April 2003 Archives

At last night's dojo training, I showed this knife to Russell Whitaker. If you visit the Northerner.com site, you can see they have a few others as well.

The Suomi people would call this knife a puukko. The people themselves live in Finland and the northern parts of Sweden, Norway, and a bit of Russia. (BTW, there is a Tornedalen dialect of Finnish or Suomi spoken by about 30,000 people in Sweden.)

For comparison, here's a pic of another traditional Suomi-style knife with the sheath made from reindeer antler and leather, and yet another using both curly birch and reindeer horn for the sheath. These sheaths, by the way (mine included) are made with a small drain hole on the back side at the bottom, in case water should get into the sheath. Deep pouch-type sheaths are the norm throughout Scandinavia (not just in the Suomi country), to avoid loss of the knife.

Being made without finger guards, the overall design of Suomi knives favors "pulling" or draw cuts (important if you're out in the cold with numb fingers or wearing mittens, etc.), but the size and shape of the Tornedals knife handle also makes it easy to brace into the palm of your hand if you need to use a pushing motion.

I don't know whether the blade of my Tornedals knife is carbon or some sort of stainless steel, but either way it takes an incredible edge. I tried to test the edge last night by shaving a little hair off my arm, but it was hard to measure my success because the hair appeared to be leaping off in terror before the blade could quite reach it.

I'd also recommend checking out the Scandinavian & Lapp knives from various makers here (scroll down the main page).

Y'know, with just a knife like this and a good tomahawk, such as the Rogers' Rangers Field Grade Spike Tomahawk from American Tomahawk Co., I'd feel very well equipped for any situation I might run into in the boonies.

Damn, just wish I had that 'hawk... :-)

A friend just sent me a link to this San Francisco Chronicle article: "How Sean Penn got gun permit" in Marin County, California, which is the county just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco itself.

I'm reminded in the article that Kern County remains a great place to acquire a permit to exercise your fundamental human right to carry, but hadn't known that Shasta County seems to be another good place to acquire that "permission". Alameda County and San Francisco City remain blatant tyrannies.

You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
1941

Steve Pegram pointed me to this site, which - among other things - sells Kydex holsters.

I'd enjoy seeing more of these shots on their site... I may have to lobby them.

So long as a man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual replenishment.

James Joseph Sylvester
(1814 - 1897)

Dale Seago will be teaching at the Schola St. George Swordsmanship Symposium the weekend of 7-8 June 2003 in Benecia, California (near the San Francisco Bay area), bringing a cognate perspective to this historical European martial arts event:

Dale Seago will demonstrate and teach techniques of armoured Japanese combat, and Japanese armoured wrestling.

See Dale's excellent comments of today on SDF on the rebirth of traditional European martial arts.

Phil Elmore, a prolific contributor to the Self Defense Forums, has his own related site: The Martialist: the Magazine for Those Who Fight Unfairly.

As I looked at my two young sons, each with his gun, and considered how much the safety of the party depended on these little fellows, I felt grateful to you, dear husband, for having acquainted them in childhood with the use of firearms.

Elizabeth Robinson
The Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann David Wyss
Unabridged version

Posted to my other blog: Visual Glossary: the Terminology of Swords.

The world needs uninhibited thinkers, not afraid of far out speculations; it also needs conservative hard-headed engineers who can make their dreams come true.

Arthur C. Clarke

"...and I'm a selfdefenseaholic."

A few days ago, I discovered the Self-Defense Forums, and have been reccommending that high-quality site to a number of people. My teacher Dale Seago has been doing a lot of posting there, including this introductory piece with lots of great photos of Scottish dirks.

In real life, however, even in our worst circumstances we have always been a relatively minor interest of the vast microbial world. Pathogenicity is not the rule. Indeed, it occurs so infrequently and involves such a relatively small number of species, considering the huge population of bacteria on the earth, that it has a freakish aspect. Disease usually results from inconclusive negotiations for symbiosys, an overstepping of the line by one side or the other, a biologic misinterpretation of borders.

Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell, Germs, p76

50 years ago today, Watson and Crick discovered the codebook of all life on Earth.

In the primordial times of the Ancient Ones, when the pyramids of Egypt were constructed, when the Temple of Doom's various spiked walls and mousetraps and poisoned darts and awkwardly placed sharp-edged coffee tables were loaded and stretched taught and coated and positioned, when various sacred artifacts capable of bestowing godlike powers on human beings were sprinkled throughout the globe in a variety of secret caverns and a menagerie of giant bugs and reptilian monsters and hot women who cast spells or turn people into statues or potted plants were tasked to guard them, said Ancient Ones apparently spent all their free time concocting incredible devices and books and objects for which Mankind Was Not Ready.

