Recently in People Category

As a Googler, I have the most incredible perks, not the least of which is a level of participation in "corporate civics" that I've never enjoyed elsewhere. Among those perks is the privilege of nominating authors to speak at Google in a sponsored venue. One of my nominations, public intellectual Christopher Hitchens, spoke at our Mountain View campus about a week before my departure to New York City:

ABSTRACT

Author Christopher Hitchens discusses his book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" as a part of the Authors@Google series. The author of Why Orwell Matters and Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor, a Slate columnist, and a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly. He has also written for The Nation, Granta, Harper's, The Washington Post, and is a frequent television and radio guest. Born in England, Hitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. He now lives in Washington, D.C., and he became a U.S. citizen in 2007. This event took place on August 16, 2007 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

"I'm not a conservative complaining about liberals," Rodgers says. "To me the 'greater good' is a catch phrase for people trying to force you to do what they want. And it's both sides of the political spectrum; it's not a liberal thing only. You look at our current administration. They have all kinds of greater good things. For example, they have decided what can and can't be done with embryo research. They're forcing people to follow their dictates. If you look the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it's freedom from, not freedom to. The Bill of Rights doesn't give you a right to something, it gives you the right not to have the government do something to you."

T. J. Rogers, in a Metro interview

I'm about a month late in actually publishing a mention of my friend (and Reuters reporter) Tom Burroughes' interview with Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey De Grey, "Lifespans soon to be decades longer", which, interestingly, seems to have been syndicated on the Indian version of Yahoo! News.

Yesterday I attended the Pleasanton Highland Games, the largest event of its kind in North America, with my friends Dale Seago and Garland Glessner. I'd missed a few of these over the last few years, and I'm likely to miss several more, so I was especially happy to have attended this one, since 1.) I serendipitously met some friends I'd not seen in years, 2.) I got to hear the Wicked Tinkers live, and 3.) I met this sweet young lady, selling handmade silver whiskey flasks:

She'll be working at the Northern California Renaissance Faire this fall; find her and say hello. Sorry, won't tell you her name, you'll have to work for it...

Libertarians should not be denying scientific fact. We should instead spend our time combatting the religious impulse of people to think the modern world is evil and that we must repent for our sins by living cruddy lives and waiting for (in their minds) our inevitable and justified doom at the hands of a wronged Gaia.

Perry E. Metzger

Want hot sex from a woman? Keep the relationship psycho. It worked for me when I was single. I had many long-term non-monogamous relationships that remained erotic right up until the moment she tried to claw my eyes out. It costs a lot in therapy, but boy is it sexy.

Want love and contentment? Dump the psycho and build a nest. You get to have steady sex with somebody who is not trying to claw your eyes out. Plus you get to have breakfast without any coffee cups aimed at your head.

And there's nothing like reading a book, in bed, next to somebody you love.

Joe Quirk
"Scientists Have Discovered the Food That Makes Women Lose Interest in Sex"

Scott Beiser and L. Neil Smith's Roswell, Texas is now online, serialized in webcomic fashion. I believe that my dear, recently deceased friend Chris Tame has a cameo somewhere in the comic's future.

L. Neil Smith finally does a real blog, "L. Neil Smith at Random", with comments enabled. I've long thought that Neil's writing would fit the format, and now I'm sure of it.

One of the pleasures of having a Netflix subsription is being able to add oddball titles to my queue, click-and-forget, and receive it later as a "surprise." One such title is a short wine documentary, "John Cleese's Wine for the Confused":

Wine snobs, beware: Monty Python's witty John Cleese aims to educate the masses with this enlightening, snoot-free wine guide. Cleese guides wine novices through the basics -- finding wines you like, getting the best value, and serving and storing wine at home. His vintner's tour includes lessons in wine vocabulary and identifying subtle flavors. Not a fan of snobbery in the least, Cleese also reveals how to cork up condescending sommeliers.

Unlike a commentator in the IMDB entry, I'm not surprised Cleese would do such a documentary: in the early 90's, working for a company in London, I found the tedium of mandatory training videos greatly lessened with Cleese as presenter. He has an impressive resume of this type of stuff.

So I'm at my friends' house in the East Bay, and I'm teaching their toddler son Josh how to use my Sony CyberShot digital camera. Lesson #1: pointing the camera, keeping fingers off the lens (a hard one to teach); Lesson #2: composing the scene:

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

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

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

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:

I've caught the "Billion Monkeys" meme from my English blogger friend Brian Micklethwait (whom I met during my London sojourn in the early 1990's), who coined the term to describe those who take digital photographs of, well, others of those who take digital photographs of others. Here's one from my trip last spring to Beijing, a tour guide in the Forbidden City:

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:

I'm just about to crash soon, having come back from the first of a multi-day Bujinkan training seminar by Arnaud Cousergue of Paris (Vincennes, actually) at the Bujinkan Martial Arts Center in Sacramento, a couple of hours' drive from here.

That's Dr. Pete Lohstroh, a UC Davis reproductive biologist, and myself. Pete's interested in medical nanotechology too, by the way, but that's deliberately off topic. I really do meet cool people in this art.

The shiner I acquired Thursday night is even more pronounced in this photo, but it doesn't hurt at all anymore. On a related note, Arnaud ended the day insisting on the use of padded training weapons through the end of the year, for various reasons with which I entirely agree. To that end, on the way back from Sack-of-Tomatoes to Saint Jose, I stopped at the Home Despot near the Sacto dojo and acquired the requisite materials:

- a $1.97 bag of thin 6' bamboo rods from the Garden section
- a $1.97 6' section of 5/8" inside diameter foam copper pipe insulation

I then duct taped 3 pinky-width lengths of the bamboo together at 9-inch intervals, put that inside the foam, and placed styrofoam caps at the ends, duct taping those. I finished by taping the entire thing lengthwise.

Looks surprisingly good, and not at all like a late-night vodka fueled project. I took photos of every step of the project which I will be posting in a few days.

Time to crash now.

An interesting blog article about the use of dendrimers in targetted drug delivery systems, sent me by Tom Burroughes in London.

University of Michigan scientists have created the nanotechnology equivalent of a Trojan horse to smuggle a powerful chemotherapeutic drug inside tumor cells – increasing the drug's cancer-killing activity and reducing its toxic side effects.

Previous studies in cell cultures have suggested that attaching anticancer drugs to nanoparticles for targeted delivery to tumor cells could increase the therapeutic response. Now, U-M scientists have shown that this nanotechnology-based treatment is effective in living animals.

...the digital (PDF) version I'm reading now, but Charlie Stross tells his readers not to do so. I will, however, be buying several copies from Amazon as gifts to friends. Damn it's good!

Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey will be speaking next week at Stanford University, on "Why the prospect of dramatic life extension matters now." Talk will occur Wednesday evening 7:00-8:30 PM, 8 June 2005, at the Clark Center Auditorium. Thanks to Tyler Emerson for forwarding this to me; I do plan to attend.

...reading for pleasure is pretty much the single most important determinant (and correlant) of later success in any fields involving thinking, planning, writing, and intellectual effort. Those who don't read as children are mostly lost forever...they'll simply never catch up with those of us who read books every night.

Timothy C. May

One afternoon last week I rented an electric boat and plied around the north lake in Beihai Park. After returning the craft to the boathouse, I came across this guy doing taijiquan near the shore, practicing a jian form:

When he'd finished several iterations of the same form, he walked over to the bench where a couple of older women had been watching intently. He then started pushing the tip of the jian into the bench near them! What the hell?

Ah... it was a collapsing practice piece, neatly converting into an 8-inch assembly, which he then slipped into the carry pouch his wife held out for him. Neat! I wanted one of those jian then and there, but didn't have time left in the trip to shop for one. Rest assured it's on my shopping list for my next Beijing visit.

I mentioned here a couple of years ago that I attended a seminar given by Don Angier of Yanagi Ryu Aiki Jiu Jitsu. I missed last year's event in northern Californa, but I managed to make this year's event last weekend. I attended both days (as did another Bujinkan practicioner), and met one other Bujinkan student during the Sunday session at Aikido of Diablo Valley.

As has always been the case with Don's seminars, I enjoyed it immensely. Both days were Yanagi-style taijutsu training, no weapons this time (e.g. the jojutsu we did in April 2003.)

The first day, we did 3-man training involving breaking from 2-attacker both-arm wrist grabs (morote in aikido parlance). The second day, we did 2-man Yanagi "kiri dori" with reversals. Both days ended with recap training.

As usual, the training was incredibly useful: the principles of Angier's art are shared with our own, with an interestingly different emphasis on how to convey them. I didn't attend with the intent of "learning their art" - that really only happens with core Yanagi students, in their dojo environment, as is the case with us and our art - but what I do expect, as I've experienced in previous years' training with the Yanagi folks, is that I'll be able to see aspects of our own art from an outside perspective.

