those of you who are regular readers know of my great love for AG Ashcroft. but this little ditty just goes too far. I can live with the FBI prayer meetings. But songwriting should really be left to talented folk.

please god don't let it get into top forty

My oldest boy is six. He's a basically good kid if a little too smart for his maturity. he's about average size for a six year old boy.

He positively adores my wife's best friend's daughters. They are nine and six. Beautiful girls. also a little too smart for their own good. There are endless stories I could tell about this particular combination, but the one I am gonna tell today is important because it is the first time he's been involved in non familial fisticuffs.

Due to certain listening impairments on my wife's part, a situation occured where my whole family showed up at her best friend's house a couple hours before the actual birthday party we were there for. the end result of this was that I got to take the above combination of children to the library, and then the the mcdonald's in town with the playplace.

the library was uneventful but pleasant. getting food was surprisingly straightforward. they even ate without too much fuss. they were slightly pissed when they saw the place start to fill up with older kids while they were eating but still ate their food.

At this point i should mention that this particular play place has a fairly large ball pit located inside the actuall tunnel parts. it is very difficult for parents to actually observe what is going on in there. You can hear pretty well but to see you actually have to walk up to the container and peer through one of the holes. which is kind of a creepy thing to see a grown man doing when you think about it. I have three boys who usually travel in a pack and so i don't even think to worry about what goes on in there. It would take some pretty brave older kids to mess with the combined might of my three.

About five minutes into their playing the six year old girl comes out. she says "papa three, there are some big boys throwing the balls really hard at me in the pit" Don't ask why she cals me that it's a long story. suffice it to say that she is definitley not my child but i would be proud if she was.

"would you like me to go yell at them?" it's about all I can do from outside and it is probably going to be ridiculously ineffective"

" no" she says as if i was just the biggest dumbass on the planet.

I reply "look you really should ask (insert my son's name here) to ask them to stop it"
she light's up with a big smile and goes back into the tunnel system.

A few moments later I hear my son's voice. He is using the tone that Luke Skywalker uses on Jabba the Hut in return of the Jedi. He's been practicing that voice on his brothers. "I would like you to stop throwing the balls at my friends."
THWAP! I hear a ball being thrown very hard at something fleshy.
Again, "I mean it. I would like you to stop throwing the balls."
THAP! ThUNK! WaaaaaaaaH!
some scurrying and out pops the twelve year old bully, crying and sans glasses. runs out to his parents table. his fourteen year old sister later comes in to retrieve his glasses. she does so quietly.

In the car on the way to the girl's house I asked what happened with mean boys.
the nine year old answers " Oh (insert my son's name here) asked them to stop."

I look at her six year old sister "Is that true?"

"yup"

I look at my son with the round red spot on his face exactly the size of one of the balls from the pit and decide not to ask him. I know he did the right thing but am not sure I want to praise him for the violence. Ignoring it seems the best plan.

I wish that these really worked. Not for the reason that most dorks who want one wish they were real, but because I would like the ability to carry a sword concealed like a do knives. and since canes have been unfashionable for quite some time I don't currently have too many options.

would you buy an internet lottery card from North Korea? if so please contact me at this email address. I have a much better deal for you.

Our wonderful federal government want us to believe that they can put together a system to track whether people on student visa's have left the country. At present they can't even seem to keep track of the ones who died on the front page.

in the spirit of making sure your own house is clean before making accusations the UN 'fesses up. now if only the Catholic Church would hold itself to the same standard.

Some further thoughts on the subject of antivirus software.

My windows box was recently colonized by a nastly little virus/trojan. I detailed the trials and tribulations of its detection and removal here. I won't reiterate the specifics here but the summary is that ten different Antivirus Vendors failed to locate it and the one who did locate it failed to remove it EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD THE VIRUS LISTED IN THEIR DATABASE!!

Here is what i found out about the antivirus industry. They use performance measuring tools that are just as rigged and self-referential as the rest of the world's industries. That is to say the tests are set up in such a way to allow as many of them as possible to claim 100 per cent detection.

What many of the providers use as a benchmark is the WildList. a list of viri found in the wild by list contributors. The contributors happen to be almost entirely Antiviral Software Vendors. The list contains only viri that the contributors have reported in the last month. It is not very hard to see where this leads. As your software fails to detect the virus it'll drop off the WildList just as surely as if it gets caught and eliminated.

As a virus producer what you could do is release your first version of the virus. let it out there and let it get on the list and drop off the list. then do your upgrades and add the really threatening features like slipping past the major vendor AVS and Firewalls. the vendors won't detect it as still happening and will do no further development against the virus. then you too can have a trojan that is completely unchecked and very potentially dangerous.

I say potentially because much like guns and explosives these thing are really only dangerous in the hands of a person. However unlike guns and explosives it is very difficult to imagine legitimate uses for this. However I have no difficulty imagining illegitimate uses for this.

for instance imagine you are a high school kid that is having trouble with one of your teachers. it could be real or imagined trouble. You're a teenager, who can tell the difference. you decide to get even. and then some. You do a little deft social engineering to get his email address. fake up some email address(isn't hotmail wonderful?)and send an email with an attachment some inoccuous looking thing. His Antivirus software proclaims it safe so he goes ahead and looks at it. Blammo, you're in now.

his machine icq's you everytime he's got it turned on and online, and each such opportunity you pack his hard drive full of kiddie porn. you uninstall the software. Then you go to the police in your small town. you tell them about how he made you stay after class and tried to get you to come to his house and see some "very special" pictures he had on his computer. Tell then that he tried to touch you. That should be enough to get a warrant. once they have possesion of the computer it's pretty much all over for him. he will spend an incredibly unpleasant time behind bars. you walk away scot free.

Now in this instance the virus is not actually the danger, the person is. but it illustrates that the danger of a trojan is not low as the Antivirus software people would have you think is is. they are actually the highest security risk of all the types out there. they are especially high as many of them are designed specifically to foil the security software that the majority of people(who use anything) use to protect themselves. It is my contention that these software providers are selling a false sense of security. They protect themselves with various sorts of disclaimers, but in the end they just don't seem to protect against even known viruses/trojans/etc. that well and not at all against new stuff.

A few weeks ago there was some concern about whether the major vendors would act in collusion with the FBI and not detect their magic lantern trojan. As it turns out I don't think they need to bother developing such things there are already plenty out there that slide right by now, with no collusion needed.

Not fot the tolkien literal word of god types.
Funny
Funny
Funny
Funny
Funny
Funny
Funny

in case you were looking for a gaelic/hawaiian dictionary. this seems to be an early attempt at just such a thing

now here's a summer camp for the whole family

now here's a summer camp for the whole family

All you never wanted to know about semiconductors presented in the worst possible manner

now i may be off on this but i suspect that with 2300 of the things gone they aren't really losing them.

oh yeah that's who we need

I love reading the coast guard write up of cruise lines. often they show that in complex systems relatively small fuck ups can have greatly magnified consequences. this example is one of the funniest/saddest in a while

"At about 1630, the mangle, a machine that steam presses linens, began to malfunction. Linens fed into the mangle were bunching up. A ship's fitter was summoned. He attempted to align the rollers of the mangle. In trying to adjust a bolt, he broke it off."

By this time, a second fitter had arrived to help. The two went off to gather welding equipment and a fire blanket. When they returned, the first fitter spread the fire blanket over the rollers, climbed up onto the mangle and attempted to weld the bolt back on. The second fitter noticed the welding leads were too low and pulled the cables up, causing the leads to spark.

The sparks ignited a fire on the floor under the rollers. The two fitters managed to extinguish that fire with water from a sink. Then they noticed flames and smoke coming from the ventilation duct directly above the mangle. Their efforts to put the fire out with extinguishers failed and they evacuated the area.

