my little arbitrary back of a napkin scale.

1- police crime and imprison criminals, fight defensive wars and be an example for the rest of the world, and protect property rights. That is it. Pure libertarians are here.
2- build roads, bridges, and provide basic K-12 education. Firemen, health and safety inspectors, licensing doctors and lawyers, all the things the government does, which we silently expect, and no one really argues the government shouldn't do.

3- provide a basic social safety net, and regulate banks and financial institutions, to soften the naturally wild swings of the economy. Grease the wheels of capitalism.

Conservatives are up from here. Liberals are down from here.

4- Intervene in the markets through tariffs, sanctions, moderately progressive taxation, and detailed regulation to protect “the public good”, be it environmental, national defense, pro-workers, etc. Humanize the effects of capitalism.
5- Equalize opportunities for children, women, and minorities through affirmative action programs, welfare, quotas, heavily progressive taxation, government spending driving the economy, etc.
6- Equalize outcomes by confiscating wealth, removing choice from the individual to the collective, etc. Marxists are here.

No serious contender in American politics, perhaps ever, has been a true libertarian (1) or Marxist (6)

Reagan may have been a 2 and FDR a 5 and they are probably the 2 key figures of the past century in US politics. Almost everyone else I believe has been overlapping in the middle, especially both Bushes.

Lieberman is a liberal- the only reason he is there is because he is country first- the problem is the country he puts first is Israel. Ted Kennedy is very much the quintessential liberal. Clinton was a mild liberal at heart, Nixon probably a mild conservative at heart, but both were self-interested first and foremost.

Abortion doesn’t fit the paradigm, because the dispute is over whether a fetus is human life with its own rights. If you agree with me that it is, then it becomes a basic function of the state to protect and punish abortion (level 1). If you don't, then it becomes state removing choices from individuals (level 6).

Social issues I believe flip the parties on the head- libertarians say the state should get out of cultural issues. I agree there too.

Obama’s books reveal that his brain can fairly handle and assess the views of all sides, which is comforting (many many many liberals can't do anything but mock and scarecrow conservative arguments). His actual record of voting and associations are far left. His plans are moderate. We would have to see.

As with every President, from John Alien & Seditions Act Adams and Thomas Louisiana Purchase through the Central Bank Jefferson, all the way to George W Freedom in Our Lands Depends Upon Wilsonian Wars of Liberation Bringing Freedom Everywhere Bush, power is addictive, and even those whose ideology and votes come from conservative views have a tendency to govern more liberally.

This election needs Sarah Palin, and it needs Ron Paul, maybe eveen Ayn Rand. Not necessarily to win, but at least to speak to a viewpoint in the discussion. The country needs someone to say that government action caused this housing bubble, it caused inflation, tough medicine is needed, not boneheaded bailouts which keep the bubble bubbly and inflation at 1% a month.

2008-09-03T16:26:00.002-04:00

The Left Launches More Pre-emptive Strikes on a Conservative Woman

Children with Down’s syndrome require an awful lot of attention. The role of vice president, it seems to me, would take up an awful lot of her time, and it raises the issue of how much time will she have to dedicate to her newborn child? – John Roberts, CNN

In small groups, Palin can seem like the young, trophy running mate – David Wright, ABC News

John McCain will have to do better than naming Tina Fey his vice presidential choice. -Lisa de Moraes, Washington Post

Bimbo alert! – Ed Schultz, liberal talk show host

Vice in go-go boots. –Maureen Dowd, Washington Post

a skirt on the ticket. –Susan Reimer, Baltimore Sun

Laughter in many many newsrooms. –Eleanor Clift, Newsweek

Sarah Palin works fast. She instantly became the object of the kind of partisan hatred that most politicians can raise only after prosecuting an unpopular war and lying about their misconduct in office (Nixon), after making sanctimonious dishonesty an art form and getting caught in flagrante with an intern (Clinton), and after winning a disputed election and botching a foreign occupation (Bush). – Rich Lowry, National Review

2008-09-02T17:36:00.004-04:00

Sarah Palin

So below are a random sample of 6 political commentators sharing just some of the myriad views on the controversy of the day. Never before (or at least not in the last few days of Election 2007-2008) have so many held such different views on something which meant so much for so many...

Sarah Palin: Dan Quayle with an Up-do…Astonishingly, some people are trying to claim that Sarah Palin's nomination is another breakthrough for women. In fact, it's an insult to women. It's a triumph of marketing, not governing. The message it sends is that after all these years of so-called equality, tokenism still trumps ability and experience. If Sarah's name had been Stan, she never would have got the nod. – Margaret Wente, Boston Globe

I think she is the most inexperienced person on a major-party ticket in modern history - presidential historian Matthew Dallek

McCain’s surprising choice of Palin — and the equally surprising news about her family — is paying off.- Byron York, National Review

There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation. Many of us are in this movement because of something that has happened in our lives. - Marlys Popma, the well-known Iowa evangelical leader who is now the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign

with his insane, opportunistic, clueless, out-of-touch and breathtakingly audacious, game-changing pick of Sarah Marshall Palin to be his vice president, there’s another Sarah in town to hate… she fulfills every trope of feminism except for her unfortunate and inexplicable opposition to murdering unborn children, we would also have made at least two TV movies about her life, celebrating her choice to have her fifth child and the announcement yesterday that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant and is going to marry the teenage father of her child. That’s the kind of heartwarming, inclusive, empowering story we love — she’s like Juno come to life as Juneau, set in Mystery, Alaska. But she’s not a Democrat, which despite her va-va-va-voom appearance, means she’s not really a woman, which is one of the reasons we’ve spent the past four days since McCain unveiled her trying to tear her limb from limb – David Kahane, National Review

This could only mean there must be something about Sarah Palin that is deeply threatening to the left, a constituency that has long believed they have cornered the working mother market. Five kids? She should be at home begging Democrats for a handout. A husband in a union? He should be on the picket lines… because governor Palin is endearing, authentic–and with this latest revelation–easy to identify with, she invokes panic in the left. Why else would they assail a very popular, promising lady and her children? – Andrea Tantaros, Real Clear Politics

2008-08-29T00:48:00.002-04:00

Mormons and Torture

In the April 2008 issue of Sunstone Magazine, Boyd Peterson- the Mormon Studies Dean at Utah Valley University, wrote a fascinating 3 page article on Mormons and torture.

Mitt Romney, of course, facing data which showed that when 100 Americans were polled and given 10 adjectives each to describe him, 0% ever used the word "tough", famously suggested we should "double the size of Guantanamo" in a courageous move of cheap political bravado.

But I didn't know this

The 2 authors of the new torture techniques being practiced by CIA interrogators are both Mormon psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jenssen. Colleagues call them "the Mormon Mafia."
Steve Kleinman, and Air Force Reserve colonel and expert in military intelligence, says it is weird that the CIA chose 2 clinical psychs who have no intel background at all, who never conducted an interrogation, and who "have caused more harm to American national security than they will ever understand."
The Justice Department's Legal Counsel, Judge Jay Bybee, was the one defending the interrogation techniques, writing memos in 2002 that even the Bush administration has since disavowed
Dan Burk, LDS law prof at the U. of Minnesota, started blogging to protest the actions of the 3 above
"Best of all", Fred Gicks, a BYU law professor, said in the Salt Lake Tribune "It's fine to talk about the teachings of the Savior about peace, but when the other side is not living those teachings, there are real risks by living them unilaterally."
Worst of all, Alyssa Peterson, a 27 year old LDS soldier who knew Arabic, became the 3rd woman to die in Iraq when she commiteed suicide in September 2003. She objected to the interrogation techniques being used on prisoners and after 2 days in "The Cage" refused- "they stripped prisoners naked and then removed their blindfolds so that I was the first thing they saw. And then we were supposed to mock them and degrade their manhood", said Kayla Williams, a soldier who worked with Peterson.

2008-08-27T19:12:00.003-04:00

The Best of the Bore

Hillary Clinton gave a pretty darn good speech last night. Sure, it had plenty of dumb things in it that aren't true, but it is a convention of Democrats, and her ratio of stupid wrong things was much lower than the others. And you have to laugh at things like "The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pantsuits." In fact, even the horrible sounding choppy build up things as the crowd starts to cheer- that was at a minimum, thankfully.

I don't buy the CW that she has 18 million zealot followers. Not one bit. Maybe there were some people who would have found it nice and neat to have a female President, maybe 280 million or so of those. But she does not have some cult followers who are angrily heading to McCain. (There may be a few million backwoods hicks in West Virginia and Kentucky who won't vote for a black though, that may be what we are talking about).

I am always amazed at how many of the 2nd tier national figures- the Janet Napolitano, Bob Casey, Mark Warner, Debbie Stabbenow, Kathleen Sebelius, etc.- those people, who me and 2% of America know... I am amazed at how poorly all of them always do. I can't help myself from thinking "How the heck did anyone think Mark Warner was big time? He has more teeth than David Bowie in that freaky movie, and he's so boring that he's more likely to be headed for a High Council near you than a national candidacy. Napalitano is always spoken well of- but eecchhhh! I heard her on the radio and at home and it was quite disillusioning.

Do they censor anything interesting out of the non-prime slot speakers?

Mark Steyn in National Review had it straight when he said today "The truth is, from the standpoint of style and oratory, this Democratic convention has been a bust. From Virginia Senate candidate Mark Warner's poorly-received keynote address — with lines like “You know, America has never been afraid of the future, and we shouldn't start now” — to Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer's inspiring declaration that “We're pursuing coal gasification with carbon sequestration,” the Democratic delegates who pay any attention to the podium have been forced to wage a constant battle against boredom."

2 Complaints

1- "John McCain voted with President Bush 95% of the time" is not accurate- because Bush doesn't vote. If Bush has a stated position on Legislation, which I doubt he does on EVERY piece of legislation, then maybe you could revise the phrase. It doesn't bother me when little things like this get wrong- except when they become the repeated 400 times phrase- then get the phrase accurate, especially if it is supposed to be a statement of fact.

2- If the glass ceiling has 18 million cracks in it, it is one hell of a strong ceiling.

2008-08-27T18:27:00.001-04:00

What makes Biden Biden?

The moral backbone that led the V.P. nominee to stand up to Milosevic and pass the Violence Against Women Act was bred into him by his father.
By Norman Kurz
Aug. 27, 2008 If Joe Biden's many years in the public eye have provided occasional material for his detractors, then far too little time has been spent listening to the substance and meaning of his remarks. Paying attention would have revealed that the unifying theme animating his views for three decades is the same concept that first motivated his entry into elective office: abuse of power.
Whether it's global or local -- from the Balkans and the Middle East to domestic violence -- Biden typically is among the first to respond when a cause pricks his conscience. For Biden, these are not merely political issues. They are personal challenges that compel action, usually in the service of a dutiful allegiance to the lessons hammered home by his parents. No speech, no interview, no television appearance is complete without reference to the guiding hands of Jean Biden and the late Joe Biden Sr.
Every reporter who has covered Joe Biden possesses dozens of stories referencing a familial anecdote or aphorism, all intended to provide a window into Biden's formative political thinking.
For example, nearly everyone on Capitol Hill has heard Biden quote his mother saying, "Out of every bad thing that happens, if you search hard enough, you'll find something positive." These weren't just words to get Biden through the personal hell of the loss of his first wife and daughter; they were the touchstones of his thinking in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. That is the basis of his oft-heard refrain during the Bush years that the worst thing this administration has done repeatedly for seven-plus years is squander opportunities.
Biden was keen to deliver justice to the Taliban and al-Qaida, but few others spoke with his eloquence about unifying a divided America, about taking advantage of Europe's sympathies, about how this was a moment to bring together the entire civilized world, emphasizing the important ties that could bind East and West to combat the new century's fascism, terrorism and intolerance.
In his father's worldview, there are the haves and have-nots, and what distinguishes them most is not acquisition of wealth or a particular lifestyle, but the humility and grace with which they handle their lot in life. Those who forget their roots, or whose station leads them to detachment from those less fortunate, are among the most irredeemable of souls in the Biden universe.
Biden loves to quote his father saying that "it's a lucky man who wakes up every morning, puts both feet on the ground, and knows what he wants to do." Biden reveres his father for many reasons, but surely one of the most important lessons is about duty and obligation, and to whom they are owed: to family above all else, but also to community and to oneself.
And it's also a call to action, to find a useful and productive life, humble and ordinary though it may be. Simply put: Stand up and be somebody. It would be more than enough for Biden if his tombstone read, "He made his family proud."
How does this play out in his approach to real-life political issues?
As the Balkan wars of the 1990s unfolded, few in Washington believed the United States should get involved in what appeared to be another round of a centuries-old, brutal conflict that seemed to promise only endless bloodshed for outsiders foolish enough to get trapped in someone else's ethnic struggles.
Biden has always been Eurocentric, defining America's interests as closely tied to the security of Europe, and convinced that the fate of southeastern Europe was inextricably linked to the well-being of the rest of the continent and, by extension, the United States. But the tipping point for Biden was the abuse-of-power issue he had absorbed from his father decades earlier, and he could not abide witnessing another genocide in Europe.
Many years earlier, when Biden's sons, Beau and Hunter, turned 13 little more than a year apart, he took them, separately, to the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich, Germany. It was critical for Joe Biden to teach his sons what his father had impressed upon him: the immorality and unacceptability of turning a blind eye to abuse of power, with Dachau representing the ultimate consequences of the unwillingness to confront evil.
Biden traveled to the Balkans virtually every year throughout the 1990s and finally succeeded in convincing an initially reluctant President Clinton -- and an even more recalcitrant Sen. John McCain -- that saving Muslim lives from a genocidal fate was a wise and just use of American military force. The iconic moment came in a face-to-face meeting between Biden and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic when the senator told the tyrant he was a "war criminal" who one day would be held accountable at the Hague, a prescient statement few others dared whisper.
Years later, accompanying Biden to Libya, I witnessed firsthand the senator's unique brand of personal diplomacy and his willingness to speak truth to power. Moammar Gadhafi had asked Biden to come to Libya to address a large convention at the time he was seeking a rapprochement with the United States. Biden agreed to go only after Gadhafi consented to a one-on-one meeting. We were ushered into Gadhafi's large tent in Sirte. There was minimal small talk before Biden asked why we were really there, why Gadhafi had embarked on his new approach. Gadhafi replied by asking, "Why not -- after all, the normal state of affairs between nations should be one of cooperation and friendship."
To which Biden responded without hesitation, "Well, you blew a passenger plane out of the sky, you've supported terrorists, and until recently you were developing nuclear weapons, that's why not." Gadhafi realized his jive had been rejected, and he resorted to honesty. "It's true we supported the PLO, the Sandinistas, the IRA and others, and they've all ended up on the White House lawn -- why not me?"
Biden succeeded in getting the despot to admit his real purpose was far from democracy building, as Gadhafi's single-minded interest was to secure Western know-how to develop Libya's natural resources quicker.
But the best moment came minutes later when Biden interrupted the maximum leader's soliloquy on the virtues of Libyan democracy by asking, "Please tell me, in your democracy can the people get rid of you?" After the translation was complete, it was hard to avoid glancing at the goons with automatic weapons lining the sides of the tent. "No, they can't," said Gadhafi, "because I am special. I started the revolution and they respect that."
"Oh, I understand," said Biden. "We had someone like that, too. George Washington. But after eight years, we got rid of him."
His commitment to passing his signature legislation, the Violence Against Women Act, similarly arose from lessons learned long ago about the moral centrality and need to uphold human rights and redress society's injustices.
Yes, Joe Biden can be glib. And he's the first to admit there are times he talks too much, even to his detriment, so that a phenomenal 15-minute speech turns into a good 25-minute speech and ends up as a maddening 40-minute speech.
But listen closely to what Biden actually says and means. Understand the values and principles that underpin his views. And try to appreciate his ability to connect the dots better than almost anyone else in public life when it comes to articulating a uniquely optimistic foreign policy and domestic agenda that are elevated by the simple but profound lessons learned in the humble home of Jean and Joe Biden Sr.
-- By Norman Kurz