You would think, after the third or fourth Object of Ultimate Power was locked away in the care of an immortal protector, it might have occurred to the Ancient Ones what a spectacularly bad idea it is to have so many really, really powerful and dangerous things lurking about. In the Movieverse, that realm in which movies take place, in which roadside bars employ more bouncers than they have patrons, in which jaded, don't-play-by-the-rules, unshaven cops are routinely partnered with wide-eyed rookies or robots or intelligent animals or Charlie Sheen, scarcely a weekend goes by when a small group of individuals does not preserve the world from being horribly destroyed when some ne'er-do-well gets his greasy mitts on one of these world-destroying old keys or pendants or spheres or staffs or something. It would seem, however, that much as groups of Movieverse teens select for their vacations year after year "that place where all those horny teenagers were disemboweled with pruning shears last year and the year before that," there is no talking sense to the people in charge of creating these paranormal knickknacks.

Phil Elmore

Fox News is reporting that Uncle Josef Stalin's Mini Me clone, Kim Jong Il, has admitted that North Korea has nuclear weapons. Anyone surprised?

David C. Harris passes this along: DNA Day at the Stanford Human Genome Center tomorrow, Friday 25 April 2003, "to honor the 50th anniversary of Watson-Crick's article with the structure (and hinted function) of DNA."

It must be time for me to hit the sack, because the white-noise-background-TV-channel-from-among-500-choices has rolled over to one of those goddamned 30-minute infomercials... this one advertising FREE GOVERNMENT MONEY YOURS FOR THE TAKING. Goddamned Matthew Lesko leeches: "how to get a $6,000 subsidy, courtesy of the U.S. Congress" (a real example). Earn your money honestly, you brainless twits.

There, I feel better now. G'nite.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Ayn Rand

In a February post, "An ancient Japanese hideout gun", I showed a grainy picture of a "tanto pistol" which Jeff Sherwin had photographed recently in the arms museum at Matsumoto Castle in Japan. Tonight at the dojo, Jeff lent me a small stack of photos to scan with the better scanner (an Epson 1260 Photo) I picked up a few days ago; here's a sample:

Still a bit indistinct, but here's a breakout of the image on the left:

And the one on the right, which appears to be a mortar/rocket assembly:

I'm not able to make out any detail of the text on the placards in the display case, so I'll have to take pictures of the text on my own visit, whenever I get back to Japan. I promise a translation: my kanji knowledge has been getting reasonably adult in recent times.

Those who are more adapted to the active life can prepare themselves for contemplation in the practice of the active life, while those who are more adapted to the contemplative life can take upon themselves the works of the active life so as to become yet more apt for contemplation.

St. Thomas Aquinas

I recently bought a new pistol, one that I have craved since it was announced nearly a year ago. It is a Sig-Sauer P226ST chambered in .357 Sig. It is the all-stainless configuration. It differs from the standard P226 in that the frame is made from stainless steel, whereas the standard P226 frame is alloy. It has heft, to the tune of nearly 40 ounces. Shooting it is a dream. The action is very tight, recoil and muzzle flip are reduced by the heft, and delivers outstanding accuracy. It also has the new M1913 Picatinny rail for attaching a light, if desired. It is also available in 9mm and .40 Auto.

As we have seen, the first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence arose around the question of "self-defense." In a sense this is a false issue, for the right to defend one's home and one's person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
Chapter II, Black Power, p55

What's up with some of you people? I'm wondering about these:

• cheap wines to have with turkey
• police quote of the day
• how to win a colorado restraining order - luck o' the draw, I suppose
• eject or implements or today or spiritual or norwich
• ninjutsu training online no costs - ...and if you believe that's worth what you pay for it...
• united consequences by john ross
• penn and teller fucking bullshit
• cheap gun magazines - wanna bet your life on it?
• glock magazines cheap - see above
• are there any magazines on ninjutsu - yes: they all suck
• how to piss off a teacher
• got my free immortality rings
• militia digital camera
• wisconsin carrying concealed weapon defense sword
• mea culpa mea culpa maxima mea culpa means
• cheap merlots - should be "harlots"
• personal site guys naked
• simple matter to drag people along
• what training to bones taller man by photo or pic
• humour goat
• deviant arts

I'm not quite sure why, but my monthly search logs show my old extropian friend "Perry Metzger" as 6th in search engine referral popularity, after:

• the girl who owned a city
• banryu
• pen and teller bullshit
• two buck chuck
• mark morford

Hey Perry: sorry I didn't hook up with you when you were in town for IETF.

