February 2003 Archives

Thanks to both Amritas and James Hudnell for this:

How evil are you?

I heard about this yesterday. Thanks to Michael for sending me a link about it today.

Transportation officials say a contractor will be picked soon to build the nationwide computer system, which will check such things as credit reports and bank account activity and compare passenger names with those on government watch lists.

I ask: what degree of police state are you people willing to put up with?

The sages do not consider that making no mistakes is a blessing. They believe, rather, that the great virtue of man lies in his ability to correct his mistakes and continually make a new man of himself.

Wang Yang-Ming
1472-1529

I just found out about HighLift Systems today. Looks like someone is trying seriously to make a business out of the space elevator concept.

Fox News' Hannity & Colmes just now completed an update on their coverage of a month ago on the plight of Ronald Dixon, again interviewing Mr. Dixon, the Brooklyn man who honorably defended his family - his wife and 2 year-old child - from a vicious scumbag home invader (who, by the way, has a 15-page Brooklyn rap sheet and 5 felony convictions under his belt). I'm not surprised to hear that the Brooklyn DA is dead set on persecuting/prosecuting Mr. Dixon.

The DA wants to put Mr. Dixon away, in prison, for a year, on a spurious "unregistered firearm" charge. I consider this actionable criminal behavior on the part of the DA: an attempt at prosecution with malice. The DA should himself face charges.

Mr. Dixon is doing the honorable thing, refusing to plea bargain with the DA. Even Alan Colmes, an anti-gun liberal, is passionately on Mr. Dixon's side in this matter. It's interesting to note that while Mr. Dixon appeared with his defense attorney Andrew Friedman, at no point did Friedman try to keep Mr. Dixon from saying anything he wanted to say. This is a very clear-cut case of justifiable self-defense, and the DA is not exercising his discretion in dismissing the spurious registration charges.

Greta Van Susteren asked an interesting rhetorical question of Colmes in the transition to her show: is the Brooklyn DA elected or appointed?

I'll remind readers here that there's a cheap, effective way to contact the Brooklyn DA. Use it. Use it again.

News of Mark Morford's latest disgraceful San Francisco Chronicle article has spread like wildfire the last 36 hours. Quite a few people have expressed their displeasure with his irresponsible rantings, writing him directly. I'm not convinced that writing the guy does anything more than let him know that he's succeeding in angering people he obviously wanted to anger. He's a print-medium version of a radio shock jock: he wants to raise our hackles.

I would like to emphasize, as I did in my original post on the matter, that he should lose his job at the Chronicle, since he's going to cost his employer advertising dollars if he continues. That's the way to be truly effective. Certainly, you should copy Morford on your complaint, but he's much more likely to get that special sinking feeling when he realizes that he's simply a 3rd party in the complaint.

The SF Chronicle does have an impressively comprehensive "Address Book" page, from which I'll excerpt this interesting little tidbit:

Reader representative: If you have comments on The Chronicle's coverage, standards or accuracy, please call Dick Rogers, the readers' representative, at (415) 777-7870. Written comments can be e-mailed to readerrep@sfchronicle.com, faxed to (415) 442-1847, or addressed to Readers' Representative, c/o San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103. For information on delivery, billing or how to become a subscriber, call (800) 281-2476.

The Chronicle has a page listing contact information for the people who run the revenue side (advertising makes up the lion's share of a newspaper's revenue stream).

Consider contacting these people directly:

• George Raine - Business Reporter, Advertising and Marketing
• Beverly Best - Retail/National Sales Manager - (415) 777-7244

And here's the masthead: the people who actually run the paper's operations. Contact them.

I've just now posted this to my other blog.

Japan has extropians and cryonicists, and a language capable of expressing our ideas. Oh, and it's a country of latent gun nuts. There's hope... on a singularitarian timescale.

...then I speak my mind. TV likes a nut. If I just speak my mind honestly, I fulfill all my nut obligations.