2008-08-26T15:40:00.002-04:00

Draper Burns

I always thought that Suncrest was a 1 hour holocaust waiting to happen if there was ever a perfect storm. The winds they get up there are insane- like 60 MPH for hours straight. Imagine a dry winter or 2, a hot Summer or two, and then this exact time of year, one gets going and it is windy. Ouch. This current burning in Corner Canyon just reminds me of that.

2008-08-26T14:01:00.002-04:00

Democratic Convention, Day 1

I didn't expect too much from a Convention, but even that was too much. Somehow I don't remember them being quite such syrupy commercials of obvious progaganda and no merit beyond that.

I mean, how about the music? After Ted Kennedy did what he could, they play these songs that are so ridiculous- it is so obvious they are trying to persuade you to something.

Poor Michelle looked very uncomfortable, like she didn't want to be up there. She did what she could- and on paper it would look fine. But she took some powerful and meaningful personal stories and it just became a packaged rehearsed sales job.

And the little "Good night, Daddy" routine with all the canned lines from his daughters and all- I mean, come on. We think you are stupid, says Day 1, really stupid. Forget policy. We are here to tell you about an ice cream cone, a fat spoiled Kennedy grandkid on a yacht, and Malia's bedtime.

2008-08-25T15:30:00.002-04:00

Utah & Energy Policy, Part 3

From the Deseret News
Sunday, August 24, 2008
N-plant proposal fuels worries
By Stephen Speckman
Proposals for a uranium mill and nuclear power plant near Green River, Emery County, are raising more and more eyebrows.
A group that says it seeks to protect Utahns from nuclear and toxic waste wants to know where high-level radioactive waste will go if the state allows a nuclear power plant to be built in an industrial park on state trust land near Green River.
Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah members also told the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration board of directors during a meeting Tuesday that the state isn't maximizing the trust's revenue potential by exercising an option to give the nuclear-plant owners first dibs on 1,600 acres in the new industrial park six miles from Green River.
HEAL policy director Christopher Thomas told SITLA board members that the deal, which could benefit Emery County coffers, in effect puts a cap on the price of the 1,600 acres.
"As I understand it, other potential buyers will now have to get in line behind the nuclear power developer, even if they wanted to offer a higher bid for the land," Thomas said.
Thomas wants land in the industrial park opened up to bidders.
The proposed plant's waste stream is another sticking point for HEAL. Thomas said the plant developer should guarantee a disposal place before being allowed to set up shop near Green River.
"Without that assurance, we don't know how long we'll need to manage that waste on site, who's responsible for it after the plant's useful life and just how much it could cost," Thomas said.
If Yucca Mountain ever gets going as a waste site, HEAL is worried there won't be enough room to store waste there from a Utah reactor.
Some are touting the plant's benefits.
Earlier this year Heritage Foundation research fellow Jack Spencer wrote that a proposal to build two 1,500-megawatt reactors in Green River would provide Utahns with "clean and secure" energy while possibly lessening the blow on industry from efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, blamed for global warming.
But water issues for the mill and plant may be a long way from being resolved.
Last fall Rep. Aaron Tilton, R-Springville, talked about building two reactors somewhere in the state. Tilton is an owner of Transition Power Development. Water from one of the units could come from the Kane County Water Conservancy District, directed by Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab.
If the plant proposed for construction near Green River is built, it will be in the same industrial park as a planned uranium mill.
In 2001 the price for a pound of uranium cost less than eight items at the Dollar Store. By last year, however, uranium soared to $138 per pound, which has renewed interests from prospectors with an eye on Utah's cache of yellowcake.
Last May Mancos Resources Inc. presented the Utah Radiation Control Board with a plan to operate a mine that will produce about 1,200 tons of uranium per day. It's unknown at this point where the uranium would be enriched or even if the neighboring plant would use it or rely on sources outside Utah.
Canada-based Bluerock Resources Ltd. owns Mancos, which now has an office in Green River, and it has 12 "uranium properties" in Utah and Colorado. The Mancos mill would employ more than 40 people, last about 50 years and result in a $125 million investment in Utah, with an "optimistic" start date of three years from now.
The group Uranium Watch is keeping an eye on how the mill might impact water resources. The mill would need licensing from three state regulatory agencies, including the Division of Water Quality. A hearing on water rights protests is set for Aug. 27 in Green River.

2008-08-23T13:59:00.009-04:00

Biden- Obama 2008 (pun intended)

The process was seriously bungled- somehow I don't think Saturday at 3 AM was how they wanted it to come out. Unless they really did want to take a mocking stab at Hillary for the 3 AM commercials- but I hear there is something about how the cell networks work that they could only do that time.

But it was the absolute correct choice, and this probably will really help Obama win. It is a move to the center.

The other big winner from it is Romney. He is almost a sure thing now. Even if the leak that McCain had settled on Romney is false (which I don't think it was), this forces McCain to move right. After all- Biden persuaded Kerry to offer McCain the Democratic VP slot in 2004. Biden said a couple years ago he wouldn't mind running with McCain. And Liebermann was Gore's 2000 VP pick, of course.

Liebermann is 100% not a conservative. His support for a Wilsonian war of nation building doesn't change anything. If McCain doesn't do Romney or something to the right, it will be an election of Star Young Democrat- Old Tough Democrat vs. Almost Democrat- Independent Democrat.

Foreign policy is now basically not going to decide this election. I don't think it decided 2004: 42% had it as their top issue, call it terrorism and Republicans got those, call it Iraq and Democrats got those. It has been a funny dance for foreign policy in 2008- originally the Dem was going to win on anti-Iraq in 2008, then McCain was going to win on the Surge, then it all was a non-issue behind the economy, then Obama was going to lose because of Russia eating Georgia, and on and on.

In the end this won't be an election about how Biden and McCain voted for the war in October 2002 while Illinois State Senator Obama spoke against it early and often, or an election about how Bush & Cheney went for it in March 2003, or an election about how Rumsfeld & Bush & Co sipped lemonade on the Crawford, Texas seashore while Iraqis and New Orleanians drowned, or any of that.

All Biden has to say is "I want to punch Vladamir Putin in the face" and the Democratic landslide is on.

2008-08-22T18:46:00.003-04:00

Pick Joe Biden

For whatever it is worth, I think Obama should pick Joe Biden, if he ever actually announces this decision. Apparently his strategy is... well, alienate everyone by keeping his secret for days and days. He is doing this in a week where polls say John McCain would win the Electoral College if the election were today.

So the text message gimmick is backfiring- alienating the media probably. And a lot of the people are saying this is kind of "cool kid on campus"/ "hard to get" behavior. Oh, and next week, he doesn't need a 75,000 fan concert of a convention in Denver- he needs spreadsheets and graphs and details and plans.

The best reason for Biden is the weakness of the other options. Tim Kaine and Chet Edwards are kind of a joke. Evan Bayh would be okay, I guess. Ditto for Wesley Clark. Kathleen Sebelius is crazy left wing. Hillary Clinton would be an absolute shock, but it would be better than most of these options. I can't believe people are even talking about bringing back Gore or Kerry.

This election is 74 days away- and it appears to be turning into a real fight. McCain has had a good month, but there still has to be an unheard of alignment of the stars for him to actually win.

I think Biden would absolutely destroy Romney or Pawlenty in a debate. Biden has experience and foreign policy credentials, but what he really has is presence and realism to him, a no-nonsense candor and apparent desire to take off the gloves if he can- that would really keep the cotton candy candidacy criticism of Obama in check.

2008-08-20T23:29:00.003-04:00

Utah and US Energy Policy, Part 2, Electricity

(scroll down for Part 1, Part 3 will come later)

Another big thing happening lately is the school trust land being possibly sold to Carbon County to possibly lease to a company to possibly build a nuclear power plant in Green River.

That puts us squarely in the middle of both sides of the energy equation: electricity and transportation.

In the United States, we have not built a nuclear power plant in 30+ years. China, benefitting from the convenience of being a one party state with unlimited powers, has basically snapped their fingers and built 30 or 40 nuclear power plants recently. France runs largely on nuclear.

HEAL Utah has been in a couple times talking to us, trying to stop the spread of nuclear energy. They are a nationwide thing run by a nuclear scientist who got his PhD from Berkeley and has drawn up a Carbon Free & Nuclear Free roadmap to the yellow brick road. It has been interesting.

The cons of nuclear energy are

1- Storage of radioactive waste, just a 100,000 year half life wait away

2- Possible meltdown, a la Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and lots of supposed covered up stuff that almost went as bad. Think Homer Simpson saying "its nuk-u-lar"

3- Nuclear proliferation- ie, if the world goes this way, nuclear weapon technology will spread along with it. A la Iran and their "for peaceful purposes."

4- Gigantic capital costs up front, impossible red tape and suits, need for taxpayers to 100% liability protect the involved parties or no one will do it

There isn't really much argument about 1 and 2. We can just throw our mindset over them- and say "we can safely do it now" or "they can never be sure of such huge risks!" Who knows? As to nuclear proliferation, I think the cat is pretty much out of the bag. From what I understand, it isn't really a big scientific secret- it is simply a matter of a large enough amount of money being put into a multiyear project and anybody can figure out the engineering of it and do it. As to item 4, the whole question is should we pay for it, remove the red tape, and do it?

The pros of nuclear power are

1- It is carbon free basically, meaning it does not contribute to global warming, unlike coal and oil/gas

2- It is infinitely renewable, unlike coal and oil/gas

3- It is proven to be able to generate a lot of electricity

Coal is the biggest source of electricity today. Nuclear is 2nd. After that are renewables- which have been wonderful political things: wind, solar, geothermal, apple pie, etc., for about 4 decades now.

The cons of renewables (non-nuclear renewables) are

1- They account for 6% of the puzzle today. Even with tax incentives for companies to go that way, and federal funding, and warm fuzzies from society, and everything else, they aren't going to top 15% of the picture anytime soon.

2- Wind in particular is limited in how much it can do. T Boone Pickens wants $35 billion to build a whole network on an almost constant wind corridor from Canada to Texas and another from California to Texas. I don't think it can generate very much under the best circumstances.

3- Wind and solar are useless when it isn't windy or sunny. They have to be backed up by conventional sources. The Western United States, I have heard, has the best (wind + sun) climate on Earth to put these together. What have we done?

The pros of renewables (non-nuclear are)

1- They are endless, unlike oil/gas and coal

2- They don't involve sending evil Middle Eastern crazies hundreds of billions of dollars every year

3- They do not emit carbon, basically, and don't contribute to global warming

2008-08-20T19:12:00.001-04:00

Utah's Congressional Delegation on US Energy Policy

(This is Part 1: I will write more later on in a series)

I went to a meeting with US Senator Orrin Hatch and US Representative Rob Bishop this morning for work. Kind of cool to say that. I didn’t scream like they were Lennon & McCartney when they walked in, or when I shook hands with them. Took much self restraint.

Here is my review, in the ugly, the good, and the good.

You can read the Deseret News story here http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,700252348,00.html?pg=1

The UGLY

Everyone in the room agrees that the bad guys are the environmentalists and lawyers out there. There of course were no environmentalists, or green lawyers, or even apparently a single Democrat in the room, making it much easier for everyone to confess that all the sin is on them out there. It was practically Church, just with environmentalists and lawyers standing in for gays and feminists.

And Rob Bishop, former NRA lobbyist, has a history of quarrels with PTA Moms who volunteer to advocate for schools on Capitol Hill. Something about them wanting to keep guns out of Elementary Schools. He won.