The flames, feeding on the lint, were then making their way through the laundry's ventilation duct, which exits in the vicinity of the ship's aft mooring deck. It was here that the fire became most intense, feeding on the polypropylene mooring lines. About 7,200 pounds of this line was stored on three winches and five pallets. The lines on the starboard side of the deck did not burn, but the fire consumed the rest, approximately 3/4 of the total.

alright i got rid of the noise. I didn;'t really like it either. i realized that when i was avoiding coming here to check my stats that i was no good for you either.

alright the endless loop of chuckling weasel even got to me
so now it's just a few times

yes that is a chuckling weasel. deal with it .

there is hopefully a new feature on the page today. I am not sure if it will stay or not. the idea is to have an embedded sound to set the mood while you read. the trick is finding one that will set the mood propwrly whilst not taking forever to download for you poor sad people not on broadband

didn't we all think it was just a little funny that they were targeting congresspeople as they were trying ram through that awful piece of jackbooted thug legislation.

As is often the case John McCain is showing signs of actually thinking. a very dangerous habit it a United States Senator. but my favorite quote is this one

Ethnic conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa are so numerous and complex that they defy comprehension, and staggering poverty is a constant source of instability. Although it is difficult to imagine the circumstances that might precipitate large-scale U.S. military involvement there, our recent experiences in Rwanda and Somalia demonstrate that so long as the region remains mired in poverty and ethnic conflicts, it will retain the capacity to involve the U.S. in limited ways.

11.99 plus shipping and handling. isn't this exactly what we pay shipping and handling for?

i've had to sit on this one for awhile. you see one of my heroes died recently. was murdered actually.

if you follow sailing stuff you will make sense of this. you see there was this cheeky kiwi. who put together financing and a crew and started doing amazing stuff. he crushed the records in the whitbread around the world race.(which has changed corporate sponsorship to volvo or some such) he bought and old tras atlantic racing multihull and won the jules verne trophy(sort of a spectacular race.start and finish line is drawn between france and england. pass south of all three capes. no stopping on land. that's the rules) he got really cheeky after that and put together an amazing crew to win the america's cup(they not only won it fair and square they had beck's Loser cranked on the stereo every day as the boat was towed out to race) all in all an amazing man but even more important that these things were the other things he did. he was actively involved in improving the education system in both his native land and his wife land. He stood up straight and honest in an arena which was previously dominated by lying cheating assholes(Dennis Conner, and Ted Turner for example.) he was a genuinely decent human.

last week he was murdered by pirate in brazil.

yes really.

murdered by fucking pirates.

there is a magazine that i subscribe to that actually keeps track of piracy accross the world. for the last several decades piracy has been something that mostly happened to large container vessels and usually withins a day's steaming time of China. It really hasn't been much of a threat to the average cruiser.

fuck

fuck

And on the geek front. i once again have a fully functional linux workstation. Graphics, soundcard everything!!!!. it is separate from the router/firewall box and is therefore allowed to have insecure things like an Xserver on it. i forgot how much linux kicks ass on the desktop. the noise you hear about how linux is unsuitable for the desktop is just plain wrong. and although i had switched to gnome just before circumstances forced me to give up the workstation I have now come back into the kde fold. kde 2 kicks ass too. the Gaim client for aol im is pretty spiffy. and opera is spiffnificent. (so for those of you look at your server logs you were not hit by Internet Explorer on linux. it was actually opera lying about itself(cuz it can)). check out icepack linux while it is not the distribution i am currently running it is just what most people need for a workstation. and not a lot of other stuff

no wonder this negotiating surrender thing is so difficult. Read the section on flags

For those of you who might be alarmed by dJd's use of the TWAT directory. RELAX, isn't that the natural acronym for The War Against Terrorism?

For those of you who enjoy batting around the ethical issues of stuff like a dead horse in the middle of a manhattan thoruoghfare. This issue of an american found in the Taliban's army is a complicated one. and resolving it will speak volumes about us as a people. the person who wrote the page i linked to is one i have known(if only in an online form) for quite a few years now. he is uniquely qualified to expound on the subject.

I got an email from one of the lists I'm on that reminded me of one of my favorite Greg Benford quotes.

"Under capitalism, man exploits man."

"Yes, comrade. And under communism it is just the other way 'round."

--Gregory Benford

Ok since most of you visitors seem to be coming here to find out about fuel-air explosives i figured that i ought to give you a brief explanation of what they are.

they are an explosive made by mixing some fuel (usualy liquid or gas) with an amount of air(specific ratios vary by fuel and conditions) then igniting it. a very simple one can be made by taking a 55 galon hefty bag and waving it around until it is full of air, then opening just the acetylene valve of your torch into it for a few seconds. tie it off and get FAR away put ear plugs in and fire a flaming arrow through it. quite an impressive bang huh?

modern fae weapons usually contain some liquid fuel in a highly pressurised aerosol container. the aerosol is released just before the bomb achieves the target then a when the fuel air ratio is just right the fuse sets it off. our government claims now that we only use them in mine clearing and antistructure purposes. that wasn't always the case. they are one of the most effective and horrible antipersonnel weapons imaginable. you can see a spiffy demonstration here

there have been allegations of the Russians using fae's in Groszny as antipersonnel weapons. They are likely true. These weapons are a powerful psychological weapon. the first thing the the weapon does is suck all the oxygen from the surrounding area ,so as the following troops, you could show up to a scene where all you buddies in the center are just ash and all your buddies at the edge are just dead with no marks on them. spooky for sure.

The nature of the explosive tends to put it own fire out quickly, limiting collateral property damge. Incidentally a specially designed fae would be ideal for dealing with people in caves and tunnels. I mean, as long as we're throwing the geneva convention and rule of law out the window anyway.....

I am not sure why google rates me so highly when i spout off. I am in the top ten for fuel air bomb searches and it is doing wonders for my hits. but when i actually performed the search myself i saw the sites that i have pushed off the top ten. gotta love satire.

Hope you all enjoyed thanksgiving. I did. Which is a little unusual for me. I often have difficulty getting into the propper spirit to be thankful for the great wealth that is my life in the midst of preparations and complicated family gatherings and assorted crap that also comes with the thanksgiving event. Usually I can't achieve that moment of thanksgiving until we are finally home and the kids are in bed and the house is quiet.

This year was a little different. events around conspired to make it easy to remind just how wonderful my life is. Several of my friends have returned to the western new york area to live and while I didn't get to see them on thursday i did speak with most of them and have seen all of them in the last week or so. one of mt friends who lives far away came home last weekend to see me. my wife and kids are safe, happy and well fed. the thanksgiving dinners were organized in such a manner as i got to spend time with those relatives that I like and had to spend little with those that i don't. my children didn't break anyone's nose or anything like that. the weather couldn't possibly have been better. the freezer is full of venison.

Honestly, I am a little embarassed about how easy it is to be thankful this year. But don't take that for ungrateful.

Opening day of Deer season and I find myself partaking of an eight-point buck weighing in over two hundred pounds. The coolest part is I didn't even put the slug barrel on my gun.

Last night, just before midnight I got the call: "hey I need you to come help me gut and skin a deer." Usually when i get this kind of call in the middle of the night it's to butcher a deer completely and ger everything cleaned up before light and the neighbors might notice and rat out to the DEC. In this case it was an entirely different deal. someone hit this beastie right in front of my brother. He gladly took the tag the sherriff issued and called me up.
as it turns out the poor bastard was very uncooperative about getting his skin off. I'm thinking if I do this much more often I am gonna have to make a good skinner. His starboard quarter took the force of the bimbobox (and incidentally did some fairly serious harm to the minivan too), so it appears to be good for nothing but sausage or dog food. but the rest of him is prime jerky just waiting to be made.

I have a new email address here at Cu Mor Glas. see the side. and send me email.

Cnn.com leads with the headline "like a bomb exploded" You read further into the article to find that the quote comes from a person on the ground describing the secondary explosion after the plane hit the ground. I hate journalists. at least I hate this type of journalist. my little sister is a journalist. I don't hate her.

here's my headline.

Nine Out of Ten Experts Agree on Explosions

Most experts familiar with fuel air bombs agree that they sound remarkably like a plane crash when the actually explode. Several of the experts went on to describe the similarity in design between long range jet planes and fuel air bombs. none of the experts would go on the record as specificall recommending against the continued use of this type of aircraft but did mention that this type remained a risk whenever you auger one of these planes into the ground.

