Survival Arts

"Roswell, Texas" by L. Neil Smith and Scott Beiser

Today's QOTD is a bit of background on the graphic novel "Roswell, Texas" by L. Neil Smith and Scott Beiser, which has been serialized in webcomic form on the Bighead Press website. It's a kick, and I recommend it highly.

Quote of the Day

We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn't matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively.

Rilke, as quoted by Coetzee, as quoted by Donald Ritchie, as collected in "The Japan Journals", as editted by Leza Lowitz
p441

"Casinarcology": you saw it here first

OK, made-up word time: "casinarcology", from "casino" and "arcology". If you've been to Las Vegas, you've seen them, mostly Steve Wynn's properties, e.g. The Bellagio, The Venetian, etc. And unlike Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti (which I've visited), a never-to-be-finished boondoggle staffed by grad students suckered into paying for the experience of "finishing" his vision, a casinarcology works.

As far as I know, I made this word up recently. It's a bit cumbersome, but it's mine.

Quote of the Day

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way.

John Paul Jones

Quote of the Day

William Faulkner, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, called upon writers of the future to not write merely "for the glands." Of course, at that moment, Faulkner was being rewarded for being the best writer for the glands this country has ever known. Incest, serial killing, insanity, race war, castration, burial of the dead, biblical flood, hunting bear, rape with a corn cob - Faulkner did it all. The guy played our genome like a xylophone. Faulkner, in a suddenly noble moment, called upon writers... to transcend the endocrinological. He didn't set the best example.

Joe Quirk
Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women, p118

Quote of the Day

All of the liability problems of general aviation manufacturers were brought on by their own lawyers. They maintained that they couldn't afford to fight these cases, when in truth they couldn't afford not to. Ford fought their Pinto case to the Supreme Court and had a $125 million judgment against them thrown out of court. Nobody sues Ford capriciously anymore.

Scott Crossfield, aviation legend, who died yesterday at the age of 84 while piloting his Cessna 210
Courtesy of AVweb

Quote of the Day

"I wish the eagle had not been chosen as the representative of this country. He is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched in some dead tree where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing hawk and, when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish and is bearing it to his nest for his young ones, the bald eagle pursues him and takes the fish. With all this injustice, he is never in good case."

Benjamin Franklin

Another interesting cover from my pulp collection: 1984

Here's another from my collection, a 1960 Signet Books edition of the 1949 classic of George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Testing my OCR (OmniPage SE) on this back cover text:

"Which One
will YOU be in the Year
1984

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY"

More old school book covers: "Strike From Space"

Now that I've wrapped up what turned out to be a surprisingly subtle and difficult volunteer Japanese translation job (which I'm very happy to have done, I should note), I'm going to blog a bit more for fun. Combing my bookshelves, I pulled another several titles with interesting cover copy and art. Here's one: "Strike From Space: A Megadeath Mystery" by Phyllis Schlafly and Chester Ward, 1965, Pere Marquette Press:

Oh, yes, another War Department language guide, this one Japanese-English

Yesterday, I scanned the cover of a pocket WWII English-Chinese dictionary published by the U.S. War Department in 1943, at the height of the war. Today, I've scanned the cover of another from my collection, published shortly after V-J Day, in September 1945: TM 30-481, "The Supplementary Japanese-English Dictionary", this one a very large hardcover which I just barely fit on my scanner's flatbed:

This dictionary of 43,000 terms is supplementary to the following six standard Japanese-English dictionaries with which it forms a complete set of seven:

• a technical manual of about 100,000 terms which was in "final editorial stage" at the time;
  
• another technical manual of about 4,000 terms which was claimed in a similar state;
  
• Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, Harvard Univ. Press;
  
• Kato's Medical dictionary, 1944, German language edition (!);
  
• "Ozaki's Sea Terms";
  
• "Creswell's Military [Dictionary];
  

I'd love to see a copy of the 100,000 word technical manual... anyone know if this was ever actually published?