The GOOD

Hatch, at 74, in his 32nd year in the Senate, is still an entertaining and articulate guy with an encyclopedia of detail in his head. At one point Rep. Bishop said something about how the “Senate’s Gang of 10 bill is crap, sorry Orrin, but it is.” And Hatch leaned into the microphone and said “I’m sorry, our less refined members of the junior chamber don’t speak with manners sometimes.” He may never get his dream of being a Supreme Court justice, but that is a shame- he would add an entertaining pen to the decisions, alongside Scalia’s.

Hatch grew up in Pennsylvania and got a BA in History from BYU in 1959 and a JD from Pitt Law School in 1962. He was an attorney in Pennsylvania and Utah for 14 years before carpet-bagging into the Utah Senate in 1976, defeating Democrat Frank Moss, partly by complaining that Moss’ 18 years were too long for a Senator to serve. He entered the Senate in 1977, when there was a 62-38 Democratic majority. He had good things to say about Jimmy Carter’s energy policy- “There are many Saudi Arabias of oil shale in the Green River formation” and so on. (The school trust lands own much of that developable land over oil shale, hence my presence at the meeting.) In Hatch’s version of history, OPEC flooded world markets to drive oil below $10 a barrel specifically to stop us from developing oil shale.

Energy policy may sound boring, and perhaps it is. But it really is everything. Foreign policy is a footnote to energy policy. Am I wrong? Economics are a footnote to energy policy. Again, am I wrong? Is the economy’s problems speculators losing paper money on houses- or is it $4 a gallon gas, inflation, food prices soaring, energy costs soaring, weak dollar, and on and on- all directly caused by energy policy.

2008-08-15T21:12:00.004-04:00

An Obama Referendum Election

McCain's "Obama is a celebrity" ad has become a series of ads, and now the theme of his campaign. His recent attack on Bush- "America is worse off than it was 4 years ago", and the fact that he is supposedly trying to pick between Pro-Choice Tom Ridge and Independent Democrat Joe Liebermann for VP, just solidifies the fact that this isn't an election about McCain, and it isn't an election about Bush.

This election is an up or down vote on Barack Obama.

I doodled at lunch on a napkin and figured that the last 12 Presidential elections have essentially been about 1 person.

4 times the person that the election was mostly about wasn't even on the ballot: 1964 was about JFK, 1968 was about LBJ, 1988 was about Reagan, and 2000 was about Clinton. The Democrats would have loved for this to be an election about Bush, but seeing as how Bush has been in exile since Katrina in 2005, and McCain cannot fairly be linked up with Bush, it won't be.

The Presidential election as an up or down vote on 1 person is interesting. Americans have voted no 1/2 the time, yes 1/2 the time. 2 elections were about voting "Yes" on JFK (1960 & 1964). 2 elections were about voting "Yes" on Reagan (1984 & 1988). America voted "Yes" on Clinton in 1996, and "Yes" on Bush in 2004.

But America voted "No" on LBJ in 1968, "No" on McGovern in 1968, "No" on Nixon in 1976, "No" on Carter in 1980, "No" on HW Bush in 1992, and "No" on Clinton in 2000.

And so that is why attacking Obama is basically the only thing for 1/2 the political country to do the next 85 days. What can a conservative do? A- Jump on the McCain campaign? B- Head to the wilderness for at least 4 years? C- Look to Bob Barr... and help Obama win Georgia and Virginia on his way to 350 electoral votes?

No. Conservatives will choose D- Insult and childishly mock Obama. Character assassination. Lower the level of debate. Not just "He's arrogant", "he's out of touch", "he has no experience", "taxes will go up for everyone even if he says only on households over $250K", "he's Michael Jordan running for President", "he's the most liberal politician since..." and so on- which won't do the trick. Not even close. It is quite hard to attack him for lack of policy detail when he is running against against McCain. It isn't like you can make this an election about conservative ideas vs. liberal ideas. A single chapter of either of Obama's books, or 10 minutes on his web site, lays out more ideology and specific ideas than one could attach to McCain's quarter century political career- which seems more about going with the flow than courageously making a stand.

The political right, totally without enthusiasm for McCain, will have to really tear into Obama to win. I don't think it will stick. I think Obama is heading for a huge win, the most decisive win since 1988.

2008-08-15T21:05:00.002-04:00

The Clone Wars

The bad reviews are pretty much right. I don't know why the Star Wars Universe is wasting so much valuable money and effort on the gap between Episode 2 and Episode 3, which is about the most boring spot in the entire chronology. Here's hoping that they actually do start up the live action TV show, set between Episodes 3 and 4, that George Lucas promised. And someday they must do movies from the Old Republic and then later in the New Jedi Order.

2008-08-15T00:01:00.004-04:00

Eagle Mountain, Our New Home

So 6 weeks ago, we moved. Our California investor landlords were in the process of losing their shirts on their property flipping schemes, and asked us to leave a little early so they could try to sell this Summer. Then they went and asked $335K for it, when it needs $15K in landscaping/sprinklers/retaining walls and so forth done on it still, and it is going to sit there. They lowered it to $325K since, but it will still sit there. If they don't sell by early Fall, they can forget selling up there until next Spring.

But, back to us, we moved to a smaller, cheaper, flatter, simpler, AND INCREDIBLY HUMBLER neighborhood in Eagle Mountain, about 5 miles west of Lehi and American Fork

We of course took the best cat in the history of felines with us

This is the only picture of the interior which will post until we clean. The house is, uh, 2186 square feet, which I actually like way more than the old 3212 square feet. Honestly, seriously, we downsized by a little over 1000 square feet and are happy about it. Truly. The basement here is unfinished, or else it would be like 3800 square feet, but I'm glad. It is homier, it is easier to keep clean, it is connected. It is nice. I think we are better able to host people for big dinners or game nights or whatever, because the kitchen/ living room/ dining area all interconnect and are very open.

This picture is of the back yard. The Ranches Golf Course surrounds our neighborhood, which is "Highlands on the Green." I took this picture from my dining room table. We love the green, being native Californians/ Texans who miss the green sometimes in Utah.

This is the back of the house. I love the double doors going out to the green, and the fact that the whole house is oriented to the back windows- except maybe the little loft upstairs- which is the kids Wii room within which they spend 15 hours per day.

The front of our house. Most of the neighbors have bigger houses with more they have to take care of. Ha ha.

Looking down the street, it is a 98.5% active LDS neighborhood, by my scientific estimate. And I like it, a lot.

The playground and pool are a 45 second walk away, love it

2008-08-14T23:22:00.007-04:00

The Last Days of Summer Vacation

I have had the last two days off. We spent both in Heber City and Park City. (All the pictures are from today because only this morning did I admit defeat in finding the darn memory cards missing since the move 6 weeks ago- and I went- kicking and screaming, to waste money on replacing them).

We had lunch at the train place in Heber City. I've been up there for a work lunch before but the kids had not, they loved it

There are a lot of cities with character and charm in the mountains of the West. Add Heber to the list of those I really like

Some kind of disgusting goo that came as a "toy" with lunch, the boys laughed so hard for so long at it

Historic Park City :)

The boys endured lots of back to school shopping, with a trip to the toy store promised as a reward, conditioned on behavior. Revoked and reinstated more often than Ricky Williams.

I'm that tall. The mirror makes me look fat.

Olympic Village, stumbled into out of curiosity. Benjamin is getting too cool for this stuff

There's a dude in mid air in the picture, click on it for a bigger version

The boys are on the far right

After a final stop at a 70-90% off Linens and Things sale, the kids run to the toy store

I said a small toy... but I'm so proud of you

It may say "Cowboy Lasso", but it IS an Indiana Jones bull whip, and he LOVES it, and though we may accidentally get struck a few times per hour, his joy is worth the scars

Jordanelle- Deer Creek Reservoir- Provo Canyon, all always so gorgeous, very nice these last few clear days

2008-08-14T02:11:00.002-04:00

Just Follow the Prophet

That makes it awfully, awfully simple, doesn't it? It is an airtight, impenetrable, unbreakable logical loop, 2 simple steps: He is the Prophet, He cannot be wrong. Obedience is the first principle of heaven. Therefore, whatever brain power I have need only be consumed with A- Discerning the teachings of the Prophets, and B- Conforming myself to the above.

Given the ease, given the simplicity, given the strength that such a formula locks everything into, it can no doubt be very appealing. After all, thought is uncomfortable. Uncertainty is absolutely no fun. As JFK said, “We prefer the comfort of opinion to the discomfort of thought.”

Maybe it is inevitable given my absolute inability to cease being a Smartass. Everyone has to either be a Smartass or a Dumbass though, it seems. Well, there are a few outside that formula. I have run into about 20 genuine really good people in my life. You think you know thousands of good people, but you are blind, you don't. I don't mean to be rude, if you are older than me maybe you have known 50 goodfolks. But I am an extremely good judge of character- not to brag but I must because it is the truth- I see right through people- I see way more than they want me to see, certainly more than they ever want me to say. (just as example #35913, I saw through John Edwards instantly, forget politics or idea, I knew he was a subpar human, I have no idea how anyone didn’t).

I cannot watch General Conference and simply download the package without scanning for viruses. I cannot even read the scriptures (especially the Old Testament) without seeing so much stuff that cannot be swallowed without a lot of chewing- even stuff that tastes so bad it needs to be spit out. If you don't it is because you didn't notice the 200 outrageous things- like Moses yelling "Damn it, kill the prisoners of war! Kill them!! But keep the virgins for your own fun. God commands it!" or Paul laying out, in about 6 places, why Eve was to blame, why women shouldn't speak in Church, why if they have questions at Church they should go home and let their husbands tell them how it is, etc etc. Sorry if I'm arrogant for noticing what you didn't. Shoot the intellectual. And no, the Joseph Smith translation doesn't touch the above instances.

I really think what I go through is true of anyone who actually listens and thinks about what they are hearing at Conference, or what they are actually reading if they are reading the scriptures and not just highlighted quotes. Maybe 90% of the time people have the TV on and get internally generated warm fuzzies for the fact that they are being a good little person and watching Conference. I don’t know. I don’t know what other people do. I get the need to turn the brain off and act at a certain point when the ball is about to be snapped. One can't quibble with analysis forever, choices must be made.

Well, actually I do know what many others do. In Elders’ Quorum any halfway interesting topic usually has a way of being melted back to “We know what we have to do; we just need to be better this week!!!” Sorry, but I heard more worthwhile principles than that laid out by fellow 7th graders in the basketball huddle. I mean, Rah Rah Rah, I am right there with you, but since when the whole "this isn't pertinent to salvation" nonsense. What happened to Joseph Smith'sprinciple equating salvation directly with knowledge and mysteries? What happened to Brigham Young’s “Every Elder should be a profound theologian”?

A friend recently told me about the wisdom of having a shelf. A mother once told her children “anything bugs you, anything you disagree with, just put it on the shelf.” Good idea. But one can't put the whole thing on the shelf.

Seriously- since when is ‘Follow the Prophet’ the first principle, the central concept, and only theme? Am I supposed to read the scriptures because the Prophet says so?

And why is “having a testimony of the Church” the primary need? I object to both ends, and have been for about 3 years, and haven’t heard anything resembling a good defense of either side. Here is why. A testimony is overrated. Vastly overrated. Muhammed Atta had a testimony. The Mountain Meadows Massacrers had testimonies (Not that they will be discussed in the lessons on obedience, the modern 2nd principle, but they absolutely should.) . The evil spirits possessing the pigs had testimonies. Republicans have a testimony that A, B, and C are true, and Democrats have a testimony of D, E, and F. The Jehovah's Witnesses have testimonies. Fawn McKay Brodie has a testimony the other way. Saul, Saul, why persecutest- SAUL HAD A KILLER TESTIMONY!

The thing actually boils back to what the status of the General Authorities is- what the status of the First Presidency and apostles is, etc. Are they infallible? Well, we claim not, but act as though they are more reliable than the sunrise. Does the Prophet have a red phone to Kolob? Does their fax machine receive policy books and statements from Kolob? Are they actual literal witnesses of Jesus? The fact seems to be, no. Not long after the birth of the Church they were called to try to be, and most of them ended up excommunicated. Brigham never claimed 1% as much as Joseph claimed, and then soon the matters- on which their authority seems to be based- became “too sacred to talk about”, which was an odd reversal of the early days of the Church- when they did claim to have the actual witness, but didn’t claim it gave them any kind of authority. Joseph was about a .315 hitter on the calls to General Authority level leadership that he made. We have a testimony of the process by which the handbook is written today? I mean, seriously, you do? You have too many testimonies dude.

But well, God wouldn’t allow it, we say. Someone said somewhere that God would never allow the Church to be led astray. We have 180 years of wonderful and colorful history- but history that cannot but show that they can certainly be very very wrong on very very big matters (race, polygamy, politics, and so on). There are prophecies abundant from the early leaders which did not come true- sorry, call me evil, but if you open up the history books and actually put the prophets to the test, as the scriptures say to do, you don’t come out anywhere near 100% accuracy unless you’re bucking for a promotion in the Church. The later leaders, well, pretty much shut the prophetic faucet down to an occasional trickle.