Dumbass journalist. of course it sounded like a bomb going off. I want to know who on the ground was hurt. If that is the best headline you can send in on short notice why don't you skip it and do something useful like drive a truck full of foam out to Rockaway.

Here in the united states we have plenty of food and really if you look at the numbers we hardly ever kill each other. here we think of lapis lazuli as a gemstone and make small bits of jewelry out of it. In afghanistan they could grow food if they would just stop killing each other, and they build mosques out of lapis lazuli.

psst never mind the spelling error I don't proof this. do you? what the hell is wrong with you?

every now and then something from my referrals makes me happy and proud

Seventeenth century poetry from Afghanistan. Somehow this still makes sense today.

blogbuddy officially kick's ass!

The email address that I link here is one i mostly use to collect spam. If I need to download something from someplace and they have one of those bullshit setups where you have to give a live email this is the one i use. I check at least a couple times each month to see if anybody has emailed me from the site. it rarely happens. I do get my share of spam from my site and god knows what else. For the most part I will look at the sender and subject line. but I admit sometimes i just empty the whole damn mailbox. I actually looked at the body of one of the spam pieces in there today just because what it purported to offer was so ludicrous and so obviously preying on prurient interest that I just had to look at the text.

Indeed what they were offering was so unlikely and yet so positively attractive. at least attractive in the senses that a trainwreck is attractive. you know you don't want to look you know it's bad to look but at the same time there is no human way possible not to look.

Yes indeed, they were offering what every red blooded male in the entire United States of America wants to see.

Totally nude photos of all 4 of Bin Laden?s wives in a
lesbian love pile!

yes indeed. marketing in action folks.

test blog from blogbuddy

Halloween came and went without the traditional bacchanalia and debauchery. I took my boys trick or treating at a few houses of friends and family, came home and made mahimahi(dolphin, dorado, etc.) steaks and enjoyed them with my wife and one other friend. Made jerky in my new dehydrator. Then I turned thirty.

not a bad birthday at all, really. but still no bacchanalia either. That requires an absence of children and just the right mix of friends and alcohol. Someone once told me acquaintances are poeple who won't walk up to the edge with you, friends are poeple who will, and good friends are people who will walk right up to the edge let you look over and yank you back by your hair just before you fall. I haven't had that kind of party in a long time

The senate has just passed the USA PATRIOT act. It now has only to be signed by our feckless leader to become law. Bad, undermining the bill of rights, kneejerk, jackbooted thug law. I would like you to think not just about what power we the people just gave over to our federal government, but also think about Who we just gave those reins of power to. Ashcroft differs from the Taliban only in degree and power. And now he has more power. I invite you to read carefully the text of his speech today after the senate passed this monstrosity. Write off the fourth, part of the fifth, a good chunk of the first, and some of the sixth ammendments to the Constitution of the United States.

Since I've been unemployed recently I've taken to wearing my old standby of jeans and a black pocketT damn near every day.

That and I've been listening to Johnny Cash quite a bit. Maybe too much my wife thinks

look at the date on this one. 1971. not much has changed has it?

Man In Black
By: John R. Cash, © 1971
House of Cash, Inc.
Recorded February 16, 1971


Well, you
wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.
I wear the
black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his
crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.
I wear the
black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.
Well, we're
doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.
I wear it for
the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could
have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.
And, I wear
it for the thousands who have died,
Believen' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen' that we all were on their side.
Well, there's
things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin' everywhere you go,
But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things
right,
You'll never see me wear a suit of white.
Ah, I'd love
to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black.

This is not a door we want to even think about opening. especially after we have thrown out habeas corpus and the fourht ammanedment. not a good idea at all. thinking very seriously about moving out of the country for a few years till this shit settles down.

This may be the craziest/best idea I have heard yet. Congress hasn't issued a letter of marque in slightly less that two centuries(that whole issue with the barbary pirates). But what an interesting idea.

leave our soldiers out of it. leave the cia and the rest of the spooks out of it. bring back the privateers. When i was eight I dreamed with my best friend of growing up to be a privateer. We had it all figured out.


Anyone know what a used c-130 goes for these days? I'd like a combat talon version but I want it rigged for the jato bottles like the navy uses for launching off carriers. and one of those kiowas that fit in the cargo bay of the herc. hmmmm I've got a few calls to make.

on why you should never read your referrals

according to google I am the number two expert in the world on Killing yourself with framing nailer.

boys and girls while this is probably possible I really don't recomend it. If you're serious and really want to do it I would really recommend the drug overdose. but first make sure all the other options won't work. Spend some time with a couple different professional counselling type people (psychiatrist, priest, witch doctor, that sort of thing) before you commit to anything so permanent.

If the issue is just that you are a menace to dociety and shouldn't breed, then you should also consider the possibility of having yourself rendered surgically sterile.

for what my two cents are worth

In case any of you out there were wondering what I want for my thirtieth birthday.

a ten inch frying pan with really good abuseable nonstick. I am not fussy about brand but abuseable is the key here.

metal measuring spoons that are on a ring so that they can't be removed except by busting them

measuring cups, stackable

an assortment of bamboo cooking utensils

David Brin's _The Transparent Society_

four port router/firewall with printserver

a thirty pound anvil

assortment of smith's hammers

a shiny new katana

Iron Body Ninja cuz I am really into the workout, but get tired of having to give it back to the library each time I reach my max checkout time

A Boye Cobalt Boat Knife, left handed, with sheepsfoot blade

A small farm around two hundred acres w/barn and on a good road

Yesterday while you were forced to watch the red herring about anthrax on most of the channels here is what ashcroft and your congresscriminals were really doing.

lest I appear too angry and cranky here is a game that should help to remind you what it is all really about.

I really hate to continue to be so negative but one more time fuck you dubbya.

tell me it's not true

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


Fuck You Larry Ellison for Offering to hand big brother the keys to the palace.

Fuck You Senator Gregg for suggesting that we should be criminals for having a private conversation.

Fuck You George W. Bush for thinking of a way to get rid of Habeus Corpus

Fuck You John Ashcroft for taking advantage of the situation to get yourself some tools to make your assault on the first and fourth ammendments.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP Personal Privacy 6.0.2

iQA/AwUBO697dGpZhNnKRSoZEQJSLwCeLqt3yqcTsWNH0UcpjfkH6rqI8tIAoPxE
KSt+PlDNiYtWCUMw6ZsZJNo1
=lspv
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

not for every morning wakeup but just for now. call it a going to war mix

Dead Kennedys - Kinky Sex Makes The World Go Round
Arrogant Worms - The War of 1812
Pop Will Eat Itself - Nightmare At 20,000ft
Screaming Blue Messiahs - Smash the Market Place
John Prine - Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore
Ministry - NWO
The Cure - Killing an Arab
Dead Kennedys - When Ya Get Drafted
The Levellers - Liberty Song
The The - Armageddon Days Are Here (Again) [live]
Levellers - The Ballad Of Robbie Jones
Johnny Cash - Don't Take Your Guns To Town
Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes (Extended Mix)
Tom Waits - Earth Died Screaming
Fred Eaglesmith - Time To Get A Gun
Stan Ridgeway - Camoflage
Bob Marley - Redemption Song

Now all of you out there know I am not a republican by any stretch of the imagination. although there were a few moments over the last week or so where I really desperately wished that John McCain was president, I really want no truck with them. when along comes Bob Barr and steals the words out of my mouth. Blammo, there goes the fourth ammendment. I told you I didn't trust ashcroft. respect the bastard yes. trust him? not further than I can spit dead rats. This rolls our protection from wiretapping and the like back to the days of McCarthy. I can hear it now, "he's just another fifth ammendment terrorist".

Todays post will be a refrain from a John Prine song.

Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore
they're already overcrowded from your dirty little wars
Now, Jesus don't like killing no matter what the reason's for
and your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore

yup I think that's just what I feel like saying today.

I am tired of our news outlets letting any fucking moron talk as if they are an expert.

In the past two years I have logged nearly a hundred thousand actual flight miles. I've been into and out of logan and dulles. I don't have any illusions about how good their security is. I have never gotten onto a plane unarmed. never.

