Magic Under The Lights

Imagine walking at night in near-total darkness on an abandoned city side-street
Straight into a forest
Where trees are a hundred feet tall
The grass is trimmed neatly
And each tree is covered in points of light right up to the top of the canopy 

That was the perspective from the eyes of #4 last week-end.  If this does not qualify as a magical experience for a child, I don't know what would.

Click the image to see it supersized, hit escape to close the image window.  Better yet, right-click the image and "view image" then click it again to see it full-size (I left it at 1600 pixels wide so it should cover your entire screen)

I'm A Tool

Is a hammer self-aware? Well, I am.

I normally wait until my gas tank is at about 25 pounds before filling up, but this morning I was going to get gas anyhow, with a good 50 pounds on board. This is highly irregular.

I normally don't take pictures of my car for a few reasons, and I never enter photo contests. I always leave my camera at work. Today I found out at lunch time that there is a photo contest for pictures of cars at gas stations. I grabbed my backup camera "on a whim" as I left work. This is very highly irregular.

Normally I like to spend maximum-possible time at home and leave right at closing time. Today I spent a few extra minutes shooting the breeze/talking business after work and thought it good to call my Darling Wife and let her know I'd be late getting home. This is irregular.

At the filling station, I made a few photos of my car and took longer than usual, which lead to . . .

The car wouldn't start. At ALL. I missed the first ignition and flooded it, and usually I can give it gas pedal and crank for a few seconds and it will fire up. This time it was cranking for like a minute, with a break in the middle to go poke under the hood and see nothing obviously wrong. This is highly irregular - my car has maybe ten times EVER not started properly in twelve years.

I figured I would be at the gas station for a while, so I went to push the car away from the pump. I didn't want to tie up their moneymaking machine until the Hot Rod was fixed. I had parked a little forward of the pump so looking out of the door meant looking at the pump. The Hot Rod sits low, and I could see under the control panel of the fuel dispenser. Someone in a higher car or truck/van, or someone with a car with the seating position a few inches higher would have missed what I found.

Under the control panel on this type of gasoline dispenser is a metal cover with a lock to control access to the guts of the machine. In that lock was a key. The key to the gas pump was IN the gas pump. This is a Very Bad Thing for a lot of reasons.

I pushed the Hot Rod back into a parking spot. I was glad of a little pushing buddy assist from Random Strangerman who stopped his truck beside the car and left the little lady in the passenger seat while he pushed for a moment. I walked back to the dispenser and took the key and went into the store.

VFD: (holding out hand with open palm toward clerk, showing her the key)
Clerk: What is that, for you or for somebody here or ???
VFD: I don't know, but I don't think it should have been left in [pump] #10.
Clerk: (Surprised look)
VFD: Just a guess.
Clerk (happily receives key and has suspicious look around at her co-workers)

I walked outside and phoned my Darling Wife and told her I'd be even later than I thought. I speculated to her that maybe the reason the car wouldn't start was so I would find that key. I told her I'd be there for a while until the car cooled down, thinking it wouldn't start because something in the engine was too hot to work quite right. Then I thought maybe the car would start since the key was found. I said a quick prayer and turned the key - and the car started normally without any hesitation.

********

An evolutionist will try to tell you this is all random chance. I say God used me to get that key into the Clerk's hand this evening. What say you?

Application for Waste Services! Film at 11:00!

Bad language alert. Turn back now lest thy delicate sensibilities be offended!

Nice. We just got a letter in the mails from the city (my the city) saying we have to use their trash service.

Hold on there.

We bought our house in 2003. It was in an unincorporated part of the county. When we got the house, we entered into individual private contracts with various companies to provide us with what we needed (electricity, water, etc) and asked nobody permission to do so. In Texas, you can even pick your electricity provider. But in Davesville, you get to use the company the city decides is best, when it comes to your trash. This was not an issue for us, as we were not a part of Davesville. Then in 2008, against our will and over the objections of a minority of the property owners around us, we were annexed into Davesville. We had, to date, used exactly zero city services at our house. Thanks very much citizen! You may continue to use zero city services, but we will now be charging you an additional $600+ per year in taxes for the privilege of living within the expanded boundaries of Davesville!

Thanks, asshole.

