jc blog - tales of a modern-day nomadic hunter-gatherer

Follow jcomeau_ictx on Twitter This is the weblog of Intrepid Wanderer. You never know what you might find here; graphic descriptions of bodily functions, computer programming secrets, proselytizing for the antichrist, miscellaneous ranting and kvetching, valuable information on living off the land... if you don't share my rather weird interests you may want to try slashdot instead.

You can consider my Del.icio.us links an extension to my blog, as are my LifeTango goals and my other to-do items. My to-buy list is also public, but only for sharing any useful ideas that might be there; I'm not requesting charity, neither do I offer it.

You can find me easily in google searches, as jcomeau, jcomeau_ictx, or jcomeauictx. There are lots of other jcomeaus, but AFAIK I'm the only jcomeau_ictx out there so far.

If you want to comment on anything you see here, try the new Facebook comments, reachable by clicking the "[comment]" link at the end of each post. If for some reason that isn't working, go ahead and email me, jc.unternet.net. You know what to do with the first dot. Make the 'subject' line something reasonably intelligent-looking or it goes plunk! into the spambasket unread.

This RSS feed may or may not work. Haven't fiddled with it in forever. RSS Feed


2011-10-27-1627Z

Finally spoke with the old guy who hangs out on the bench outside the downtown Starbucks. Howard Mayer is how I heard his name, don't know how it's spelled. He's the one who, I heard, was attacked by a bunch of cops a few weeks ago after someone called the police saying he had a gun (he didn't).

Walking home after my morning jog downtown, I realized why the pledge of allegiance the other night at the city council meeting irked me so much: subjects pledge allegiance to their masters. Our forefathers were subjects of King George, and they didn't throw off his yoke just to put their necks into a new one. We are soveriegn; not the flag, not the "republic", which has been replaced by thinly-disguised plutocracy. If anything, the city council should stand and pledge allegiance to We The People.

While I didn't say the pledge, I stood by reflex, and out of societal programming didn't sit back down until the pledge was over. I'm ashamed of myself for that. Next time I hope I'll have the courage and presence of mind to sit it out. [comment]

2011-10-23-2231Z

Was thinking about travel to the Moon again today; using my exhaled air and urine as "fuel", compressing and/or heating it for maximum thrust. Could also set up a way station in geosynchronous object that I can stop at a few times until I'm ready to go and build a dome over one of the smaller craters. [comment]

2011-10-22-1723Z

Put on two wool sweaters, the first inside-out and the 2nd right-side out. Now every time you take them off (together) you can put them on without inverting them, and the outer one will be right-side-out. [comment]

2011-10-22-1650Z

Bummer. After I thought I had recovered from the "cold", it took a turn for the worse. Holding back the coughing so far. [comment]

2011-10-21-1443Z

Finished my 20-day internal black salve regimen yesterday. Now to try MMS to see if I can cure the phlegm problem I've had for years. [comment]

2011-10-20-0109Z

#OWS is showing the world that the US Government does not have the "consent of the governed", and thus it is unauthorized and should step down. Unfortunately, we don't yet have anything solid with which to replace it.

My throat is mostly back to normal. It was probably an overdose of refined sugar the other day that caused my healthy flora to suffer and the bad stuff in my gut to dominate. Got to watch that crap.

I'm thinking about toning down the profanity in my blog so that I can put Google ads back in. Even though it has historically been only a dollar a month or so, some months when my website gets a lot of hits, the blog might also. I'm missing out on that income. [comment]

2011-10-19-1421Z

As the #Occupy movement unfolds, it will provide a testbed for all the wacky ideas for moving Beyond Civilization we've been mulling over for years. Sure, Burning Man helped in that regard, but that's a very contrived setup. This is real. [comment]

2011-10-17-0555Z

Felt a cold coming on all day today. Hope I kick it soon, this is a bad time to be sick. [comment]

2011-10-16-0101Z

Occupied Petaluma today, hung out with my poster at Putnam Plaza for about an hour (3-ish to 4-ish). No negative comments, but then only the most savagely misanthropic of the top 1% would have objected to my main points. [comment]

2011-10-13-1633Z

Kaiser Permanente in Walnut Creek has signs on every floor of the parking garage extolling the benefits of taking the stairs rather than the elevator. It is annoying and somewhat ironic that the stairs in the hospital itself are locked at each floor, and if you take the wrong exit door at the first floor (which has a misleadingly unlocked entry door), a loud klaxon horn alarm sounds. [comment]

2011-10-13-0615Z

Regarding the guy who allegedly took a San Jose policeman's gun the other day and then got run over by the cop; I got this email from someone who knows him:

This is the story, Jason Evans is mentally ill and the police knows that. They had enough contact with him. Jason is a graduate of San Jose State and lost his mind when he was cut from a pro-football team, lost his job and girlfriend left him. He became homeless until his family found out about and started supporting him. Jason and two other guys were going to play basketball when the police was called for no reason except ___ (you fill in the blank). Jason has never been violent. The first officer on scene was wrong what he tryed to do to Jason, beating him for asking questions.