One solid claim I can make for training with these guys is that I'm forced to re-examine all the "unclean" (or sloppy) elements in my own movement.

Really, I can't recommend highly enough that Bujinkan students take the time to attend a seminar by this incredible 73 year old practicioner of a rare Japanese family art.

I should also add that the people I trained with, mostly aikidoka, were very good training partners, and incredibly welcoming, which made the experience all the more rewarding.

On a mailing list I frequent, list owner Mike Lorrey took an unfair swipe at an old friend of mine, libertarian science fiction novelist L. Neil Smith. I forward the message in its entirety, and Neil took the time to respond to Mike in an essay released today, "Under False Colors."

Mike has quickly responded by taking the argument to his own blog, in a post counter-titled "Under Honest Colors."

Alan Weiss now has a blog.

I get the occasional numb-nut. They say, "I can see how you can shoot ugly wild boars, but not a beautiful deer." Oh, a little more Hitlerism is just what we need. This can live and this can die according to my whims. Eat me, you fuck! Here's the truth so you can print it in bold, capital red letters: The cuter the critter, the sweeter the meat.

Ted Nugent
Interview in April 2004 Maxim magazine, p104

People who will not take the trouble to raise children should not have them.

Robert A. Heinlein
Podkayne of Mars

Yesterday, I attended Dale Seago's "Return from Japan" seminar in San Francisco. I'm reminded that my friend Monica attended a Bujinkan seminar in London, and had some good things to say about her training experience.

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...

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?

Anton Sherwood has moved his musings to a blogging system with a commenting facility and much friendlier navigation. No trivial feat, given that he's been blogging (in one place) since February 2002... this meant converting over 1400 postings! Take a look.

Q. How can you, an anarchist, be a lawyer?

A. My father was a physician. That doesn't mean he believed in disease.

Duncan Frissell

Jeffrey L "the Hunter" Jordan is freed, with a few hundred dollars' fines (and months of expense and a lost job and other anguish,) and even gets to keep his own property. I first posted about this 8 months ago. I'm glad it's (mostly) over, with the exception of his upcoming expected fight with Verizon over their cowardly treatment of him. More news as it happens.

By the way, I did notice the glaring omission of the National Rifle Association in the list of those organizations that assisted Jordan. Figures.

Monica White has really gotten the Firefly bug: today, her extended recommendation of the series, "The Ascendance of Firefly,' was published on the Objectivist culture site The Atlasphere. It's particularly interesting to see how a Joss Whedon fan site has reacted to Monica's just-release piece. See also Monica's short announcement of the piece on her own blog, and the interesting speed with which some Whedon fans have engaged her in some image-correcting commentary. I love the Web.

A half year ago, I was invited to join the Orkut social networking service by my old friend Perry Metzger. A half year later, I've decided that it's an evolutionary dead end: for a service "affiliated with Google," it's unusually clunky, feature-poor, primitive, and dreadfully unreliable. I've made a few good friends through it, however, and am glad of the experience, which has been useful and informative.

Interestingly, in the last couple of weeks I've gotten email from a few people I know through Orkut, inviting me to the Multiply network, an Orkut competitor which seems vastly superior in its execution. I'd ignored those invitations, being busy with other things, but tonight I took my friend Shannon Kaplan up on her invitation, and am impressed at the sophistication of the interface. I'm not convinced I need all their features - I already have my own self-administered blog, for example - but for the general public, it seems at first approximation to be an incredibly well-integrated suite.

So, if you receive an email entitled "Russell Whitaker invites you to keep in touch on Multiply," don't automatically assume to be spam. Multiply has an interesting feature - apparently driven by Orkut user dissatisfaction - with which Orkut users can export their entire network of contacts over to Multiply in order to generate invitations to the rival service. Better I should use it now, before Orkut programs logic to block that data export.

Of course, if Orkut's programmers had been sufficiently on the ball to quickly develop such program logic, they'd also have been sufficiently agile to develop new features demanded by their users... such as forum threading up to 1990 newsreader standards, perhaps?

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.

While I'm enthusing about food, I should point out that Julia Child would have been 92 years old today. She died yesterday, however. My maternal grandmother was born 3 months after Child's birth date; I plan to visit her in a few weeks, I'm reminded. I'm also reminded that the women in my family live a long time, though not nearly long enough, my standard being centuries, but that's of purely tangential interest here.

The modern crop of food divas and divos (the humorless Martha Stewarts and the gimicky "Bam!" Emerils) owe a debt of gratitude to Child, an eccentric of the first order (anyone else remember the Dan Ackroyd parodies?) She was a woman with a very interesting personal history (reminding me of Martha Raye, "actress and denture wearer," the only civilian buried at the U.S. Special Forces cemetary at Fort Bragg), which includes having been an OSS officer during WWII.

Child is quoted as having said in an AP interview in 1989:

"What's dangerous and discouraging about this era is that people really are afraid of their food... sitting down to dinner is a trap, not something to enjoy. People should take their food more seriously. Learn what you can eat and enjoy it thoroughly."

Sounds like someone who lived her life fully. Too bad she couldn't have stuck around a few more centuries to enjoy it even more thoroughly.

By the way, Child's original TV set kitchen is preserved at the Smithsonian.

About three weeks ago, I wrote that my friend Monica White had indirectly informed me (through her blogroll) of the existence of the Quent Cordair Fine Art Gallery in Burlingame, California, about a mile from San Francisco International Airport.

Well, on Saturday - on a whim - I suggested to Peggy that we head up to the gallery for the short remainder of the afternoon. We arrived about two hours before closing... and left about an hour after closing.

I'd called ahead to confirm that the gallery was, as indicated on their website, indeed open for the afternoon. When we arrived, a friendly lady greeted us and, upon hearing my voice, recognized me from my call-ahead. When I mentioned my name, she remarked that it sounded familiar, and that she'd actually - somehow - come across my blog recently and had even recommended that a friend of hers named "Carter" (whose contact I welcome) contact me about gun-related issues! I was happily astounded. I quickly found out that this friendly - and sharp - lady is Linda Zimmerman, the director of the gallery.

Linda spent the better part of three hours talking with me about the purpose of the gallery, the only one of its kind in the world, specializing strictly in high-quality painting and sculpture of the Romantic Realist variety (see Ayn Rand's "Romantic Manifesto" for an in-depth introduction to the genre.) I was deeply impressed at the operation, the selection, and the director. The storefront has had 8 years of profitable operation, but its recent years of online operation alone keep it sufficiently profitable that it can continue in business, without diluting its collection with low-quality pieces which would otherwise meet "school of art" requirements or with technically high-quality pieces which are outside those stated requirements.

The gallery itself has on display about one-third its total collection, the other two-thirds of which is in storage, but pieces of which can be viewed by the seriously interested. The walls are arrayed with paintings, as would be expected, and a number of bronzes are also on display. Linda encourages a healthy, tactile approach to the sculptures: touch them. At one point in our long, animated chat, she took my right hand and placed it on the hip of this statue, "Gratitude" by Danielle Anjou:

This is a lovely piece, and was strangely reminincent of the 1987 Boris Vallejo cover art for the Robert A. Heinlein novel "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," itself a triumphalist riff on Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus." I love it, probably as much as Monica White loves Bill Mack's alto-relief sculpture "Forever," which was not on display the day I visited... but which I hope Monica can eventually acquire.

Linda and I talked each other's ears off, happily, while Peggy enjoyed one of the overstuffed leather couches near the front of the gallery. We talked about the business of art, and the multifarious ways the gallery has connected Romantic Realist artists, including the recently immigrated Chinese master Han Wu Shen, with deeply appreciative customers, including passionate-but-temporarily-impecunious college students who've arranged payment plans for their "must have" pieces. We talked about a great many other things, with most of the conversation led by Linda cheerily educating me in the business of her gallery, and with me responding with semi-articulate "Wows!" and "Cool!"

I do plan to spend quite a bit more time in the gallery, and may even hold a party of friends there in the near future. Yes, I did say "party"... anyone interested? It would be a great excuse to gather a few dozen of my closest friends and acquaintances in a fantastic setting near the near San Francisco. This is a very real possibility, since Linda did say that the gallery encourages people to hold their parties there. I'm thinking sometime in September, when my good friend Tom Burroughes is in town visiting from London with his girlfriend: first a morning sailing on the Bay (Tom's a qualified yachtsman), then shooting at the range, then a catered affair that night - after cleaning up - at the Quent Cordair Fine Art gallery... sounds like good living to me.