Anyways, back to the pain-in-my-ass at hand. Three years ago, my street had two flavors of trash cans on the street: bigass blue and bigass green. These were provided by two private companies that sent bigass trash trucks lumbering down the street twice a week to pick up the bigass trash cans the people would roll out to the curb. Then the city of Davesville came along and annexed us. Now once a week there are TWO BIGASS TRASH CANS at the curb in front of every house. There's a green one for trash and a blue one for recycling. The other six days of the week, there are two bigass trash cans cluttering up the front or side of every house. Well, not every house. OUR house and one across the street are the only two that still feature only the one bigass blue trash can. These are hauled to the curb as often as TWICE a week. Sometimes I even SKIP a trash day, because I get service twice a week BOOYAH!

Well, now we have this letter. It says (to paraphrase): "Our records indicate that you people have chosen to use a private company of your own choosing to collect your trash. This is unacceptable comerades! You vill use zee State-approved garbage company only!"

We now have the privilege of filling out an application for a Waste Utility Account with the City. We have the distinct honor of filing a $25 deposit with Davesville in case we (who have not missed a trash payment in going on eight years) turn out to be deadbeats. We also get to use this joyous occasion to provide Davesville officials with a "Copy of Valid Identification" along with our application for a solid waste account, to prove that we are not a bunch of godless heathen illegal aliens from France or whatnot.

So here I am venting my spleen at you (as usual) before I write up a nastygram to Davesville about what they can do with their bigass blue and green trash cans. Follows the letter I would like to send. It will be toned-down somewhat in the final draft.

********

Dear faceless City of Davesville bureaucrat,

I am in receipt of an undated form letter from the City of Davesville informing me that I must desist using the company I have used for the last eight years for solid waste disposal, and begin using a company chosen by the City. This is a sack of horseshit and I'll tell you why:

Requiring me to pay my money to use the services of a company you choose is FASCISM. Google "sic semper tyrannis" to see what red-blooded freemen think of this sort of thing.

You can take your application for a waste utility account and shove it. If you to have your people send their bigass trash cans to my house and have their trucks pick up my trash, bring it. I'm not applying for shit. I live here. Send them here. I will pay them.

While you're shoving things, take your recycling bin and shove that, too. Like hell I'm going to presort my recyclables from my trash. It all goes into the same bin inside the house and it will all be going in the same bin outside the house.

If you want photo identification, you can call and set up an appointment and I'll show it to you. You're on the wrong track if you think I'm sending a copy of my drivers license to an unknown place with unknown ID security protocols to be shoved in an unlocked drawer in some office. Of course, this is a bullshit requirement anyway. I am a citizen both of Texas and of the United States and have been since birth. I have lived here for eight years and never missed paying a trash company bill. Send the bills and they will be paid.

The bill that won't be paid is the $25 deposit. See the foregoing paragraph and take my fucking word for it that I'm not going to welsh on my trash bills. I refuse to pay extra, up front, for the privilege of being forced to change my trash company. You want to change companies, fine I don't give a flying fuck but you can keep out of my wallet. Send bills, and send trash trucks. What is $25 going to get you? Nothing is what, because I'll still be here, paying trash bills, a year from now and you'll eventually refund my deposit to me if I pay it. Will I have interest coming to me? Are you going to give me $5 for the honor of holding my cash for a year? No? Then fuck off. Oh wait, you'll waive the deposit if I set up an automatic bank draft to pay the bill? How generous of you! How about you'll waive it anyway.

P.S. like hell am I giving you a work or cell phone number, and you'll have to start guessing if you want my email address. I'll be putting my trash bin out twice a week like I do currently, even though it will only be picked up once, just to piss everybody off. The recycle bin you will find beside the house with a potato plant growing in it. Please don't mess with it until the plant dies.

Here's hoping your office burns down.

Sincerely,

VFD.

********

It's actually cheaper than the current service we use, but that's not the point. It's the principal of the thing.

Throttle Should Be A Cable.

In automobiles:

Throttle should be a cable or a linkage.

Brakes should be hydraulic.

Steering should be mechanical.

Shifters should be a cable or a linkage.

Lights should be wires and relays.

The radio should have a dedicated volume knob.

Always. Anything beyond these is a step into the Realm of Bad Ideas.

oh, and one more:

The default failure mode when sh*t goes haywire should NOT be "Uncontrolled Full-Throttle Acceleration You Can't Do Anything About No Matter What You Try Including Turning Off The Ignition, Shifting to Reverse, and Standing on the Brakes.