I'm testing out a new scanner (an Epson 1260 Photo) which I've obtained to help bring a bit more order to my archives: I'm digitizing as much of my archives as I can manage. I hate paper, but I have too much of it.

I found a 12-13 year old pamphlet from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, entitled "Why Cryonics Can Work". I'm a member of the organization, and before I moved to Europe for a few years in the early 90's, I was pretty active as a weekend volunteer. Here's a bit of that history, the front of the aforementioned brochure:

I believe this is one of those "what I did on my spring vacation" types of photos: to the best of my recollection, this happened in the spring of 1991 when I was back in the States for a couple of weeks from London. Instead of taking it easy - which I have a hard time doing anyway - I heard that Alcor was in need of, um, warm bodies to help move a cold one from storage in an old style dewar to one of the recently manufactured Bigfoot units. The guy in the sleeping bag was the first man successfully frozen and maintained continuously since 1967.

From left: Dr. Michael Perry, Mike Darwin and (back to camera) me. I believe, from the hair, that the 4th person may be Steve Bridge. Notice the heavy gloves and my care in reaching around the body: the sleeping bag was saturated with liquid nitrogen. Cold.

Teri Seago will be teaching "Women's Safety Series - The ABC's of Self-Protection" on Saturday 17 May 2003 at the San Francisco Buyu Center:

This seminar is the first in a Safety Series of workshops for women to learn the basic self-defense skills that will keep you safe in day to day life. It has been created for non-martial artists who want to learn simple concepts, tactics, and movement to improve awareness, confidence, and physical competence. This seminar is limited to women, and taught by Teri Seago.

Highly recommended.

Another discovery from my server logs: "Self-Defense Forums: For A Fighting Chance".

The uniformity of earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell

Have you forgotten?

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world. The minute a new one is launched, in whatever fields, some imbecile of a theologian is certain to fall upon it, seeking to put it down. The most effective way to defend it, of course, would be to fall upon the theologian, for the only really workable defense, in polemics as in war, is a vigorous offensive. But convention frowns upon that device as indecent, and so theologians continue their assault upon sense without much resistance, and the enlightenment is unpleasantly delayed.

H. L. Mencken
American Mercury, March 1930, p. 289

As she lay there dozing next to me, one voice inside my head kept saying, "Relax... you are not the first doctor to sleep with one of his patients," but another kept reminding me, "Howard, you are a veterinarian."

Dick Wilson

YES! Just out today: Burt Rutan unveils Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne and its drop-ship, the White Knight.

Proof that some of us pay very close attention to our server logs: howdy, Australian Survivalist readers! A special hello to "Warrigal".

Speaking of Fox News, someone in the studio allowed a cellphone to go off on air... causing me and - I'm assuming - thousands of viewers to flinch.

Just saw this mentioned on Fox News, figured I'd Google for it immediately. I wonder if there's a "Fox News effect" similar to the "Slashdot Effect". Some of this is just plain goofball, some of it's stuff I've seen and done in climbing gyms and on rockfaces. Good fun, in any case: House Gymastics.

Looks like I'm going to need to "bust at least one classic Harrison & Ford move" to get into their gallery; watch this space...

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

Leonardo da Vinci

Perry Metzger, on my exi-liberty mailing list, alerts us to the discovery that stem cells reverse multiple sclerosis (MS) in mice; excerpt from the New Scientist article:

Treatment with adult stem cells has cured mice suffering with a form of multiple sclerosis, say Italian researchers. Almost a third of the mice recovered completely from paralysis of their back legs, and the rest all showed substantial improvement.

He and I have a longtime mutual friend with this affliction: yet another reason I strongly support stem cell research.

If Wendy McElroy is correct, then there may be a bit of a culture shift happening in the midst of at least one demographic usually opposed to gun ownership.

It is inconsistent with the nature of life - as revealed by the record of the past - for a species to remain in an environmental niche when the opportunity exists for escape. Most individuals of the species remain within the security and comfort of the environment to which they have become adapted... [But] certain individuals will always probe the limits of their environment. These adventurous few are the vanguard of a new development in the evolution of life... As most fish remained in the water, and most apes remained in the forest, just so, in tomorrow's world most of us will remain on the earth... But a small percentage of the human species... will leave us, and their descendants will spread out into the galaxy.

Robert Jastrow
Introduction to The Next Ten Thousand Years by Adrian Berry, 1974

Der größte Unsinn, den man in den besetzen Ostgebieten machen könnte, sei der, den unterworfenen Völkern Waffen zu geben. Die Geschicte lehre, daß alle Herrenvölker untergegangen seien, nachdem sie den von ihnen unterworfenen Volkern Waffen bewilligt hatten.