In fact airports and airplanes have always been the only places that I feel the need to be armed to the teeth.

when I say this people look at me like I'm loon. but this scenario has haunted my night mares ever since I first started flying. I have always been confident that it is difficult to get guns on board planes. it is very difficult. so difficult that no one does it.

Knives are another manner entirely.

I like knives. I always have. I have knives. I always have knives.

I have guns too. but I don't feel the same way about them. I don't even keep them in my house. People are scared of guns. they make loud noises and enable you to kill things or people from a safe distance away. turning what should be a personal transaction into something very distant and impersonal. but in a way people are comfortable with guns. It is easy to simply think of guns as dangerous and let it be at that.

Not every person is wired in such a way as to allow them to kill with knives. it is a VERY messy and personal way to kill something or someone. innocent bystanders(and probably also not so innocent bystanders) are usually stunned by the amount of mess that knife attacts make. so stunned that a determined person with a knife can sometimes kill more people that a nutjob with an automatic rifle in a mcdonalds. Japan found this out this past summer.

My fear on planes has always been just this. someone would would show up on board with knife. after we got up in the air go up to the front, to talk with a flight attendant, do a quick down slice at the jugular, burst through the cockpit door lock it from the inside and kill both pilots and auger us into the ground at 500 plus miles an hour. it never occured to me that they might have taken out a building with more people in it than my hometown.

I always got a seat where I could see the cockpit door. and my hand was never far from my own knife. I was cranky with flight attendants that liked to close the curtain for the first class and often argued with them to leave it open just a little so I could see the door. some people might have classed me as paranoid if they knew why I was so insistent. So I never told them why. I just let them assume that I was a pain in the ass fraidy cat.

I am not the worlds best knife fighter. but I am good. better than many who practice a hell of a lot more than I do. good enough to take out two or three bad guys in an enclosed space like a 757 cockpit.

I know that I am not the only person who feels this way on airplanes. I know it because spyderco makes a knife called the copilot. it has a reassuring big knife heft and feel but fits into the Airlines 2 inch restriction on blade lenght. and Boker sells a lot of ceramic folders. I never bothered much. I often carried my full size mariner(ten plus ounces of ats-55 steel) and never once had trouble with detectors.

I'd be willing to bet my right big toe that somebody like me was responsible for making sure that the plane near pittsburgh never made it to whatever massively populated place it was headed for. if that is true we may never know. but in my heart I know it is.

In fact my first assumption when i heard what was going on was that somebody did just my nightmare with a big ceramic knife. My wife just told me that they think(based on a cell phone conversation with an exsenator's wife(now late wife)) they used box cutters. yup, box cutters.

fucking sharp as all get out at least for the first couple swipes. cheap as hell and very low mass. the metal detector would probably never catch them even dialed all the way up. my boots have more metal in them that a plastic frame box cutter.

so we are shutting offices all over the country, secret service agents are running scared, THOUSANDS of people are dead, and our country is in turmoil, because a few determined people with 79 cent knives had a grudge and a plan. Now our government is gonna look for a scape goat and our president is promising to hunt down "those responsible" and bring them to justice. but that is never going to happen because the people actually responsible are dead. in the planes they used to kill so many others.

over the next couple days or weeks we will see our people put to the test of what we believe. our president promised that they will protect us. but also promised that our freedom would win. what ever else I think about that man those two things are just not possible simultaneously. think about that these next couple days as we watch congress pass whatever kneejerk legislation they think appropriate.

And keep in mind that what ever conspiracy theory the feds or the media eventually latch on to. that it really could have been a few determined people with a plan.

and 79 cent knives.

sometimes being a parent is weird. I was playing scrabble with my oldest. His brothers were in bed his mom had sacked out long ago with a migraine. He actually picked up all his toys(and some of his brothers too!!!) so he got to pick the game we played. At six he loves words. loves reading, loves playing with words. Loves scrabble. we never play for points. just till we run out of tiles.

Today I legitimately got squirrel stretching between two triple word scores. A feat that would have thrilled me if I had been playing for points. Instead I remember a moment when he was just over two. He revealed a somewhat bloodthirsty side. I now realize that it is just normal for two year olds. at least for my two year olds.

Driving in my old pickup when a squirrel crosses the road in front of us.
"PAPA!!!! Quish that QUIRREL!!"
"No, it would kill the squirrel"
"I know! I WANT to kill the quirrel!"

I think he's out grown it. At least he knows not to talk about it anymore.

This morning on the ride to work, I have never missed my caddy more. For those of you who don't know I once had a 1970 Caddilac Coupe De Ville. It was huge. It had a high compression pre emissions control 472 cubic inch engine. It put out 470 horsepower and 525 foot lbs of torque. It was 400 pounds heavier than my dad's suburban and eight inches longer. It was red with a white top. It had a white leather bench seat. It would do donuts on dry pavement. It refused to run on anything less that 104 octane fuel. when you rolled rolled all the power windows down there was no pillar from the windshield to the rear window. You could fit eight bodies in the trunk with out sectioning them first.

It was a mighty big car.

It was the ultimate good weather windows down stereo cranked get it out of your system car. There is an exit from the free way not too far from my house that I once took at well over 60 miles an hour with the foot down and the car in full float sideways mode. just to see if you could do it like Hunter Thompson says. You can. If you've got balls.

This morning the weather was PERFECT. the radio was on. I'd just had sex. The new butthole surfer's tune came on the radio. I flipped the volume all the way to the right. The problem was that the little pontiac sunbird that I drive lately was just insufficient to express my joy at being alive.

Oh well .

on another note this morning before I left for work I made a playlist of music to play in the morning when I get up to help set my attitude in the right direction.

the current list:

Hank Williams, Sr. - Hey Good Looking.mp3
Levellers - captains courageous.mp3
Thethe - Perfect.mp3
Fred Eaglesmith - Mighty Big Car.mp3
Levellers - One Way.mp3
My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult - Sex On Wheels.mp3
I mother earth - One More Astronaut.mp3
Levellers - The Boatman.mp3
Blue Rodeo - Diamond Mine.mp3
Northern Pikes - Kiss Me You Fool.mp3
Pixies - Surfer Rosa - 01 - Bone Machine.mp3
Fred Eaglesmith - Seven Shells.mp3
Screaming Blue Messiahs - gun03 Smash the Market Place.mp3
Levellers - Carry Me.mp3

It may date me but there it is.

today the theme is heroes. what makes a person a hero? that's pretty easy for me to picture in my head but hard for me to describe. I am going to tell three true stories from the news. two of the stories are from the local news and one is about somebody I know and miss cause he's far away. Two are stories of heroes and one is not. I sort which is which at the end.

Story A:

A volunteer fireman goes back into a burning house after rescuing a family. In his haste to return and look for hot spots he refuses to take the self contained Breathing apparatus that is offered to him(by his own father!!). He, not surprisingly, succumbs to the almost complete lack of oxygen. the newspaper hails him as a great hero who died valiantly saving other's lives.

Story B:

A guy Drives into the ambulance parking of the local VA hospital and shoots the attendant who says "Hey you can't park here!". He gets out of the car with the gun and as he tries to get into the E.R. is confronted By a volunteer patient van driver who take two or three slugs in a successful attempt to wrest the gun from him. Then a record clerk who was trying to render some aid to the van driver and took the worst of the injuries, several deep stab wounds from a knife. The assailant the fled to his car and took off. While the police were tracking the plate he called 911 to turn himself in and report that he was suicidal.

Story C:

After locking up the retail establishment where he works(sort of like getting hit with a fire hose for eight hours), a twin engine plane crashes into the very highway he is driving on. He stops, gets out of the car and hops the embankment, scambles down to where the plane is. He tries to open the hatch, tries in broken Spanglish to calm the woman who is trapped inside as a passenger. Eventually he clears all the glass out of one of the windows, climbs in and forces the hatch from the inside.

Okay boys and girls, here is the secret hero decoder ring:

Story A------ not a hero, a natural thinning of the herd. in spite of the enormous outpouring of support that has been forthcoming, this guy is just a garden variety moron who exercised bad judgement and died because of it. he not only didn't he die while saving people he endangered two more firefighter who had to go in and get his sorry ass and left a family behind.