Make your own judgement, but now you have two sides of the story instead of just one. [comment]

2011-10-12-0144Z

The Moon's page now finally shows the phase correctly; I had to add a unique parameter to the URL just to defeat FaceBook's content cache. I racked my brain for weeks to try and figure out what was happening, and one morning I woke up with the answer. [comment]

2011-10-11-2135Z

"I never ceded my sovereignty". If I go to #OccupyPetaluma, that should be my sign. What does it have to do with the movement? It signifies that I'm protesting the government's arrogation of sovereignty unto itself, thus taking mine away without my permission. I'm protesting the government's spending trillions on wars and corporate bailouts that don't serve We The People, and saddling us with the debt. I'm protesting the thousands of new laws that make illegal things that I do, or would like to do, that don't harm anyone, and that in many cases would make the world a better place. [comment]

2011-10-11-1523Z

Cops slowed down at the crosswalk by McNear's today, but wouldn't stop, and I yelled at them. They thought it was funny. They set a great example for other motorists, NOT.

I'm thinking #OccupyWallStreet is the roaring river, the new current, that Daniel Quinn was talking about in Ishmael. Planning on starting an #OccupyPetaluma today, by posting on Aqus's FaceBook wall.

Finally got my newboot.nasm booting all the way, on Qemu, Bochs, and real hardware. Qemu only shows about the top 1/3 of the screen, though, and Bochs shows black in the top 1/3 and white at the bottom. I added a register dump at each instruction using the trap flag, a visible stack (by placing it in the video hardware's memory map), automatic video mode detection, and ability to boot from a USB drive partition. I'm not going to try and keep up with any more arrayforth releases, just branching it at af-35f-g144a12-PD. I still have to add the serial port initialization, but that can be done in upper RAM, doesn't need to be in the bootblock. And then I can copy the 2nd block into low RAM and use it for mode-switching with the 16-bit code selector I added to the GDT. Then can follow reads and writes using BIOS calls. Some things might not work with this bootblock, I don't have any kind of unit testing.

Can't remember if I mentioned, but INT instructions don't clear the trap flag, as I misunderstood. It only clears it during the interrupt. [comment]

2011-10-10-1649Z

Some recent random ideas in no particular order: have the front end of a bicycle on my HPV so that sitting on the bike makes the front (steering) wheel touch ground and lifts the rear wheels. A skateboard under the rear wheels can also lift them, but not so high as to make the bicycle touch. So it can be controlled from front or back.

Cops, politicians, the richest 1%, all these groups are like individual nations, and within these nations there are tribes. The more a group excludes ideas from outside the group, the more they see themselves as the real people, and others as somewhat subhuman. This is why we see the police brutality, the arrogant patronizing from federal and state government, the callousness from the wealthy. Makes a lot more sense than David Icke's "reptilian" hypothesis, doesn't it?

This is what I finally distilled out of Mayer's They Thought They Were Free. The cure? Radical inclusion. Dialogue. Now to figure out how to make it happen. [comment]

2011-10-08-0538Z

Just finished Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, about the Germans in the 1930s. I was hoping to draw some useful parallels to the present-day United States, and while I was succeeding at first, I became bogged down the the last 2/3rds of the book. Perhaps I should try again someday; the prize could be the ability to see cops as people, the way Mayer saw Nazis as people. [comment]

2011-10-07-0623Z

I'm reading Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, a story of ten average Germans during Nazism. Its lessons clearly apply to present-day USians (from page 56):

So, in the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.

It is actual resistance which worries tyrants, not lack of the few hands required to do the dark work of tyranny. What the Nazis had to gauge was the point at which atrocity would awaken the community to the consciousness of its moral habits. This point may be moved forward as the national emergency, or cold war, is moved forward, and still further forward in hot war. But it remains the point which the tyrant must always approach and never pass. If his calculation is too far behind the people's temper, he faces a palace Putsch; if it is too far ahead, a popular revolution.

The free ebook can be downloaded from kobo books. [comment]

2011-10-05-2054Z

Found this at topix.com today. Finally! Now if someone can set up electronic payments...

Support the Reese Family
For the Headlight
Posted: 10/04/2011 12:00:00 AM MDT

When my wife and I moved to Deming some of the first people we met was the Reese Family. Over the years, we have been to their home many times and they have been to ours.

I used to have the key to their gate so that I could go over and take care of the animals and check the buildings. The Border Patrol also had a key because they use the shooting range.

When we would be gone one of the Reese boys would come over and return the favor. Later, the Reese boys would come and help me with work around my place. When it came time to pay them for their time, they never wanted to accept money.

This is a nice family who have worked hard for many years to build their business. Trying to keep up with all the rules and regulations involved in selling guns is very hard.

Now the government is trying to shut down all gun dealers close to the border. It doesn't seem to matter to government officials how they go about it. They can say anything they want about anyone, have it printed in the news and no proof is required. Meanwhile, the Reese's are in custody and unable to refute what is reported. They have been described as callous people who "knew or should have known" that some of the guns they sold were going across the border. "Knew or should have known?" That statement tells me that the prosecutor doesn't have proof. But they have the family in prison, have frozen all their assets, seized all their property and left them no way to fight back.

These are the same law enforcement agencies who over the years have given us Waco, Ruby Ridge in Idaho where a sniper shot and killed Mrs. Weaver as she stood in the door of her home with her baby in her arms. Last, but not least, they have given us Operation Fast and Furious.

We all have our lives to live and it is only natural to assume that when things like this happen, the people must be guilty. We shrug it off, forget it and go on. We really need to start paying more attention. Don't assume that because you read it in the news, it must be true.

A fund has been opened at First Savings Bank in Deming. Any help for the Reese Defense Fund will be greatly appreciated. The address is: First Savings Bank, 520 S. Gold Avenue, Deming, NM, 88030. Phone: (575)546-2707.

Mark Macy, Deming, New Mexico

[comment]

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