More old school: "New Worlds of Modern Science"

In preparing yesterday's "Little Red Book" post, I discovered that my US $99 Canon all-in-one scanner/printer/copier is an excellent proxy for a macro lens on an expensive camera (I have an Olympus E-1 but don't yet have that lens.) Here's another old school example from the many I have in my personal book collection, this one from 1956, "New Worlds of Modern Science":

A "Little Red Book" of another kind

A few hours ago, I went on a somewhat controlled shopping binge at one of my favorite used book shops, one in Sunnyvale, California. I found this little gem, TM-633, "Chinese Phrase Book" published by the U.S. War Department in 1943:

"Radar Scope sees through walls"

I had an offer to get some free stick time in a friend's friend's luxury (pressurized cabin, an aisle between the seats, etc.) airplane for a trip he and the other guy were making to CES in Las Vegas, but I'm getting ready for school on Monday, so I declined. I'm taking in some of the show's highlights by way of reportage, and just saw this on one of the gadget/gimmick blogs:

"Radar Scope sees through walls"

Fascinating, and a bit terrifying at the same time. It's a handheld device for detecting people on the other side of a (presumably radiolucent) wall. The display device looks milspec/ruggedized, and the printed matter pitches to military application, but I'm quite sure they're being pitched to police departments too. I wonder, what are the relevant U.S. laws with respect to using this device in warrantless searches? I believe SCOTUS has already ruled that "standoff" search techniques are not covered under the 4th Amendment.

It's OK if I explain the sight gag

Four weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a Halloween party in Manhattan. I wasn't prepared with a costume, unless you count my normal get-up below as, um, "Visiting Silicon Valley Guy." On the left is Perry Metzger who is, ahem, a eusocialist insect:

Quote of the Day

FEMA, in fact, is an illegal organization. It's mentioned nowhere in the Constitution (which lists the lawful powers of the government in Article I, Section 8), nor did anybody ever vote about it, neither you nor I, nor even the Congress. It was created out of thin air by Presidential fiat, and given unprecedented power to override, at gunpoint, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law in general.

L. Neil Smith

Quote of the Day

The idea of a constitution, we’re told, is to limit government power. It’s supposed to bind the government to certain operational procedures that restrict its ability to violate rights. So a constitution cannot grant human rights; it can only spell out what are seen as the proper functions of government, and try to limit its ability to invade rights.

The US constitution came perhaps as close to this ideal as possible, until its meaning was perverted into a complete reversal, from restricting power to enabling it, from binding government to giving government a mandate for a thousand things to do to us.

But here is the problem. Constitutions by necessity leave the government as the primary enforcement agency. It’s like a memo: "Government to Self: don’t become tyrannical." It only works so long as the enforcement agent operates in good faith. If we remember that the worst rise to the top in government, as Hayek noted, we can have no realistic expectation that this good faith will last. Government gains not by adhering to its own restrictions, but by re-rendering them as positive mandates.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"A Constitution for Iraq"

Quote of the Day

If you can, within principle, take over and adopt whatever name your enemy calls you, do so. It shuts them up very handily.

L. Neil Smith

On oppressive knife laws

My teacher Dale Seago sent this reference to "Oppressive Knife Laws" to our dojo's mailing list. This summary dates from 1998, but is a nicely written short piece on the key features of this particular type of prohibitionism.

Murderers strike London

My friends Chris, Sean, and Tom, in London, are safe and accounted for after today's murder bombings. Chris lives near Russell Square, where I too lived a number of years ago.

Quote of the Day

Year by year, a third of the [American] labor pool emerges with a college degree. Most of these degrees are in the humanities and social sciences.

Meanwhile, China produces over 450,000 college graduates a year in science and engineering – as many scientists and engineers as the United States has, total. Then, next year, China will do it again.

Gary North

Quote of the Day

I think it was one of the Jeffersons who said history was a nightmare from which mankind was trying to wake. We're moving deeper, it seems, into REM.

