A year ago, Curt and Lissa Howland's daughter Athena Sakura Howland was born. Happy birthday kid!
January 2004 Archives
I have a few pet peeves, one of which is shopping cart thieves. I think this particular crime pushes one of my outrage button because it's an everyday occurrance, out in the open, that many people witness and almost no one does anything about. That type of thing rankles me. So, when I was driving through Cupertino (which like many American towns has a well-known problem with this type of thing) a few days ago, and saw this guy crossing the street across from Long's Drugs with the latter's property, I had to do something.
He was on the corner, and I was stopped at the light waiting to turn. I opened my window and told him he should return the cart. He was startled, and blurted out that he was moving the empty cart to a "collection center" a block away! Nonsense, and I told him so. He was visibly shaken, and turned around to return the cart to the nearby store. I pulled into the parking lot nearby to watch, and saw him making motions to resume his theft (thinking me absent), at which point I pulled up nearby and took some photos with the tiny digicam (a Sony CyberShotU) that I keep in my pocket whenever I leave the house. It's in this photo where I've informed him that I have pictures of him, and he's objecting that since I don't work for the store, I have no say in the matter.
He eventually returned the cart and did a bum-swagger off the lot. In the meantime, I parked my car and walked into the store seeking the manager, who was happily surprised, and requested that I use the store's memorycard-to-film converter to leave him copies of the photos I'd made. I took the Memory Stick from my camera, stuck it in the front of a neat little kiosk with a surprisingly idiotproof user interface, and within minutes we had a set of hardcopies for myself and for the store management, to be posted on what I assume is the "deadbeats bulletin board" where many retail operations post photos of bad check passers and other BOLO (Be On the Look Out) notices.
Yet another reason there are certain things I carry with me regularly.
Just finished a small box of "Oregon Berries" by Cranberry Sweets & More, which we picked up on our trip to Portland a few weeks ago. We'd been nibbling very sparingly on these, since they're so good. I really like these candies, and they make nice little gifts. You can pick up some yourself, since the company does mail order
Yesterday I posted a note about Jeffrey Jordan's indictment for concealed weapons charges in Ohio. I placed a link to that note on Packing.org, which has generated some interesting response from High Power shooters who plan to boycott attendance at Camp Perry, Ohio in protest. An example from miller1952:
You should be aware that the felony indictment of Jeffery Jordan for the "crime" of traveling through Ashland County and failing to secure his legally owned handguns in his trunk is viewed with some level of alarm in the shooting community. I am advising everyone I know to avoid Camp Perry in the future. Over the last few years rifle matches with three day venues like Perry have sprouted up in Missouri and Minnesota as an alternative to the expense of Perry. If the State of Ohio follows through with ruining this young man's life via a felony conviction I think you can expect a widespread grassroots "Boycott Ohio" movement in the gun owning community. Take a hard look at K-Mart.
It'll be interesting to see if the organizers of the Camp Perry events will take notice.
Don't believe anything unless you have thought it through for yourself.
Anna Pell Wheeler, mathematician
1883-1966
Quoted on p281 of Discrete Mathematics with Applications, 2nd edition
Garth Lynch just posted a note to our dojo mailing list mentioning that the great Kitano Takeshi, one of my favorite actors, is starring in a new movie adapation reprising the character of Zatoichi, the Blind Swordsman (originally played by Katsu Shintaro), one of my all-time favorite chanbara movie series. The trailer for the new film looks great!
Ward Griffiths has alerted me to the news today that Jeffrey Jordan has been indicted by an Ashland County, Ohio grand jury. From the article, "New Hampshire man indicted for carrying concealed weapon":
ASHLAND -- A New Hampshire man arrested last month by the state patrol was indicted Thursday on a felony count of carrying a concealed weapon by an Ashland County grand jury.
Jeffrey Jordan, 42, was arrested Dec. 31 by a trooper of the Ashland post of the Ohio Highway Patrol after a traffic stop. He faces a charge of carrying a concealed weapon because troopers said they found two handguns on him.
Jordan is scheduled to be arraigned Monday at 11:30 a.m.