(I hate to be the one to break this to y'all, but being a Libertarian, pro-freedom, governs-least-governs-best, free market advocate makes you as bugnutty in the TV world as Christopher Walken tangoing with Dennis Hopper while Sinead O'Connor plays finger cymbals.)

Penn Jillette

I'd written earlier about a piece of trash writing pawned off on San Francisco Chronicle readers today. Geoff Metcalf returns fire against Mark Morford in an analysis piece; highly recommended. Geoff also makes the point that the Chronicle is especially potentially vulnerable in respect of their advertising revenue (thanks to Dr. Edgar Suter for passing this along).

Dale Seago once again alerts us to another wildly hysterical San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece by Mark Morford, this time entitled "Me And My Big Dumb Gun", bemoaning the introduction of the new Smith & Wesson .50 caliber handgun.

I urge you to read the article and see just how vile a writer can be. Search this site for references to "Morford", and also read Dr. Edgar Suter's early commentary on the same, as well as Dr. Jim Finn's response.

These were done in response to Morford's earlier rant, but - surprise, surprise - seem to have done little or nothing to convince Mr. Morford (unlikely, anyway) or his employer to curb his nasty behavior.

I suggest this: do continue to editorialize against the idiot writer, but direct your responses to the advertisers of the San Francisco Chronicle, copying the Chronicle editors. This is a tactic suggested a while back by L. Neil Smith, who is in my experienced opinion correct in stating that the threat of losing advertising dollars is the only thing editors truly fear.

I will very gladly reproduce well-written letters here. Copy me at whitakerATsurvivalartsDOTcom (replace the appropriate tokens with "@" and ".", proving to me you're not a spambot).

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T.E. Lawrence
Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

Thanks to commenter Dirk for pointing me to this excellent resource! I highly recommend pointing your friends to this site, Oleg Volk's "A Human Right", especially potential new shooters - females, particularly - and political fencesitters.

Aside from being an excellent source of pro-rights arguments, there are so many superb, powerful images worth reproducing. For fellow Bujinkan practicioners, there's an interesting article by a Texas shidoshi on martial arts & firearms.

The Liberty Belles issue this challenge:

Which would you choose?

The enemies of the Industrial Revolution — its displaced persons — were of the kind that had fought human progress for centuries, by every means available. In the Middle Ages, their weapon was the fear of God. In the nineteenth century, they still invoked the fear of God — for instance, they opposed the use of anesthesia on the grounds that it defies God’s will, since God intended men to suffer. When this weapon wore out, they invoked the will of the collective, the group, the tribe. But since this weapon has collapsed in their hands, they are now reduced, like cornered animals, to baring their teeth and their souls, and to proclaiming that man has no right to exist — by the divine will of inanimate matter.

The demand to “restrict” technology is the demand to restrict man’s mind. It is nature - i.e., reality - that makes both these goals impossible to achieve. Technology can be destroyed, and the mind can be paralyzed, but neither can be restricted. Whenever and wherever such restrictions are attempted, it is the mind - not the state - that withers away.

Ayn Rand
“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” from Return of the Primitive

Thanks to Clayton for pointing out this shocker: New York State to regulate martial arts (originally posted on Sword Forum).

These east coast martial arts licencing & regulation schemes are partially a way to eliminate non-sport, combat martial arts, like the Bujinkan arts, and partially a way for the "respectable" sport arts such as Tae Kwon Do and (modern) Karate to lock the rest of us out of "their" turf. This needs to be fought.

A while back on the Front Sight Alumni site, there was some discussion about a Miami Vice episode a couple of decades ago, called "Calderone", in which a real-life pistol champion plays a character (in this case, a hitman) who executes one of the most spectacular displays of true gun handling ever caught on film and integrated into a fictional narrative.

Apparently the episode aired a couple of nights ago. Video captures are available too... wow. Do check them out.

Celebrate Diversity!