Dr. Sean Gabb

A claimant to the manufacture of "Vampire Killing Kits"

A couple of years ago, I posted a short entry about an auction titled "Rare Mid to Late 19th Vampire Killing Kit" on eBay. Today, a fellow posting as "Michael de Winter," whose IP address indicates he's writing from Gibraltar, has posted a rather long and interesting commentary claiming the phenomenon as originating from a hoax he perpetrated in 1972. I have no way of knowing whether the guy is for real, but he spins an interesting yarn nonetheless, so I'll mention it here in this separate entry.

I should do this more often for those blog entries that surprise me by taking on lives of their own. Undead threads, anyone?

"Correcting a Steel Mistake"

My friend L. Neil Smith emailed this today:

"Russell --

I thought you and Dale [Seago] might enjoy seeing a project I put together a long time ago, possibly before you came to Fort Collins the first time. As you can see, it's a Camillus Marine Corps knife wedded to a bayonet. It fits my M1 Carbine, the standard issue bayonet for which is a disgrace.

Note the serrated portion at the base of the blade. That was done with a
checkering file. Ahead of my time, I guess."

Here's another:

My Bujinkan teacher Dale followed up:

"Very sweet piece of work -- nicely done!!

BTW, the Marine Corps has adopted a new official-issue bayonet which largely retains the look of the old Ka-bar, but with a longer blade (8" instead of 7"). It's an issue item for Marines, but available commercially for private purchase as well."

This is the new Marine issue item, the "ON3S ONTARIO Marine Bayonet Khaki Brown Handle And Sheath 8" Blade":

"Minarchy in the funnies"

Thanks to Anton Sherwood for pointing this out a few minutes ago on a mailing list:

In Sunday's "Beetle Bailey" strip (linked today by FFF), Pvt Plato writes a minarchist screed on walls, even supporting selfishness.

For non-American readers, Beetle Bailey is a very well known American icon, syndicated in newspapers for decades.

"Layered Communism" in Poland

I just got back from a meeting of an organization of which I'm a member, and was talking with a Polish acquaintance at the potluck which followed. We were discussing the until-recent history of Russian occupation of his country, and he told me that some Poles he knew had during that time advocated "Layered Communism":

"Layer of Communists, layer of sand, layer of Communists, layer of sand..."

Three guesses where I am this week...

I'm a big believer in getting out of town on spring break:

"The Costs of Training with the Best"

Speaking of good martial arts training, which I just mentioned I undertook last weekend with Don Angier (and the weekend before with great teachers from my own art), I just stumbled across this Jan 2005 article by Peter Boylan, "The Costs of Training with the Best" author of "Angry White Pyjamas: A Scrawny Oxford Poet Takes Lessons From The Tokyo Riot Police" (which I've read and recommend).

Boylan has some good points to make, and some sad observations to share.

Quote of the Day

How much time have you spent in the Western US?

Have you ever tried to buy a semi-automatic rifle in Canada?

Have you ever tried to order an "unapproved" video from Loompanics in Canada?

Have you ever tried to tell a Mountie to "Get a Warrant"?

None of these things work very well in Canada.

When Canada is as free as, say Montana, where a man stopped by a state traffic cop for driving 80 mph, with a beer in one hand, and pistol on his hip, can ask the cop "What the hell do you want?", and have the cop eventually just give up and walk off, then you can discuss with us how "free" Canada is.

As for the "we're doomed" crowd here ... The US is the healthiest patient in the World's tyranny cancer ward. If we don't win here, things are going to get very ugly.

Kristopher Barrett

Quote of the Day (via Rocky)

They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give 'em ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years and, what the hell, we're not using it anymore.

Tom Skinner

Early British Customs ID check

This is rather funny.

Quote of the Day

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity

James Fenimore Cooper

"The Anglosphere Challenge" by Jim Bennett

This just in from my distant friend James Bennett: his announcement today of the website supporting his new book "The Anglosphere Challenge." This seems like a very enticing book, and I plan to read it during winter school break.

Quote of the Day (via Perry)

The enemy was repelled. But victory was not won. The war dragged on for a year and there was no decision. Gold grew scarce, and again the Government was in despair.