Some background on Hunter's situation can be found here and here.
Ward Griffiths: "To me gods and governments are eternally intertwined and neither deserve respect."
L. Neil Smith: "Yes, to me, atheism and anarchism have always been essentially the same position. The very concept of gods or governments is an insult to the human spirit."
Christopher Pellerito has written an excellent piece on the phenomenon of "financial pornography", a term coined by mathematician John Allen Paulos to describe "under-researched puff pieces on personal finance (e.g. Five Hot Stocks to Pump Up your 401k NOW!)"
It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.
Alfred North Whitehead
[This entry was originally published on my other, dormant blog 27 April 2003. - Russell]
I had the pleasure of meeting Fred Weissberg today at the Cupertino Sakura Matsuri, and was pointed to several websites of his and his cohorts. For those of you - like me - who are into traditional Japanese martial arts, here's a useful resource: a Visual Glossary of the Japanese sword.
Time to upgrade Movable Type on both this blog and on my other (dormant) Asian languages blog: the penis pill comment spammers have gotten much, much more aggressive lately.
Even when you're dead, the chains don't come off. That's why I'm so fond of the indie/DIY/Open Source movement, in all its low budget, cacaphonous, disorganized, multifaceted glory. Local band I used to do management/booking/road work for, years back, spent far too much time trying to get label attention. If we'd just put the stuff out ourselves, we'd have saved a lot of hassle and time, and probably made more money than we'd have ever squeezed out of any label. Still kicking myself over that, especially now that the production and distribution tools are so damn easy to get and use.
Most [music] labels are a honeytrap, only without the hot sex from a Russian spy chick. Just the unlubed prisonsex.
James Lesczynski, of "Guns for Tots" fame, today on the smith2004-discuss list alerts us to the cover story of today's New York Press edition, "Libertarians at the Gate":
James notes that "it takes a few shots at us, as expected, but overall the philosophy leaks through. And it's publicity, at any rate..."
I admit I still find it a little amazing people fall for this crap. Magicians have been doing it for well over 100 years. Just off the top of my head there was Munito the dog, Toby "The Sapient Pig," and the "Two Curious Birds" -- one of which was a parrot as I recall. All could perform amazing tricks incuding "mind reading." It is no big secret how it is done: Cold reading (sometime called "Barnum effect") mixed with clever training or exceptionally perceptive animals.
What used to be sideshow entertainment has become a near-as-dammit religion. Perhaps it is just another side effect of how the publik skoolz fragment and compartmentalize knowledge and prevent critical thinking.
e0ts
I've been slightly busier than usual the past few days. I did manage to meet up with friends Mark Quon ("Genghis Khan") and Alan Weiss on Friday before Alan's departure for Austin, for lunch and for some indoor shooting at the excellent Reed's Indoor Range in Santa Clara, California. Here's Alan with his EAA Witness in .45 ACP with Wonderfinish coating (he favors the isosceles stance):
Continue reading Friday at the range with Alan and Genghis.
One must learn by doing the thing; though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
Sophocles
Wealth may provoke envy, but it seldom provokes the truly venomous levels of resentment provoked by achievement. There is no surer way for a minority group to become hated than to enter a country as destitute immigrants and then, through long hours of hard work, rise to a level of prosperity above that of the indigenous population.
Firearms and painkilling drugs are among the principle advancements of modern humanity. A sorry crew of US legislators have understood that it is their job to stand between human beings and these advancements made by humanity - no matter if it kills the human beings.
Proof serves many purposes simultaneously. In being exposed to the scrutiny and judgment of a new audience, [a] proof is subject to a constant process of criticism and revalidation. Errors, ambiguities, and misunderstandings are cleared up by constant exposure. Proof is respectability. Proof is the seal of authority.
Proof, in its best instances, increases understanding by revealing the heart of the matter. Proof suggests new mathematics. The novice who studies proofs gets closer to the creation of new mathematics. Proof is mathematical power, the electric voltage of the subject which vitalizes the static assertions of the theorems.
Finally, proof is ritual, and a celebration of the power of pure reason.
Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh
The Mathematical Experience
A woman standing there is enough
but
When she moves
ice flows
rivers melt
the day stops ticking by in regulation
and the seconds start shashaying back and forth
as if they had a mind of their own
Brett Froomer
I have one more entry to write after this one, an actual writeup of my impressions of the event, but as promised earlier today, I'm putting up the rest of the (useable) pics from my tiny Sony CyberShotU digicam, after a bit of cropping, enhancement, and redeye reduction:
In the foreground are Alan Weiss ("WINBEAR2" on the Fox Firefly Forum) and a nice lady whose name I've forgotten (apologies!) Alan is a libertarian friend of mine from the smith2004-discuss list, visiting from Austin for the week on business, and the mystery lady is a Democrat activist... proof that disparate fans can booze together and have fun! Old friend Dr. Kurth Reynolds ("yes, I actually am a rocket scientist!") is lurking in the background over her shoulder.
Continue reading As promised, the rest of the pics I made at last night's Firefly Shindig.
I'm still waiting for permissions to post some more of the pics from last night's Firefly shindig. In the meantime, while I'm waiting, I'll post one of the pics from the set which Fred Moulton handed me on a CD when we met at the event:
That's Anton Sherwood on the left, who was also in attendance at last night's Firefly shindig. I think he's dressed as "The Man with One Brown Shoe." Me, I'm dressed as myself. Really. Or, at least an aspect of myself. And yes, the blades are real. Party was at the home of Romana Machado Reynolds and Dr. Kurth Reynolds, Halloween 2003. Romana has always held cool parties.
I have about half a dozen or so photos I took at last night's Firefly MicroMiniShindig. I have to identify some people and get some people's permissions to post before I put them all up. Here's one for starters, though:
From left to right: Kim ("EARTH2KIM" on the Prospero Firefly Forum), me, and Mark Quon ("Genghis Khan").
Thanks to Anarchist on the smith2004-discuss list for passing on SciFi.com's report today that Tim Minear is working on a screen adaptation of Heinlein's libertarian classic novel:
Genre TV producer Tim Minear (Angel, Wonderfalls) told SCI FI Wire that he has been hired to write a screenplay adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's 1966 SF novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The novel deals with a 2076 rebellion on a former penal colony on the moon and has been read as an allegory about libertarianism and its costs.
Can't wait to see the trailers for this film. Minear wrote or co-wrote 4 of the scripts for the excellent Firefly series, I should add.
We had about 25 people at last night's Firefly MicroMiniShindig in Mt. View, California, and a great time was had by all. I'll be posting some pictures later.
The pattern of information embodied in a fictional movie is created, not discovered: the producers didn't stroll into the Mojave one day and find a set of characters ready to be filmed.
From "cats on grass" to "cat with brass":
There's nothing a kitten doesn't find interesting. I'd just laid out 15 expended .50 BMG cases for photographing before putting them in the cleaning tumbler, for before-and-after pictures. Not a minute had passed before the kids jumped on them and started batting them around.
The 1st Silicon Valley Firefly MicroMiniShindig will be held tonight in Mt. View California, and looks to be great little gathering of friends old and new. If you're planning to come but haven't told me yet, traverse the links to the RSVP instructions to tell me privately, or you can do so publicly as a comment on this blog entry.
I'm no longer looking for a copy of the Steyr Scout Owner's Manual in PDF form: I have it now, thanks to private mail from Claudio in Zaire, and Mikael Häggström in Sweden on the Yahoo! Groups ScoutRifles mailing list (who posted it into their "Files" section for other seekers). Thanks to both of you, and also to Bill St. Clair and Steve Pegram.
In the post-reconstruction period, when the pendulum swung back to overt racism, Taney's philosophy resurfaced as "the return-of-the-repressed" -- the American trauma, It was during this period that the most rabid anti-gun legislations, designed to keep guns out of the hands of black men, were enacted. This racial paranoia about black men with guns, which was at first southern, eventually spread to the north. This paranoia was potent enough to cause the infringement on a basic right: "the right... to keep and bear arms." To allow this to happen, two basic American tenets had to be ignored: one grounded in constitutional law and the other based on natural law.