Story B------ heroes Galore here. It might be a stretch to call the parking attendant a hero as he was really more of an innocent bystander but, he did take a bullet in the line of duty and that has to count for something. The volunteer van driver, definitely a hero. Records clerk, yup, definitely a hero. And behind the scenes there were the people the news left out. The E.R. crew and surgeons who stitched the three injured folks back together while worrying that the nutjob would be back to finish the job, probably should count too.

Story C------Hero. Hell Yeah. Me surprised, Not even a little bit.

and then BLAMMO! a whole month wips past.

I'm cranky. REALLY CRANKY

It's hot it's been hot for like ever. I don't like the heat. Work is complicated. As near as a can I figure I'm canned but I can't get the guy to call me back and tell me for real. So I might not be. I might have to go back to managing the store.
which would actually be a good thing. I can un-fuck the place in a month or two and then get it back in the right direction and positive comps. but that will mean that I am not home schooling my eldest this year. which is probably ok, it's only first grade and he's already covered everything in that curriculum.

But some decent things have been going on. I've been able to go out sailing twice in the last two weeks. once on a friends dad's boat. I even got to dive on the prop and unsnarl the shaft. Once on some acquaintances cape dory 36. Among the biggest 36 footers going. I got to be on the helm most of the way and I am gaining some confidence with a wheel instead of a tiller.

On the way home from work saturday I was listening to the CBC station out of Toronto. They had some live show and and I started right at the beginning of what turned out to be Fred Eaglesmith singing a song called white rose. He's a bitter angry man who grew up farming in ontario. not unlike my ancestors. It rang clean to the bone for me. to the bone I am composing this listening to him now. Now I don't particularly like country. I've often been heard to say that all seven good country song were written by Hank Sr. and Johnny Cash and every other song after that was a lame imitation.

Fred Eaglesmith is not a Lame imitation

He's the genuine article.

It may be also that I am going through some wierd internal thing related to my family's Homestead. I haven't been there in years. too many years. My little sisters and my new brother-in-law are up near it right now, but they are staying at the hunting lodge down the road on account of the homestead needing some roofing work and glazing on the windows. in all, two or three days hard work for a determined person. It really should get done before winter(read September) but I just don't see how I can take the time away from my work (unless I actually do get canned and then I really won't be able to afford it,) and my familly to go up there to do the work. In my own head the place I became a man was up there and the place I learned just what that means was there. I've got my own issues with that to work out right now. I haven't been doing so well in the providing for my family part of being a man.

For those of you that are curious it's in a town called charlton. such a small town that you can't even get driving directions to it from yahoo. You have to get a map to Englehart and wing it from there. which is pretty much what happens as there aren't any roadsigns anyway.

that was the first real writing i've posted here in quite a while. spell and grammar checked by hand in notepad and linkchecked in opera. but don't expect more like that anytime soon. this came at the cost of two nights sleep.

On the way home from work saturday I happened to catch This American Life. It was the independence day episode with the Vowell sisters on the trail of tears.

I got to thinking. this story is pretty similar to every other story in the great collection of stories that make up the attempted genocide of the entire sum of native north american races. Everyone gets taught the "trail of tears" in school here. It has all the classic elements; greedy white people, malfeasance of the federal government, long forced march to a place unsuitable for them to continue their lifestyle, lots of them dying, buried on the way.

I know a story similar to this.

when I was young My mom bought a horse for us. It was a beautiful horse, slightly crazy, very inbred, fast and incredibly agile. It was an appaloosa. There was an important rule at the appaloosa horse club.

You must never ever ever breed one of these horses with a draft horse. If you do we will throw you out of the club, never allow you to register another horse and eventually come to your house and murder you in your sleep and leave parts of your sorry family's corpses all over the town as a warning

Well maybe it didn't say exactly that but the tone was there. As a ten year old kid, the story of how that rule came to be, left quite an impression on me.

For me the story begins right near the end of the actual story. In the late 1870's the US Army takes possesion of all the horses from the Nez Perce tribe(a name that particularly irks them, because in the generations since the obnoxious frenchies gave them the name nasal piercing has gone back out of fasion for them). The US Army hates these horses, because for much of the last few months and 1700 or so miles it has been getting its ass kicked by fierce men on these even fiercer horses. This has just recently changed because you've recently gathered a much greater number of the US Army and had some astoudingly bad weather in your favor. Unlike virtually every other group of natives on the continent these nose piercing "Dreamers" have been selectively and scientifically breeding horses to do just the sort of things the Army wishes its cavalry horses would do. The problem is these horses just won't do the same things for them. The US Army takes the other route and breeds every damn one of them with draft horses to make their progeny slow and not very agile at all.

Fast Forward to nearly two decades ago. I had been doing some barrel racing with my Shetland pony.(which happens to be a very poor choice of breeds for that sort of thing, as they are a miniature draft horse, but I was ten and it was the pony I had, and I was quite fond of her so just shut the hell up, ok?) I was competing in these gymkhana events with the real gamers, who all had appaloosas. While there are other horse breeds that excel in gymkhana like cloverleaf barrels or keyhole, The kids who did the game series in the summer played polo in the winter.(It might be worth noting at this point the kids I am refering to were between six and eight years older and not what some of you might have come to mind when you think polo player. These kids were all white trash from the outlying towns and drove beat up camaros and hauled the stock trailers around to events with their dad's farm truck. For good or ill, at that time of my life, I idolized them.) They had appaloosas because that was just the horse you wanted to be on when you had to charge into a crowd of other people on horses and armed with nothing but a very long hammer steal their ball and run it down to the goal. The game is essentially similar hockey or lacrosse, but on horseback played by marginalized adolescents it achieves a level of hostility that makes those sports seem tame.

They have these horses because a group of very dedicated white people have spent most of a century trying to breed the draft back out of those horses from the tribe in the Palouse hills. They are fine beautiful horses if a little inbred. That is why they are so particular about the draft horse thing. The club has a version of the tribes story they tell to explain the tradition. It goes something like this:

In 1877 the Nez Perce Indians, led by Chief Joseph, were told to leave their lands for an already crowded reservation in Idaho. The tribe refused, whereupon the Army showed up and commenced to chase the indians all the hell over the West until trapping them on a mountain almost in sight of the Canadian border. Chief Joseph then surrendered and while his people were figuratively bent over and nailed by a draft horse their horses literally were.

Again I have taken some liberties quoting here but that is pretty much the way I remember it.

Like all stories involving two or more people there are a few versions of it and the above version seems to have left out some facts. As it turns out four fifths of the tribe (those led by other chiefs) signed the treaty and moved without much incident onto the Lapwai reservation.(These folks don't seem to make much noise about Chief Joseph. They do however have an interesting program in which they are trying to get their kids into breeding and using horses. When I was in college I was involved in a program where we taught "at-risk" kids of the local reservation to build canoes. It wasn't ironic, it was just sad.) The appearance of the Army to roust them off their land wasn't a sudden surprise although it was hastened by the rash act of a few young braves. When they did finally surrender, their trail of tears wasn't over. They were marched from Montana all the way to Leavenworth, where they dropped like flies. From there, they were sent to Oklahoma. If they converted to christianity they were allowed to go to the Lapwai reservation from there. Joseph and the others who wouldn't convert eventually were sent to a reservation in Washington.

If you prefer you can read the whole story from the perspective of Chief Joseph. It has a little intro from some missionary at the time. You could also read the version from the general that Joseph mostly faced in this whole deal. I'd recommend that you read Joseph's account first as General Howard's version is mainly written as a rebuttal. They are both found on the web courtesy of someone who has done an exhaustive amount of research on the topic for a book.

All in all a sad story but really not an unusual one. Whether you you look at the example of the jews in Germany or the natives in North America, or the neighboring tribes to the Incas, the moral to the story is always the same. You have much more to fear from governments and similar large organizations than just about anything else. In spite of all our squawking to the contrary our government is no exception to this. But never forget that greed plays a huge role in this too.

yesterday was independence day.

