Survival Arts

The Tornedals Knife From Northerner.com

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... :-)

The maker is also good about responding to questions:


>--- Original Message ---
>From: "Frank Svandal"
>To: "Dale Seago"
>Date: 4/30/03 2:56:51 AM
>
>Hello Dale,
>
>Thank you very much for sending your feedback to us.
>I will try to pass your feedback on to the craftsman
>who made the knife.
>
>Kind regards,
>
>Frank Svandal
>____________________________________________________
>
>http://www.northerner.com - The World's Largest Scandinavian Shop
>
>My Name: Frank Svandal
>Phone: +46 31 68 1991
>Fax: +46 31 68 1993
>
>Northerner Scandinavia AB
>Hantverksvägen 15
>436 33 Askim
>SWEDEN
>Company Registered in Sweden with Registration Number: 556559-1699
>VAT Number: SE556559-169901
> _________________________________________________________
>
>-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
>Från: Dale Seago [mailto:dale @ bujinkansf.org]
>Skickat: den 29 april 2003 22:12
>Till: mailbox @ northerner.com
>Ämne: Order Received :-)
>
>
>I just wanted to let you know that the Tornedals knife I ordered
>arrived yesterday, and that I am VERY pleased with it. It is
>beautiful, feels wonderful in my hand, and I know that it will
>be a fine working tool as well.
>
>Thank you!
>
>Sincerely,
>Dale Seago


"How Sean Penn got gun permit"

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.

Quote of the day

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

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
1941

"This company has a good marketing department"

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.

Quote of the day

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 at Schola St. George Swordsmanship Symposium 7-8 June 2003, Benecia, California

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.

The Martialist: the Magazine for Those Who Fight Unfairly

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

Quote of the day

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

Visual Glossary: the Terminology of Swords

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

Quote of the day

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

"Hi Everybody, My Name is Dale..."

"...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.

Quote of the day

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

It's DNA Discovery Day!

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

Quote of the day

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

Uncle Josef's Mini Me has the Bomb

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?

DNA Day at the Stanford Human Genome Center tomorrow

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."

Rot in Hell, Government Money Pimps!

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.

Quote of the day

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

More from Matsumoto-jo arms museum: fin-stabilized rocket mortars?

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.

Quote of the day

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

Ken Lunde on the new Sig-Sauer P226ST in .357 Sig

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.

Quote of the day

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

Speaking of search engine referrals

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

Perry, if you're reading this...

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.

Blast from the past: helping transfer Dr. James Bedford to a new dewar

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.

Women's Safety Series - The ABC's of Self-Protection

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.

"Self-Defense Forums: For A Fighting Chance"

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

Quote of the day

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

It's been 10 years

Have you forgotten?

Quote of the day

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

Quote of the day

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

"Passenger-Carrying Spaceship Makes Desert Debut"

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

Welcome, Australian Survivalists!

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

100,000 people just now flinched

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.

House Gymnastics

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...

Quote of the day

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

A real pro-life technology: stem cell research

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.

"War May Redefine Gun Control"

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.

Quote of the day

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

Quote of the day

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)

Why isn't Election Day today?

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

Tip 'o the day (Hard Lesson #1)

Never wash cat bedding with human clothing. Never.

Guilding a peasant's weapon

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.

Quote of the day

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

Don Angier aikijiujitsu seminar, 12-13 April 2003, at Aikido of Diablo Valley

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.

Tom Jefferson's birthday yesterday

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

Quote of the day

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

Quote of the day

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

Quote of the day

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

Quote of the day

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

Quote of the day

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

Toren Smith bows out... for now

Toren Smith bows out after a year of blogging... for the time being. He'll be missed.

Clot-inducing bandages

Just now rec'd from a friend:

Sone interesting information on materials that are used to induce clotting when applied to wounds. Neither seems to be available for sale to the general public yet. Both have FDA approval, but most/all production is headed to the military. Expected initial prices are around $20 per package.

Relevant links:

• Fox News article
  
• Z-Medica, the developer of QuikClot™
  
• HemCon, Inc.
  