Roy Innis, speaking in 1991
National Chairman, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality)
I know my paper copy of my Steyr Scout Owner's Manual is around the house somewhere, but I can't find it. Remembering that Steyr's erstwhile U.S. distributor GSI published a PDF version of the manual online, I went looking for it, and discovered it gone from the GSI site, unavailable from the Dynamit-Nobel site... and as a side effect, saw that Steyr is once again changing U.S. distributors!
I went to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and was delighted to find snapshots of GSI's site from 2 years back... but no stored PDF documents! I've looked all over the Scout-related sites, Googling widely, still no luck. Does anyone know where I can find this file?
My friend Franklin sent me a pointer to AlaskaJobFinder a few weeks ago. Looks like a great way to find summer/seasonal work in Alaska:
AlaskaJobFinder.com is the leading website for finding jobs in Alaska. We specialize in the Alaska fishing industry, featuring such jobs as deckhand jobs, cannery jobs, onshore and offshore processing jobs, and aquaculture jobs. We cover employment on sport fishing charter boats as well Alaska fishing industry support jobs.
Being elected President and taking my cues from Alexander Hope. L. Neil Smith would be my Secretary of State ("go fuck yourselves, fellas -- TANSTAAFL!"). Russell Whitaker would be my John Pondero ("don't even THINK of reaching for it, sucker.") Genghis Khan [Mark Quon] would be my Secretary of Defense. Tom Knapp would be in charge of destroying every other Cabinet level department. ALL of you would be free to take whatever jobs you wanted, with the goal of putting yourselves OUT of a job in 60 days or less.
After several hours of putzing around with my Steyr Scout (after having taken it out yesterday to test functioning with a range of old NATO surplus ammo), trying to figure out how to re-install the extractor (it's a long story), I got everything back together and continued the cleaning job I'd started before the re-assembly odyssey. I pulled out an item I picked up at a gun show a few months ago: a C.J. Weapons Chamber Maid flexible cleaning rod. I originally bought the Chamber Maid with the AR-15/M-16 dual-diameter chamber brush, but I also bought a range of additional brushes, including .308, 12 gauge, and 20 gauge (because it can be used with a 50BMG chamber).
"The Chamber Maid is a special bore cleaning system. Unique brush is actually two brushes in one, utilizing two different bristle materials and diameters. The rod supporting the brush is a flexible steel braid coated with a clear rubber to keep it from scratching your barrel or receiver."
I fitted the Chamber Maid with the .308 attachment, and found it an excellent tool for getting into that heavily recessed Steyr chamber. I strongly recommend it.
I was rummaging around a couple of boxes trying to find my Steyr Scout's owner's manual when I ran across this photo, which I popped into my Epson flatbed scanner:
That's me about 7 years ago hanging out with my good friend in Arizona. I like this picture.
For those into growing their own vegetables, and who have a taste for Asian food, you should check out the Kitazawa Seed Company in Oakland, California: over 220 varieties! This year, I'll be saving the $0.15-$0.20/leaf cost of Ao Shiso (Blue Shiso mint) by growing my own.
Melissa Skypod has found an interesting and unusual job opportunity site: Backdoorjobs.
Speaking of content on the AnCap Wiki, Terry Egan just posted a pointer to John Ross, author of "Unintended Consequences," pointing out that Ross does have a personal website.
Bill St. Clair's AnCap Wiki seems to be past the "stone soup" stage now. There are more anchors for adding content... in the form of existing content that about half a dozen contributors seem to have been adding in the last few days (myself included).
10 years and 8.5 hours ago, at 4:30 AM PST, I was awakened from my sleep at a friend's house in West Hills, part of southern California's San Fernando Valley, by what would be quickly called "The Northridge Earthquake," which was centered a few short miles from where I'd been sleeping. For the following days, my buddies and I holed up at my friend's parents' relatively undamaged house... armed and comfortable.