What do I conclude? Well, personally, for the time being, I cannot read the Book of Mormon for 20 minutes without being blown away by the wisdom and awe and power of the thing, really spiritually moved by it, on the one hand, and laughing out loud and “saying COME ON FARMBOY!!!” on the other. I do this in the same sitting. Sorry, but I do. BH Roberts, the Apostle in the 12 for decades, the scholar, the polygamist Congressman, etc., well he spent decades studying the mysterious book and, it sure appears to me, died dubious as to whether there is historical reality to the stories therein. If any of you read, say, the Book of Ether, for example, and carefully study it, you will have to say “This is patternism on steroids and then some”, and that would be being kind. My list of “Seemingly blatant Biblical plagiarism items” reached 15 before I quit keeping it, just on Ether. The worst may have been the beautiful woman who dances for the King and her wicked mother gets her to ask for John the Baptist’s head on a charger after the King promised her anything she asked up to half the kingdom. There is no honest way for one not to see that, short of just choosing to ignore- which we do like crazy because as JFK said we prefer the comfort of opinion to the discomfort.... And yet, if there was ever a Prophet, Joseph Smith was a Prophet. Pick up the Lectures on Faith and see if it doesn’t instantly demand to be many levels above any other religious writing. Look at what he said in Liberty Jail. Look in 1000 places- what Joseph writes is music to the soul… and yet, on the 3rd hand, he had about 50 or 80 wives and lied to Emma and many others about it and they were generally very young and it was definitely sexual and it was not rare for them to be already married to other men and it had not a darn thing, despite what your Seminary teacher will tell you, to do with caring for old widows or population growth (explain that math).

Sorry, I was concluding. I conclude that religion is a mysterious, complex, spiritual thing, and it isn’t algebra. God can make my next door neighbor a Prophet, or a woman in Cambodia could speak eternal truth while David Bednar speaks rubbish. Mormonism is a tiny and shrinking religion (despite the wildly exaggerated nonstop propaganda reports to the contrary). But it is mine and I love it. The real religion is Christianity- but Joseph Smith was inspired- he got it better and truer and deeper than anyone else, in my completely biased assessment. I have basically no issue with President Hinckley, even if he is the 1st Prophet in the history of the world to write a book called Way to Be! (enough said). I certainly have no issue with President Monson, he is a favorite, and here’s hoping he outlives… sorry, I digress. I do take issue with the schmuck from Arkansas whose first act was to blame inactive people for the fact that Mormons who are asses drive them out of the Church and who instantly became a 4th Sunday classic, beloved by every such ass in the Church. I don’t have a ton of respect for people who claim that God has confirmed Bednar to their souls in prayer, but I’m going to hell, so we’ll see. “Martin Luther King is a commie spy” Ezra Taft Benson was able to become a Prophet in time, so maybe Packer and Bednar will too.

I respectfully request that hard-line absolutist people, who are overflowing with certainty about way too many things, stop acting as though this stuff is algebra. And I welcome more to join me in turning their brains on within the topic.

2008-08-12T23:05:00.002-04:00

A Mix of Realism and Idealism

A very wise Professor of Philosophy told me a couple years ago that politics, especially foreign policy, has to be a mix of idealism and realism.

And so here are my thoughts on the first 4 or 5 days of the Chinese Olympics

The $300 million Opening Ceremonies were beautiful. They were gorgeous. They were amazing. We watched all 4 1/2 hours (DVR is so worth $10 a month everyone, best $10 you'll ever spend) and loved it all
China is a gorgeous place with wonderful history and culture
At some point during the Parade of Nations (203 of them, vs. 192 at the UN), as we tried to find them all with the boys on the $1 DI globe that was made in the 1980s, we gave up. I became temporarily in favor of changing the entire world into about 5 empires. Sorry Georgia. I don't need zillions of countries with fewer people than many American cities.
Bush's interview with Costas went well Sunday night. He is smarter and funnier than people think.
As Russia gobbled back up Georgia, and Tibet and the Sudan were ignored, I thought "You know, America has been behaving like an Empire for about 12 decades. Russia for centuries. China for millenia. All the wimpy little European countries sure did in past centuries when they could. Let's be real about what's happening here
Michael Phelps was born to swim.
2nd Most Proud to be an American moment: When the US relay team came from way behind to barely beat the trash talking French.
1st Most Proud to be an American moment: Every time one sees a black athlete, and says "oh, they are from somewhere in Africa... or America", and every time one sees an Asian athlete, and says "oh, they are from China or Japan or Southeast Asia... or America", and every time one sees a pale white skinned blonde and says "oh, they are from Northern Europe... or America", or every time one sees a Latino athlete and says "oh, they are from Central or South America... or America." One really sees 202 nations built on ethnicity, race, and language, and 1 built on an idea.

2008-08-12T22:39:00.001-04:00

That's My Boy :)

So Benjamin is now a Cub Scout. He was excited to learn from the Den Mother that he will be able to go up in the mountains for scout days and learn to shoot bb guns and stuff. But amidst the excitement he said "I'm not going to shoot a deer. That's a living life."

2008-08-08T18:20:00.002-04:00

My Dream Journal

I had a very interesting dream in the Summer of 2004, interesting enough that I went and started to read up on dreams. Not the stupid "dream dictionaries", which supposedly give you the translated meanings, but real dream stuff- from Freud and Jung to REM scientists and that sort of thing.

Everyone said the same basic thing- the interpretation is a matter of what clicks for the dreamer, all dreams matter, keep a pen and paper next to your bed and write immediately when you wake up, ever detail, no matter how insignificant seeming, etc.

And thus began my dream journal. I went back through my journals and did my best to remember every dream I had ever had, and I recorded 19 dreams, a page and a half when typed, for my entire first 23 years of life: mid-81 to mid-04. I would record 37 dreams in a single month in September 2004, but eventually I fell out of the habit and don't have a single recorded dream for a 13 month period in there.

Still though, now, 4 years later, I have a dream journal which includes 398 individual recorded dreams, and it is 53 typed, single spaced pages.

I was finishing another book on dreams last night and I was doing some of the exercises, looking back at themes.

I have had very many dreams set within movies or TV shows. As most know, I have had 22 Star Wars dreams, most involving Darth Vader, and if not, then the Emperor. But I also have had 7 dreams set within LOST, 5 within Heroes, 3 Lord of the Rings dreams, and many other things, like Batman Begins, Passion of the Christ, Last of the Mohicans, King Kong, Pan's Labyrinth, Jerry Maguire, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Titanic, Karate Kid, Grey's Anatomy, National Treasure, A river Runs Through It, Sicko, Indiana Jones, even one (really scary) from Scooby Doo when I was 5 or 6. In conversations, it seems to me that some people often connect the screen visuals into their dreams, and dream this way a lot, and other people never do.

I have had about 20 dreams about airplanes- usually involving a recurring dream of taking off through the fog of San Francisco and not being able to get up high because there are telephone poles and the plane has to stay low and circle very fast. I'll have variations on this- St. George, the Moon, Texas, wherever, but the airplane dream is recurring.

Fear seems to be the most common emotion, followed by desire and frustration.

Like almost everyone, oceans/ water/ lakes/ flooding is a very common element in my dreams.

I have had many dreams about throwing a football or baseball, about 25 dreams about football, 10 about baseball, and 8 about basketball, often involving being in a game alongside or as famous players: Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, LeBron James, Deion Sanders, Kevin Mitchell, Ryan Howard, Barry Bonds, Ben Roethlisberger, Tom Brady, Tim Duncan, etc.

I often dream about famous political or religious leaders, I have had 4 dreams that Jesus was in, 2 with Joseph Smith, 1 with Muhammed, but also many with George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton (she is either an opposing quarterback or a lecturing parent usually), John McCain (usually a football coach), and others with Osama Bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, ulius Caesar, Muhammed Ali, Jesse Jackson, David Koresh, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Will Smith, Woody Allen, Al Gore.

Maybe a dozen dreams of brakes not working or other assorted car crash incidents, usually early in the night, and somewhere I was dreaming that day.

Since he has died I have had dreams involving my brother Ben 6 times.

I have had about 15 dreams involving arguments, disputes, or reconciliation with my other siblings.

I have had 5-10 dreams which were very long and detailed and seemed to be archtypical and apocalyptic. For example, the first of these was in 2000, when I was in Sacramento, and I dreamed of an epic war in the sky. There had been a great council in a circle in the clouds, and soldiers were there in various nations uniforms, the red with yellow of China, the blue and white of Israel, India, America, and Britain were there, sparkling uniforms of perfect detail, all standing in the clouds in a council circle around a table, and then they started to pull their guns out of their belt on the side and started to shoot each other, one led to another over and over, and it led to escalations of wars among nations.

There was a time when I had a theme of stars and space for a few months in my dreams, another when I had 5 dreams about fire in a month, another when spiders and snakes infesting the backyard or the house was recurring.

I have had 5 dreams wherein I could fly, which are becoming more common as I learn how to lucid dream (realize you are dreaming while you are dreaming and yet remain asleep and control the dream however you want. It is a learned skill but I am getting it, you can get books on the topic.)

The setting of most of my dreams, where setting is relevant, is San Francisco or New York. I also have a recurring theme of hiking or travelling on a camping trip on some sort of journey across the Western US; involving places like Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Montana, Idaho, Washington State, Seattle, Kansas, Missouri, even Nauvoo. I have had a cluster of dreams about Park City, another cluster about LA, and a bunch involving the Central California Coast; Monterey, Point Lobos, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Santa Barbara, etc. A few set in Sacramento or Lake Tahoe. I have had detailed dreams about the San Francisco Bay: many of being in the water, memorable dreams about the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Mateo bridge, and the Dumbarton Bridge.

Almost all of my dreams are visual in nature, but I have had a few which were primarily audio- about songs like Across the Universe (hearing it while travelling in an Einstein-Rosenburg Bridge Contact style, or standing in a sunny rainbow getting drenched and looking at lions in Africa while Toto's Africa was playing, or a dream narrated by Al Gore about the Earth being flooded).

So I exhort you to start keeping a dream journal today.

'Prejudice is the only true robber." - Victor Hugo

2008-08-07T14:13:00.002-04:00

Beijing 2008

Certain events have already begun, and the Opening Ceremony will be on tomorrow night. That is, the portions of the Opening Ceremony which the "People's Republic" doesn't delay or block broadcast of due to protesters.

It is a joke that they are hosting the Olympics there, maybe not as bad as 1936 Berlin or 1980 USSR, but still a joke. As least the Berlin Olympics were awarded before the Nazi's were elected, and the Soviet Olympics awarded before the invasion of Afghanistan.

The Olympics are obviously not simply sporting events. They are an international political statement. And this is the world saying that we can make so much freaking money off Chinese sweatshops that we will ignore

1- the human rights abuses

2- the fact that Bibles are prohibitted from being brought in by foreigners for the Olympics

3- the fact that foreigners are being notified they have no search and seizure protections in their hotel rooms

4- The ongoing travesty of Tibet and exile of the 14th Dalai Lama

5- The Falun Gong persecutions

6- North Korea, their chosen "bad cop" on the world stage

7- Darfur, China's own grandoise move to be the new imperialist, as has been written about

The torch run turned into an embarrassment, appropriately.

Some Eastern European leaders are purposely not attending ceremonies, especially those who grew up under communism decades ago.
I had a good friend try to have a China-free Christmas last year. It was not easy, he said.

2008-07-31T15:12:00.000-04:00

Wendy's

Probably the best hamburgers... but definitely the worst fries

2008-07-31T13:47:00.001-04:00

"Jesus was quite indulgent with the sincerely erroneous, but severe with hypocrites... I don’t think keeping up with the times was very high on Jesus’ list of priorities. Moreover, he never claimed to be a realist. When confronted with the difficulties of his teachings, Jesus blithely replied that “what is impossible for men is possible for God.”...

"God expects more of us than we think we are capable of. He demands selfless, faithful love. He demands that we pardon our enemies and those who have hurt us. He demands that we give from our want, and not only from our surplus. Why does he ask such difficult, such “unrealistic” things? Because he is calling us to greatness. He is calling us to realize our potential and to grow in resemblance to Jesus. Is this unrealistic? If we were left to our own devices, yes. With the assistance of his grace, no...

"The world is not a Swiss watch, where every part fits perfectly with every other part. Humanity is a mishmash of passion and self-control, selfishness, and love, personal interest and generosity, reason and irrationality. We are called to the triumph of good over evil and reason over chaos, but the perfect world we dream of will happen only in the world to come."

- Father Thomas D. Williams, Greater Than You Think, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzA2ZDNlZjE0Nzc0YjlmMTE4MGYxZWU3NjY2YzNkYzk=

2008-07-29T20:01:00.006-04:00

And then There Were 8?

The 8 Vice Presidential Finalists, according to the InTrade markets

2008-07-29T19:28:00.005-04:00

The 10 Second Guide to How Oil Went From $25 a Barrel in 2003 to $140 a barrel last month

(Steve Forbes, Oil and the Feeble Greenback, July 29, 2008, http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=27731)

2008-07-29T12:42:00.002-04:00

Sunday Night Blues

Is it just me, or is Sunday night the hardest night of the week to sleep? I have always hard a hard time sleeping that night. Maybe it is because I know I have to wake up early again and transitioning from weekend mode (which of course is always a 3 day weekend now for me here in the land of Hunstman's goofy ideas) to work mode isn't easy.

I went to bed at 11 on Sunday night and actually fell asleep at 4:15 in the morning. That kind of thing never happens to me, but I got all tied up in the whole "I have to fall asleep NOW!" thing and totally lost the game mentally.

I managed the 10 hour workday on Monday just fine. But today, after a good 8 hours sleep last night- I have been dragging. I snoozed about 12 times and got in a little late, the whole deal.

2008-07-27T20:12:00.002-04:00

There are 126 Temples in Operation, with 16 more announced/ under construction. I have been to 16 of them (endowment sessions). How many have you been to?

