Monthly Archives: September 2004

Busy weekend

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Saturday we went for a hike near Helmer.  Xenia put on her elf ears and her corset and other clothes to make her look like an elf.  Just to bug her I keep telling her she the pointy ears made her look like a Vulcan.  It was a nice walk and I took lots of pictures of my little Vulcan.

Sunday I shot in a Lewiston Pistol Club IPSC match.  The results aren’t out yet but I suspect I won.  I did very well in two stages and “pretty good” in the other two.  Some of my biggest competitors had problems in one or more stages and probably put themselves out of the running.  I took lots of pictures and put them on the web.  In the rifle match I came in last though.  I really need to practice IPSC rifle stuff a LOT more.  I can start by doing dry firing a bunch.  There were a lot of people at the match and it wasn’t organized as well as it could have been and it ran very late.

When I got home from the IPSC match Barb and I went for a walk.  When we came back I started working on cleaning out the garage which I was supposed to do much earlier.  I just barely started when Kim called and said she was coming over to say hi and her friend Spunky wanted to play a game of chess with me.  They came over and I stomped on the poor kid.  He said he couldn’t get very many people to play him and none of them were very good players.  I thought maybe he knew how to play but I knew it was going to be a push over after he made his very first move (he moved his knight to king’s rook three).  As I told Xenia I could only think of about two other moves that would have been worse for a first move.  He was very polite and seemed to be a nice enough kid.  He said it was the first time he had a good game since he played his science teacher.  I told him I was home on weekends and I would be glad to play him again.  If he comes back I’ll give him some pointers after the game.

Xenia and I put finished off getting all recycling stuff to the center then went to a move, Alien vs. Predator.  The best thing about the movie was the line in the preview, “Whoever wins, we loose.”  It wasn’t a bad movie.  It just wasn’t that good.  It wasn’t entirely consistent with the other Alien movies which bugged me some.  But I did like what they did with one female character.  She is putting a pistol in her holster and the lead character in the movie asks, in a disapproving voice, if she thinks she is going to need that (they think they are just going to visit a pyramid site under the Antarctic ice cap).  The woman with the pistol says something like, “I would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.  Just like condoms.”  Very cool. Handguns portrayed as a protective tool.  Of course she does need it – but against the alien beasts and the predators it doesn’t do much good.

Today Barb and I are going for a hike on Kamiak Butte.  Maybe look for a geocache.

British censors ban Land Rover advertisement with a starting pistol

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A few days ago I got on the case of the California lawmakers who were afraid of toy guns.  In the U.K. the repression is so extreme they used the force of law to stop a paid advertisement that displayed the use of a starting pistol.  Apparently they are afraid that people might actually think it is ‘normal’ that some people would own a starting pistol.  They banned the advertisment:

In this advertisement, the starter pistol was used in both an apparent casual manner and just for fun, to signal the start of the man’s journey. The domestic setting, together with the gun simply lying in a drawer, normalised the ownership of guns.

So not only is it against the law to own a firearm but it is against the law to express a viewpoint that it might be normal for people to own a firearm.  Why are those politicians still allowed to breath?  How are they any different than some theocratic country where women aren’t allowed to show their skin and everyone is required to adhere to the same religious tenets?  They are a bunch of repressive tyrants and should be dealt with as such.  I’m increasingly lead to believe we should start pushing the human rights issue with some of our “allies”.

School kids as hostages

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The Islamic extremists are expanding on the activities of earlier this week and last:

Heavily armed insurgents, some with explosives strapped to their bodies, seized a school in southern Russia today and herded scores of schoolchildren and others into its gymnasium.

More than a dozen guerrillas, including men and women, stormed Middle School No. 1 in the town of Beslan in the republic of North Ossetia, not far from Chechnya on Russia’s southern border with Georgia, just moments after the opening of the new school year, according to officials there and news reports.

According to one report:

…the hostage-takers threatened to kill 50 children for each of their number killed and 20 for each wounded.

This reminds me some of the Modoc Indian War.  Barb and have visited Lava Beds National Monument where the war took place several times and each time is just as interesting as the last.  The bit of history that is relevant here is that at one point the Modoc Indians entered into peace negotiations.  They didn’t really understanding how the U.S. Army worked believed that if they killed the “big chief”, the general, the army would just go away.  And so it must be with the Chechnya Islamic extremists.  They apparently just don’t understand what their actions mean to us. 

Probably just as important is that we might really understand them.  As one person in the CIA who worked with psychologists there told me, “Most people don’t realize just how different these people think than we do.”  It wasn’t an appropriate time to follow up on his statement but I would love to do that some time.  Just what can we do to “motivate them” in a manner consistent with our goals?  High velocity lead poisoning works but what other things could we be doing?  One thing is certain, they don’t know how to motivate us in a manner consistent with their goals.  My response would be somewhat along the lines of  “we are going to read up on the methods used on Dresden and it will be one city block containing a mosque for each child injured, one small town and all mosques for each child killed”.