You won't hear about it much - if at all - in official histories of the event, but there were humvees with soldiers (whom I've always assumed were Guardsmen) patrolling some parts of LA and the Valley.
...you might say you don't have a choice, but by your own criterion (someone who chooses to take it rather than die), you most certainly do have a choice. Nobody's FORCING you to drive down that gummint road. You're free to barricade yourself in your house and never come out again. How is that less of a "choice" than dying?
Do you pay for that government road? Sure you do. You also pay for that government health care. How is it less moral to accept what you paid for in the latter case than it is to accept what you paid for in the former case?
The real horror of the state is that it has made it effectively impossible to live without becoming an accomplice to its thefts and other depredations. The answer to that dilemma is not to cease living -- but to get rid of the entity which makes it impossible to live morally.
I don't necessarily advocate that anyone accept any particular "benefit" that the government offers. At one time, I also swore that I'd die rather than accept Medicare or Medicaid. I don't think there is anything WRONG about drawing that line and refusing to play their game on that field. On the other hand, when I realized that I was taking money from EXACTLY the same source when I went to the VA hospital to be treated as a veteran, I finally decided that I'd rather concentrate on smashing the state than concentrate on trying to figure out, and avoid, every possible trap that the state lays for people to turn them into accomplices. The former may be impossible -- the latter definitely is.
It is a sign of intelligence to make generalizations. Frequently, after observing a property to hold in a large number of cases, you may guess that it holds in all cases. You may, however, run into difficulty when you try to prove your guess. Perhaps you just have not figured out the key to the proof. But perhaps your guess is false. Consequently, when you are having serious difficulty proving a general statement, you should interrupt your efforts to look for a counterexample. Analyzing the kinds of problems you are encountering in your proof efforts may help the search. It may even happen that if you find a counterexample and therefore prove the statement false, your understanding may be sufficiently clarified that you can formulate a more limited but true version of the statement.
Susanna S. Epp
Discrete Mathematics with Applications, 2nd edition, p123
My discrete mathematics professor is a very, very bright lady with a PhD in graph theory, and an Englishwoman. I was startled tonight when we were discussing techniques of mathematical proof when she pronounced "corollary" as "coROLLary", quickly. It's not that she pronounced it differently from American standard, it's that after having spent several years in London, some years back, I have no recollection of ever having heard an Englishman say "corollary". That's what startled me.
A few months ago I joked about Michelob Ultra being an "Atkins Beer." Just now on Fox News an announcer pointed out that it's now Anheuser-Busch's best selling beer ever!
Bill St. Clair announces:
I got to playing with wiki [while] playing with one set up for collecting legal information for Hunter [Jeffrey Jordan]. I set up my own, initially to provide space to mirror that info, but then decided to call it "AnCap Wiki" and devote it to creating, in our lifetimes, anarcho-capitalist societies around the world. Check it out. Contribute if you're motivated to do so. Links to instructions near the top of the page.
Pretty ambitious goal for the site.
The internal combustion automobile is one of the biggest engines of personal liberty ever created, right up there with the firearm. With it, the individual is free to leave the jurisdiction, free to travel on his own schedule, and free to haul an enormous amount of stuff around with him if he desires. "Mass" transit trains its users to be livestock, and so it is no wonder that our putative betters are constantly trying force us into its cattle cars. The old saw about totalitarian governments making the trains run on time cuts deeper than many think. By contrast, the automobile makes you captain of your own ship.
Robert Clayton Dean
14 January 2004
[This is an entry I originally published March 4, 2003 on my other blog. I no longer maintain that blog, so I've decided to move most of the substantial articles to this blog to consolidate the materials - Russell]
"If a foreign businessman in Japan wants to hire a Japanese salesman or manager, he should find out if the prospect has konjo, which means "fighting spirit". By the same token, a foreigner who is negotiating with the Japanese has his work cut out for him if his Japanese counterpart is a konjo ga aru otoko (man with fighting spirit). Such men are noted for never letting adversity get them down, never giving up no matter what the odds. In fact, the more resistance they meet, the harder they fight."
Boye De Mente
Japa