Temples I Have Been to, By Dedication Date

1. Nauvoo, Illinois (1846/2002)

2. St George, Utah (1877)

3. Logan, Utah (1884)

4. Manti, Utah (1888)

5. Salt Lake, Utah (1893)

6. Mesa, Arizona (1927)

7. Idaho Falls, Idaho (1945)

8. Los Angeles, California (1956)

9. Ogden, Utah (1972)

10. Provo, Utah (1972)

11. Jordan River, Utah (1981)

12. Dallas, Texas (1984)

13. San Diego, California (1913)

14. Bountiful, Utah (1995)

15. Mt. Timpanogos, Utah (1996)

16. Redlands, California (2003)

2008-07-27T19:33:00.002-04:00

14 Year Old Joseph's Existential Angst

I was reading the manual this afternoon after Church, when, upon the 438th reading of the Joseph Smith History, I was struck in a new way. I was impressed and encouraged by how much deep philosophical strife Joseph went through, as seen by highlighting out his own words below

"Excitement... affected... stir... division... contending.. mind... serious reflection... great uneasiness... deep... often poignant... aloof... confusion... strife... impossible- to come to any certain conclusion... my mind at times was greatly excited, the cry and tumult were so great and incessant... which is it? and how shall I know it?... I was laboring under extreme mental difficulties... I was one day reading... how to act I did not know... destroy all confidence... amidst all my anxities..."

2008-07-21T17:07:00.003-04:00

The Dark Knight (95.5/100)

Only a few movies in my lifetime have been more hyped than this one, but it lives up to it. Hugh Nibley (I think) once said something about how the problem with movies is that the crashes have to always be louder, the explosions bigger. Well, this movie has the louder crashes and bigger explosions.

It is also very deep and thoughtful- at least as far as $155 million opening weekend blockbusters go. Well, there's never been a $155 million opening weekend before, but you know what I mean. Batman Begins was a fantastic film, and this one is right up there as well.

Heath Ledger will win, and should win, the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this. I saw it the second time Saturday night at Jordan Commons with Dad next to me, grumbling about the crowds. Personally I am usually grateful that there are people stupider and less cool, calm, and collected than me who will cheer and hoot and holler when Batman emerges and starts pounding the bad guys. I couldn't wait for him to deliver some of his lines, and everyone can't help but laugh at him.

It is too long, about 2.5 hours, it could be 20 minutes shorter. The best stuff is in the middle, not the end. They bring back the wonderful twisted psychologist character Scarecrow from the 2005 version, but make him into a blundering fool at the very beginning and then forget about him. Here's hoping he gets more play in the 3rd round- which apparently will be without Eckhart, and of course, Ledger- who, by the way, was essentially a Backstreet Boy until he all of a sudden came out of nowhere with this.

But in the end- see it, see it again, and see it on the biggest screen, with the volume as loud as you can get. When the Batmobile self-destructs and he comes roaring out on his motor-thing with the music blaring, or even better, when he flips the Joker's semi upside down.... wow. WOW! A lot of fun.

2008-07-04T02:17:00.003-04:00

Most Overrated Right Now:

In Theaters: Wall-E

The universal affection found for this long snoozefest seems to have reached all 6 billion on Earth except two- Tim and Brittany. Her name is EVE you idiot robot, not EVA! What is most unfathomable is the critics who talked about how people will want to watch it again and again. No thanks. Most Overrated On DVD: Definitely Maybe

Or maybe I just watched it over multiple nights while trying to decide where to move to and didn't fully give it a fair hearing. Abigail Breslin was the charming little Shirley Temple with an attitude character that she usually is, despite the crime that was The Constant Gardner Rachel Weisz does look a lot like Kate Winslet, which never hurts, and the guy was a staffer for Clinton's '92 Campaign for most of the movie, and then throws his microwave dinner at the TV while watching the "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" deposition line- so it did have a smart ass, a good looking girl, and politics, which is way more than most dime a dozen romantic comedies.

2008-07-04T02:09:00.002-04:00

Can a Tim McGraw Song a Movie Make? Yes

Every single time Jack Nicholson takes a role he gives at least a couple lines that make the whole two hours worthwhile. (Just like 1000 pages of Dostoevsky was worth the single line "Without God all things are permitted" in The Brothers Karamozov).

Should Tim McGraw be given royalties for this film? Well, I guess they didn't do 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu.

Anyway, Nicholson as a hospital patient, saying "I think visitors kill more people than diseases do", that was one of those lines. Freeman held his own and then some against him, an impressive film. Good call Leslie.

2008-07-04T01:58:00.002-04:00

Fireworks!!

You know, despit being raised by people who have lived so as to avoid fireworks like the plague- I love them. I go to as many as possible every year. I usually will peruse (peruse is a word that actually means the opposite of what people think it means, it means to look very carefully, it is the antonym of skim) the newspaper and the web and try to line up July 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 etc if possible. Some years the 4th is on a Sunday or Monday or some other weird day and it actually is possible. Being in Utah gives the added Pioneer Day bonus on the 24th.

Tonight we went to Granite High (now alternative high for expelled gangsters and pregnant teens, which led to calls regarding fights involving 20 on police radios) on 33rd and about 6th East in Salt Lake, with some friends we made when we lived in that ward and have stayed close to ever since. We have been going there on July 3rd as something of a when-we-are-in-Utah-tradition since 2002. The finale was fantastic, the songs reminescent of Elementary School, the little light sticks the kids lightsaber fought with were wonderful.

In all, the War God Festival was worth the crowd.

2008-07-04T01:49:00.002-04:00

Happy 4th of July!

We are in the midst of moving, but I did take the time to watch Lions for Lambs (2007, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Michael Pena of Crash) today while working on the kitchen and living room. Looking at the box office receipts (a tad under $15 million), critics reviews (C+ average) and fan reviews (D+ average out of 9000) it seems like I am alone- but my gosh, I thought that was an excellent film.

I think everyone presumed that it was going to be a garden variety anti-war film, or some kind of Angelina Jolie-ish bleeding heart Hollywood blather. It isn't. Here's the tag line "Two determined students at a West Coast University, Arian and Ernest, follow the inspiration of their idealistic professor, Dr. Malley, and attempt to do something important with their lives. But when the two make the bold decision to join the battle in Afghanistan, Malley is both moved and distraught. Now, as Arian and Ernest fight for survival in the field, they become the string that binds together two disparate stories on opposite sides of America. In California, an anguished Dr. Malley attempts to reach a privileged but disaffected student, who is the very opposite of Arian and Ernest. Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. the charismatic Presidential hopeful, Senator Jasper Irving, is about to give a bombshell story to a probing TV journalist that may affect Arian and Ernest's fates. As arguments, memories and bullets fly, the three stories are woven ever more tightly together, revealing how each of these Americans has a profound impact on each other--and the world."

It is about an hour and 20 minutes long, and worth the effort this 4th of July.

2008-06-30T17:40:00.002-04:00

Scapegoating Others + Confessing Others' Sins = Always Popular

An invitation to show up or walk out on June 29th
by Chino Blanco
Fri Jun 27, 2008

On June 20th, the First Presidency (the president and counselors) of the LDS (Mormon) church issued a letter to California's LDS church leadership that asks the Mormons in the state to do "all they can" and donate their "means and time" to promoting passage of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
The Mormon leadership intended the letter be read from the pulpit to Mormon congregations across the state on June 29th. They were no doubt dismayed by news that, within a day of issuing the letter, it had already found its way to WikiLeaks and has now been widely promulgated (e.g., here and here).

Reading the responses of Mormon bloggers, it would seem that many of the LDS faithful are also dismayed - not that the letter was leaked, but that it was ever issued in the first place. A comment by Oregon Republican (and Mormon) Sen. Gordon Smith, made ten days prior to the letter's unintended public release, during a discussion at the Center for American Progress, suggests one aspect of why getting rank-and-file Mormons onboard with anti-gay marriage actions might not be such an easy sell:
"Part of what I fear, as you start defining marriage — we have a long history of doing that in this country, and my Mormon pioneer ancestors were the victims of that. They were literally driven from the United States in the dead of winter for following their religious beliefs. I don’t want that coming back, but there are some on the front pages of your newspapers who are trying to now."
Yes, a sad history is repeating itself in the pages of our newspapers, Senator Smith. And now it looks set to repeat from the pulpits of your own church. For those who understand and value the worthy lessons of Mormon history, this letter is a betrayal, and its reading from Mormon pulpits amounts to a provocation of Mormonism's worthiest believers and defenders. Considering your June 11th remarks, I count you among those able and equipped to comprehend the decided lack of enthusiasm among Mormon bloggers for the sad task that their church leaders intend to set before them this Sunday.
It is also a provocation of those outside your faith, Senator Smith. The instructions to read the letter on June 29th, of all days, is an obvious challenge to the GLBT community and its supporters - a quiet riot of anti-Stonewall sentiment dressed up in Sunday best - and what follows are some thoughts and suggestions re what a useful response - what an appropriate action in response to this provocation - might look like.
But before jumping into considering what to do about these darn Mormons, I'd invite any reader who's made it this far to first take a gander at this discussion: Same-sex marriage and hypocrisy?
And I'm making that invitation for two reasons:
As an introduction to what's called The Bloggernacle (Blogger + Tabernacle ... clever, no?). Entering the 'nacle is probably the quickest route to getting a handle on how Mormons themselves are reacting to the news of this letter (e.g., here, here, here and here).
As evidence that Mormons don't belong to some mindless monolithic religious and political monoculture. There are plenty of Obama voters attending LDS services on any given Sunday. So, please don't come around here talkin' trash about the Morg* ... OK? My view is that any actions against this letter would be a waste of time if they're undertaken by activists incapable of leaving their pet anti-Mormon pejoratives at home. *Morg: Borg + Mormon (more mean-spirited than clever, no?)
Prior to posting here, I've taken the time to shop this question around to some Mormon bloggers:
If, as with Prop. 22, LDS church members in California are again asked to canvass their neighbors in support of the church's position against gay marriage, what view would you take of activists on the other side of this issue who might deem it fair play to mobilize and park themselves outside LDS chapels on June 29th in a show of disagreement with your church's position?
And they were cool with it. In fact, some of them even came up with their own suggestions for protesting.
So, I hope it's understood that this is not about hating on Mormons.
It's about fashioning a response to a harmful and hypocritical move by the LDS leadership.
If you don't think it's harmful, please go spend a little time here.
If you don't think it's hypocritical, well, I've tried to explain elsewhere why I think it is.
But regardless of how you personally view this move, I'm sure we can agree that coordinating a response looks to be quite simple at this point: the letter is scheduled to be read on a specific date, at specific times, in specific locations.
So, if you live in California, this Sunday, June 29th, you've now been given a golden opportunity to express your opinion in a way that reaches a critical California constituency, all gathered under one steeple, and on a day when many of them may not be feeling all that pleased with what they've just heard come down from the pulpit.
It's as easy as finding the location and meeting times of your nearest LDS chapel. And if you're in California, trust me, there's an LDS chapel near you. Start with LDS.org or your phonebook.
Or, maybe, you're already a member? If you are, I think I'll start with you, and share some of the suggestions I've seen floating around the bloggernacle:
* Don't attend church on the 29th
* Attend and wear a rainbow ribbon pin
* Stand up and walk out during the reading of the letter
I'm sure the title of my post has already given you some clue as to which suggestion I favor. So, yup, this is me extending my sincere invitation to you to get up and walk out this Sunday once that letter starts being read. When you get outside, if you happen to see anyone in the vicinity that looks like they might be there protesting as well, I'd hope you'd head over and say hello. If you don't see anyone, I suppose you might just wanna head back inside. It's pretty boring standing outside by yourself, and that short letter's gonna be a quick read, and I don't want you to think that I'm asking you to do too much. In fact, if you're terribly conflicted about peeling yourself away from your pew, why not just conveniently schedule a bathroom break for around about the time that letter comes out?
If you're not a member, I'd planned on listing all sorts of suggested actions for you for this coming Sunday, all based on the idea of you showing up in, at or near an LDS chapel. Rather than go that route, I think I'll list one here, and then save the rest for comments below (if you've got a good idea, please weigh in). Here's one that impressed me, submitted by a faithful Mormon blogger:
However, if, on the first Sunday of July, gay people would organize so a few gay families with children would show up to every ward in Cali, and then, during testimony time, one would get up and briefly say: "Hi. I’m not a member of your church, but I am impressed with what nice people you all are, and what beautiful families you have. That’s why I cannot understand why your leaders would encourage you to vote for a measure that would hurt MY family. I hope you don’t," and then sit down, or leave with their children, then they would–I think–make both a powerful protest and a very good argument. It would change some minds.
The genius of this suggestion is that it recognizes how Mormons absolutely worship family. It's why so many Mormons feel ill about what their leadership is doing (again) with this letter.
Obviously, it's not the job of gay Americans with families to go parading themselves around for the benefit and enlightenment of Mormons who oughta know better in the first place than to support what this letter is calling for. I understand that. If you're offended by what's being suggested here, please take it out on me in comments.
So, I'll be looking forward to either your criticism or your suggestions for how to take advantage of the opening that the leaking of this letter has provided.
I'm gonna close out with some comments by Mormons gleaned from random Mormon blogs ...
From mormon matters:
An unpopular minority - Mormons – trying to limit the rights of another unpopular minority – Gays - on an issue - Marriage - which Mormonism has a somewhat vexed (and very very famous) history, reminds all and sundry about said vexed history, is on the wrong side of history ..., hurts the reputation of the church in society at large, does nothing to lessen the distrust of the church felt by the Evangelicals who are the main supporters of the amendment, and ... is the exact opposite of what the church should be doing.
From Feminist Mormon Housewives:
If I had the choice to spend $5 million on political lobbying efforts against same-sex marriage versus $5 million on food and medical supplies, I’d choose to feed hungry children.
The Church is free to send out press releases and publicize its position against same-sex marriage. But asking members to spend their time and money lobbying against same sex marriage when they could be volunteering at a local school teaching children to read, or working in a homeless shelter is an unfortunate allocation of resources.
Furthermore, I don’t understand why the Church chooses to engage in a high-profile fight in California, while it remained silent and did not join in the coalition of organized efforts to stop gay marriage in Massachusetts. If gay marriage is such a dangerous threat to our social institutions, the Church should be fighting it whereever it rears its ugly head.
Thanks for considering my invitation.
Peace, Love, and Understanding this Sunday.
The task of any religion is to teach us whom we're required to love, not whom we're entitled to hate.
Update: A handy tool for finding the LDS chapel nearest you.