On our dojo mailing list today, sometimes-training-buddy (and all around good guy) Irishman Stephen Ewart forwards this excellent essay, "Fighting," written by the U.K's Peter King, a superb Bujinkan practicioner and teacher with whom my friend Monica White has the privilege of training in London. An excerpt:

Hatsumi Sensei criticised martial artists who act like they are dangerous animals. He said that man has been able to use his intelligence to be able to kill dangerous animals in the world. Such people will be defeated – in a way that they had not expected, because they were outwitted by brain and not muscle. When Takamatsu Sensei was in China he was known as the Mongolian Tiger because of his martial prowess. However on his return to Japan, a friend said that he was more like a Japanese cat. Takamatsu Sensei was happy to agree. He said that, in China, it was necessary for him to be fierce like a tiger, but that now that he was back in Japan it was not. He added that women like cats and would often stroke them. Although said in humour, it illustrates the need to be hard only when needed, and then be able to return to gentleness.

I've started tonight on the job of cleaning up the over-long blogroll on the right side of this blog's main page. I'm taking the example of Monica White and moving toward a shorter, annotated blogroll. If you're a friend of mine, and your name has disappeared from the main page, it's only because I'm now choosing to include links to friends a.) with blogs that are b.) actively maintained. More pruning later, along with some annotation.

Orkut.com and Chris Claypoole both inform me that Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik hits the half-century mark today. Congrulations on your continued survival!

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

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 control, allowing spontaneous orders to flourish. Economic and political systems must furthermore advance (trans)human ends. Extropy [magazine] takes the [editorial] point of view that these two qualifications are entirely compatible; the most efficient economic and political systems are those that maximize human liberty. Thus the best economic systems are free market, and the best political systems libertarian. (Libertarians assert that the state, if one is neccessary, should permit all acts except assault, theft and fraud.) Extropy [magazine] will pursue such free market and libertarian analyses of economic and political systems, working toward the day when economic and political systems serve us, rather than we them.

(T.0. Morrow, '88-'98. All Rights Reserved. Please attach this paragraph to all copies. Fully attributed noncommercial use of this document hereby permitted.)

This was, as mentioned, published in the paper version of Extropy magazine (a copy of which I own), and is notated "online version, edited Nov. '96." I plan to publish many more such examples as I run across them, at my convenience. Why? Well, while I do acknowledge that the term "extropian" has been diluted to the extent it's indistinguishable from standard socialist transhumanism - and this is a tragic thing - I will not stand for the historical revisionism being pushed by some of those in the existing "extropian" movement... especially since I've been around that movement from the very beginning, and will not drink the Kool-Aid.

My old friend Perry Metzger gave in today and finally started a blog. Now to convince him to add a comment mechanism...

First of all, the Founding Fathers loathed a democracy, calling it a tyranny of the majority. The United States is not a democracy. The United States is a constitutional Republic based on private party and individual rights. In the 1860s we passed the 13th amendment, which presumably eliminated slavery and it took well over 100 years to erase the racial hatred between the whites and the blacks. How does the American government think that they can go into another country and
override thousands of years of culture? It is not our job to export anything except products and services.

Michael Badnarik

My friend Anton complains about the lack of comments on his blog:

In two months and a bit since opening comments, this blog received just eight, of which half were mere applause; and Blogger makes handling comments a bit of a nuisance. So I've turned commenting back off; and incorporated the four substantive comments as addenda to the original posts, which is what I do anyway when someone bothers to write to me.

It's because Blogger makes handling comments a pain in the ass that most of us don't bother, Anton, and nobody I know will submit comments by a separate channel (email in another software client) for possible posting at your convenience later. That's not how users expect the mechanism of a blog to work. You can continue to bitch about what other people will or won't do, complaining publicly about it, or you can take the actions necessary to actually induce people to leave comments: set yourself up using a genuine blogging system.

Jackie D at Samizdata reprints a recent article by Hollywood screenwriter Robert J. Avrech, "Jews and Guns":

Ariel [Avrech's recently deceased son] was always amazed at how many Jews - Shomer Shabbos Jews - aligned themselves with the advocates of gun control, in reality a movement to banish the private ownership of guns by lawful citizens. During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, Karen and I, Ariel and Leda were inside a film theatre. Abruptly, an angry mob congregated outside; soon they were trying to break down the doors. Trapped inside, we were all terrified. I held Leda in my arms; she shivered like a frightened rabbit. Karen held Ariel's hand.

"Don't worry," I said with false confidence, "the police will be here soon."

But the police did not arrive that night, nor did they protect the city from arson and widespread looting. In fact, we watched in disbelief as news cameras captured images of police officers standing idly by while looters gleefully committed their crimes.

A few days later, I bought a gun.

I bought a gun because I realized that the day might come again when the people who were sworn to protect us would once again choose not to.

I was told of this by a poster to the smith2004-discuss list, an incredibly meticulous comparison of the performances of a number of common ammunition types: "Terminal Ballistics Comparison in Water Media", a compilation of many years of data generated by 84 year old Carmon Crapson (published by Stephen Ricciardelli.)

Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik has a blog.

The famous Koko the lowland gorilla lives a few miles north of where I'm sitting. Apparently her keepers are looking for an excuse to move from Woodside, California to Maui.

A few days ago I picked up a pristine copy of the book "Letters of Ayn Rand" which is a fascinating comilation of Rand's personal and business correspondance over a span of decades. The book seems to be selling everywhere at remainder prices, about US $6.

Melissa Seaman passes along this interesting bit of local TV news coverage of the strength of the Libertarian Party in Austin, Texas, home of national candidate Michael Badnarik.

This is the in-flight face of the first non-government, privately-financed test pilot to earn American astronaut's wings:

The success of a party can be determined by the number of gatecrashers. And we do have friends who've been knocking away on the virtual doors of the cartel. MadMan is devising a logical test of libertarianism. Get ready to jump through the hoop and clear the hurdles!

Any more wanting to join us in the battle against the evil forces of socialism, illogic, and unfreedom? Drop me a line.

Yazad Jal

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Ronald Reagan

Today's the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. I'm reminded that a couple of weeks ago, a couple of friends of mine and I went shooting at a rifle range in northern California, taking a number of weapons including an M1 Garand rifle which probably saw action in WWII. Here, my friend Andy Chen, a brand new shooter (and 18 y/o college classmate), fires my other friend's Garand:

This was Andy's first time out shooting... and on steel reactive targets set out at 100 meters - after having been briefed on safety and weapon operation - he kept up with us two trained, experienced shooters, at least on the sandbag rests. He's spent his high school years reading military history, and knows an incredible amount of factual data on weapons history. He's also used to playing first-person shooter games - in which I've never been interested, thinking them useless for training - causing me to start to re-think my opinions of twitch games.

An older gentleman at an adjacent shooting stall took some time to discuss the Garand with Andy, pointing out that he had ordered his own Garand (which he was also shooting) from the U.S. federal government's Civilian Marksmanship Program, which I've heard about over the years, though I'd bought my own past two Garands from commercial sources.

I'm encouraging Andy to join a local CMP-affiliated club and shoot a match this summer, so that he can be eligible to buy at least a "rack grade" rifle for as low as $350... shipped Fedex directly to his door (yes, they do that)! I don't see Garands selling at gun shows for less than around $800 nowadays. Here's a very detailed and interesting account, with photos, of the experiences of two CMP participants in the purchase and shooting of their own CMP Garands.

It's especially worth noting, for California residents, that a Garand is "Kalifornia legal", making it an excellent rifle to keep locked in the trunk of one's car... just in case. Also note that a number of companies (such as Smith Enterprises) do "tanker conversions" to shorten the overall length, and one can convert the weapon to .308 caliber.

I had the pleasure of first meeting Barbara Branden very briefly at the November 1987 Future of Freedom Conference (FoFCon) in Culver City, California, but didn't engage her in conversation, since she was on her way to a talk at that convention centered around "The Passion of Ayn Rand," her biography of novelist Ayn Rand, with whom she had been associated professionally and personally for a number of decades. Her book had been published the year before, and I'd bought my own copy as soon as it hit the bookstores (this was the pre-Amazon era).

At the end of March this year, a few weeks ago, I finally got the chance to chat with Barbara in a comfortable venue where she was wasn't being shuttled around to talks, in the course of other business: her apartment in southern California. What a lovely, intelligent, funny and benevolent lady she is! I must once again thank my friend Glenn Cripe, who had business to conduct with her that afternoon, for allowing me to tag along with his crew, and of course to Barbara for her warm hospitality... and for autographing that book I bought 18 years ago.

I found out from posters to the smith2004-discuss list this morning that C-SPAN keeps video archives of recent shows available for downloading. A search for "libertarian" on their website yields all the video coverage of the recent Libertarian Party nominating convention in Atlanta along with a follow-up interview (which I'm playing now) with the newly nominated presidential candidate Michael Badnarik.