Quote of the day

The top half of the screen displays a map of the world that shows where it's day and night. Tiny colored dots twinkle on and off across the continents, each representing a different language and a burst of several thousand questions. Europe, Japan, Israel, Korea, and most of North America are dense, nearly permanent galaxies of dots. In Africa, the Middle East, and South America, the dots are so few that you can often identify precise locations - Brasilia, Caracas, Johannesburg, Nairobi, the airport in the Cape Verde Islands.

It becomes apparent that this is a map not just of Google's users but of the spread of technology, and thus of prosperity in the new century. In an imprecise but important way, it is also a measure of human freedom.

Michael S. Malone
Wired magazine (print edition)
"Inside the Soul of the Web - 24 hours watching the world looking for answers at Google"
May 2003
p104

Quote of the day

We have tried to reward overall self-sensitive and self-controlled performance with a sportsman's trophy. To sophisticated folk's way of thinking, this prize, given to the entrant who best used his equipment and best exercised his judgment, is the most important categorical award of all. That riflist may not have a notably high score, but he will see everything, he will shoot at nothing he should not, and he will not miss. That riflist is truly a hunter in the greatest sense.

Dr. David N. Kahn, speaking of the Keneyathlon

Zach Lunderville's "Revolt" site

A reader, Zach Lunderville, today posted a comment on a posting of mine from January, a recommendation of the book Unintended Consequences by John Ross. His website, "Revolt", has some excerpts from various training manuals. Check them out.

Quote of the day

Those who do not have swords may still die upon them.

J.R.R. Tolkien
The Two Towers

Article on "The Fictitious Truths of Michael Moore"

Steve Pegram pointed me to this 3-part article in "Film Threat" magazine's on-line edition, "The Fictitious Truths of Michael Moore", which ends with an online petition to have Moore and Michael Donavan's Oscar award for "Bowling for Columbine" revoked.

An excerpt:

The movie uses this tragedy as a springboard into the great gun debate, but the Columbine massacre is obviously about more than guns. A quick look at the story shows these two ghouls were plotting the event for some time and their acquisition of guns was a late bit of fortune for their designs. Along with firearms, this aberrant duo brought with them a propane tank modified into an explosive device, as well as a quiver of napalm fueled pipe bombs. It is doubtful the absence of guns would have stalled their quest for long.

and:

Another target in the film is the NRA, and specifically, its president Charlton Heston. The movie uses creative editing and a fluid timeline to paint Heston as a reactionary, who rushed into towns in the wake of shooting deaths of children to hold pro-gun rallies in an effort to stave off anti-gun sentiments. We get to listen to Heston’s Denver address, in which he sounds like a heartless boor in light of the current events in the region, but what is actually broadcast is a judiciously edited version that also contains segments from another speech that was given across the country, nearly a year later. Heston’s original speech was somber and conciliatory, but the audio cut-and-paste transforms him into a state of bloodlust. Moore not only fails to make this distinction, but he edits the scene with visuals so that the audio sounds to be seamlessly delivered from the Denver podium.

It gets worse.

Quote of the day

...the preceding definitions and examples identify four of the five elements of an inferential statistical problem: a population, one or more variables of interest, a sample, and an inference. But making an inference is only part of the story. We also need to know its reliability - that is, how good an inference is. The only way we can be certain that an inference about a population is correct is to include the entire population in our sample. However, because of resource constraints (i.e., insufficient time and/or money), we usually can't work with whole populations, so we base our inferences on just a portion of the population (a sample). Thus, we introduce an element of uncertainty into our inferences. Consequently, whenever possible, it is important to determine and report the reliability of each inference made. Reliability, then, is the fifth element of inferential statistical problems.

The measure of reliability that accompanies an inference separates the science of statistics from the art of fortune-telling. A palm reader, like a statistician, may example a sample (your hand) and make inferences about the population (your life). However, unlike statistical inferences, the palm reader's inferences include no measure of reliability.