[The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.]

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitlers Tischegesprache Im Fuhrerhauptquartier 1941-1942. [Hitler's Table-Talk at the Fuhrer's Headquarters 1941-1942], Dr. Henry Picker, ed. (Athenaum-Verlag, Bonn, 1951)

I'm not the first to say this, but Federal and state elections in America really should be April 15 or 16.

Never wash cat bedding with human clothing. Never.

I just now saw a flash of news preview on Fox News, apparently related to a raid on one of Uday Hussein's villas. What a shocker: an apparently gold-plated AK-47! The AK was intended to be a low-maintenance, idiotproof carbine to be issued to dirt-poor illiterate peasants. Amazing to see one gilded.

Reminds me... a few days ago on the same news channel I saw coverage of the booty from another raid, this time on one of Saddam's own hidey-holes. The usual motley assortment of weapons. The Marine guide did what I would have done: he saw a piece he'd not expected and in a "I only have eyes for you" moment picked it up and shouldered it for the camera: it was a new-in-box, pristine Steyr AUG, with the Austrian muzzle cap (plastic dustcover) still attached! Never fired. I had to change my drool bib.

The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H. Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.

Robert A. Heinlein
Time Enough for Love

Now that I'm mostly recovered from this weekend's training - though still moving slowly - I'll mention this weekend's training I attended in Concord, California, conducted by Soke Don Angier of Yanagi Ryu Aiki Jiujitsu at Aikido of Diablo Valley, graciously hosted by Rick Rowell and Shari Dyer (who provided the photo below).

Mr. Angier is the only American soke of a Japanese family martial art, Yanagi Ryu Aiki Jiujitsu, an offshoot of the Daito Ryu tradition. He'll be turning 70 this year, and has been doing his art since 1958. He has an interesting story to tell, recounted in the article "'So Sorry! Jiu-jitsu Please, Not Judo!' My Career in Yanagi-ryu Aiki Jujutsu", originally printed in the May 2001 edition of Aikido Journal, and reprinted by the Journal of Combative Sport (an interesting venue, since Yanagi Ryu, like the Bujinkan arts I study, utterly lacks sporting elements).

My American teacher in the Bujinkan, Dale Seago, some years ago strongly recommended that his students take advantage of the fact that Mr. Angier was visiting San Francisco for a weekend seminar on the principles of his art. A number of us did indeed take Dale up on his recommendation, and a small core group of us make a point of training with Mr. Angier on the roughly yearly schedule he visits the San Francisco Bay area.

Don Angier teaches these 2-day seminars with a very small number of very specific techniques, which are vehicles for the important lessons: the principles behind martially effective movement, e.g. commutative locking, finding the opponent's weak lines, taking advantage of hardwired mammalian and reptilian visual responses to misdirection, etc. All physics, all anatomy & physiology.

As is usual at these events, we had a larger (18-20 people) group training the first day, and a small group of about half that size training the second day. Mr. Angier and his direct students Jeremy and Mort (great guys) circulated the room giving intensely minutely specific directions for correcting our movements.

The attendees were predominantly aikidoists, with a much smaller number of Bujinkan students. The purpose of the training was not to make us practicioners of Mr. Angier's art, but rather to take home the lessons of his training to our own arts and our own movement. I can't recommend his training highly enough. At $70 for the weekend, too, it was practically given away free. Train with him, if you have the opportunity.

I was in training this weekend, and was so thrashed I forgot to wish Thomas Jefferson a happy 260th birthday yesterday.

Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes with an unprepared people a tyranny still of the many, the few, or the one.

Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1815

Greetings, large black person. Let us not forget to form a team up together and go into the country to inflict the pain of our karate feets on some ass of the giant lizard person.

Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins
Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head

Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.

Sir Edmund Hillary

You can't have your cake and eat it too; either the Net is a business and you pay for routable IP space, or it's a communist free love fuck fest, and it's your god-given right to have portable routable IP space.

Jeremy Porter

I like to think that we Brits have now added yet another component to the rich tapestry of Middle-Eastern culture and it reinforces my belief that the pithy, seductive quality of this word will continue to fuel its steady but relentless conquest of the Anglosphere, the Middle-East, the World and, who knows, maybe even beyond.

It is at times like this that all the speculation about possible encounters with alien species from other planets comes to mind. I am not sure that such an event will ever come to pass and I am quite positive that I will no longer be around to witness it even if it does. But I am willing to bet green money in the here and now that, within weeks of that first, portentious, epoch-making encounter, said aliens will be calling each other 'wanker'.

David Carr