All of us must begin telling everyone we know—especially if they're not libertarians—that if they're fed up with this mess the Republicans have made in Iraq and Afghanistan, if they want to see the USA Patriot Act go down in flames, along with all the unconstitutional intrusions and limitations that it has inflicted on us, if they want to see drug laws, the income tax, and federal gun laws repealed, and if they don't believe life under a Kerry Administration would be any better than it has been under Bush, their only option is to see both "major" parties shocked and embarrassed by a high turnout for Michael Badnarik.

L. Neil Smith

One of the benefits of being myself - being open about my passions and not worrying overmuch about getting along with everyone - is that occasionally, someone I've never heard from introduces himself or herself and extends a hand in friendship, knowing who I am and what I stand for.

This happened again today, this time from somewhere I'd least expected: India, in the form of an articulate fellow named Yazad Jal, a thoroughgoing and studious anarchocapitalist, who'd taken note of me from a couple of running battles I'd been having with a few people on the Atheists community on Orkut.

After taking a quick look at Yazad's Orkut profile, and seeing immediately that he didn't seem like a flake (believe me, I've met a couple of crazies in the last year), I checked out Yazad's blog. I'm impressed: he's a very solid, intelligent, articulate and funny individual who's been writing fairly regularly for a couple of years, and has some interesting things to say about the political and economic problems of India. Visit his blog and make friends. If you're a fellow Orkuteer, introduce yourself to him and make friends there.

The lovely Monica White informs me a few minutes ago that she has a blog, Th'inkwell. I'm really happy to see it! Welcome to the blogosphere, Monica!

Michael Lorrey reports on Orkut community Libertarians the results a few minutes ago of the presidential candidate nomination at the national convention in Atlanta, Georgia:

LP 3rd ballot

256 249 423 Michael Badnarik winner
246 244 Gary Nolan
258 285 344 Aaron Russo
xxx 005 011 NOTA [None Of The Above]
015 others

All single digit vote candidates dropped on 1st ballot.
NOTA is never dropped.
Nolan is dropped on 2nd ballot.
Shock. Badnarik was thought to be trailing in third place.
Nolan speaks to convention and endorses Badnarik.

I'm happy, I like Mike, I met him in November at the LPNH convention, where he gave one of his Constitution classes.

I'm happy too: these results give me some confidence that the Libertarian Party is serious about its founding principles. Congratulations to Badnarik! I'm looking forward to seeing whom he chooses as running mate... I hope he doesn't choose Nolan in a quid pro quo for having thrown his support to Badnarik after the 2nd round of voting.

Happy birthday to Tom Burroughes! I hope it's a good day for sailing, mate.

An old friend of mine, Redvelvet (who doesn't keep in contact as well as she should!) sent me email last week announcing that she would be displaying some of her most recent products, including scented candles, at a San Francisco house cum ad hoc art gallery. So, my g/f and I headed up to the City for some good and outrageously low priced dim sum in the Sunset district, then motored over to the neighborhood where she was working.. where we spent half an hour scrounging for parking.

We found the funky house where she was working, first encountering "artists" of the type one usually finds in the Haight district, then found Christina, who'd been given a corner slot on a semi-indoor/semi-outdoor veranda. I introduced her to my g/f, and exchanged "how've ya been doin'?" gossip for a while. Turns out she had a bellydancing accident a couple of months ago - she's not explained to me yet what that means - and decided to start a cool little business while she's looking for work in the field she's re-trained for recently, digital circuit layout (her first degree is in theoretical mathematics).

I was stunned at the dozens of fantastic candles she had on display. I and everyone who stopped by to snap up candles noted that these types of candles usually cost a multiple - 2 to 4 times - what she was charging. So, I'm telling you, my friends, about this (though I get no cut of her sales at all) because I like Christina and I think these candles sell themselves... see for yourself.

My friend Peter Chang called a few minutes ago to let me know he was getting ready for a 100-mile bike ride/race in Tahoe in a few weeks, and mentioned along the way that he'd been asked to play the male of an Asian couple in a Jaguar television commercial. Here are pics from the recent filming; his "wife" Lily Chai is certainly a lovely woman!

This was sent me yesterday by my good friend Tom Burroughes in London, who gave me permission to reprint here:

Hi Russell, you remember my friend Martin who came over to California back in 1995? Well, he did a crazy thing today -- he went to Lord's cricket ground in north London, and as a "dare", took his clothes off and ran across the pitch before getting booked by the police, all the while producing pandamonium in the crowd.

Oh. My. God.

My thanks to my longtime friend (I avoid the term "old friend" for such a young woman) Kennita Watson for alerting me to this lecture at Stanford on 23 June 2004: "The Artificial Synapse Chip: Towards an Electronic Prosthetic Retina" by Harvey A. Fishman, M.D., Ph.D, Stanford University School of Medicine, the Director of Ophthalmic Tissue Engineering and Chief Ophthalmology Resident in the department of Ophthalmology.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common form of severe and irreversible blindness in the U.S. Our research program consists of a highly interdisciplinary effort between physicians, engineers, and scientists to develop a neural interface that will connect the output from a digital camera to individual retinal cells in patients with AMD, thus bypassing injured cells.

By the way, this sounds like a skillset for the type of research physician I find really interesting:

Dr. Fishman's area of expertise is translational research that uses a multidisciplinary approach to develop novel therapies for blinding diseases in the eye – in particular, Age-Related Macular Degeneration. His research bridges the gaps between tissue engineering, surface science, nanofabrication, chemistry, neuroscience and retinal transplantation biology in Ophthalmology. His background in new technologies and medical science is diverse including bioMEMS, chip-based microfluidics and confocal and time-lapse microscopy, neuroscience/nerve cell regeneration and macular diseases in Ophthalmology. He has made contributions in the fields of microfluidics, laser-induced fluorescence detection, separation science, and biosensors.

I imagine respirocytes as minuscule objects consisting of roughly 18 billion atoms arranged in small balls about a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter. Each respirocyte is a tiny pressurized gas tank equipped with small pumps. Respirocytes are nanobots that move with the blood. In the body's periphery, they release oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide. In the lungs, they do the opposite, recharging themselves with oxygen. The exchange of gases is regulated by minute sensors. Though the respirocytes are modeled on red blood corpuscles, they transport oxygen two hundred times more efficiently than the natural item. A small syringe-full of respirocytes could carry as much oxygen as your entire bloodstream.

Robert A. Freitas Jr
28 July 2000

I was lead to believe that fidelity was about genital exclusivity. It took a long time to realize that infidelity is about lying and not abiding by (or re-negotiating) interpersonal contracts.

It's been a long journey. Now I know that I can never again promise exclusivity (even if I in fact have only one partner). I cannot trust myself to live up to that promise and therefore cannot expect any future partner to trust such a promise.

What I can promise is total honesty. I want a partner with whom I can share my feelings, my attractions, my crushes. Most of these never get acted out anyway.

If a woman wants genital exclusivity, all she has to do is keep me sexually exhausted. :-)

Richard Birney-Smith

I'm given to understand that as of today, it's been an integer number of years since the parturitions of my buddies Michael Reed and L. Neil Smith. In other words, happy birthday guys! Keep surviving!

...when I saw Vlad in Carlsbad he patted my stomach and said big (fat) men make great fighters, then smiled and said they can't run away like everyone else so they have to be...

Clayton

This is pretty cool: scans of Linus Pauling's Research Notebooks taken from 1922 to 1994 (he lived 1901-1994).

As with many scientists, Linus Pauling utilized bound notebooks to keep track of the details of his research as it unfolded. A testament to the remarkable length and diversity of Dr. Pauling's career, the Pauling Papers holdings include forty-six research notebooks spanning the years of 1922 to 1994 and covering any number of the scientific fields in which Dr. Pauling involved himself. In this regard, the notebooks contain many of Pauling's laboratory calculations and experimental data, as well as scientific conclusions, ideas for further research and numerous autobiographical musings.

Well, it didn't take long for this to happen. We've been "adopted" by a stray dog. This is Pesky.

I found him at our gate, shivering and obviously starving, a couple of days ago. At first, it was a toss-up: have him put to sleep, or try to nurse him back to health. In the end, his sweet disposition won me over. If he's this nice of a dog when he's near death, he must be a genuinely nice dog. I'm keeping a watchful eye on him, however, just in case he starts to show menace. One of the side benefits of being always armed is that I can be comfortable taking controlled risks with something like an unknown dog. In an unarmed society, there would be only one route for dogs like Pesky - some gov-goon would show up and either shoot him on the spot, or lock him up for a few days until he was gassed.

Bob Tipton

Last night in the dojo, our teacher Dale Seago inquired as to who might be attending this coming Saturday's Systema seminar to be given by Kwan Lee at Mountain Lake Park from 10am - 3pm. I'd missed the announcement from a couple of weeks ago:

I'm not in the habit of recommending other martial arts' seminars: to date, the only exception has been for those taught by Donald Angier, Soke of Yanagi ryu.