Statistics (9th Edition)
James T. McClave and Terry Sincich
page 7

Tombo Weapons for sword training, made by Tim Bathurst

I've got a set of Tim Bathurst's "Sword bound handle" training shinai which I picked up last May on a training trip to Japan, and highly recommend them. I especially like the tsuka on my daisho set, which are wrapped with ito over an imitation same. Great training tools with a really good feel.

"America is a great country"

Patrick Crozier has posted a real winner on Samizdata. You don't often see this kind of openly expressed respect of America on the part of an Englishman... unless, of course, he's a libertarian.

Quote of the day

Nationalism, of course, is intrinsically absurd. Why should the accident - fortune or misfortune - of birth as an American, Albanian, Scot or Fiji Islander impose loyalties that dominate an individual life and structure a society so as to place it in formal conflict with others? In the past there were local loyalties to place and clan and tribe, obligations to lord or landlord, dynastic or territorial wars, but primary loyalties were to religion, God or god-king, possibly to emperor, to a civilization as such. There was no nation. There was attachment to patria, land of one's fathers, or patriotism, but to speak of nationalism before modern times is anachronistic.

William Pfaff
The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism
p17

More on the rape of Meigs Field

I'd mentioned this a short while ago; here's more information. Apparently this indeed did happen in the dead of night, 4 days ago. The NOTAMS on this page are gut-wrenching to read. See also the Friends of Meigs page (main one here) on the same site; one telling comment:

From Stuart Gitlow on 01-Apr-2003 How do we define terrorist: A terrorist would attack a public work of great importance to the community. A terrorist would attack the public work with no notice, no announcement, and no regard for those using the facility. A terrorist would ignore the needs and desires of those around him. A terrorist would destroy the target without any plan for replacing the services that facility provided. And a terrorist might attack in the dead of night, the better to proceed with his heinous plan without anyone noticing until it was too late.

Blazing technological idiocy from the American Bar Association

Daniel J. Boone reports on another reason why, as a lawyer, he isn't a member of the ABA: this pile of festering compost, a recommendation to regulate what they call "pirate" WiFi.

Chicago's Meigs Field destroyed in overnight coup by mayor's wife

I heard first about this from a posting by Toren Smith last night. This morning I met my old flight instructor for racquetball, and it was the first topic of conversation. It's worse than I'd thought. I'm personally really pissed off at this because I visited that area of Chicago many years ago after Navy boot camp, and told myself that I'd eventually fly into that field. If you'd ever seen it - and the view from it - you'd be pissed too. Oh, and the only reason the polipukes were able to get their way with the field - the Mayor's wife wants a friggin' park there - was that this time they had - you guessed it - the excuse of (drumroll please): homeland security.

Quote of the day

The universe rewards us for understanding it and punishes us for not understanding it. When we understand the universe, our plans work and we feel good. Conversely, if we try to fly by jumping off a cliff and flapping our arms the universe will kill us.

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart
The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

A brief rant about the uses of a few words

I've recently heard Fox News reporters calling found weapons caches "arsenals". Guys, an "arsenal" is a place where weapons are manufactured (and sometimes designed); an "armory" is a place where weapons are simply stored.

While I'm ranting, I also noticed that one of Fox's talking head retired military analysts actually misused the term "decimate" to mean "annihilate". This is a somewhat understandable mistake, had it been committed by someone not schooled in the arts of war, but rather shocking on the part of a professional officer.

To those who don't understand my quibble, see this definition of "decimate". I disagree with this guy, by the way: I'm aware that words do change meanings over time, but "decimate" still retains the distinction of "to reduce (in force)". And yes, I'm aware of the arguments of Pinker against "language mavens" in his superb The Language Instinct and related works - I actually agree with most of them - but I'm annoyed at the degradation of language where caused by several generations of horrible government schooling.

(Bitch mode off)

Gummint tries to shake down Paypal

Gabriel Syme reporting from London: "PayPal falls short of Patriot Act".