"I easily relieved them. 'Write,' I said, 'promises on paper to be repaid in gold.' They did as I advised, paying me (at my request) a trifle of half a million for the advice. I handled the affair on a merely nominal profit. I punctually met for another year every note that was paid in. But too many were presented, for the war seemed unending and entered a third year."

"Then did I conceive yet another stupendous thing. 'Bid them,' said I to the Sultan, 'take the notes as money. Cease to repay. Write, not 'I will on delivery of this paper pay a piece of gold,' but, 'this is a piece of gold.'"

"He did as I told him. The next day the Vizier came to me with the story of an insolent fellow to whom fifty such notes had been offered as payment for a camel for the war and who had sent back, not a camel, but another piece of paper on which was written 'This is a camel.'"

"'Cut off his head!' said I."

"It was done, and the warning sufficed. The paper was taken and the war proceeded."

Hilaire Belloc
The Mercy of Allah, 1922

Quote of the Day

A college student challenged a senior citizen, saying it was impossible for their generation to understand his. "You grew up in a different world," the student said. "Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers..." Taking advantage of a pause in the student's litany, the geezer said, "You're right. We didn't have those things when we were young. So we invented them."

Unattributed, sent to me by email from Terry Egan

Quote of the Day (via Steve)

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

Hilaire Belloc
"Epitaph on the Politician"

Quote of the Day

These things escalate because everyone always tends to focus on the differences in ideology rather than working on the more abundant commonalities. My homeland has of course taken this to the extreme. Only in Northern Ireland can two people have been brought up in the same street, go to the same school, have the same colour skin, and the same religion (christianity) and still have their marriage considered 'mixed' (i.e. protestant & catholic).

Stephen Ewart

"Getting Into The Launch Business: The Amroc Story"

Most of us are familiar with the events marking the Ansari X Prize winning flights of SpaceDev's SpaceShip One recently. Far fewer, however, know of the story of the American Rocket Company (AMROC), the pioneering company whose intellectual property lives on in that prize-winning ship: the revolutionary hybrid rocket engine that sent it to the edge of space, twice. Read on...

Quote of the Day

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Stephen Jay Gould

Guess I'll be seeing "The Incredibles" soon

The New York Times is pushing hard on campus to pick up new student subscriptions for the paper edition: for the last few weeks, they've been giving away free copies, many of which end up as seat blotters on rainy benches. I picked up a copy last Thursday, and glanced through a fascinating and typically snide review of the Disney/Pixar flick "The Incredibles" which opened this last weekend. One of the reviewer's complaints was that the film apparently expressed, under the veil of comedy, an unrepentent disdain for mediocrity. The reviewer speculated that Ayn Rand was a likely influence on the filmmakers. Intruiging!

This morning, the first thing my o-chem professor asked me in lab was, "Have you seen 'The Incredibles'?" He was raving about it. I guess I should check this film out. Anyone seen it yet?

Quote of the Day

A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy induced not by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before.

Max F. Perutz

Quote of the Day

The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source code too. One of the less publicized benefits of the open-source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. When I learned to program, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. The one big chunk of code available then was Unix, but even this was not open source. Most of the people who read the source read it in illicit photocopies of John Lions' book, which though written in 1977 was not allowed to be published until 1996.

Paul Graham, in "Hackers and Painters"

"A Brief Monetary History of Gilligan's Island"

Thanks to David Purves for the pointer to an entertaining article published yesterday, "The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell II (sic)," which I've discovered is also today the subject of intense discussion on Slashdot.

Quote of the Day

As [Charles] Adams writes, the Lincoln Cult is terrified that this truth will become public knowledge, for it if does, it means that Lincoln "destroyed the separation of powers; destroyed the place of the Supreme Court in the Constitutional scheme of government. It would have made the executive power supreme, over all others, and put the president, the military, and the executive branch of government, in total control of American society. The Constitution would have been at an end."