Russian Systema, however, is worth checking out. It's the closest thing I've yet seen outside "the Booj" in terms of movement, concepts, "feeling", and philosophy to what Hatsumi sensei has been trying to get across to us. To get a better sense of what I'm talking about, check out some of the discussions [here].

I'm going to be at this one myself, and I hope to see some of you there as well.

-- Dale

If I'm recovered from a hip bruise I somehow picked up in training last night, I might consider attending myself.

When Monica and I spent some time in Malaysia it was an interesting experience.

We were in the capital, KL. Something to know about Malaysia is that it is the most Westernised Muslim country. As an example, people from the fully fundamental places that want to experience 'Western Decadance' will be allowed to go there by their government because it is not a secular country under the surface.

Most of my recollections about it were negative. I was there with a Chinese friend. Something to note is that Malaysia has three predominant cultures - Malay, Indian and Chinese - in that order of population. Wealth and power, however, goes in the opposite direction with the 3-5% of Chinese owning most of the country.

There's a major reason for this. The Chinese people (on the whole of course) work damn hard, and the Malays don't - they don't need to. There are laws saying that there must be X% of Bumis (the local name for Muslim Malays) working in every business and other such crap.

I also tried to put an ad in the local paper but couldn't because it needed to go to a government office to be "checked" before being printed - they had true government censorship.

As to the people, I'd never seen so many women covered up before. In Australia there are many Muslim women around so you can get used to it even if you don't like it. Seeing this many in a place that for all other appearances was Western (ie: in the malls with Nike stores or in the KFCs) was weird. (Incidentally the fashion was to wear a dark dress with a white head scarf... when you look down the mall over their heads at them (I'm tall and they are generally short), and when they cluster, they look like lots of little bowling pins ready for a big bowling ball :)

We grilled (nicely of course, just in case) a taxi driver as to why they don't eat pork, even though there were good historical reasons for desert dwellers not to eat pork due to trichinosis, but no longer. And also why women have to be wrapped up.

His answer was that pork has things in it that are like cancer. If you eat it even once you will die, not right away, but you will have long term problems.

As to the women, historically it's just to protect their beautiful faces from harsh winds and sand storms, and now it's just a fashion - nothing more.

Yeah... right. that's why I saw many beautiful Chinese women in short skirts and business jackets, or thousands of beautiful Indian women in saris or other dresses but NEVER in three weeks saw a single Malay woman uncovered.

Matthew White

Mark Miller informs me via Orkut that K. Eric Drexler now has a personal nanotechnology website, e-drexler.com.

Just peeled off yesterday's entry on my Sports Illustrated desk calendar to reveal the lovely Jessica White. Nice!

Though we have many words with Latin roots, English is Germanic in origin. Romance-language speaking peoples conquered England from time to time, and injected our language with a few of those words. As a result the less common “Latin” words spoken by our conquerors were treated as superior to our native language because they were often used by the upper class. The big problem was that these words and sometimes even entire systems of grammar were not used by the majority of people and muddied communication exceedingly when they were used. In my experience, the use of Latin words in the place of simple Anglo-Saxon mono-syllables that mean precisely the same thing usually goes hand in hand with intellectual pretension. Language is a way of bridging the gap between people, so you can probably understand why it bothers me when people do this.

Diane Duncan

pacifist monotheistic zealots
My taxi driver yesterday was a zealous muslim. Upon finding out I'm jewish, he spent the entire drive to the airport ranting about religion, citing the Bible, Torah, and Koran. On the plus side, his angle was all about how the christians/jews/muslims are brothers following slightly different interpretations of the word of the one true god. While he was clear about how his way is the right way, he was also clear on the importance of peace and brotherhood and how any terrorist (whether bin Laden, Bush, or Sharon) is acting contrary to god's will.

It was still creepy and weird, but at least he was creepily condemning violence instead of creepily advocating hate.

Patri Friedman

To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he [Douglas Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.

Richard Dawkins, in "Lament for Douglas" (17 September 2001)

Curt Howland passed on to me this chilling travelogue of Chernobyl from a Ukrainian motorcyclist named Elena.

I always go for rides alone, because I do not want anyone to raise dust in front of me. I have never had problems with the dosimeter guys, who man the checkpoints. They are experts, and if they find radiation on you vehicle, they give it a chemical shower, and this eat ya bike. I don't count those couple of times when "experts" tried to invent an excuse to give me a shower, because those had a lot more to do with physical biology than biological physics...

The thinking physician identifies AOIs [areas of ignorance] daily.

Professor Elliot Wolfe, MD
Stanford University Medical Center, 5 April 2004

The textures of life that so fascinate dynamists are full of such historical surprises. Consider a strange fact about doughnut shops in California: More than 80 percent are owned by Cambodian immigrants. Doughnuts are not a Cambodian food; indeed, Cambodians don't even like them that much. But when Ted Ngoy fled to southern California in the 1970s and got a job in a doughnut store, he realized the possibilities. Here was a niche that matched his skills (or lack thereof) and had potential to grow. The business required hard work but little start-up capital and little English. Ngoy soon owned several doughnut shops. He hired and trained many other refugees, who then started their own stores, hiring and training still more immigrants. Over time, the community developed special expertise and suppliers, making it much easier for a Cambodian immigrant to California to get started in the doughnut business than in other ventures. By 1995, Cambodians ran almost 2,500 of the doughnut stores in California. They also expanded the market, giving Los Angeles one doughnut shop for every 7,000 residents—ten times the concentration in Phoenix.

The doughnut story is surprising, but not a random accident. It represents a complex order of selection and feedback: A perceptive entrepreneur discovers an opportunity. His knowledge spreads through communal networks, which develop specialized product, labor, and capital sources. More and more Cambodians learn how to make doughnuts, and how to make them well. Competition among shops improves doughnut quality, and the mere presence of so many stores reminds potential buyers of their product, leading to more sales. This legacy, an example of what economists call "path dependence," does not keep non-Cambodians from owning doughnut stores or block Cambodian immigrants from other businesses. It was not predetermined, nor does it guarantee any particular future. But it makes some choices more likely than others.

Virginia Postrel
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, pp49-50

Last night's Firefly MicroMiniShindig was a more intimate gathering than the previous one in January, with 13 attending. We got a late start on the TV viewing part of the night, since I'd forgotten the DVD player's remote, so I ran home nearby to pick it up. Of course, that gave the rest time to enjoy the excellent food (the elkburger was a popular pick last night) and chat before my return. We had exactly the right amount of time to air "The Train Job" and "Bushwhacked", finishing just as the Tied House was being closed.

Unfortunately, in all my rushing around doing hostly things, I didn't get around to taking any photos for posting here. Maybe next time... if there is a next time. My original reasons for hosting these types of events included spreading freedom memes so nicely packaged in the series, as well as doing my little bit to increase the possibility that the series might get picked up again by a television network. Well, in the interval since the previous MicroMiniShindig, something like the latter has indeed happened: the Firefly movie has recently been greenlighted. So, we've won, at least to that extent. If I do hold one of these things again, it will only be as the result of at least 30 people agreeing to actually appear at a particular time and place. If you're one of those interested people, let me know, otherwise this Shindig thing is happy history.

If you're interested in this series, I strongly recommend you buy the 4-DVD box set and watch it for yourself.

I should have done this on the weekend... apologies for not having done so earlier: I'd like to warmly thank Bob Tipton, a reader of this blog and, I've found out, an investor in Project Ceres, the funders of L. Neil Smith's next science fiction novel, for having donated into the "Amazon Honor System" payment account for the upkeep of this blog. This was very generous of him, and I truly appreciate it.

This is reprinted with the permission of Monica White from a thread today in the "Antichrists" community on Orkut:

Or not compromising in general....

ie: couple of days ago in Dublin we did the cheesy city tour and visited the Guinness factory.

Paid something of the order of 20 euros each to go on the official Guinness factory tour. Cost didn't matter, though, as I am a bit of a factory addict (love process & systematization etc). So here I was, grinning and ready to see machines go 'whoosh' and produce beer.

Nope, we stepped into what I can only call a first-year marketing student's wet dream. Not in the factory - in some sort of fitted out multimedia shell. It was supposed to be 'self-guided'....pah!....different sizes and styles of arrows haphazardly pasted to the floor, almost no lighting, displays of barley, hops etc in clear glass tubes (that you couldn't see due to lack of lighting) with attached.....speakers. Yep, so that you could LISTEN to someone pouring said grain onto microphone. Yawn.

I could go on - and I did - to the manager. Needless to say that I demanded my money back and their general no refund policy wasn't going to cut it with someone who had received NO value at all for the admission fee.

