funny how some audio products made with supposedly premium connectors are much more problematic cleaner-wise than stuff with the cheapo connectors. my first such experience was paying a comparative buttload of cash in high school for a heavy duty guitar cable with "superior" brass connectors. the cable and connectors were great mechanically, but the brass sucked, and i was regularly rubbing it with fine steel wool to get rid of the audio scratchies.
since i tend to use my bitchin' iPod earphones only when in noisy environments, the metal on the connector doesn't get exercised, and sometimes the signal reliability sucks; i was constantly spinning it around in the headphone jack, trying to rub off whatever the hell collects on the surface with that awesome frustrating power to entirely cut off a signal despite a definite mechanical mating. the weird part is that it doesn't happen with any other earbud set, no matter how cheap; all other sets (and i've gone through plenty) were reliable in that regard, even with long gaps between uses.
from my recording studio days i still have a treasured can of cramolin R-5 with the original formula (now banned), though i'm starting to think the little bit remaining may have lost its power through age. got off my ass and applied that vigorously with a Q-tip last week, but it didn't completely solve the problem, even with that squeaky clean friction feel vibrating back through the Q-tip.
so at the gym yesterday i got pissed and just used soap and water and my fingers, then dried the plug very well. fixed it completely in 15 seconds. couldn't believe it. sure, soap and water aren't practical for much audio gear, but next time i have a plug with the usual oxidized bullshit or whatever, i'll head to the sink.
okay, i'm done with this post. could easily write 1,000 words about the double-edged sword of contact cleaners. always been a pain in the ass.
rodney dangerfield joked about using a dog to pick up chicks (until he figured out the dog was using him to pick up other dogs -- [rimshot]). i'm sitting inside a starbucks, watching some older dude run the ultimate pussy magnet scam.
he's been parked at a table outside with his beautiful golden retriever. he just reads the paper, kicking back, and bam, here it comes. perfect opener with everybody (few don't at least pat the obviously friendly pal on the head), and he can keep up the chat with the taste treats, including plenty of hugh grant's "single mums", their kids entranced for an easy 5 minutes while the "adults" blah blah.
i don't have a dog, but for some reason i was picked out by strange women twice this week — one to watch a 4-year-old girl while her mom ordered something, and just now to watch a purse. not sure which incident i understand less.
speaking of strangers in stores and kids, when my daughter grew old enough for me to let her get out of my sight in a store, i'd brief her regularly that if anyone attempted to get her to leave the main area without me or my direct permission, she should immediately and without apology scream her head off and make a scene. with that method i felt comfortable being aisles away in a bookstore, checking only every 10 or 15 minutes. we also had a code word a stranger must supply if trying to pick her up from school or wherever in my stead. never had any obvious use for it, but there it was.
if you'd any doubt that there's no boundary on US federal overreach, consider the indictment of scumbag lori drew, the "adult" neighbor who stalked and manipulated teen megan meier (now dead, via suicide) mercilessly via MySpace.
the US "justice department" is basically doing what the "treasury department" did at mt. carmel (waco) — issuing a press release, jackboot style. the indictment is a disgraceful piece of shit employing the almighty US empire as the enforcement arm of MySpace terms of service. read it!
the charges are:
conspiracy
accessing protected computers to obtain information
aiding and abetting and causing an act to be done
serious question: how could anyone not be ashamed to participate in such drivel?
If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If, however, the offense, the commission of which is the object of the conspiracy, is a misdemeanor only, the punishment for such conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for such misdemeanor.
hmmm, something tells me "interstate commerce" will be invoked before the traitor sig at the end, huh? shocker!
(a) Whoever— [...] (2) intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains— [...] (C) information from any protected computer if the conduct involved an interstate or foreign communication; [...] (c) The punishment for an offense under subsection (a) or (b) of this section is— [...] (2) [...] (B) a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or both, in the case of an offense under subsection (a)(2), or an attempt to commit an offense punishable under this subparagraph, if— [...] (ii) the offense was committed in furtherance of any criminal or tortious act in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States or of any State; or
(a) Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal. (b) Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by him or another would be an offense against the United States, is punishable as a principal.
for those bothering to read the piece of shit indictment, the section OBJECT OF THE CONSPIRACY essentially concludes logically that anyone violating AOL or google or MySpace or any other computer joint TOS is guilty of the same fucking thing they're charging lori drew with. dress it up with the C word (conspiracy), and now a non-crime has been elevated to the planning in secret of a non-crime, which... wow, i guess that's a crime! sure sounds like a crime.
these fedgoons aren't worthy of life. you gotta read this crap. the entire doc is simply the psychotic magnification and elaboration of piddly bullshit. why? because they haven't yet crossed the line into overt usurpation of every local matter. jesus christ, it even goes into the tort of "intentional infliction of emotional distress". fedgoon behavior long ago reached the point where it's almost a waste to analyze it in detail. they're in green=orange territory, sporting a humongo-cannon.
maybe someone with some balls will bash lori drew's skull in for her. leave the powermonger PR squad out of it.