Exactly right.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo
"Lincoln’s 'Great Crime': The Arrest Warrant for the Chief Justice"

Quote of the Day

You might want to take note of the interconnection between purpose and action in the minimal State. The minimal State does not, for instance, build art museums, because it does not exist to promote art but to enforce agreements and provide mutual defense. In order to build an art museum, the State would need to acquire the resources with which to build it. If people are willing to donate those resources freely, there is no need for the State to build the museum — it could be built privately. If people are not willing to donate the resources freely, then the act of forcibly taking the needed resources turns the purpose of the minimal State on its head — instead of enforcing the decision by the participants to respect each other's lives and property so that their own lives and property will be respected, the State then becomes an agent for some to abscond with the property of others. I may think it is a good idea to build a home for orphans, but if I take your resources against your will to do it, whether I'm an official of the State or a private citizen, I have violated the truce. To obey the truce, I must convince you to voluntarily provide resources for my goals, whether by trading with you or appealing to your charitable instincts.

In short, if the justification of the minimal State is that it exists, at the behest of a collection of sovereign individuals, to enforce a mutually beneficial truce among those who choose to participate in it, and to organize mutual defense against those who choose not to participate by violating the truce, then that justification does not reasonably permit the expropriation of resources for the purpose of projects that are merely laudable.

Note that this view of the minimal State cannot provide a justification for initiating warfare in distant lands which are not a threat its citizens' safety, regardless of how laudable it might be to re-arrange the social structures of those foreign places to suit enlightened tastes. However, by the same token, neither position prevents individuals from engaging in such activities on their own, at their own risk and with their own resources.

Perry Metzger, in "What is the Role of the State?" today

Quote of the Day

I'll tell you what I'd prefer our government's foreign policy to be, assuming we need to have a State at all. My proposal is pretty simple: Swiss-style armed neutrality. That means no invasions, no military threats, no foreign aid, no "covert operations", no military bases outside the country, no attempts to influence the internal affairs of foreign countries whatsoever.

No one blows up bombs in the streets of Geneva. No one from Switzerland gets kidnaped in third world countries to protest the evils of Swiss foreign policy. Wherever they go, at worst, people think of the Swiss as boring — it is rare that anyone feels the need to buttonhole someone from Zurich or Lugano and tell them off for what their government does.

The Swiss are not pacifists, though. They have a very strong militia for defense, and in times past when Europe was less peaceful, it would have been extremely costly for an attacker to invade them. Even if (in the case of particularly strong enemies) an invasion might have ultimately succeeded, it would have yielded very little of value at an astonishing expense.

Perry Metzger

Quote of the Day

Capitalistic competition is also why "child labor" has all but disappeared, despite unionist claims to the contrary. Young people originally left the farms to work in harsh factory conditions because it was a matter of survival for them and their families. But as workers became better paid—thanks to capital investment and subsequent productivity improvements—more and more people could afford to keep their children at home and in school. Union-backed legislation prohibiting child labor came after the decline in child labor had already begun. Moreover, child labor laws have always been protectionist and aimed at depriving young people of the opportunity to work. Since child labor sometimes competes with unionized labor, unions have long sought to use the power of the state to deprive young people of the right to work. In the Third World today, the alternative to "child labor" is all too often begging, prostitution, crime, or starvation. Unions absurdly proclaim to be taking the moral high road by advocating protectionist policies that inevitably lead to these consequences.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Quote of the Day

In Colorado, the state where I live, the constitution provides that no new law may be passed unless it is immediately necessary to protect the health and safety of the people of the state. The idea—which went along with discouraging professional politicos (especially lawyers) in the legislature and strictly limiting the number of days that it could be in session—was to keep state laws to an absolute minimum.

The result? The infamous "safety clause" rubber-stamped at the top of every item of new legislation, a standard "boilerplate" asserting—whether a proposed law subsidizes unicorn ranchers or designates an official state intestinal parasite—that the law is immediately necessary (natch) to protect the health and safety of the people of Colorado.

L. Neil Smith

Quote of the Day

I always opposed the National Libertarian Party's adoption of the Statue of Liberty as its logo. The idea was typical of the LPUS at the time, and oddly appropriate, both the statue and the LPUS being hollow and devoid of meaningful content. The statue was co-opted by statists so long ago that our using it offered nothing but negative publicity, very nearly as negative, for instance, as having an office in the Watergate.