I wrote two solid pages of complaint - I gave them a full analysis of the problems with the tour as well as ways to improve it and metrics that could be implemented to ensure quality. In essence, I did something that I usually charge for.

Funnily enough, the manager realised that I was serious after a while and confessed that they were redoing the tour.

I've long ago learnt to argue my case as a consumer, probably because I'm usually the demon on the other side of the fence haranguing people into giving excellent value.

If I were asked to teach anyone one easy to implement lifeskill that would make them happy in the long term it would be to ask for a refund when they're not happy rather than compromise on what they want.

Show me a man over 40 who is not responsible for his face.

Abraham Lincoln

A week ago, I referenced a famous, widely disseminated Heinlein quote, since I think it deserves even wider dissemination. My friend James sent me this note yesterday, which I reprint here with permission:

Hi Russell,

How are you doing? So I read this oft-quoted quote from Heinlein on your website (yes, I do drop in semi-regularly):

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

I was thinking about it while sitting in traffic on the way to work and I had a vaguely entertaining idea:

It sounds like the basis for something kind of like a "Heinlein Olympics". Imagine a three-day event, a polymath decathalon of sorts, where one competes in a series of wildly divergent pursuits (like the quote suggests). The person with the highest aggregate score across all the challenges wins.

If done right, I would be willing to bet it could be a both popular and highly entertaining event, and because it would nominally cover such a broad range of tasks would have something for just about anyone who cared to try.

Just a thought, feel free to use or abuse as you see fit.

j. andrew rogers

Interesting idea. I ran this by the members of the smith2004-discuss list, one of who made the observation that this would make for a vastly superior "Survivor" style television series. I concur with a couple of list members that the above list would be a good start... with the exception of the last list item.

My friend Glenn Cripe today informed me that he and his Russian business partner Dmitri Kostygin have good news to share: "The next printing of Atlas and Fountainhead in Russian is due out next week!" In his mail he also send copies of the cover proofs for the 3 volumes of Atlas; here's a copy of the cover for volume 1:

Glenn notes:

We are also looking for sponsors. For $500, you get your name in all future editions of the books, a few free copies for your own use, a tax deduction, our undying gratitude, plus the chance to participate in changing the course of history! Inquiries should be sent to randinrussia@yahoo.com

It's worth noting that copies of Rand's works have found themselves into some interesting places in Russian society, such as the lending library of Vladimir Putin's chief economic adviser, a strong advocate of Rand's economic philosophy.

Today's swimsuit girl on my daily desktop Sports Illustrated calendar is Audrey Quock... yeah!

My good, longtime friend Romana Machado Reynolds has aroused my envy by taking a long trip to the Galapagos Islands:

The guy on the ground is Raj Apte, brother of Arun Apte (whom I've met). According to Romana: "[The] only way you can get close to the big turtles is by creeping toward them at their level, or from behind."

That's so cool. I had my childhood fascination with the Galapagos re-kindled last year when I read a couple of Darwin biographies, and really stoked a couple of months ago when Hollywood made history by filming the fantastic and epic Master and Commander in the Islands. I'll be hitting up Romana for many more vacation photos in the near future.

Whilst on board the Beagle (October 1836-January 1839) I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament; from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.

Charles Darwin
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin with original omissions restored. New York, Norton, 1969, p85

Yesterday, we had a Lunar New Year's exhibition on campus. Here, my chemistry classmate Minh, a Kuk Sul Do practicioner, is caught in some type of flying leap (I really love my digicam):

He's shoeless: both shoes flew off within a few seconds of starting his demo. The guy's a ball of energy. He ended the demo covered in concrete abrasions and sweat; it all looked pretty cool. I know nothing about the art he practices though.

I just now spoke to smith2004-discuss list buddy Rocky Frisco, who's laid up in hospital dealing with some issues consequent to an appendectomy. He sounds good (from what I can tell), and on the mend: no more surgical procedures, just careful postop inpatient monitoring... should be out by the end of the week.

He'll have a lot of list mail and personal mail to weed through! But considering the problems he could be having, these are happy problems.

...Valentine's is a stupid holiday - another sign of these emotionally incontinent times... like there is any attraction in 'let's all be romantic on cue, with pink and ribbons and roses'. Geez.

Adriana Cronin

I just received notification of a surprise payment using the PayPal Donate button on this site from Ken Valentine, a regular on the smith2004-discuss mailing list. Thank you, Ken, for helping with the upkeep of the site! I really appreciate it.

A year ago, Curt and Lissa Howland's daughter Athena Sakura Howland was born. Happy birthday kid!

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.

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

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.

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):

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alan Weiss

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.

I mentioned earlier today that I check my web stats often. Whenever the number of hits from a obviously personal web site exceeds a certain threshold, I check into the referring URL. Here's an excerpt from another, Dave Polaschek's "Dave's Picks":

Here’s a cool this phone is tapped sticker (with instructions) that you may want to download. More about them over at survival arts which might make it onto my daily reading list.

A few days ago, the News Journal in Ohio reported on the Jeffrey Jordan situation in that state, and today follows up with another surprisingly well-reported piece on the situation. In both articles are sidebars which accurately summarize the goals of the Liberty Round Table... with no journalistic venom at all.

This week's "The Libertarian Enterprise", issue 254, has a memorial to Kerry Pearson, with the photo that Kerry loved.

About a year ago, I recommended Victor Koman's "Kings of the High Frontier" to my readership. I just re-read this by Ricky Roberson in his memorium of Kerry Pearson:

I learned about a few other things besides Firefly from him on his [Kerry's] website, such as some insights into political anarchy as a philosophy that I don't personally agree with but still have to acknowledge more than a few grains of truth in...

Reports from credible sources indicate that Kerry Pearson AKA "Lux Lucre" is dead, most likely from complications due to diabetes, at the age of 41. Kerry had been a sometimes-prolific poster on the Yahoo Groups mailing list for friends of L. Neil Smith. The Prospero Firefly forum is, as our friend Alan Weiss notes, "alight with the news of his passing."

I was not close to Lux, but I remember him as a kind, clever, creative man. He was kind enough to answer some questions for me on the Firefly forum when I joined a few weeks ago. I'll miss him.

Ricky Roberson of SciScoop has also written a memorium.

First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.

Mohandas Gandhi

On the Prospero foxfirefly forum, I asked actor Adam Baldwin - a prolific poster who's racked up 3325 posts on the forum since he joined - what type of knife he wore on the "Firefly" series when he portrayed Jayne Cobb. The knife's name is Binky. When the series ended, Adam was given it as a gift from the properties master. He mentioned he'd check the markings on the knife. He got back about it a few days ago:

Hey Russell:
Sorry for the delay.

I examined "Binky" and to my chagrin, there are no markings on it. :(

Must be a custom job.

Peace,

A.B.

It's a beautiful knife. I can't wait to see what he finds out eventually.

Jeffrey Jordan is back in Ohio to retrieve his stuff from the For those in the area of Ashland, Ohio. If you're in town in the morning (tomorrow, Saturday 10 January), Matt Gaylor invites you to meet Jordan:

For those within driving distance of north central Ohio, please join us for breakfast with Jeff Jordan, Liberty Round Tables' The Hunter. Jeff was recently charged with carrying a concealed weapon by the Ohio State Highway Patrol. Jeff is coming back to Ohio to get his vehicle and belongings back from the OHP. You can show your support for RKBA and Jeff by showing up tomorrow. Please dress respectful, business causal would be good. Everyone who values freedom is welcome to attend.

I spoke to Jeff this afternoon and he will be in Ohio this evening along with DLT.

When: Saturday, January 10th at 9am
Where: Bob Evans Restaurant 1304 E MAIN STREET, ASHLAND OH 44805

Just exit off I-71 at St. Route 250 and head west toward Ashland. The Bob Evan's is on your right about 2-3 miles from the Interstate. Ashland is about 80 miles north of Columbus, just off of I-71.

For a map just go to Mapquest and enter the address above.

We'll meet in the parking lot, and then have breakfast together. Just look for a 2003 Black Ford F-150 Supercab as a rally point. Our presence will mainly serve as a respectful send off for Jeff and to provide moral support. Other details will be provided in person.

For additional info you can contact me on my cell phone at 614-313-5722 or DLT at 608-345-7731.

Regards, Matt Gaylor

A fellow named John Venlet has been giving me good cigar recommendations the last couple of days on this blog. I've checked out his blog, found it interesting, and have added it to my blogroll.

Yesterday on Fox News, I witnessed Washington State's Actiing Director of the Department of Revenue, William N. Rice, declaim his belief that tax-free internet sale of tobacco products to Washingtonians is "a slap in the face" to those who pay the confiscatory taxes customary on cigarettes in his state. His argument is morally equivalent to that of a mugger asserting that a potential victim who successfully avoids being mugged (e.g. by being armed, avoiding dangerous places, etc.) is somehow culpable for not having been mugged. Rat bastard mobster.