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... so let's look at the bird and see what it's doing - that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Richard Phillips Feynman

Thanks to fellow Bujinkan practicioner Jeff Sherwin, who knows my interest in firearms, for giving me copies of a couple of photos he took on a recent trip to Japan. Pictured here is what is apparently either a flintlock or percussion blackpowder single-shot pistol, artfully concealed to resemble a tanto. This would be worn in a samurai's obi, even in a castle, where longswords were often not allowed. This is a digital scan of a low-contrast analog photograph, so please forgive the lack of detail:

Here's a blurb from a Japanese tourist guide:

The simple yet magnificent castle has become the symbol of Matsumoto. The 5 tiered 6 storied castle tower is approximately 30 meters tall and is the nation's oldest among existing castles. The dark stairwell leads to a viewpoint of the Matsumoto plains. The moon-viewing turret and all sorts of crenelations for stones, arrows, bullets and such still remain. The battlements and the scarce windows are all parts of the historic war strategies which display the intense power struggle of the times.

On the 2nd floor of the Matsumoto-jo Castle tower is an exhibit of 106 historic guns [emphasis mine - ed.] as well as references regarding modern weapons.

All the times I've been to Japan, and the year I lived there, I never thought to visit this museum near Nagano. I plan to make the trip sometime, and take a very good digital camera with me. Jeff has enticed me with descriptions of grenadier samurai armor and lacquered blackpowder grenades. I really must see this stuff.

Oh, and relatedly, I guess it's about time I get around to writing a review of Noel Perrin's Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879, as I'd mentioned a while back.

Thanks to my friend Michael for passing this along to me: the Rock SOPMOD M-14 conversion ("Commando Carbine"). I'd love to try one of these 9-pound carbine modifications. It's apparently a smaller overall package than even a typical M-4.

For the better part of those eight centuries under the shoguns, most Japanese were unaware that emperors still existed, and only a small circle of court nobles continued to regard them as divine. When the shoguns were toppled in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan's new strongmen gained control of the current Son of Heaven, a boy of 15, and announced that the whole country had "submitted to rule by the divine emperor." This was sheer bluff. Even today, there are huge credibility gaps in Japan. If there were a Japanese version of the fable The Emperor's New Clothes, the tailor would be executed for exposing the truth, the little child for speaking the truth and the peasantry for seeing the truth.

The Yamato Dynasty, p15
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave

I'd opined a few days ago that Bill Whittle, author of the essay Courage, should publish a book of his writings (an opinion neither original or unique to me). Looks like he'll be doing exactly that, soon.

Octagenarian arms designer Mikhail Kalashnikov has finally agreed to start licencing his name... to a German firm selling "manly products". Took him long enough: guess he still has a few years to enjoy some benefit from the half-century of marketing of his easy-to-field ingenuity.

The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

Robert A. Heinlein

This is a reminder that Teri Seago's Weapon Disarming seminar is tomorrow. I very strongly recommend her to women wanting to learn the art.

Take the best and make it better. If it doesn't exist, create it. Accept nothing nearly right or good enough.

Sir Henry Royce

L. Neil Smith has some interesting things to say about the state of television. Take this interesting tidbit about the Star Trek franchise:

Star Trek: the Next Generation came along and I watched it, too. In many ways it was a tremendous improvement over the original series, although the world it was set in would have been a fascist nightmare to live in, the hero was more bureaucrat than ship's captain, and the "final frontier" was being settled under strict military and political supervision, after the timid Canadian or Australian models—which is to say not much at all—instead of the robust and energetic American model.

The best episodes of the series were those involving the Klingon civil war, when it became clear almost immediately that the Klingons were the only decent, honorable, heroic, and worthwhile people in the galaxy. Maybe that's why the socialist creators of the series had it terminated. There has to be some reasonable explanation. To this day, Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi) says that she doesn't know why they did it.

The essay continues to state that The Libertarian Enterprise will, from now, be taking on a much broader mission, to take back popular culture from assorted fascists and other scumbags. See "You Can't Fight a Culture War If You Ain't Got Any Culture" for some background reading.