2008-06-26T18:46:00.002-04:00

Bernanke Should Have Raised Rates

I don’t know if anyone else has heard, but it has been a really bad day- week- month- year for the stock market.

The S&P 500 is down 22% since the October 2007 highs. The S&P 500 actually closed higher on March 10, 1999 than it did today.

The Nasdaq is down 23% since the October 2007 highs. The Nasdaq actually closed higher on January 7, 1999 than it did today.

The Dow is down 24% since the October 2007 highs. The Dow actually closed higher on December 28, 1999 than it did today.

Bush 41 blamed Greenspan for his 1992 loss for being too stingly with money. McCain's slim to none chances are being destroyed by Bernanke being too loose with it. The economy needs some tough medicine, and he really blew it yesterday.

2008-06-23T15:28:00.003-04:00

Swinging for the Fences

I was reading today that Obama is spending money to advertise in Georgia, Indiana, and Alaska. Some people think this has just been some kind of gamesmanship trick, but it is just one more sign that November 2008 has Democratic blowout written all over it.

Consider this: Alaska, in the history of the state, has voted for a Democrat once- LBJ in 1964.

Indiana voted for FDR in 1936, but then voted against his 3rd and 4th terms in 1940 and 1944, starting a run where Republicans won 16 of Indiana's past 17 Presidential elections- again, only LBJ in 1964.

Georgia has a colorful record. JFK in 1960, but Barry Goldwater in 1964 in response to the Civil Rights Act which flipped the entire South for.... well, we're waiting. In 1968 they went for "Segregation now, Segregation tomorrow, Segregation forever!" George Wallace. In 1972 they went for Richard Nixon. In 1976 and 1980 they voted for home-grown Jimmy Carter. In 1984 they went to Reagan. In 1992, Perot and Bush split enough that Clinton won. That's "JFK-Goldwater-Wallace-Nixon-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Dole-Bush" if you are scoring at home.

But the last 3 elections they have been enormously red. Bush won by 17 points in 2004. McCain led by 1 point in a recent Georgia poll, and Obama is spending money there.

The general election odds are 2-1 Obama with 137 days to go. 90% betting chances that Democrats will add to their majorities in the House and Senate, CNBC said on Friday.

2008-06-22T12:21:00.002-04:00

Maisy's New Home

After months of thinking we shoukd, we finally found Maisy a new home yesterday. We gave her to a family that lives at a cabin up in the mountains and has a lot of space and a lot of animals and wildlife around their ranch.

This is Maisy with Montana, her new best friend. They hit it off right away. The family has always had 2 dogs, but had to put one down recently, and Montana- a 10 year old huskie, has been lonely and wanting a friend.

We were very sad to see Moo Poo go, Brittany stood on the street bawling when they drove away, but we were even more relieved- with work and school and us being gone from 7 AM to 8 PM some days, and with no fences in the state of Utah for some reason, and the electric fence not working so well, it just wasn't working out. She was awfully fun some times, and really nice, but a pain most of the time, and it is best for her and us.

2008-06-18T01:20:00.000-04:00

Story of the Week

'Urinating Man Attacks Family With Shovel'

http://origin.sltrib.com/news/ci_9616747

2008-06-13T16:18:00.002-04:00

The Best is Gone

I am very sad to hear that Tim Russert died today, just 58. He was, in my opinion, the best journalist today. I would have said so had you asked me yesterday. Thanks to DVR, I have watched his Meet the Press hour-long show every week for over a year now. He was so good at making a difficult interview for a politician- at playing clips from 6 months previous when the candidate had said exactly the opposite of what he or she was saying now, that kind of thing.
No one else’s voice will possibly sound right when the prelude music of Meet the Press is playing and they say “Our issues this Sunday…” The state of journalism is in trouble in America already- serious trouble. Look at how the Deseret News just announced they are no longer going to be a newspaper, but some sort of Mormon specialty thing in the direction of Church News.
I will miss him.

2008-06-04T21:16:00.003-04:00

GOP Veepstakes

In the almost irrelevant lone excitement between now and November, it is kind of fun to play the "32 person field", avaialble here http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24672458

List A: Not Gonna Happen

1- Mike Huckabee- At last check, 67% of Americans think he is a religious fanatic nut. He hurts in swing states, kills any blue state appeal McCain may have, and the South is a lock anyway. I think religion at the ballot box went fabulously out of style since 2004, and McCain and Obama, to me, seem pretty devoid of religion beneath it all. Regardless, as a politician, no chance McCain will be this dumb. Zero.

2-6 Lindsey Graham/ Rudy Guiliani/ Joe Liebermann/ Charlie Crist/ Jeb Bush- Moderates/ philanderers/ Democrats/ Bushes + they are in states which are not in play (Florida is now a GOP lock in every scenario outside of Obama landslide) these guys are not the direction where McCain will go

7-11 Condi Rice/ Colin Powell/ Kay Bailey Hutchison/ Bobby Jindal/ Sarah Palin- Would be far too obviousy gimmicky for him to pick someone whose prime qualification seems to be gender or race

12-15 Tom Ridge/ Fred Thompson/ Haley Barbour/ Duncan Hunter/ Newt Gingrich- I don't think he will go with a cranky old man

List B: Utahns

Mitt Romney

16 This is probably the wise move that a consultant would suggest. The conservatives, the financial wing, they know Romney now, and they could all get excited again. It lifts Mitt past Huck forever and hands him "a decade coming soon to a TV screen near you" as the GOP leader. McCain needs someone economic. Romney can conveniently discuss carbon with a guy in June and decide he is now against global warming. He can have a conversation with another guy in July and decide he is against torture now.

Why not? I don't think McCain would say no because of the Mormon thing. I do think McCain will go another direction because he doesn't like Romney much, and doesn't want to help the GOP go that direction in the future- I think he would want his shove of the party to go on a different arc. And unlike LBJ or HW Bush, Romney isn't necessary to the bringing back of that constinuency. Any fiscal conservative would do. There are lots of substitute goods available, maybe a little less known, but they are there.

Jon Huntsman Jr.

He was a 4 seed in that 32 politicia tournament. He's a moderate enough guy for McCain's trendy issues (global warming, education, etc.) and a financial guy, young, popular, fakebake, will be re-elected with 999 out of every 1000 votes, etc. He can fake talk just fine- although I'd worry about his abiity to debate at the next level, that is an unknown. I'm sure McCain's favorite Mormon is Huntsman, not Romney.

List 3: Other Favorites

1. Mark Sanford- Fiscal Conservative, business owner guy, he's actually in the Air Force. In fact, he is probably the purest conservative possible, in an election and at a moment when conservatives are fearing a return to the 1932-1964 era of old fashioned liberalism totally ruling Washington. Sanford has an MBA, he was a 1994 Contract With America guy who kept the 3 term pledge and left Congress in 2000 with high conservative ratings, almost an economic libertarian. One of the 3 elected officials in DC, out of 535, who actually opposed a tiny subsidy for a breast cancer awareness stamp on conservative principles.

He actually brought live piglets into the South Carolina Legislature to protest their Republican pork bills overriding 99 of his 106 vetoes. He is a college budget slashing, vouchers supporting enemy of public education, which most conservatives like. Many hoped he would jump in and pick up the torch after George Allen imploded in Nov. 06, but he didn't, leaving the recent convert of convenience a wide opening. Sanford cut taxes, he maintained state bond ratings to save taxpayers money. He was a farm bill excess killer in the late 90s. He sounds like half of McCain's message personified, doesn't he?

2. General David Betreaus - probably redundant, but so was Clinton/Gore in 1992 (but conservatives wistfuly dream of what a Romney/Betreaus ticket could have done)

3. Businessman- Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, someone like that

4- Tim Pawlenty- He's a little bush league, but suposedly on the short list. Bush league. His radio comment showed how well he could handle speculation of a possibility. Wisconsin in November is a naive dream.

Conclusion

Tim's Odds

Sanford 25%
Romney 20%
Petreaus 20%
Pawlenty 5%
Huntsman 5%
Someone Else 25%

And I will say "I told you so" on Sanford, Petreaus, or Huntsman. I will eat crow if it is Crist or Pawlenty.

2008-06-04T21:02:00.002-04:00

Clinton Lie Number ... Well, Who Is Counting?

"You are the nurse on the second shift, the worker on the line, the waitress on her feet, the small business owner, the farmer, the teacher, the miner, the trucker..."

Small business owner? I bet there are 5 small business owners in America who supported Hillary. They may be the 2nd best sounding group (just after "children" and barely ahead of "leaders") in politics, but seriously, why on Earth would any small business owner prefer Hilary?

According to Tim's Gallup exaggeration invention, 134% of small business owners oppose Hillary.

And so do 98% of miners, based on my experience in rural Utah.

2008-06-04T01:19:00.001-04:00

Best Headline in Months

From the Washington Post

'In Defeat, Clinton Graciously Pretends to Win'

2008-06-03T20:43:00.003-04:00

Good Heavens!

John McCain is speaking on TV right now, and after praising Hillary Clinton for a while he certainly went on to give a pretty liberal speech- something about the government not keeping up with history (Buckley is rolling and rolling and rolling in his grave, believe me), not funding entitlement programs enough, not responding with basic competence to catastrophes, mismanaging Iraq, Americans are tired of this war, I mean... did he get confused by all the headlines today and think he too needs to submit a resume for the position of Obama's VP? It's almost enough to make someone get nostalgic for Romney. What I really want is a Bush 3rd term or the suddenly stand up comic Cheney, but what can you do? Wait for their VP choices and deide, I guess.

298-240 Obama in the Electoral College according to Intrade (and for 10 cents you can become the very first to bet on Obama to win Utah).

2008-05-31T00:04:00.003-04:00

Day 4: Ouray, Durango, &... Ouray! I forgot to snap pictures of the B&B dining room and hot tub, where we met a couple from Denver and a guy from Chicago who works on the 63rd floor of the Sears Tower. These are from the web site

This is the Million Dollar Highway. It is the most avalanche prone road in the country. 3 snow plow drivers have been killed by avalanche there in the past few decades. I dove through there in January 2006 by myself- in the Accord- which had a warranty covered new transmission, after it went out in Grand Junction in December 2005, long story. Basically, I thought "January in Colorado. Go south!" and the map just showed 550 linking 70 with 20. It didn't say anything about 15 MPH roads on the sides of cliffs with no shoulder. But it led me to Ouray, and I love it.
In 1912-14 it cost $1 million just to make 12 miles of single lane dirt road connect from Ouray around Red Mountain towards Silverton. Hence the name.

The road to Durango was stopped for a while so they could use the chopper to hang avalanche nets. I'm serious, look, I have the pitures to prove it.

The Million Dollar Highway is just 12 miles long- the full San Juan Skyway is 263 miles. You should go sometime.

See, there is the helicopter
And there are the avalanche nets
And that is the Sunset on our last night in Ouray. We went to the hot springs until it closed at 9:45 that night and watched the mountain silhouttes go dark.

On Day 5 we had breakfast, gave Tiger a leftover rib from dinner the night before, drove the 367 miles home. I took some bass ackwards roads so that we could swing through Moab for lunch, and we were in the middle of nowhere for a long time. But more for me to highlight yellow on my road map. Green River to Price is 63 miles- it feels like 485 coming home. On the way South, Price to Green River always feels like 5 miles.

2008-05-30T22:40:00.010-04:00

Day 3: Ouray, Telluride, & .... Ouray!

This is Box Canyon, in between some of the mountains that surround the city
It was loud and wet down under the falls, hence the water on the camera

The Catholic spaniards called them the San Juan because it was their ideal spiritual retreat into God's wilderness- a la Saint John the Baptist
Indians used to hunt wooly mammoths up there, seriously
Waterfalls and rivers everywhere, so powerful, so amazing
Ouray grew in that spot because it was so low in elevation (7700), yet so close to so many mines, and easily accessible to the North, thanks to a 300 foot glacier that carved a valley over milions of acres.

That is me standing on a 300 foot bridge above Box Canyon Falls, and not looking down
That is Brittany on top of the 300 foot bridge, and not lookng down
The miners blasted that tunnel in the late 19th Century

Geological strata

The blue one in the middle is our B&B as seen from the bridge, for a reverse view, see the bottom

A blue bird
A paw print of some animal

In the Winter all these waterfalls freeze, and they become the worldice climbing capitol, everyone comes and competes- seriously

The Uncompaghre River("un" "come" "paw" "gray"), I love it, follows the Million Dollar Highway all through there

The Hot Springs Park, very warm, very relaxing, and you just have to look up and try not to smile

In the late afternoon we did the 50 mile loop over to Telluride, this is Bridal Veil Falls, and that is a resort on top of it- Wow
Bridal Veil Falls, zoomed out, those insane switchbacks I guess are the way up to the resort
The first time in my life I bought sunglasses, my eye balls were practically getting burned so I had to give in

A river runs through everything up there this time of year (they once got 62 inches of snow in one day), the roads have rivers on the shoulder. This one runs through Telluride, 8700 feet elevation

In 1893 Congress passed the Sherman Act and went off silver based currency. The San Juan mning towns died overnight, with the US Treasury instantly selling, instead of buying, silver. William Jennings Bryan went to Telluide and said "You will not press down this crown of thorns upon the head of labor. You will not crucify mankind upon this cross of gold." Bryan swept Colorado, but lost elections. Frank Baum wrote a book mocking the whole thing. It is called 'The Wizard of Oz.'
Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Jerry Seinfeld, and lots of others have 48 week a year empty houses in Telluride. It's no better than the other San Juan cities, and not as nice as Ouray, but there is a film festival, ski left, and most importantly, an airport there
On the gondola which goes up to the top, and then down into Mountain Valley. 99% of what I hate about flying made me uncomfortable in that thing. But, it was awesome.
Telluride was also the site of Billy the Kid's first bank robbery. The sherriff was paid off to be out of town, and was himself a member of Jessee James gang. Wyatt Earp, on the other hand, was in Silverton for 3 months before he went back to Dodge. And in 1929 the local bank didn't lose a dime of deposits for the community because the bank manager pulled a $500,000 fraud on Wall Street after the crash, he got 3 years in jail, but the town loved him forever.