I don' t smoke cigarettes, but I will redouble my efforts to avoid taxes when buying my cigars from now on, just to spite him and pissants like him. Yes, I'm a political smoker nowadays. That makes me and people like me "political niccers"... are you one too?

Michael Reed pestered me for a couple of days to read Michael Crichton's Caltech Michelin Lecture "Aliens Cause Global Warming", and I'm very glad I did. Crichton's polemic is an uncommonly clear warning against the phenomenon of "consensus science" in America. Lysenkoism is still alive and well... and in America now.

A little over a week ago I was sitting in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, checking my email, when I discovered that Ricky Roberson (whom I'd misattributed earlier as "Ricky James") of SciScoop had written a rather lengthy post on his site entitled "The Toy That's Not For Christmas" expressing his fascination with my ownership of an Armalite AR-50 single-shot .50BMG. I'd mentioned my discovery of his blog a few days before, and he was apparently returning the favor, in spades.

Ricky expresses his apparently sincere and heartfelt belief that if guns are going to exist, then he'd rather be in the group who has access to guns:

...I do unfortunately see the need to kill humans upon occasion - preferably a selected few key enemies instead of massive indiscriminate "shock and awe." An Armalite AR-50 is the best tool out there as far as I'm concerned for accomplishing this grisly task, and if this fearsome rifle is going to exist, I want to be in the group of people who have access to this technology instead of belonging to the group that doesn't.

While I essentially agree with this sentiment, I should point out a few things. First, I don't think the AR-50 is the best tool for that "grisly task". There are better tools for sniper and countersniper work nowadays, e.g. the 300 Winchester Magnum, or the 300 Lapua. Both these and related types are in increasingly common use nowadays by people whose paid jobs require their use as tools. A 700 grain .50 caliber bullet, for long range antipersonnel work, is fast becoming an outmoded approach. The guns are heavy, the ammo bulky, and the ballistics, while impressive, aren't nearly as optimal as the new breed of .30 caliber wonderguns (two of which I just mentioned).

...would consider moving to a real hosted blogging solution like Typepad so that I might be enabled to actually comment on things he says in his blog?

I'd meant to get this out earlier today, but it's been a very, very busy day for me on a number of fronts. Here's the latest today from Matthew Gaylor, reprinted as usual with his explicit permission, on the Jeffrey Jordan situation, told from the first-person perspective; I've added links to his original text, for research purposes:

Hello everyone,

I thought I'd respond in an open letter format to the deluge of comments I've gotten concerning Jeff Jordan's recent arrest for CCW near Ashland, OH this past week.

First I want to thank everyone for the kind words for my helping out Jeff. It was really nothing, albeit my significant other was a little pissed about it being New Year's Eve and all, but I'd want you to help me if I got into a jam. She wasn't all that pissed as she had to work early on the 1st and went to bed early anyhow.

For those who haven't figured it out already Ohio is a state with ample law enforcement, I travel frequently by vehicle all around North American and I can always tell I'm home because the police always seem to be around. The Ohio Highway Patrol has a reputation for being one of the toughest agencies in the nation which make speeding in Ohio a risky proposition. The OHP also are vehemently anti-CCW, in fact our Republican Gov. Bob Taft, who the Cato Institute gave an "F" for fiscal policy, cites the patrol opposition to CCW as his reason for not supporting out right to carry concealed. Ohio's legislator's have passed a CCW bill, but Taft is threatening a veto unless law enforcement friendly changes are made.

Matthew Gaylor forwarded those of us on interested lists a link to the on Jeffrey Hunter's arrest from New Hamphire's Nashua Telegraph, "Area man arrested in Ohio."

Thanks to Bill St. Clair, Mary Lou Seymour, and Matthew Gaylor for keeping us on the smith2004-discuss list apprised of Jeffrey Jordan's situation. The Liberty Round Table has now posted an informational page with incident background and instructions on how to donate to Jordan's legal defense fund. There's also now a very vigorous thread on this issue on the The High Road: "Please help! Good guy arrested in Ohio." More news from the conventional press too, this time from the same local Ohio that first reported the news: "Police looking into gun charges."

I just now saw an impressive interview with Star Parker on the Hannity & Colmes show on Fox. She asserted that there should be no government assistance to "needy" families, and when Colmes tried to corner her on the issue of welfare for "the wealthy", she responded exactly as I hoped she would: they shouldn't get government handouts either. Pretty cool.

I'd promised Michael Reed I'd send him and/or post for him the additional photos from our meeting, taken by our (rather cute) waitress at Sungari. There were two photos. I'm posting the least worst. Michael looks presentable in both, but in this, the least worst, she pushed the button on my Sony CybershotU and, thinking the shot had been taken, moved the camera as the CCD activated:

The other photo, while slightly more clear, caught me in the middle of an utterance instructing the waitress in the use of the camera... so I look like I'm sucking on a lemon. That photo I'm sending privately to Michael, since I'm pretty sure he's an archival completist like myself.

A few days ago, I mentioned that I was visiting Portland, Oregon, and was updating my blog from my hotel room. One of my readers, Michael Reed, offered to buy me lunch in downtown Portland. Right before I left, we did meet up, and spent over two hours exchanging interesting bits of information, ranging from restaurants to books to DVDs - he'd bought Firefly based on my blog entry earlier, which was gratifying - to insights on concealed carry in Oregon and other states. Michael gave me a great deal follow up on, and I'll be posting some of his recommendations soon.

Speaking of recommendations, I would be remiss not to mention that the place we had lunch was Sungari, a Szechwan restaurant in Portland's Yamhill district. I had the Rainbow Scallops, which were huge, succulent, and wonderfully spicy. Thanks for lunch, Michael!

If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.

Albert Szent-Györgi
(1893-1986)

My Bujinkan teacher Dale Seago asked me to take some pictures of his new custom dirk last night. This is the first pic I snapped as he was about to place it on the tartan plaid backdrop on the dojo mat on the floor between us. I thought this captured one aspect of Dale so well that I have to share it (the spots on the pic are from the camera lens.)

It's great to get feedback on one's blog postings, especially when it results in the personal discovery of a great resource. Blog commenter Ricky James runs the compendious and incredibly interesting SciScoop: Exploring Tomorrow, which I strongly recommend telling all your friends about. So much to explore!

I'd not heard of this guy before today, but a number of friends whom I deeply respect are throwing their support for Michael Badnarik, who is working to become the Libertarian Party's 2004 candidate for the U.S. presidency. See his blog too, in order to make up your own mind.

Not receiving enough email? Looking for yet another mailing list to consume? If you're a libertarian, and aren't familiar with the incredibly prolific pamphleteering of the UK Libertarian Alliance, I recommend joining the Yahoo mailing list libertarian-alliance-forum, if for no other reason than to witness the astounding post rate of my longtime good friend Dr. Chris R. Tame.

...as if to make my point for me, when I arrived at that part of the speech, three or four angry individuals -- out of approximately three hundred, undoubtedly Nerf libertarians themselves -- got up and walked out. I was gratified, of course. Any speech that fails to offend at least one percent of your audience is a poor, pale thing, hardly worth making.

L. Neil Smith

Bob Schulz just went on Fox's Your World with Neil Cavuto show and said that he has stopped filing his yearly income tax. He comes across on camera as a rational man who seems to know exactly what he's doing.

The local Libertarian Party's listserv is misconfigured in respect of its outgoing timestamps, so I only last night saw this:

Subject: libertarian talk show host update
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 08:46:26 -0700

The San Francisco Bay area just lost another libertarian radio talk show host.

LP of Maryland member Brian Wilson no longer does lost the 7pm to 9pm weekday time slot on KSFO in San Francisco.

However, we do have a consolation prize.

KSFO (560 khz AM)

Larry Elder (on tape delay)
Sat 10pm- Sun 1am
Sun 10pm- Mon 1am

I had written here about Brian Wilson about 10 months ago, when I started this blog. I'll miss him. Now there's practically no reason to listen to KSFO 560 AM anymore, as most of the remaining crew are blithering neocons. There are no libertarians left there, with the exception of Larry Elder on the weekends... which is ironic considering that Larry Elder and Neil Boortz - both libertarians - had a great start on newly re-launched competitor KNEW 910 AM with their own shows in the afternoon... and both were booted, leaving neocons in their places too.

Fox News occasionally runs a short commentary segment by American comedian Dennis Miller. While working just now, I heard Miller comment that the U.S. should occasionally test a nuke in the desert for demonstration purposes, calling it "showing the Big Portabella".

That's pretty vivid imagery... can't quite get it out of my head, so I guess I have to write it out.