OMG, what will he do? the catastrophe was published early this morning, and world famous typo-whining cunt michael rozeff must now decide if he should believe anything lew rockwell says anymore:
yep, that error's pasted directly from the LRC front page. wonder if lew will kick the cunt off his site after the cunt renounces him. i mean, he will renounce him, right? you can't take seriously anyone who'd accidentally type "It's" instead of "Its". just can't.
sad day for lew, i guess. now who's gonna write the ron paul 2008 "republican" presidential nomination acceptance speech, with rozeff off riding his grammar witch's broom (i.e., stick up his ass) over more pristine pastures?
went to my first public star party last night — first time in over 20 years that i looked through a telescope not in a store. what i discovered by talking with many people and checking out, among others, an 11" schmidt-cassegrain and 18" and 20" dobsonians:
huge, expensive telescopes are wonderful, but... not always so much an obvious improvement as i figured they'd be. seems they're somewhat like bicycles in their cost/performance curve; plenty of fun to be had with a moderate joint.
most of the hosts were friendly, and eager to show cool stuff — very helpful and attentive to the little kids that were there. the knowledge wasn't as deep as i expected (had i the same rigs and time spent, i'd know much more than most of the geeks i met), but the "i don't knows" were quick and honest when applicable.
if you have kids, or are shopping for your own scope, you should consider visiting an open star party. (many astronomy clubs offer them regularly — some even on city sidewalks, though most tend to be out in the country for better visibility. here's a good search start.) the kids have fun whether looking through scopes or running around the grass, and you'll get a chance to quickly test a wide variety of gear. the guy with the 20" dobsonian had disconnected it from the servos, and encouraged visitors to move it around by hand. that was a kick. (i'm talking about a telescope that's about 8' tall, and requires a ladder for most viewing.)
all three of the most expensive rigs i was fortunate to look through for more than a single glimpse had at least minor problems with their object location systems. that surprised me. had read so much neato material about how simple and reliable such systems are. if you're not familiar, the general deal is that with a computerized rig you rough-align your mount to polaris, aim the telescope at three suitably angularly varied objects for alignment (you don't even need to know what they are), then merely punch a "go to" button for any other visible object in the database. sounds wonderful, and i can understand theoretically how it works, but even these guys with their mega-$ setups had problems. a thrill nonetheless.
if attending a star party, be sure to check that org's recommended practices (including clothing, which most people tend to underestimate on warm days). for example, waving a standard white flashlight around, or enabling your car headlights... not popularity-inducing; some of the stuff you'll be looking at requires extremely dark-adapted vision.
of everything i saw, i think saturn was the freakiest for me. almost looked cartoonish in its supreme clarity and realism. beauty beyond words.
moon wasn't bad either though. a good telescope gets you right up the moon's ass, with shocking clarity. BTW, though it's not immediately obvious, the full moon isn't necessarily the ideal time to view the moon, since there's no oblique light to add shadows; easy to forget that the sun is nearly directly behind you (opposition) as you view the full moon. moon looks tasty when the sun's more from the side. obviously, any bright moon tends to lessen the visibility of other sky stuff.
for those unfamiliar with the theremin, it's a music gizmo with two antennas; one controls pitch, the other volume. page plays one in The Song Remains the Same, and you've probably heard it quivering in many an old sci-fi/horror film.
wikipedia remains both the best and worst of recent information experiments, testament to the core failure of the average human — neurotic disinclination to question bullshit when presented with the desired wrapping.
shallow wikipedia cheerboys — many of which have obviously never edited heavily at the site — point to a study which supposedly tested accuracy of wikipedia articles against encyclopedia britannica. instead of noting the obvious — that wikipedia normally sucks ass — they wave this study around and get brother fools to fall for their distortion, ignoring entirely that the study compared only select scientific articles — cut and dried topics that attract accurate geek editors and little debate. step outside that tight set and you find untold gigabytes of dreck — horrible writing infested with snippet disease (no owner of the whole), opinion dressed as absolute, and sourceless drivel by the boatload. with the popularity of wikipedia, garbage in becomes garbage propagated. wikipedia lies are now "truth", more widely promulgated than truth, often simply because of the sloppy inaccuracy of a single "contributor". admins are sure to miss most of these fuckups, but damned if they'll allow a "personal attack" on a discussion page.