What a wonderful trip it was

Probably standing at 12,000 feet. The San Juans have 14 peaks over 14,000 feet (Utah has zero). There are hundreds over 13,000 feet. I felt like there was so much oxygen and my blood was thick when we came home down to 6200 here at Suncrest.
We got to know the bed and breakfast owning family very well, including their adorable and friendly dog named Tiger
The 300 foot bridge over Box Canyon Falls from our bedroom window
And then zoomed in from our bedroom window

2008-05-30T21:45:00.007-04:00

Day 2: Cortez to Ouray via Mesa Verde Nat'l Park Hiking down the canyon into the first of 3 cave dwellings we went to see
The anestral Pueblo (formerly known as the Anasazi) built them @ 1160-1180 AD
They were built back under the cliffs, to get water out of the porous limestone
That allowed them to use all of the mesa above for farming
Very steep, easily defensible positions for the scarce water storage
They cut down the trees so that all 15-18 inches of rain annual would trickle down
Under the cave, ignoring the boring ranger
Original artwork, 700+ years old

32 foot ladder to climb
The ladder, then sheer face of a rock with just a handrail, then ladder routine later freaked me out
We had to crawl through that
After lunch in Durango we drove up to the beautiful San Juan Mountains, largest and highest in Colorado

Lake stil frozen as we drove up over 11,000+ foot passes
Silverton was one of the biggest towns in Colorado until 1893, more on that later

Ouray is tied with Monterey for the favorite place on Earth distinction

These are the Ouray hot springs, known to the Utes pr-Columbus, found by fur trappers in the 1820s
The China Clipper Inn, loved that place
Great room
I loved that painting, and read Ann Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' in that chair when Britt would get ready to go out to dinner- part of the book is set in Ouray

Magical place, 7700 feet up, surrounded by mountains on all sides, valley was cut by glaciers

We were sad, so sad, to leave
Only 600 people live there now, all basically retired or working in something tourism based
The Beaumont Hotel, since 1887, when Ouray was a thriving mining town. All the main street buildings are from @ the 1880s
A travel writer called it "The Switzerland of America" in 1879, and the name stuck

2008-05-30T21:17:00.004-04:00

Day 1: Draper to Cortez via Arches Nat'l Park & Moab

This is the rock you have to climb to Delicate Arch, good exercise
We took the trip to celebrate our 8th Anniversary I was amazed that these things happen naturally, and they are so big
That is me off to the left, see how big it is!
Kind of a scary drop off behind the Delicate Arch
A whole new appreciation of the Utah license plate picture
You have to walk a few ledges to get there, but nothing like what we would see in Colorado
No kids for 5 days and 4 nights!
Awesome, what God has done to Southern Utah
Crazy beautiful
Those are people in there, to give the picture scale
Balanced Rock

2008-05-23T00:19:00.002-04:00

Summer Movies

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Fantastic. All the critics who say it is just so-so are dead wrong. I have never seen an Indiana Jones movie on the big screen, but obviously movie theaters are made for them. The scenery in Peru is awesome, the running through caves spooked by some X-Filish plot that no one can follow? So much fun. Harrison Ford being so cool that he can wink at the camera one second and save the world from massive and epic evil the next? Yeah

Iron Man: I know, I know, it looks quite stupid. It looks corny. And you can't imagine Robert Downey Jr. being a likeable superhero. But after 46 of 46 critics were raving about it, and it spent 2 weeks on top at the box office, we gave it a chance, and it is great mindless fun. We have ISlamic radicals as villains for once! Top notch special effects and music put together by 15 year olds? Even Brittany thought it was loads of fun.

Prince Caspian: Disappointing. Missable. Pointless really, everything good was in the first one. Some fun scenes, some remembrances of the glory of the original, but I want to read the book to see if there was some purpose to this installment not there.

And Caspian is a useless mimbo, standing there with some weird accent and brushing his hair the whole time practically- and it ends with some Hillary Duff's 16th birthday on Noggin type bubble gum romance- dumb.

The Dark Knight: I have very high hopes for this. Heath Ledger's spin on the Joker looks even darker than Nicholsen's was, and Batman Begins really set a high bar for the new series here.

2008-05-22T16:01:00.006-04:00

Based on May 2008 polls; McCain Wins, 283-255

There is an Electoral College calculator here http://www.opinionjournal.com/ecc/calculator.htm

I ran the tool off of the latest polls from all the battleground states, and McCain won. In this scenario, Obama picks up Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, and Virginia, while McCain picks up Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire. The other 44 contests mirror 2004.

Quite surprising. Less than 6 months to go.

Flip Virginia, Wisconsin, and Michigan- which all seem out of whack in these current polls, and we have a 269-269 tie. Trivia Question: How would that end? Trivia Answer: With the House electing Obama.

2008-05-21T14:31:00.005-04:00

56-40-4

So, depending on which of the 4 news networks you go to, Obama has a delegate lead of between 179 and 196, which is about 50 bigger than it was a month ago. She is, as George Will wrote in Yankee Fan, Go Home on May 8, now making absurd arguments: "(she) will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's Zip code." So give Hillary a 4% chance of being President, according to InTrade, and a 100% chance of harming Obama and the party by selfishless pushing it nowhere through August.

In the meantime, Obama has a 56% chance, and McCain 40%.

I would handicap this Fall’s race this way.

A McCain :) state is one where Kerry won in 2004, and where if McCain wins he basically will win the election. These are Pennsylvania, Oregon, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

An Obama :) state is one where Bush won in 2004, and where if Obama needs to pick up 17 Electoral College delegates to win the election. These are Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

So 8 Bush states may be in play, and 5 Kerry states. But remember, Bush won 286-251 in the Electoral College, so a tie of 04 goes to McCain, and losing a couple small states could still result in a McCain win.

To sharpen the saw a little more, I seriously doubt McCain can win in Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, or Michigan, those would be tough for a Republican in a good year, and the wind and money is blowing hard the other way. Obama is not likely to win Florida, North Carolina, or Missouri. Bush won by at least 5 points in all of those, if I remember right, and they aren’t places where demographics would help Obama.

So 5 states are truly contested, basically. Bush was re-elected in 04 by 60,000 votes in the one scenario (Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada) and 70,000 votes in a completely different scenario (Ohio).

Obama needs to add 17 electoral votes to the Democratic pot, by holding every single 04 blue state (which I bet he will in almost any scenario). Those 17 can be had in any mix from these

Florida 27 not likely for Obama
Ohio 20 will be close, bad demographics for Dems, bad GOP brand there these days
N. Carolina 15 not likely for Obama
Missouri 11 tough for Obama
Colorado 9 better than 50% odds for Obama, I'd bet
Iowa 7 toss-up
Nevada 5 tough for Obama
New Mexico 5 better than 50% odds for Obama, I'd bet

3 to 2 odds for Obama seems about right at this point.

2008-05-17T23:12:00.003-04:00

Lots of friends came to Suncrest Park this morning for a sunburn party.

2008-05-17T12:14:00.001-04:00

Grant Turns 6

Just a few of the 84 places and times the momentous event has been celebrated

2008-05-09T21:10:00.006-04:00

Zion National Park

Just under 4 hours from my front door. Of the 58 National Parks, 5 are in Utah (only Alaska and California have more). Zion is the most popular national park in Utah, and the 7th most popular in America (Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone are 2-3-4, Grand Tetons is 9). One of the pictures below was not taken by us, guess which one. Hint: To get to the place the picture was taken, the last 1/2 mile is done on a 3 foot wide path with a 800 foot drop to one side and a 1200 foot drop to the other. People do it holding a steel cable, which 3 men died trying to lay out, sometime after President Taft made it a national park in 1909 and before Ansel Adams took famous pictures there in 1941.

2008-05-09T21:03:00.002-04:00

Springdale, Utah

Another little gem of Southern Utah is Springdale, just west of the entrance to Zion's. We stopped there at an organic grocery store and got some great cream soda and "organic" popcorn. It is close to Hurricane, where 0 of the 5000 polygamist children are bused to those evil and brain-washing public schools.

2008-05-09T20:47:00.003-04:00

Short Creek

I couldn't pass up the opportunity to go by Short Creek; aka Colorado City, Arizona, and Hilldale, Utah. The 8000 people who live in the isolated area are #1 in the world in severe-mental-retardation-causing fumarese deficiency, due to cousin marriage. I didn't see Waren Jeffs, he is in jail. Most of the homes, if you can call them that, in this place of a "law student like" $5000 per capita annual income, were trailers circled together. All were a few thousand feet back of the main road, Hwy 389, off dirt paths, with old pickup trucks all over.

The town was quite empty when we were there. That night I found that it was because they were in St. George appluading our AG Mark Shurtleff. Shurtleff (vote for my coworker Jean Hill for AG in November!) is suggesting Texas send the abused and removed kids from the El Dorado Ranch to their relatives in Short Creek, so that they can be raised in a healthy environment there. BRILLIANT!

2008-05-09T20:36:00.004-04:00

Red Rock Country

A Night at the Victorian Charm Inn Bed & Breakfast

Kanab, Utah

I would highly recommend the hotel and the city to everyone. It is about an hour from the Grand Canyon, Zion's, Bryce Canyon, Lake Powell, etc.

2008-05-09T20:28:00.001-04:00

Just North of Bryce Canyon National Park

2008-05-09T20:04:00.003-04:00

4 Birthday Parties in 1 Sunday

Congratulations Dad (58), Darrin (41), Brynn & Grant (6)

2008-05-09T19:53:00.001-04:00

A Maisy Day at Tanner Park in Salt Lake City

2008-05-04T02:29:00.005-04:00

For our 8th anniversary we are going to Ouray, Colorado for 3 nights later this month. In the meantime, today we got each other an awesome new digital camera and got a babysitter and went on a day date to Park City. We pretty much took pictures of everything the whole day- the babysitters' house, the grocery store, the sunset over Lone Peak and Mount Timpanogos, etc.- so awed were we by the best camera ever (Sony Cybershot, shoots instantly, 10x digital zoom, 8 megapixels, huge screen, auto-focus, loving it, heard so many good recommendations, we'd recommend it too).

2008-05-04T02:24:00.004-04:00

Uncle Rico Gets a New Camera

2008-05-02T15:07:00.002-04:00

As usual, Peggy Noonan gets it almost exactly right

Loyal to the Bitterness

May 2, 2008

I am out of step. There is something that is upsetting others whom I care about and whose thoughts are often not unlike my own. And it's not hitting me the same way.
I am referring to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I disagree with and disapprove of the things he says. The U.S. government did not spread AIDS among the black community, 9/11 was not the chickens coming home to roost, etc. He seems like a bright man, warm, humorous and compelling, but also needful and demanding of the spotlight, a showman prone to crackpottery, and I have to wonder how much respect he has for his congregation. He shows a lot of fury and does a lot of yelling for a leader of the followers of the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
When he is discussed on news shows, pundits are asked what they think Mr. Wright's political impact will be, which is another way of saying: What will people think of this?
I always wish they'd say what they themselves think. I think what Mr. Wright has been saying is extreme and radical, and people don't like extreme and radical when they're pondering who their next leader will be, and as Mr. Wright has been Barack Obama's friend and mentor for 20 years, this will hurt Mr. Obama. This is borne out in the week's polls. From the New York Times: 48% of Democrats say he can best beat McCain, down eight points since April. The proportion of Democrats who say Mr. Obama is their choice for the nomination is now 46%, down six.
I also think that if Hillary Clinton wins because of the Wright scandal, it will leave a sad taste in the mouths of many. Mr. Obama reveals many things in his books, speeches and interviews but polarity and a tropism toward the extreme are not among them. What happened with Mr. Wright should not determine the race. Mr. Obama's stands, his ability to convince us he can make good change, his ability to be "one of us," that great challenge for a national politician in a varied nation, should determine the race.
But I am finding it hard to feel truly upset about what Mr. Wright has said. This is the out-of-stepness I referred to. So here I will talk not about how people will respond to him but how I do.
* * *
I do not feel a sense of honest anger or violation at his remarks, in part because I don't think his views carry deep implications for our country. I have been watching America up close for many years – if you count a bright childhood, for half a century. I have seen, heard and respected the pain of a people who were forced to come here when they did not want to and made to live in a way that no one would want to. Who could deny them their grief or anger? I have seen radicalism and extremism, too. I have seen Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, the Black National Anthem, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Louis Farrakhan. I came to see their radicalism as, putting the morality of policy based on rage aside, essentially unhelpful and impractical. It wouldn't work as an American movement, not long-term. Hatred plays itself out, has power in the short-term but is nonsustaining in the long. America, and this is one of its glories, has a conscience to which an appeal can be made. It may take a long time, it may take centuries, but in the end we try hard to do the right thing, and everyone knows it. Hatred is a form of energy that does not fuel this machine and cannot make it run.
And all the time I was watching the old days of rage, blacks in America were rising, joining the professions, becoming middle class, assuming authority, becoming professors and doctors. No one is surprised anymore to meet a powerful man or woman who devises systems by which others should live – that would be a politician – who is black.
I came to think all the talk of radicalism and extremism amounted to little, and was in the end rejected by the very people it was meant to rouse. They didn't buy it.
This week I talked to a young man, an Irish-American to whom I said, "Am I wrong not to feel anger about Wright?" He more or less saw it as I do, but for a different reason, or from different experience.
He said he figures Mr. Wright's followers delight in him the same way he delights in the Wolfe Tones, the Irish folk group named for the 18th-century leader condemned to death by the British occupying forces, as they say on their Web site. They sing songs about the Brits and how they subjugated the Irish and we'll rise up and trounce the bastards.
My 20-year-old friend has lived a good life in America and is well aware that he is not an abused farmer in the fields holding secret Mass in defiance of the prohibitions of the English ruling class. His life has not been like that. Yet he enjoys the bitterness. He likes going to Wolfe Tones concerts raising his fist, thinking "Up the Rebels." It is good to feel that old ethnic religious solidarity, and that in part is what he is in search of, solidarity. And it's not so bad to take a little free-floating anger, apply it to politics, and express it in applause.
He knows the dark days are over. He just enjoys remembering them even if he didn't experience them. His people did.
I know exactly what he feels, for I felt the same when I was his age. And so what? It's just a way of saying, "I'm still loyal to our bitterness." Which is another way of saying, "I'm still loyal." I have a nice life, I'm American, I live far away, an Englishman has never hurt me, and yet I am still Irish. I can prove it. I can summon the old anger.
Is this terrible? I don't think so. It's human and messy and warm-blooded, as a human would be.
The thing is to not let your affiliation with bitterness govern you, so that you leave the Wolfe Tones concert and punch an Englishman in the nose. In this connection it can be noted there is no apparent record of people leaving a Wright sermon and punching anyone in the nose. Maybe they're in search of solidarity too. Maybe they're showing loyalty too.
* * *
Few voters will be more inclined to vote for Barack Obama because his friend, mentor and pastor is extreme. They will think it makes Mr. Obama less attractive. They will not think Mr. Obama handled the challenge with force, dispatch and the kind of instinct that turns dilemma into gain.
And yet . . . it doesn't get my blood up. It doesn't hurt my heart. It doesn't make me feel I need to defend my country. Because I don't see it as attacked, only criticized in a way that is not persuasive.
Mr. Wright seems to me to be part of the great "barbaric yawp," as Walt Whitman called the American people fighting, discussing, making things and living. I like the barbaric yawp. I don't enjoy it when it makes me wince, but at least when I am wincing, I know the yawp is working.