A Great Ealing Comedy: "All at Sea", 1957

Some years ago, when I was living in London, my good friend and head of the U.K. Libertarian Alliance, Chris Tame, introduced me to the Ealing Comedies produced in the post-war era (40's and 50's, prior to purchase of the studios by the BBC). A combination of subtle parody and broad farce, these predominantly outstanding cultural treasures featured actors now well known across both sides of The Pond, such as Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, and pop cultural treasures such as the late Frankie Howerd (that's the spelling) - "Oooh! Missus!" - not as well known outside England.

Last week, I noticed a strong recommendation in the March 29 mailing of Miss Liberty's Film & TV Update for one of these comedies:

My top TV pick for the week is the Alec Guinness film "All at Sea," airing on Wednesday (4/2) on TCM. This is an absolutely dead-on libertarian comedy about an amusement park operator who overcomes a corrupt and oppressive local government intent on seizing his business. To my knowledge, this film is not available on video and it rarely appears on television. If you don't have time to watch it now, be sure to record it!

The version shown on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which is now safely on my PVR because indeed, the movie's apparently not available on VHS or DVD in the U.S., was the MGM-distributed U.S. release of "Barnacle Bill", erroneously listed in the TCM program guide as having been released in 1958. The Latin numerals read "1957" in the credits, as do several filmographies.

Guinness plays Capt. William Horatio Ambrose, a competent and clever Royal Navy officer afflicted by a ravening case of seasickness ("I shall do my duty, M'am, to the best of my disability"), who buys Sandcastle Pier, a decrepit Blackpool wannabe. When Ambrose discovers that the local Mayor and Council have plans to steal the pier using eminent domain laws, he manages to have the pier registered as a cruise ship at anchor in harbor under the fictitious flag of Liberama: the RMS ("Really Motionless Ship") Arabella.

It's a great little piece, and now I have my own copy. In a similar spirit, I recommend "The Man in the White Suit", if you can find a copy. It's another Ealing comedy featuring Alec Guinness, from earlier in his career (1951): darker, with Randian undertones.

You won't find these comedies on Netflix, by the way: apparently, only Guinness' "serious" roles seem to be worthy of inclusion there. See Guinness's IMDB entry for a much more comprehensive filmography.

I can't help thinking about the Principality of Sealand when Capt. Ambrose recounts, "...hence my family motto: Omnes Per Mare... All At Sea..." when I read: "...Sealand's national motto of E Mare Libertas, or 'From the Sea, Freedom'".

Quote of the day

...once you're crazy and know nothing about numbers, the chances of finding something psychotic and hateful in a scrabble factory explosion are hovering just around 100%.

Penn Jillette

Introducing the Safari Ching Sling

I've had the pleasure of taking firearms training twice with Eric S. H. Ching: once in a day-long special defensive pistol session I put together for my friends, and once in a 6-day defensive pistol course, where he was a line instructor under Col. Jeff Cooper.

Eric is an educated, methodical, and analytical man... who first started shooting in his 30's, but is now a world-respected firearms innovator. Those of you who've not yet taken the first steps in firearms ownership and training, take heart: Eric is your paradigm example. You can do it.

Eric has followed up his invention of the 3-point Ching Sling (featured on the Steyr Scout iconic to this blog: the favorite in my personal collection) with a 2-point version of the same, the "Safari Ching Sling", intended for mounting on rifles without the extra sling point (I'm thinking of the Savage Scout in particular).

Howdy, Anorakish

A fellow traveller discovered while analyzing my server logs: "Anorakish". The guy has Hunter S. Thompson listed under "Sports" and Kim Jong Il listed under "Humor". Hey dude, any chance you could enabling commenting on your site?

His site has an interesting link to the CENTCOM Leaflet Gallery. For those of you reading it: bear in mind when reading the translated plates that Arabic reads right-to-left; the translated versions read in the same direction.