good example of the complete syndrome: in articles related to christopher mccandless (the subject of the book and movie Into the Wild), lat/long coordinates are offered for the deserted bus where he spent most of his time in the alaskan wilderness. though off target by approximately ten miles — horrendous error given the precision of the method — they remain. some shyster dummkopf (or prankster) plugged those numbers in and they took off, across wikipedia and thus the internet. wikipedia's wrongness is parroted almost immediately via automation at sites such as answers.com, then becomes the source for any lazy hack writing a blog post or travel article. google returns at least eight non-wikipedia sites passing along the wrong coordinates as correct or potentially correct. in turn, those sites are used as authoritative, and the false data appear at more places, such as in IMDb forums.
never use wikipedia as a source. if the article's worth a damn, its source for all details will be listed, and you can simply use that (if appropriate). all information should be questioned, but much more so at wikipedia, with its laughable "community" mentality and equal access to fucking up articles, regardless of editor reputation.
here's how much wikipedia sucks: in the Christopher McCandless article body, it gives the wrong location along with a footnote. the footnote refers to a YouTube video of a guy driving to the bus. however, even disregarding the questionable practice of using a YouTube video as a source in this instance, nowhere in the video will one find those coordinates. i won't waste time tracking the full heritage of the error, but it appears that the video was used merely as a citation for the description of the bus's location as "an overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park". apparently (again, i'm not wasting my time verifying this information disaster's origin, so this is just a guess), hack editors then lifted that bit from the McCandless article, and it shows up in the Into the Wild article, now missing the bit about "overgrown section of the trail near Denali National Park", transformed to a mere "an abandoned bus", followed by the wrong coordinates and bullshit footnote to the YouTube video — a video that now does nothing as a citation but show the abandoned bus. wow. still, the footnote is placed immediately after the coordinates. the kicker: at the end of the article, in the "External links" section, appears this nugget:
added as an afterthought, in direct contradiction to the primary dreck of the article body, is essentially the correct location of the bus.
good thing about wikipedia is that errors may eventually be traced to the culprit (at least the culprit IP), if one wants to go to the trouble of sifting through the edits. i burned myself out on that facility long ago, as with all editing there. my experienced opinion is that repairing wikipedia errors has the opposite result overall, just as socialism breeds more of what it claims to solve. washed my hands of the project and its abysmal administration years ago. now i'm simply regularly appalled that so few people have caught on.
good time — amid the blah blah about the "murdered" philly pig and supposedly related beatings of dwayne dyches, brian hall, and pete hopkins — to remind everyone that being a cop is hardly among the deadliest jobs in the US, even as reported by their filthy criminal brethren in the fedgoon machine.
as one who's stopped regularly and illegally by pigs (WiFi night owl), i've heard plenty of this bullshit about what a dangerous job they supposedly have. hey, pigs: fuck you. check the BLS stats every year, and what will you find? the uniformed violence monopolists don't crack even the top ten of most fatal occupations in the "US". their fatality rate (16.8 per 100,000 in 2006) is basically equal to that of cab drivers and chauffeurs (16.7 per 100,000 in 2006). compare the supposedly uber-dangerous scam of the pigs to the fatality rates of, for example, miscellaneous agricultural workers (21.7), roofers (33.9), garbage collectors (41.8), loggers (82.1), aircraft pilots and flight engineers (87.8), and fishermen (at 141.7, approaching 10x the fatality rate of the uniformed soccer squad).
next time you hear some scumbag sanctimonious pig yapping about how tough he has it, and how much you owe him for being "on the street" ripping you off (systematically and computer-like) before the non-uniformed thugs have their way, tell him to go to bls.gov and suck your non-delusional cock.
a few nights ago one of the uniformed assholes told me that a byproduct of their roving patrols of parking lots is that i also am safer. i pointed at my passenger seat and explained that the only reason i don't have a gun there regularly, as i used to when in "their" state, is because the biggest threat to me statistically is an overreacting cop; therefore, i am less safe with their behavior, since when alone in the parking lot (most of the time) i am, via coercive de facto disarmament, more vulnerable if attacked.
pigs make the world safe for pigs — rule number one, heard directly from a shift supervisor's yapper a couple of month's ago. their #1 priority is to return home safe at night, not follow the law or protect those they supposedly swore to protect.