2008-04-28T00:37:00.007-04:00

Isn't Spring the Best?

2008-04-25T11:48:00.001-04:00

A Nation at a Loss
By EDWARD B. FISKE
New York Times

TOMORROW is the 25th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” a remarkable document that became a milestone in the history of American education — albeit in ways that its creators neither planned, anticipated or even wanted.
In August 1981, Education Secretary T. H. Bell created a National Commission on Excellence in Education to examine, in the report’s words, “the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” Secretary Bell’s expectation, he later said, was that the report would paint a rosy picture of American education and correct all those widespread negative perceptions.
Instead, on April 26, 1983, the commission released a sweeping 65-page indictment of the quality of teaching and learning in American primary and secondary schools couched in a style of apocalyptic rhetoric rarely found in blue-ribbon commission reports.
“The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people,” it warned. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
To his credit, Secretary Bell, a moderate Republican who had been hoping for some political relief from critics on his right, stood by these unexpected words from his commission — and thereby became the unwitting father of the modern school reform movement.
Secretary Bell’s boss, President Ronald Reagan, was also taken aback by “A Nation at Risk,” although for different reasons. He took office in 1981 with a three-fold agenda for education: abolishing the Department of Education, promoting tuition tax credits and vouchers and restoring voluntary prayer in the schools. Using the bully pulpit and purse of the federal government to promote “excellence” in teaching and learning was not on the list.
When members of the White House staff saw an early copy of “A Nation at Risk,” they were distressed to find no mention of their political agenda and threatened to cancel the ceremony in which the president would receive the first copy. Secretary Bell and commission members replied that such topics were at best tangential to their assigned topic of excellence in teaching and learning.
Eventually a compromise was reached. The president agreed to receive the commission and accept the first copy of “A Nation at Risk” at a White House ceremony, and he used his remarks to reaffirm his political objectives — none of which were mentioned in the report. Several members of the commission later confided that they left Washington that day in a depressed mood, convinced that they had been “used” and were destined to be ignored.
Then came the biggest twist of all. “A Nation at Risk” resonated with Americans, who seemingly agreed that there was indeed something “seriously remiss” in their schools. White House pollsters picked this up. The president began visiting schools all over the country, usually in the company of Secretary Bell, who until then, as head of a department scheduled for elimination, had never seen the inside of Air Force One.
The most important legacy of “A Nation at Risk” was to put the quality of education on the national political agenda — where it has remained ever since. The last 25 years have seen a succession of projects and movements aimed at increasing the quality of American primary and secondary schools: standards-based reform, the 1989 “education summit” that set six “national goals” for education, the push for school choice and, most recently, the No Child Left Behind legislation. Proponents of each have taken pains to portray themselves as the heirs of “A Nation at Risk.”
The apocalyptic rhetoric of the opening section of “A Nation at Risk” isn’t the only element of the report that has had a lasting impact. One of the main ideas enshrined in the document — that quality of schooling is directly linked to economic competitiveness — has also shaped the way Americans think about education. This particular theory, however, hasn’t been borne out by history.
In 1983, the causal connection between education and the economy seemed obvious. Americans were living in awe of the Japanese “economic miracle” and assumed that it was made possible by a school system whose students consistently routed ours on all those comparative international achievement tests. But then the Japanese economy soured — even though it still had the same education system — and we began asking ourselves another question: If American schools are so bad, why is our economy doing so well?
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the link between educational excellence and economic security is not as simple as “A Nation at Risk” made it seem. By the mid-1980s, policymakers in Japan, South Korea and Singapore were already beginning to complain that their educational systems focused too much on rote learning and memorization. They continue to envy American schools because they teach creativity and the problem-solving skills critical to prospering in the global economy.
Indeed, a consensus seems to be emerging among educational experts around the world that American schools operate within the context of an enabling environment — an open economy, strong legal and banking systems, an entrepreneurial culture — conducive to economic progress.
To put it bluntly, American students may not know as much as their counterparts around the Pacific Rim, but our society allows them to make better use of what they do know. The question now is whether this historic advantage will suffice at a time when knowledge of math, science and technology is becoming increasingly critical. Maybe we need both the enabling environment and more rigor in these areas.
But while the theory behind “A Nation at Risk” may no longer hold (mediocre education inevitably leads to a weak economy), the report’s desperate language may be more justified than ever, for American education is in turmoil.
Most troubling now are the numbers on educational attainment. One reason that the American economy was so dominant throughout the 20th century is that we provided more education to more citizens than other industrialized countries. “A Nation at Risk” noted with pride that American schools “now graduate 75 percent of our young people from high school.”
That figure has now dropped to less than 70 percent, and the United States, which used to lead the world in sending high school graduates on to higher education, has declined to fifth in the proportion of young adults who participate in higher education and is 16th out of 27 industrialized countries in the proportion who complete college, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
The striking thing about the performance of American students on international comparisons is not that, on average, they are in the middle of the pack — which was also true in 1983 — but that we have a disproportionate share of low-performing students. We are failing to provide nearly one-third of our young people with even the minimal education required to be functioning citizens and workers in a global economy.
This is particularly distressing news at a time when the baby boomers are aging and a growing proportion of the future work force comes from groups — members of ethnic and racial minorities, students from low-income families, recent immigrants — that have been ill served by our education system. The challenge today is to build access as well as excellence. That’s the new definition of “a nation a risk” — and ample reason for a new commission to awaken the nation to the need to educate all our young people.
Edward B. Fiske, a former Times education editor, is the author of the Fiske Guide to Colleges.

2008-04-24T01:36:00.001-04:00

I have to cheer loudly on the rare occasion that Utah's elected officials act like wise leaders.

Huntsman wants to stop Italian nuclear waste
By Lisa Riley Roche

Deseret News
Published: April 23, 2008

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. is attempting to stop a shipment of nuclear waste from Italian power plants from coming to Utah, his office announced today.
Huntsman is directing Bill Sinclair, who represents Utah on the Northwest Interstate Low-Level Waste Compact "to vote against any proposals for foreign nuclear waste to come in to Utah" at the organization's upcoming meeting on May 8.
"As I have always emphatically declared, Utah should not be the world's dumping ground," Huntsman said in a statement. "Our country has limited space to store even domestic waste and it would be most appropriate to have a federal policy against the importation of foreign nuclear waste. However, as the federal government is slow to adopt such a policy, Utah will lead the way."
EnergySolutions Inc. wants to import some 20,000 tons of low-level radioactive waste from Italian nuclear facilities for processing in Tennessee, then send the leftover waste to the EnergySolutions site in Tooele County for storage. After the waste is processed in Tennessee, less than 1,600 tons is expected to remain.
The governor's office said the Northwest Compact has the authority to approve or disapprove foreign nuclear waste facilities in the region, and that Utah has veto power over the shipment.
The shipment has already been opposed by Rep. Jim Matheson, D- Utah, who has sponsored legislation along with other congessmen, including one from Tennessee, that would ban the importation of nuclear waste unless it was originally produced in the U.S., except, for example, U.S. military waste generated abroad.

2008-04-23T17:01:00.003-04:00

China in 2008= the United States in 1915?

I read the May 2008 issue of National Geographic today, (Brittany has been bed-ridden while recovering from a stomach bug that she brought back from Mexico and so I have had some time on my hands) the entire 200 page issue was devoted to China.

A very interesting and complicated nation. In the past decade it has made incredible economic progress. One one topic- personal ownership of cars, I believe- it was analogized to the United States in 1915. I think that analogy may hold across the board- a nation just beginning to implement industrialism across the board, on the sidelines while the British bled themselves to death in imperial overreach, etc. The real question is whether China will be the global superpower- or at least a rival one to the US, in one generation.

In 10 years China will have the #1 GDP in the world. They have put a massive investment in education, achieving 91% literacy for their 1.3 billion people, which is really an accomplishment worth a thoughtful whistle. They are learning English in school, years and years worth of it. Only 11% of their 18-19 year olds enter college, as opposed to 64% of ours, and their college system isn't modernized yet. Still, pretty soon they will have as many college students as we do, and better ones at that.

I recently read Tough Choices or Tough Times, which was published by the US Skills Commission in 2007, a kind of quarter-century follow up to the 1983 A Nation at Risk. The news for American education is not good, and it is not good for our future. Why? In the 1980s we all heard about Japan and Germany surpassing American education, which had been the pride of the world for many decades. In the 90s the Asian Tigers and a few Western European nations passed us by. Now we are 28th or 30th on almost all measures. Unless it is a 3rd world country, chances are they are doing better at education.

The result of this is that for the first time there is a substantial likelihood that the next generation will have a lower standard of living than we do now. With the exception of events like the Civil War, Great Depression, WW2, etc., that has never really happened in America- a generational trend downward. We are a society where maybe a majority of junior high kids can't begin to do pre-algebra, and yet parents tolerate it, let them play video games all day and consider a victory won if they can get them to do 1 hour a week of math homework. We have way too many dropouts- at least 25%, and 8th or 9th grade level literacy or math is all it takes to get a diploma. The whole system wastes unbelievable amounts of money on remediation the whole way through, instead of spending the proverbial $2 on 3 and 4 year olds, and another $5 in the K-3 realm, we spend $200 in Jr. High and High School trying to catch kids up and get them to not drop out.

A nation like China, a Communist regime, 163rd out of 169 on freedom of the press, 1 child policies, Tiananmen Square in 1989, etc. should really be a wake up call. They are the new member of the imperial club, throwing money into the Sudan and other places to get oil, regardless of Darfur and all that. They are consuming 6 times as much oil today as they were 1 decade ago, when gas at the Maverick in Clearfield was less than $1 a gallon.

They have way more boys than girls, as a result of the 1 child policy and lack of any pension, retirement, or social security type system. There are thousands and thousands of baby girls abandoned in public parks there every year, my Adoption Law teacher in Texas is raising 2 of them.

Is it science fiction to imagine serious trouble in a few decades- or sooner- when China has tens of millions of angry young men who have no women to marry? When that nation has a huge demographic problem of elderly to care for? When their energy demands are sending world markets even crazier than they are now? When their rulers go into Taiwan or Tibet or other places and try to send a clear sphere of influence message? or more importantly, Central Asia, for oil, (where we have already been building massive permanent bases), and on to the Middle East?

It is difficult to see how America can handle this. In the global economy, the US has already been weakened by the loss of the $20 an hour w/ benefits manufacturing jobs. Those all left. But pretty soon, we will lose the $45K engineer jobs, because we won't have the math and science graduates to do it, and even the few that we have won't be as well-educated as the engineer in India or China, who will do the job for $7K.

Other advanced industrial nations are recruiting teachers from the top of the class. In America, due to low pay, the fact that we want teachers to be social workers who fix the ghettos, huge class sizes, etc.- we are recruiting teachers from the bottom 1/3 of college students. As a result, we are awful at math and science. We are becoming a nation that is only good at producing salesmen, lawyers, and spolied and demanding teenagers who can't do anything. NASA and other entities of a scientific/ research/ technology/ military nature can often only hire Americans by law, and they can't find Americans with the math and science skills. India and China have plenty of them.

Somehow I don't think consumer spending (of cheap Chinese goods on borrowed Chinese money) will be able to drag our economy along much further. Our nation's lack of investment and effort in education is starting to really bite us in the global economy, and I fear it is less and lesslikely that we will be the ones making the next technological and military breakthroughs.