A day we celebrate telling the english to stick it.

as for independence well that's questionable these days.

for independence day I tried to figure out how to feed my family without giving any money to the evil motherfuckers at archer daniels midland.

the beginning of that process is mapping out the ties of corporate ownership and board of directors ties. It's incredibly complicated. I'm looking for a little help if any one knows much or a site that has already done the work It would help.

the ultimate goal is a cleverly designed page where some one can easily navigate the web and see each person in the chain with their responsibilities and related crimes against humanity. something a little bit like what those extremist anti-choice sites.

I want you to picture something.
You work at a toy'r'us.

it's the saturday before christmas

you don't have any of the cool buzz lightyears that in the ad(and you only got three when you did have them any way)

the boss took the day off (presumably he didn't think it was an important day)

he also left you with less staff than you would have on a normal saturday.(approximately half of which are B-players you wouldn't even have hired much less have still working.)

everything profitable is locked up so you customers can't help themselves (even assuming that they knew enough about the product to)

every eighth customer tramples the six patient(they at least know that they should be embarassed to be shopping at the last minute) customers to blurt out "is this the right doll for my kid!?"

you have a slightly misanthropic nature in the best of crowds.

with that picture in your head I am going to bed.

I have a bimbobox. It's not like the standard ones from chrysler that are made out of a car. It's the chevy astro flavor wit light truck underpinnings. It has a relatively new motor and the frame and floor is perfect. The doorskins and rocker panels have succumbed to the great cancer that eventually claims all vehicles here in the Rust belt. For quite awhile I possessed this minivan without actually using it. Part of it was financial. I just didn't want to spend the money to fix it,but some of it was that I didn't really put being a bimbobox driver at the top of my priority list.

I am here to tell you folks I was wrong(insert social distortion tune here). Minivans are cool. you can load three kids, wife, and all their assorted paraphernalia into the van and go to the beach. Without drama. You can make it so none of the kids can even touch each other. they are cool.

plus you sit up high enough that you can look down into other vehicles. In western new york in the summer, that's a pretty nice perk

Have Imentioned that I hate the heat? In case I haven't i'll mention it again.

I have been peering internally to try and figure out where my nearly unbreakable obsession with going to see the new TombRaider. I desperately want to see it. The problem is this: My wife and I get out to see slightly less the two movies a year. I don't even want to ask her to go see this one. It's not that she won't enjoy it, but if she gets to go out to only one movie each year, she likes it to be something with substance.

So the question becomes why the obsession?

The knee jerk answer is Angelina but that doesn't really make the cut. My wife is at least that sexy and is married to me instead of billybob. The next obvious answer is the obvious eyecandy and effects. But I'm not that powerfully motivated by F/X either.

And then it came to me. Molly.

yes that Molly. the one he wrote out of the script when he realized that the movie would suck and he would lose the rights to use her again. And since Johnny dies before neuromancer even begins nobody cared about losing him.

"You want to get out of here, boss? People are starting to stare." She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.

How can you not fall in love with a girl like that. That sexy lithe sweet little thing, who just happens to be armed to the teeth, and ready to kill to protect you. Gibson isn't alone in his creation. Heinlein wrote Friday. parts of her trickled into America Shaftoe for Neal Stephenson.

So how did we(I say we because I know I am not alone) get this little obsession? This need for a girl who is sex, violence, death. and savior all rolled into one. For me I think I know the answer.

I first met Molly when I was fourteen or fifteen. I didn't fit in in school. I got my ass kicked on a regular basis(this was before I discovered the secret of not getting your ass kicked all the time. Once, just once, you have to react out of proportion to the offense. Billy Joe Jock hits you in some kind of locker room bullying, hit him in the side of the face with the combination lock in your hand. when he goes down hit him again. once he is on the ground just keep kicking him, don't stop till someone comes to pull you off. get him once more in the face with you booted foot as they pull you off. No jock ever hit's you like that again. the verbal abuse will continue but always from a distance.) I had been a practicing pacifist for years, even to the point that I wouldn't hit back in a fight. but somewhere inside there was a thing growing. A thing built of a pubescent male fantasy. the rescue thing. the sex thing. the need for a girl who's just not like the other girls.

In college(the first attempt) I had a friend who taught me to fence. She was good, competed nationally, the whole bit. Even after I reached the point where I was good, my six inches of reach advantage didn't mean i ever won a match with her. While she was very attractive, the sex thing just wasn't there for us. But the violence, that was there. In spades.

years go by. I meet a nearly perfect(although decidedly non violent) woman. Marry her, have kids and eight years into that it just keeps getting better. but somewher the is still that little fantasy part that knows I betrayed Molly. And that is one little girl you don't want to be betraying.

Maybe I'll go see TombRaider alone.

old news
after you read that go read this

I often tell people that there is no better place in the world to live than western new york. you get four perfect seasons. there are things to do. the apples and peaches are better here than anywhere else on the planet. unlike many people who might make this claim, i have actually been other places but chose to come back here.

there is one little thing i forgot to mention. It can get hot in the summer. like alabama hot. like 90 degrees fahrenheit and 90 percent humidity. one thing i can say about winter; you can always put more clothes on. after a certain point you can't get any more naked in the summer. hopefully this weather will be mercifully brief.

Here are some of the things I have done in the last few days.

I took a ride delivering a sailboat upriver and got caught in a vale of dogwoods so thick it looked like flurries.

I drove the family communal one ton stake bed Chevy truck out to the very small town where my inlaws live. circumstances dictated that I drive the stuck down the center of town, climb out of the truck wearing grease-stained clothes and walk into the combination gas station/subshop/grocery store. I am not sure if I can convey to you just how white trash I looked at that moment.

I brought the old chevy astro van that my father in law gave my wife(she promptly failed to take into account the small item of having to put back the oil that leaked and wound up with bits of crankshaft all over the road) in to the garage that one of my little brother's friends just purchased. Since the incident with the crankshaft the van has had another engine installed, but it's never run. Because I was constantly travelling while this was going on I was never close to the details and never really put the effort into figuring out what the problem was that I should have. Well, the hard unfortunate truth is that my brother's friend not only figured it out in less than twenty minutes when three other mechanics failed he did it whilst continuing to run all the paying customers through the shop. Frank's da man. I mean it. If you live in the area he has the old sunoco station just south of the 290 on Niagara Falls Blvd.

I became involved in the barter economy. See it works like this. My brother(who is a detail obsessed gunsmith who needs a shop) builds a very nice "AT&T" rifle for Frank out of parts that Frank pays for. Frank gets an incredibly accurate long range bolt action rifle for the price of raw materials. I provide a bunch of free semi-skilled labor to my brother while he builds some furniture on contract. My brother eventuall collects severall thousand dollars for the furniture. I get my van fixed for the price of the parts. Nobody spends as much money as it really costs (except the furniture buyer who is actually getting a price only couple hundred dollars less than they would have paid elsewhere). I got a running van for the price of the parts and access to a really nice shop when I need it for the other vehicles. none of this ever exists in the money economy. so I with the assistance of some other people enriched all of our lives while reducing the GNP proportionately.

I took my two younger boys to the hot dog stand on the canal that I very occasionally went to whe I was a kid.

A kid I knew was killed this morning. Granted I only knew him in the tangential way that you know the older brother of your best friend's girlfriend. But I live in a small town and we all know each other at least a little.

He was a bright kid. A bit prone to railing on about the injustices in the world but bright nonetheless. He was a skillful and caring hunter. His dad and he didn't get along very well. He adored his little sister. Who adored him even more.

He voluntarily served his country in a war which he did not believe in. Unlike the Vietnam Veterans, he came back to flags, fanfare and a hero's welcome. and a minimum wage job with no real future.

He was angry with the way he had been used in the gulf war. He was angry with the way our government treated certain bizarre religious sects. He was angry with the way our government treated people who were paranoid and afraid of the government(I interrupt this otherwise terse monologue to remind you that just because you are paranoid doesn't mean you are wrong). He was angry at the way small farm families were being treated at the hands of the corporations who actually had influence with our government.

He was just plain angry at a lot of things. Then he did something stupid. He let that anger fester into a rage while he waited for somebody else to do something about the things he was angry about. "They", to noone's surprise, didn't do a damn thing.