[...] Following the slaying of Liczbinski, who was shot at least five times by a high-powered rifle, city and state officials called on Congress Thursday to reinstate a ban on assault weapons.
haven't been writing about cop stops, but they've continued. another one 15 minutes ago.
this one stuck around to talk, waving off the usual backup attempt, and i was spewing political theory (shocker). after explaining that he's on the pointy end of the spear of a violence monopoly (he took that surprisingly well, and quickly offered one of the better attempted refutations), i told him that resistance to power-seeking advances is the job of the victims, and that modern americans have failed. for example, i asked, how many people has he run into before me who refused to produce "ID" on request/demand (99% of cops imply that it's a demand)? answer, far as he recalled off the top of his head: zero.
wake up, pussies. if there's no resistance, there's no liberty — very simple, historically proven equation of life for humans. trusting anyone in a position of coercive power remains deeply ignoble. that didn't change in 2001, creeps.
Defense attorneys would be banned from advertising their expertise with drunken driving cases under a bill advancing in the Senate.
Sen. Rosalind Kurita, a Clarksville Democrat, successfully added the provision to a bill that would create an online registry of repeat DUI offenders in Tennessee.
Kurita says officials have a hard enough time convicting drunken drivers without lawyers advertising their expertise in the field and offering discounts to DUI defendants. [...]
lawrence taylor:
In another article appearing hours later, Senator Kurita explained her reasoning: “Kurita said she pushed for the amendment because she was tired of suspected DUI offenders not being convicted.”
Imagine that: A citizen accused of a crime who is not convicted. [...]
is this site negative? not fundamentally. here's an explanation. some people are able to fight negative forces with a positive attitude. i'm not usually one of them. the point is that i would love to be positive. may i?
[my email address isn't offered freely, because i don't want to hear from you. you're the lawyer for someone who croaked and left me $5M? still don't want to hear from you. and yeah, that means you too. like one of my articles? don't like one of my articles? don't care. old friend who wants to get together and reminisce? do it without me; don't want to hear from you.]
What I Believe
i do not own other people. i have no right to "vote" to run their lives. i may not inflict myself on anyone. voluntary interaction is a wonderful thing; when i see people lining up to buy ice cream from a neighborhood entrepreneur, i smile. my smile doesn't lessen just because the company gets bigger.
the state is evil. its members prohibit and crush voluntary human cooperation in the name of humanity. they are a lie. those who link themselves to the state are evil. those who worship and tie their happiness and livelihood to it enable most of life's misery. most people are brainwashed by the state through constant exposure and are unable to see liberty as anything good. to get around this problem in america, the state — official crime syndicate — merely changes the definition of liberty, raping the word's meaning while wringing from it the last part of positive association. "liberty" in america now means control by violence monopolists — the mafia with a twist (piety and flags).
any proposal that involves one man inflicting himself on another, taking his property, or otherwise demonstrating through aggression that his life is more important, must be opposed. to neglect that fight is to succumb to hate and surrender to inferiors. there are men who mean to be your masters. what does that make you if they succeed? a patriot?
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."
~Lysander Spooner, 1870
"I have ceased to regard Federal America as my country, sir. I lost my nationality at Appomattox."
~vampire Edgar Poe, 1918 — The Bloody Red Baron
"If it is really necessary for Congress to force (that is what legislation is about) food makers to confess that they use eggs or peanuts or whatever, in order to prevent people from dying who would otherwise croak on a crumb, if it is really essential that the coercive apparatus of the state, which George Washington compared to a fire and the whole liberal intellectual tradition warns is up to no good, be used, if this is really necessary, then there is no case for freedom at all. If government needs to do this, it needs to do everything. If the market fails here, it fails everywhere, and we need the total state."
~Lew Rockwell, 2003
"Freedom and honor! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honor. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German â it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of 'freedom and honor of the German nation' throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew. The name of Germany is dishonored for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, and atone, smash its tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit."
~The White Rose, 1943
"It is not difficult to discern that the practical man in social reform is the same animal as the practical man in every other department of human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the practical man wherever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think."
~Hilaire Belloc, 1913
"In the end, we don't need to prove the superiority of consequence of living free. Coercionists need to prove they have the Right — not the 'authority' — to cause us to live otherwise."
~NTA, 2007
"I find adherence to fantasy troubling and unreasonable."
~Tojamura, late 1900s
"The older I get, the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology."
~Henry Mencken, according to Alistair Cooke, according to George the Pill