Those of you interested in learning the why and what of the concepts of molecular nanotechnology should consider attending the Fundamentals of Nanotechnology Tutorial, 2 May 2003, Palo Alto, California, hosted by the Foresight Institute. Lecturers include K. Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, Scott Mize, and Ed Neihaus.

"But vehicles, they are different somehow. If you do not believe it is possible to love an inanimate object, then you do not know too many teenage boys and their first cars. Ships have always been she. Airplanes, too. And I don’t think this is so hard to figure out, because there is something about a machine that takes us places, something alive and magical. Many foreign observers of America simply cannot comprehend our love of automobiles, but that is because they have never had to face crossing Texas. There is a rite of passage for everyone in the US, and that is your first teenage road trip. And no matter what kind of piece of shit you may be driving when you take that trip, that machine is serving you up pure, unrefined freedom and it’s so delirious and liberating that it makes your head spin, and carves the songs you heard during those glorious hours into that part of your brain that makes you cry when you hear them again twenty and forty and sixty years later.

A guy on a Harley knows real freedom in the single, left and right direction of the highway. Sailors know it in two dimensions, the ability to point the bow anywhere on the compass and follow it, come what may.

And then there are those of us who have worked and studied and trained like hell so that we may know freedom in all three dimensions. Now a lot of people think this makes pilots a little arrogant and aloof. Not so. The average pilot, despite the sometimes swaggering exterior, is very much capable of such feelings as love, affection, intimacy and caring. It’s just that these feelings don't involve anyone else."

Bill Whittle, in his essay Courage

"I like to fly because it combines intelligence, ingenuity, passion, skill, discipline and guts. We do not flirt with danger. We try to get as far away from danger as we can. We look at the death of our friends and colleagues right in the eye so we know what it looks like when it comes for us. This is not a love or a fear of dying. This is confronting the fact that death is in fact real, and by doing so, by facing that, you do, indeed, develop courage.

Courage is not the absence of fear. It is taking action in the face of fear.

And I know courage is the stern face of love because I love to fly more than I fear being killed while flying. I do everything I possibly can to reduce the risks, knowing I can never eliminate them all. There comes a time when I can honestly tell myself I’ve been as careful as I know how to be, and then, and only then, is the time to strap in. I’ve made the risks and the fear as small as I can. The joy stays as large as it ever was."

Bill Whittle, in his essay Courage

Very few people understand why some of us fly. Bill Whittle is one of those people. Stand warned: you will cry after reading his brilliant essay Courage.

The single most important thing to know about Americans -- the attitude which truly distinguishes them from the British, and explains much superficially odd behavior -- is that Americans believe that death is optional.

Jane Walmsley

I lived in London the early part of the '90's, and had the opportunity to go shooting with the Imperial College Non-Staff Shooting Club - on campus! - at their indoor range, where I learned some neat tactical tricks from a retired Hong Kong cop. Even then, though, I didn't know there existed an "NRA of Great Britain", but now I know, according to a Samizdata article by David Carr.

I do hope the NRA/GB is not like the crowd of statist wimps which characterize the National NRA of the US, crying out to "enforce the existing laws" of the land. I wonder if there's a JPFO/GB or a GOA/GB... until then, the UK Libertarian Alliance is the closest thing they have.

Speaking of the club at Imperial College, I see that while they apparently still exist, and under the name Imperial College Rifle and Pistol Club, there is no mention other than in name of the word "pistol" on their website. I'm assuming that the nice little underground pistol range that ex-girlfriend Nagako and I trained at a decade ago has been turned into a rimfire range, at best. Ugh.

Another glance at the ICRPC website mentions this sad fact, emphasis mine:

ICRPC only owns one fullbore target rifle so we normally organise our shooting trips in conjuction with the University of London Rifle Club. The rifles we use fire 7.62mm rounds, normally 155 grain.