Then, to the surprise of practically everyone who ever knew him, he murdered 168 or so people.

There are, however, some things to remember on the event of "we the People"'s retribution:

Our government is still guilty of everything that he accused it.

there are lots of other angry ragefilled wackjobs out there

most of them have good justifications for their rage

we, the common people still have little or no access to government even at a local level(don't believe me? go down to your local school board and try to get a copy of their bylaws and policies without going through hours of paperwork and eventually having to threat a FOIA suit)

most of us would agree that it is better to effect change in a manner which does not kill people, but it only takes one person to screw it up for the rest of us.

our federal agents are fortunate that with the current administration's new focus on removing the first and fourth ammendment rights of U.S. citizens that they will be less likely to meet an untimely death at the hands of a very scared fourteen year boy. Fans of the first and fourth ammendments tend to be less heavily armed that do fans of the second.

No matter what the media and other related spin doctors say, Timothy McVeigh was not a White Supremacist Christian Identity wackjob. Whatever kind of wackjob he was, he was one of the most vehemently antiracist people I've ever met.

p.s. lest any of you readers worry about my state of mind. Don't worry!! I'm not angry or going to blow anything up. Not only do I have a wife and three kids to care for, but in my old age I find that I am too feeble to carry on Rage for enough time to listen to a Ministry album all the way through let alone plan anything destructive.

here's a search query I like and look there I am number six on the list. but from number one one the list:

The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM's annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM's corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30.

And that boys and girls is just the economic havoc they cause. wait till you see the long term ecoligical damage from their monoculture pesticide and chemical fertilizer intense one size fits all approach to agribusiness does. in another decade or so most of the "breadbasket to the world" the midwest united states will be capable of growing slightly less food than the sahara.

ok I missed the memorial day post. i was busy doing stuff in meatspace. here it is late, but here.

i am just tired of the nonsense i heard this year about veterans on memorial day. it's not that i don't appreciate or love veterans. those of you who know me in meatspace and a great many of you who know me in cyberspace know this. I have spent years and still spend hours each month listening and doing what i can to heal the aching minds and souls of veterans. it's just that we already have a national day to remember them by. it's called veteran's day.

this is memorial day. it's for remembering(memorial) those fallen in combat. by definition a veteran is one who didn't fall in combat. they survived and became veterans of the war. whatever war it happened to be. on memorial day we honor the ones who didn't come home or if they did it was in a bodybag. there have been quite a lot of them over the years.

so i spent some time thinking about them.

that and loperamide HCl is a miracle drug.

something happened today to make me realize just how strong my wife is.

some background. counting today I have puked less than dozen times in my nearly three decades of existence here. my aforementioned nearly perfect wife has some health problems. they are incredibly complicated and not really something i want to talk about here. one of the worst complications is something that is remarkably similar to but not the same as IBS. the gist is that when the trigger event happens(a particular food, stress, etc) her body stops at the point where her stomach joins her intestines. every thing above that point is ejected immediately out the top, and everything below is sent very rapidly out the bottom. the whole process takes about an hour. it takes days to recover from the effects.

some time last night or this morning I ate something that didn't agree with me. I am not sure exactly was it was but i have my suspicions. the end result was that the above event happened to me for the first time in my life. I can honestly say that this was the single most unpleasant physical experience i've ever had. take note that this statement comes from a guy who has been laying on the ground unfortunately conscious while six much bigger guys kicked the shit out of him; from a guy that has had the cinch strap from his saddle break while ascending a rocky streambed and in the resulting chaos had his beloved quarterhorse step on him at least five times. this was much worse than either of those things. I survived this but not without a lot of whining and bad language.

the point to this story is that this horrible physical ordeal that i just went through is something she puts up with on a regular basis and with virtually no whining on her part.

oh yeah and opera5 for linux kicks ass! for all the hard core open source zealots who go berserk about the qt libraries. look at netscape and then look at opera. then go shut up.

one of the things about writing is that you have to do it almost every day if you are gonna be any good at it. right now I don't have that possibility. maybe in august or september. but the cliche "make hay when the sun shines" is just what I have to do right now. still I have things to say about what is happening in the world almost every day. where I can I'll talk about it here but else I might dig up some old thing i wrote.

so in honor of the morons from the earth liberation front getting headlines again. the only thing I really have to add is that these assholes will generate so much bad press by doing stupid and counterproductive thing that now, when the nation really needs sensible productive eco terrorists they will cause the focus of law enforcement types on the whole subject.

and for those of you who might be looking to me for guidance in just what needs to be done? Forget it! I have a wife and kids and just can't do that kind of stuff anymore.

sorry I haven't posted for a month. I've been doing lots of thinking and the like but find that much of it I can't post here. work is ... well, work and i can't go into any detail here lest my former boss(who stuck his neck out to get me here) think i am whining. There are things going on in our country that I am concerned about that I also can't talk about here. I need some things.

A literary agent with connections to publishers that can get shelf space and don't mind publishing really thought provoking and controversial fiction.

about seventy five thousand dollars, although that could potentially be handled by the above.

a web host immune to subpeonas from the united states

about three weeks off to finish the novel for the above purposes

As some of you may or may not know my wife and I are working through the process of building a boat. We are very early in the process. Nothing is actually built yet. We have a design that is almost perfect for our needs. We have had discussions with the designer about what it will cost in design fees to make it perfect. and then what it will cost extra to get all the hull plates rendered into CNC files to be cut out on a giant plasma cutter.

Now, in theory, I am trained in boat design and building. In fact I have designed and built boats. However, they have all been under twenty feet and made of wood. Plywood mostly. In fact I am a pretty good small plywood boat designer and builder. The problem here is: I know jack about designing and building steel boats. I know slightly more than jack about putting interiors in steel boats. I have fallen deeply in love with the concept of a well designed and constructed Steel yacht.

So I have gone to a designer who:

Has four decades or so of building boats

Steel ones

tugs, small island freighters, and private yachts that resemble same.

that has lived a board a boat of some sort for most of those four decades

makes a habit of designing interiors that meant to be lived in not just visited on the weekend

has some experience in the type of construction I wish to do

has a good relationship with the companies who will do the thingd I want done.

has a stock plan that is within five or six hours of drafting time of the boat I want.

His name is Jay Benford.
There is a wonderful website for a boat that may be the first one built the way that I intend to. They detail it in pretty decent photos on the site. The actual constructor of the boat was Custom Steel Boats They have some wonderful photos on their site and a pretty description of the process used. The gist of it is this. Somebody (like this company) takes the plans and lofts (which means make fullsize patterns for the pieces of the boat) them into NC files for use by a company that specializes in cutting out bits of steel with computer controlled plasmacutters. the company who cuts them out would ideally cut the steel out of pieces that are pre sandblasted and preprimed with a weldable primer. This means that when you finish the boat you don't have to sandblast the entire boat, just the weld seams, saving both the labor and the problem of what to do with a hull with several hundred pounds of sand in the bilge. the cutting company then ships the whole lot to you (or your builder) with appropriate tab A into Slot B markings for your assembly. Once it welded and the seams are blasted and re-primed, the bilge sump is coated with several coats of epoxy to keep the boat from rusting from the inside out(which, incidentally is the most common way steel yachts die). The entire rest of the interior is covered with a couple inches of sprayed in place foam(not altogether unlike the stuff you might us to seal that bad patch of siding behind the gutters where nobody can see( go ahead deny it but you and I both know it's there)). The foam does several things all of them good:

it also seals the steel and prevents it from rusting from the inside out,

it prevents most of the condensation that would normally occur in a metal boat(many people who have uninsulated metal boats refer to the interior as "the rainforest"),

it keeps the interior cool in the summer and warm in the winter( surely you must know someone that has licked a steel flagpole in the winter?)

The exterior of the boat then gets primed with an epoxy primer and painted above the waterline with a pretty two part polyurethane, and below the waterline with a paint nasty enough to kill barnacles and the like(I should probably note at this point that I make my living selling just this sort of stuff and I'm damn good at it). Now you have something that looks like a boat. Now you get to spend about twice as much time as you have spent so far fitting in an interior putting a rig on it, probably an engine too unless you are some kind of nutjob purist. So let's make it three times as much as you have put in so far. But right now it looks like a boat so go ahead and woohoo if you need to.