There were some who greatly preferred the porcupine as a national LP symbol because it's all about defense, although those of us in the west who know it personally, know that the little animal is stupid and destructive.

I, myself, prefer the skunk. It's quick and clever. Predators are even more anxious to avoid its defense system than the porcupine's quills. Some species will simply crouch and spray, but what I wanted was the type that stands on its front paws, throws its back feet into the air, and joyously lets you have it with style and grace. It would have made a hell of a logo, but the Nerfies were too fastidious for that.

L. Neil Smith

L. Neil Smith on the "Hollow Woman"

I, like L. Neil Smith, didn't know until recently that the Statue of Liberty had been completely shut down since 11 September 2001, only recently re-opened "following about $7,000,000 worth of police state alterations." In an irony of circumstance that inspired the article's title, "Hollow Woman," the re-opening ceremony was presided over by a real-life hollow woman, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, whom Neil knew from her days in the Colorado Libertarian Party.

Quote of the Day

The real difference the media doesn't get is the difference between an anarchist and a "nihilist." Most modern reporters can't even define the word - but it is what they mean when they say "anarchist."

I regret the loss of my language almost as much as the loss of my freedom.

Kathryn A. Graham

Monica White comments on Neil Smith's "Captain Bligh’s Revenge"

Monica White comments on L. Neil Smith's "Captain Bligh’s Revenge," in which he informs us (I'd not known) that the British government is intent on wrecking the tiny society of Pitcairn Island: stealing their guns and imprisoning those who don't conform to their standards of marriage practice.

Quote of the Day

As Congressman Ron Paul has said, "To many politicians the American government is America and patriotism means working for the benefit of the state." Thus, on a crude level, the draft appeals to patriotic fervor. This, according to Congressman Paul, is why the idea of compulsory national service, whether in the form of military conscription or make-work programs like AmeriCorps, still sells on Capitol Hill. Conscription is wrongly associated with patriotism, when it really represents collectivism and involuntary servitude.

Ronald Reagan said it best: "The most fundamental objection to draft registration is moral." He understood that conscription assumes our nation's young people belong to the state. Yet America was founded on the opposite principle; that the state exists to serve the individual. The notion of involuntary servitude, in whatever form, is simply incompatible with a free society.

Michael Badnarik

Quote of the Day

I do not believe that fighting is the primary goal of martial arts in contemporary times. I believe that it has far greater potential. Hatsumi Sensei [says] that it is to produce higher human beings and create peace. Although these may sound like lofty ideals, we have all witnessed the personal evolution of practitioners and seen the spirit of friendship flourish between countries. In many cases, the Bujinkan has created friendships between students even when their home countries were still hostile.

Martial arts provide a model of life. They teach us to be positive and resolved in the face of adversity. They teach us to seek truth (albeit at first through technique), they teach us to seek harmony rather than accord, they teach us cooperation (which is necessary during practice) and they teach us the humility to know that we must act as part of nature not contrary to it. If we must fight, then we should do so with a pure heart. To harm an opponent more than is necessary is savagery and is unbecoming of an artist. It is better that we are judged on our dignity and humanity, rather than by how fearsome we are.

In Japanese martial arts, there is a saying, ‘The sword that kills and the sword that spares’. This is usually taken to mean that the swordsman would have such skill that he could choose whether to kill or spare an opponent. Hatsumi Sensei said that there is another meaning, that one action may have included both. An example of this may have been when faced with no other choice, a samurai would have killed an attacker to prevent him from taking innocent lives. Although regretting the taking of life, his one sword cut would have killed and spared life at the same time. To make such a judgement for the correct reasons, the swordsman needed to have had a highly developed sense of humanity and justice. Taking life cannot be compared with giving life. Hurting cannot be compared to healing and destruction cannot be compared to creativity. We are not just martial practitioners, we are martial artists and we should create beauty through the movements of our bodies and hearts.