As I implied in a piece I wrote for Samizdata a few months ago, a once-great country has been strangling it grassroots culture of weapon ownership at its base. I predict that the ICRPC will eventually lose even that one rifle... unless the students are willing to fight for it.

I'd meant to post this a week ago, but I just now recovered the digital camera I left at the Bujinkan Stockton dojo in my post-training fatigue.

Those of you who didn't make Dale Seago's Guns 'N Blades seminar at the Bujinkan Stockton dojo last weekend missed a training event worth travelling for.

As had been advertised in the original announcement, and at the request of the Stockton dojo, Dale spent some time talking about the care and maintenance of Western-style blades. Pictured above, Dale speaks about the differences in sharpening techniques between blades with conventional bevelled edges, e.g. most pocket knives, regardless of expense, and the relatively less common convex edge on a blade such as the custom Bowie pictured with Dale here.

"...when we want to know whether something was worth making, we look for the answer in a discovery machine called the market. When we want to know how something works, we have another discovery machine, called science. When we want to know if somebody was right to kill somebody else, we have a discovery machine called the law."

Jon Wilde
Ken MacLeod, in The Stone Canal

E pur si muove!
(And nonetheless it moves!)

Giordano Bruno's last cry from the burning stake
16 February 1600

It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.

Ludwig von Mises

Don't miss the airing of the "Guns for Tots" giveaway that Jim Lesczynski bravely attempted a few weeks ago in New York City:

We're getting one last hurrah out of this silliness, when "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on Comedy Central broadcasts its report on "Guns For Tots" on Tuesday, February 18, at 11 pm eastern. Check your listings for local time and station.

If you don't get the joke after watching it on "The Daily Show", there's not much hope for ever getting it.

Jim Lesczynski

To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I."

Ayn Rand

Understand from the minute the fight begins that you're going to take damage. Accept it. (You'll always suffer more from the idiots and cowards on your own side than from any enemy.) Keep your overall goal in mind above all. Those who swerve to avoid a few cuts and bruises defeat themselves.

L. Neil Smith
Tactical Reflections

Foresight Institute will be hosting its 11th annual Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology in Burlingame, California (near San Francisco International Airport) 9-12 October 2003. I plan to attend.

Unlike its antonym, 'hoplophilia' does not describe an aberration: a man who loves weapons is no more abnormal than a woman who loves babies. Countless millennia of hunting and war fighting have programmed man with the knowledge that a weapon means LIFE. This stark realization repels some - they are the hoplophobes. To us hoplophiles it is a delight.

Paul Kirchner

Thanks to Edgar Suter for passing this on: the current History Channel Poll is "Which right or freedom is most crucial to America's democratic way of life?" As of this posting, the right to keep and bear arms, as written in the 2nd Amendment, is leading the poll.

It is not the purpose of education to produce good citizens, but to help children become successful human beings. The former is properly identified as "indoctrination" and, when undertaken at the taxpayers' expense, should be illegal.

L. Neil Smith
Tactical Reflections

Choose your allies carefully: it's highly unlikely that you'll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies.

L. Neil Smith
Tactical Reflections

Teri Seago will be teaching the 4th installment of her women's safety series on Saturday 22 February 2003 at the San Francisco Buyu Center.

Weapons Disarming is the fourth installation of this popular safety series. For many people who learn self-defense, fighting back is no longer an option when a weapon is involved. If anything, the threat level is increased, adrenalin is pumping, and choices seem more limited. There are still choices, however, and this seminar will address how to remove a weapon and control the person who is attacking.

As I've mentioned before, I highly recommend her to women wanting to learn this approach to self-defense.

I stumbled today on this review of Estate Reduced-Recoil 00 Buckshot. and after having myself put several hundred rounds of it through my bedside Benelli a few months ago at a 4-day Tactical Shotgun course at Front Sight, I would say I wholeheartedly agree with the reviewer. It's what I use now.

The function of government is to provide you with service; the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.

L. Neil Smith
Tactical Reflections