A better machete: the Kris Cutlery Visayan Pinuti

Last night at the dojo, our teacher Dale Seago held an auction of a number of his blades. I picked up a very nice and extremely stout little Linder (Solingen) skinning knife, and this interesting piece, a Kris Cutlery Visayan Pinuti:

I sometimes go places where a machete could be useful. I really hate standard machetes: flimsy, clumsy, and crude. This piece is much better: attractive and servicable, weighted toward the tip (as befits a bolo), and a good enough practical travel short sword. I agree with Jeff Sherwin who commented to me last night that Kris Cutlery does these types of blades best: quality Filipino blades made in the Phillipines. Interestingly, the Kris Cutlery description mentions that the tang is simply glued in place, which is not true: it's also pinned. Oh, and the pommel as you can see in this picture is a nice, oversized knob: great for striking.

I've also owned one of their 26" Japanese-style katana, which was a great little piece for the price. I eventually sold it when I made the leap to a Bugei Samurai Katana last year, for about $800 more.

Looks a lot like Northern Nevada

Just saw footage of U.S. troops fighting alongside Kurds in northern Iraq. Looked a lot like northern Nevada mountain country, complete with snow-covered peaks! I wonder if they've got something like mule deer out there too... hmmm... I wonder if hunting is good out there.

Speaking of which, I've heard quite a bit about Iraqis being a hunter culture, and gun ownership being a common thing. I'm not thrilled to hear that British forces have been making a big deal of bringing their own special brand of domestic gun control to the population in Iraq. I sincerely hope the Iraqi people have stashed away all those Kalashnikovs they've supposedly been issued.

Don't take this to mean I'm anything resembling sympathetic to the Iraqis' maddog dictator. I'm simply concerned that we recognize the individual rights of Iraqi people. Innocent Iraqis have the right to own and keep weapons too.

Quote of the day

...in what I laughingly call my career, I've bumped elbows with a lot of other writers in the general freedom movement with whom I may agree on this or that point, but with whom I often disagree on a wide range of other issues.

One of them is my lifelong insistence on open borders and absolute freedom of immigration. How the hell can you stop another human being from going freely, wherever he wants to go, without initiating force against him? Yet many an otherwise highly principled libertarian oriented individualist ends up playing a game of Twister with himself and his readers, attempting to have his principles and violate them, too.

...Borders are imaginary lines on a map, put there by the coercive state. As a libertarian, as far as I'm concerned, the state can put them someplace else -- like where the sun doesn't shine. You don't tell another free individual where he can or can't set his feet and call yourself an advocate of freedom. At least not as long as there's somewhere that he (or she) can set them that belongs to everybody and nobody.

L. Neil Smith

Flight AA128 held at SJC: possible SARS cases onboard

This one hits me personally: American Airlines flight AA128 held at SJC (I refuse to call it "Norman Mineta International"): possible SARS cases onboard.

Fox News is showing a live feed from the tarmac. What they don't mention is that this is the only daily flight from Tokyo's Narita airport to San Jose (I know it well, personally, from too many trips), and the most inconvenient: passengers disembark onto the tarmac, walk into an immigration area, pass that area, pick up their luggage, pass through Customs, give back their luggage to a baggage transport, and travel by bus to the main terminal... where they wait for their luggage again at another baggage carousel! This SARS incident adds another potentially dangerous element to an an otherwise simply annoying travel gauntlet.

Apparently this flight originated in Hong Kong on its way to Narita outbound for San Jose. Fox News reports that the tourist industry in Hong Kong has all but shut down. I've spent a total of a couple of months in the last 3 years in Hong Kong, and really worry for my family there. I wish them health and safety.

Somewhere to bin those Nigerian scam letters

I've been in the habit of deleting these as I get them, but I've found a place to bin them, at least those with "handy phone" contact numbers: the Quatloos! Nigerian 4-1-9 Scam Gallery. You can submit your own examples.

Check out the hilarious Brad Christensen Exhibit: Brad cons the con men.

Quote of the day

At the Paris Taikai, there was a huge SAS soldier who passed his fifth dan test. He was towering over everyone at the Taikai. But when it came time to take the picture of all the people who had passed, he didn’t stand out at all. He was no taller than anyone else in the photo. It was like he was hiding within a crowd. This ability to protect yourself instinctively is very important. You could learn a lot from this.

Soke Masaaki Hatsumi, via Ben Cole