Peter King, on "Fighting"

Quote of the Day

A second fallacy is the idea of war as an engine of prosperity. Students are taught that World War II ended the Depression; many Americans seem to believe that tax revenues spent on defense contractors (creating jobs) are no loss to the productive economy; and our political leaders continue to believe that expanded government spending is an effective way of bringing an end to a recession and reviving the economy.

The truth is that war, and the preparation for it, is economically wasteful and destructive. Apart from the spoils gained by winning (if it is won) war and defense spending squander labor, resources, and wealth, leaving the country poorer in the end than if these things had been devoted to peaceful endeavors.

H.A. Scott Trask

Quote of the Day

The government doesn't produce any wealth. Factories, software companies, farmers, and others are the ones producing wealth. All the government can do is make it harder for people to produce wealth or take wealth from one person and hand it to another. It can't actually make the pie larger on its own, but it can manage to drastically reduce the size of the pie by interfering. Only the people actually doing productive work can increase the size of the pie.

We see extreme cases of this in the third world. The reason people in Africa live in shacks and have to wear our cast-off clothing is not because we're mean and keep them from having all the wealth we've stolen from them. They have little wealth to steal in the first place. They are poor because their governments are run in a way that makes the creation and retention of wealth impossible. Unlike the booming Asian economies, where foreign factories are welcomed, few foreign companies "exploit" the poor of Africa, because the African governments have made running factories and businesses nearly impossible. Even indigenous entrepreneurs are regulated, shaken down and taxed into oblivion. If you want to make the poor wealthier, you have to stay out of the way of people who want to produce wealth. The more you get in the way, the poorer people will be.

Perry Metzger

Wikipedia: I second that recommendation

Perry Metzger recommends the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia, and I concur. I've found myself referring here to entries there on occasion the last couple of years, and have been impressed at the tendancy to improvement of the content over time. You see, at one time I hadn't been sure that allowing (pretty much) anyone to edit entries would result in better content, but it has.

I only very recently actually registered as an editorial user with the service, after having been a consumer of it. Registration gives you a number of benefits, such as the privilege of watchlists, where if interesting entries are modified by others, you're notified of those changes. Also, since the history of all entries is maintained in CVS-like changelogs (preserving history) and is recorded against some evidence of identity (discouraging vandalism), registration means that your chosen name is made public rather than your IP address. This is a good thing, if you don't already know. Check it out.

Francis Crick has died

Perry Metzger reports that Francis Crick has died. He will be missed.

Quote of the Day

Robert LeFevre taught us that capitalism is simply the postponment of consumption today, so that resources may accumulate, allowing us to much greater things in the future.

I think he quoted von Mises, who pointed out that taking the time and making the effort to prepare a stick so that you can knock down fruit that's higher up on the tree, instead of simply plucking and eating the fruit you can reach by hand, is the fundamental act of capitalism.

That being the case, in any conflict that ever existed between capitalism and anything else, capitalism won several hundred years ago. The real struggle is whether we will practice private capitalism, or some other form that will seize your stick for the community, or "merely" license it, and either claim your future fruit production for "all mankind" or limit how much you can take at any given moment, idiotically "saving" it for future generations (by which time it shall have rotted or be eaten by birds).

Me, I'm a private capitalist, as much as I can be in this nation of fourflushers and cheeseheads.

L. Neil Smith

A bit of something for fun

If you're using a unix-like system, open a shell and type this command:

cal 1752

Hint: pay particular attention to September.

Extropianism and revisionist history

A few weeks ago, on a mailing list I run, it was reported to me by a good friend that the present management of the Extropy Institute disavows free-market libertarianism as its politico-economic root. As a matter of fact, we're told, extropianism was never about liberty and its deepest ramifications. To those people, I have a large number of examples from the early history of the extropian movement which contradict that claim, such as this reprint of a short declaration by law professor Tom Bell, writing in 1988 as "T.O. Morrow," a piece called "Economics and Politics" (words in brackets below added by me for clarification):

As information processing systems, good economic and political systems must meet the same standards that apply to any of their kind; they must achieve their ends efficiently. Researchers such as Friedrich Hayek have demonstrated that the most efficient economic and political systems are those that exert a minimum of