In the process of researching this whole process I felt I needed to learn how to weld. I kind of know now but just the sort of stuff you do on a farm on an antique arc welder that is powered by the engine of the very same tractor you are trying to weld. certainly not the sort of professional look I would be going for here. So here are a bunch of links that I found to larn ya the theory and practice of bonding metals.

For those of you that don't know I have recently switched from my previously and tenaciously held view that privacy is a must have freedom that is to be defended at all cost with every thing from crypto to violent revolution. I have switched over to David Brin's image of a Transparent Society". It's a concept put forth convincingly in both his novel Earth and his nonfiction book The Transparent Society. Go out and take the time to read these (and I do mean time. Earth took me two weeks and I go through books like the folks down on genessee street go through Crack), but the gist of the idea is this. In a world where noone has privacy not even and ESPECIALLY governments we could all trust that what we say is happening is really happening and begin to hold individuals, corporations, and governments responsible for their actions. With accountability comes a sort of freedom we have only imagined in large scale but have never seen. The anarchists dream society. You can do whatever you want as long as you are willing to be held accountable for your actions. You can even listen to an hour and not quite twenty minutes of Neal Stephenson trying to sell Brin's idea over dinner at CFP in Toronto if you are still not sold on the idea.
Now I don't for even one second think this will be an easy task. even brin depicted the rest of us bombing Switzerland flat as Kansas in an attempt get them to sign the treaty of openness. I think something not quite as drastic would be needed for our government to let go of it's pathological need to keep secrets as well. In the meantime there are some people already starting to push in the own quiet way for openness.
Now there is one character in the news lately who has taken this to quite an extreme. Unfortunately for both him and us, he is possessed of a case of terminal can'tshuthisdamntrapitis and has not surprisingly fallen afoul of the feds. They have an extremely weak interstate stalking case against him for attempting to collect just exactly the sort of information that would be needed in the hands of citizens to make good decisions in holding our civil servants accountable for their actions. Unfortunate for him because he is probably going to go down for a crime he either didn't commit or isn't actually a crime. unfortunate for us because those of us less extreme in our views will have this awful precedent set and it will make it much more difficult for us to assemble accountability mechanisms that don't involve hunting down and killing bad people.
There are still some permanent accountability options but I'll leave that discussion to another post.
Given these type of situations I am not about to be giving up my encryption tools just this moment.

about a month or so ago I was reading a piece by Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba(it's available for the palm from Memoware. It was one of the last things he had published before the Company had his head and hands buried separately. For those of you not familiar with Che and his writings He was brilliant man who hated several sorts of go for the jugular capitalism. In the part of argentina he grew up in he was exposed to it from several directions. His father was at different points in his life a wealthy landowner and at other points a shiftless jobless poor layabout.(some of this was brought about by the failed boatbuilding business owned by his father's cousin German Frers(yes that German Frers)). Any how he was a brilliant guerilla organizer who in spite of a pretty terrible asthma condition was also a passable jungle fighter in his own right. He will probably be forever remembered as the guy who got Fidel a job. If you look deeper you will find that he wasn't much of a communist. Fellow traveller yeah probably but in fact a pretty shitty marxist. (damn good thing too!, as that crap certianly didn't work out like they thought) Any how the point of this whole intro is to highlight a few quotes from this last little article and point out that as Che was predicting how communism would fail That he turned out to be right fucking on the money.

We can attempt to graft elm trees so that they bear pears, but at the same time we must plant pear trees.

Translated "you can remove despots and even temporarily replace a despot with another more to your liking but if you don't have a better plan you're gonna starve"

Our job is to keep the present generation, maladjusted by its conflicts, from becoming perverted and perverting the new generations. We do not want to create salaried workers docile to official thinking nor "fellows" who live under the wing of the budget, exercising freedom in quotation marks.

I don't even think I need to translate that one. Right on the money.

If a man thinks that in order to devote his entire life to the revolution, he cannot be distracted by the worry that one of his children lacks a certain article, that the children's shoes are in poor condition, that his family lacks some necessary item, with this reasoning, the seeds of future corruption are allowed to filter through.

It is awful tough to continue a revolution when you have infront of you solid proof that while you have thrown of the yoke of oppression you're children are starving and those still "oppressed" are having no trouble feeding their kids and indeed even buying them jeans and playstations.


Come to think of it maybe it wasn't the CIA that had him wacked. It might've been Fidel.

yes it's been awhile. and now you're going to get a great big pile of linked goodness.

While we are on the topic of thieving intellectual property I have a few more links. the first is more flash than substance right now but it does have a copy of the CIA's Psychops in Guerilla warfare. You can go out to a bookstore and buy this ( I know that at least a decade ago my university bookstore carried it) but if you're like me you might just have the attitude that your tax dollars already paid for it and damnit why should I have to pay for it.
the second is a neat idea of open content with a liscence similar to the GNU LPL. Lovely idea but the implementation is a little pedantic. I'd like to see something similar but without so much of the baggage that academics carry into the life.

This might be the most evil thing I've seen in weeks. the current implementation is a little flaky but it's still down right evil.

I particularly love the way they describe it as if it's a perfectly ok thing to do. It's a little like saying "every day thousands of people leave their houses unlocked. in fact here is a tool to get a nice convenient list of them. that way if you ever need a place to crash or to put some things for a little while you'll always have one."

I wouldn't recommend giving your credit card number to these guys to pay for the software. these are definitely the sort of people who need to have their Intellectual Property stolen from them.

To top off my lovely series of days I just this afternoon narowly escaped serving on a jury. I was ready for it though. the case had to do with a situation where the case rested on a he said she said deal with the defendant and a police officer and on the surface it looked like they were both lying. The questions they asked the prospective jurors were things like "do you think that an officer of the law has more credibility than an ordinary citizen?" they got the last alternate from the woman on my left as I was seated in the questioning box. That's good. They probably didn't want my answer.

"no, in fact my experience has been that in the pursuit of their profession that pigs are much more likely to lie that your average plumber, auto mechanic, or lawyer"

Declan McCullagh (who runs the politech mailing list that I have been a member of for several years) was subpoenaed at CFP just after the carnivore panel discussion. Declan lives in Washington DC, where as some of you know, is where the USDOJ is also located. So I ask you why oh why was it necessary to fly all the way to Boston in the middle of one of the worst storms in a long time to serve him a subpoena in front of all the other people that oppose the government's encroachments of our (meaning the citizens of the USA) privacy and other fundamental rights.

Oh wait. I think I just answered my question

A friend of my wife's(who I actually do like) that we haven't seen or heard from in quite a while tracked me down based on Patti Ann's notes about her wedding. Apparently that is what shows up when you google my real name. when you google cumorglas this is pretty much all you would get. Not that many biggreydogs out there. He is apparently doing ok but details have not yet been achieved.

Erratic has become quite alarmed at ICANN's tentative plan to screw with .org names. He has started a lovely page to help you agree with him. (he is right to be alarmed. for the same reason I oppose the creation of a .xxx domain. I just don't want them deciding what we can and can't say on which pages. right or wrong I don't want it.) Go there and give him a nudge of support.
While I am not personally threatened by this nonsense(the only .org I own is actually for a nonprofit I successfully completed the 501c-3 bullshit on just two weeks ago.) I do think that it is a good idea to hammer ICANN on this one.

Some of you may have noticed that I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy. work stuff was hectic until just recently. for about the last 10 days one member or another or occasionally all four of the other members of my household has been leaking/exploding out of all the natural orifices. Not pleasant. And I am sick of always being the healthy one. So when i wasn't at work selling stuff or counting little shackles and what not or dressed like the pilsbury doughboy helping my little brother smear epoxy on furniture or wishing I was dressed like the pilspury doughboy cleaning up puke or diarhea I quite honestly wasn't up to writing much.
some things of note have happened so I will try to relate them and their significance.

this may be my favourite query hit yet.

But I'm still betting on Steve Case