The Get-A-Republican-As-Governor-At-Any-Cost crowd in the California gubernatorial recall effort are exerting more pressure on the field to "get behind Arnold", which means attempting to shame conservative Republican candidate Tom McClintock into dropping out of the race. Only a few voices are urging Arnold to drop out and throw his support behind McClintock. Fox News personality and talk radio High Church Republicrat Sean Hannity, who initially supported McClintock, seems to have been bought off by the Arnold crowd, since he's now reversed himself and is berating McClintock for not dropping out of the race. So much for holding dear his "conservative" principles.

I'm an admirer of McClintock now. I'm a libertarian and disagree with him on the abortion issue - I'm all for a woman's right to choose - but I understand that as Governor, he would have no say in the matter. We do both agree that there should be no government funding of the practice, which suits me fine. Where we do almost completely agree is on matters in which he as governor does indeed have some say. For example:

“I'll spend the rest of my first day as Governor to personally de-fund every state agency that duplicates local or federal jurisdictions, or overlaps other state agencies or that is performing functions that the private sector could and should do anyway.”

He says this consistently in radio and television interviews, usually crediting the libertarian Reason Foundation for many of his policy ideas. He's an A+ supporter of the human right to keep and bear arms, and is not afraid to say so, time and again, on radio and TV. The Gun Owners of America endorses him, noting "...Senator McClintock has a perfect voting record on Second Amendment issues..."

I am a libertarian. I am not, however, a Libertarian Party loyalist. If a candidate espouses libertarian ideals, and has a shot at winning, I'll support him. McClintock seems to be The Man in this race.

I was going through some of my personal papers. I found an original copy of my buddy Dr. Ralph Merkle's seminal 1989 Xerox PARC paper "Large Scale Analysis of Neural Structures". I'm not surprised to find that Ralph has put it online. Check it out.

If you carry a gun, people call you paranoid. That's ridiculous. If I have a gun, what in the hell do I have to be paranoid about?

Clint Smith
Director, Thunder Ranch

Johnny Cash died today at the age of 71. I was never a great fan, not being able to connect fully with his somewhat tragic sense of life, but I really admired his musicality. I met the man briefly, some time around 1973. My stepfather was a country DJ at the time, and we were living in Memphis, where I spent most of my childhood. My dad took me backstage at a Grand Ole Opry show which was taking place in Memphis, on the road from its home in Nashville. I vividly remember being introduced to Grandpa Jones who, despite his avuncular public demeanor, was a cold SOB, refusing this 7 year old boy the pleasure of holding his banjo while his dad snapped a photo. Awkward moment, that.

Johnny Cash, who looked 20 feet tall to me, was by contrast a surprisely warm, friendly giant, who surprised me further by handing me his guitar unasked, when it came my turn for my dad to pester him for a photo together. I tell you, these may seem trivial things, but to a 7 year old boy they mean the world.

And yes, he was wearing black. I remembered this later when, emulating him and Marty Robbins, I found myself imitating their sartorial habits for a memorable span of my adulthood. He will be missed.

"It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. This means that when men are born from heaven they are all equal. There is no innate distinction between high and low. It means that men can freely and independently use the myriad things of the world to satisfy their daily needs through the labors of their own bodies and minds, and that, as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others, may pass their days in happiness."

Fukuzawa Yukichi
Gakamon no Susume (An Encouragement of Learning), 1876
as quoted in Japanese Culture by Paul Varley, 4th edition, 2000, p243

On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.

Thomas Jefferson

My friend David sent this; indeed, truly amazing...

Ralston was hiking Saturday when he became pinned by the boulder. He ran out of water on Tuesday and on Thursday morning, he decided that his survival required drastic action... ...using a pocketknife, Ralston cut off his right arm below the elbow and applied a tourniquet and administered first aid. He then rigged anchors, fixed a rope and rappelled 60 feet to the canyon floor.

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... :-)

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

James Joseph Sylvester
(1814 - 1897)

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

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

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

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

"...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.

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

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.

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

Robert A. Heinlein
Time Enough for Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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.

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.

I'm getting really sick of Geraldo/Jerry Rivera/Rivers/Rambo. Looks like he finally screwed the pooch: the Pentagon has him under investigation for having "shared" maneuver plans for the 101st Airborne on air. Ooops.

It'll be good to see the whore get kicked off the Fox Network. I'll bet his cohorts on Fox, who are already going to great lengths to say that Rivers is "...with the 101st but not officially embedded with the armed forces".

A few weeks ago I saw this moron sign off on a live report from Afghanistan, handing off to Fox's Orlando Salinas, saying "gracias, Amigo!". Salinas, a real Latino, was visibly taken aback, but managed to maintain his gentlemanly composure.

Moron. Hope he gets the boot soon. Can't happen fast enough for me.

Dogs could not be used in the streets in the manner many Jews were treated. One circumstance among others put an end to the ill-usage of the Jews. About the year 1787 Daniel Mendoza, a Jew, became a celebrated boxer and set up a school to teach the art of boxing as a science. The art soon spread among young Jews and they became generally expert at it. The consequence was in a very few years seen and felt too. It was no longer safe to insult a Jew unless he was an old man and alone. But even if the Jews were unable to defend themselves, the few who would now be disposed to insult them merely because they are Jews, would be in danger of chastisement from the passers-by and of punishment from the police.

Francis Place, Improvement of the Working Classes (1834) as quoted in Robert Kiefer Webb, Modern England: From the 18th Century to the Present (1970).

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.

Lillian Hellman

Teri Seago has just now alerted friends that mutual friend Geoff Metcalf will be speaking today on the Michael Dresser radio show from 5pm Pacific time. This will be interested for a number of reasons, one of which (I've just discovered) is that Michael Dresser runs his show from Fairbanks, Alaska, broadcast on local station KFAR AM 660. From what I can tell, a large proportion of his audience is composed of those of us in other locales, listened via streaming audio.

A big welcome to Claire Wolfe! Took her long enough.

Here's a great little vignette: the story of retired USAF Col. Gail Halvorsen, AKA "The Candy Bomber", the most famous pilot of the Berlin Airlift.

I'd like to extend a warm welcome to new contributor Mariko Kage, whose interests in martial arts, firearms, medicine, and fieldcraft parallel my own. Mariko was born in Japan, and has lived in the U.S. for most of her life.

Ms. Kage recently attended Tom Brown's 1-week (Standard Class) Tracker School, and will be writing a review for this site.

Dr. Ken Lunde of Adobe Systems (author of CJKV Information Processing) surprised me a few days ago by sending me a large gift box of O'Reilly & Associates books, including half a dozen titles I'd actually queued in my "buy when I find my next job" list I carry in my Sony Clie:

Essential Blogging
Java Swing, Second Edition
Programming Jakarta Struts
Java Performance Tuning
NetBeans: The Definitive Guide
JDBC Pocket Reference

I can't adequately express how much I appreciate this gift. I'd mentioned in an earlier post that I'm retooling for a new career (I'm in school again, and looking for work), and these books are exactly the types of mindfeed I need right now. Again, thanks!

I personally, then, had decided that cryonics is worth the gamble. I could spend the time collecting stamps, yes, but I doubt if I am going to find a stamp as interesting as an endeavor that may be one of the greatest adventures that human beings have ever undertaken. After all, who knows? If we - the first and second generation of cryonicists - succeed in our efforts, some of us may well end up on stamps ourselves one day. And if that happens, consider; we'll be the only people on U.S. stamps to ever be able to take pride in being there.

Steven B. Harris, M.D./PhD
May 1989

Lately some literary critics have been condemning my stories as being "elitist" and concerned only with superior people--instead of the little people, the common people, the born losers. Those critics are correct: the sort of hero I like to write about is a boy from a broken home and a poverty stricken background who pulls himself up by his bootstraps...

Robert A. Heinlein
Personal communication to a reader, letter of 15 June 1981

Michael Moore is just like P. J. O'Rourke, only without the wit, the humour and the insight.

Tom Hedley Burroughes (via Samizdata)

Jack W. Boone has started his first blog: The Creative Foot Dragger: strategies for restless slaves. Besides being an apparently good guy who understands the real deal behind the Boot On Your Neck (BOYN) party, he's also the father of Daniel J. Boone, the outlawyer blogmeister of Nolo Consentire. Welcome to the blogosphere!

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

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

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

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

Two years ago at about this season, Russell sold me a half-price voucher for a four-day course in practical defensive pistolry. I didn't schedule the trip until late summer.

The weekend after the Disturbing Events in the East, there was (as every few months) a gun show at the Cow Palace; I had been told to bring 800 rounds of ammo to the course, so I went looking for bargains. I also needed a new hat for Nevada sunshine, so later that day I went to the Berkeley Hat Company.