********

I always thought that drive-by-wire was a [deleted] stupid idea. When I heard of commercial passenger aircraft going to fly-by-wire instead of direct hydraulic controls, I got a case of the creeping willies. Airplanes go through ridonculous amounts of safety testing. Cars are, by comparison, a very slapdash affair. Just ask this guy, who used to design Fords, and would never buy one.

How To Wear A Boonie Hat

Tips For Comfortable Wear of a Boonie Hat

Most of the complaints about a boonie hat are related to the annoying retention strap string, the leather brake on it, or the width of the band. Here are my comments on these potential sources of irritation, at least party illuminated by the practices of one of my brothers-in-arms who spent some time in places he never visited, depending on whom you ask about where he was at the time.

Note: under most reasonable conditions, a boonie hat which fits will stay on your head. Boonie hats were not made to be worn by persons operating in reasonable conditions.

There are a lot of modifications you can make to a standard-issue boonie hat. Some companies have "improved" upon the original design. Installing double bands for holding camo on the head, maybe I can go along with, but it would make the hat hotter to wear. Velcro patches and interior document pouches, the same thing. But when you go changing the string, you're asking for trouble. A removable string will get lost. Not might, will. The plastic sliding adjuster like on your ski jacket WILL break. Narrowing the brim defeats the purpose of having one.

What to do with the retention strap: (hint - the last is the best)

Wear it loose, behind the head, for retention from rear. This keeps the hat from blowing away completely when you catch a tailwind or updraft from the rear. Look down when you go through the downdraft from a helicopter's rotor. The string flopping around back there will eventually get under your collar (as shown) and irritate the back of your neck, even if you have a high, close-fitting collar. Worst case is that the hat could snag your weapon when you really needed both the hat and the weapon where you planned for them to be.





Wear it loose, in front of the head, so it looks like a necklace. This is good if you are constantly facing into the wind. Remember to pull the hat off before unassing a helicopter. If you catch a tailwind the hat is gone. If you catch a snag, it could be a garrote. If you tighten it under the chin, it is a hassle to put on and off, and we all know how uncomfortable a tight chin strap gets.





Wear it tied up over the top of the hat. Look like a cowboy, and get sunburned ears. Lose the hat with any sort of wind, or if anything at all snags on the hat ("wait-a-minute" vines, branches, briars, etc).





Wear it over the head, under the hat. Unless the hat is WAY too big, this will be very uncomfortable. Murphy says it will eventually fall out right when you needed it to stay in place

Worse yet: Cut the dam' thing off! This is a bad move. The strap is useful.





Be like VFD:



Be like VFD: Tie a knot in the strap, at the back of the head. Done properly, this will prevent your hat blowing off in even a very stiff wind. It needs a special flip of the wrist to put the hat on, but when you have the hang of it it is just as fast as not having a string. You will know the knot is tied properly when there is just a little pressure from the string against the bottom of the occipital bone (the bulge at the back of your head). This is not any more uncomfortable than wearing clothes in the first place. The little "tail" sticking out of the knot does rub the back of the head and neck (a little, sometimes), but mostly it stays outside your shirt's collar. The best part is, you have to be trying to pull the hat off (hint: pull up on the brim in front).


What to do with the stupid-wide brim:
I really fail to see why this is a problem. I prefer the wide brim on my boonie hats, for all the reasons they were specified on the headgear in the first place. The boonie hat is a universal umbrella and sunshade, and it helps dissipate the "hey look there's a guy over there" human-head-recognition factor. If you can't see, there is one super-easy thing to do:

Tilt the hat on your head. Tilt it forward to block a rising or setting sun. Tilt it back to clear your upward peripheral vision. Tilt it sideways to block sidelong illumination sources.

Cutting the brim means you will have to tilt it to an extreme amount if you are looking at something backlit by a low rising or setting sun. Not cutting the brim means you have to tilt the hat or your head a little bit to get the brim up. If you need to look straight up at something, look up already.

Photography: Photographing Inside Rifle & Long Gun Bores (and Pistols)

This type of photography is a pain in the ... if you have the proper equipment. If you do not have the proper equipment it is right next to impossible. This article is intended as a guide for those with less-than-ideal photography setups.

To prevent you wanting to use the rifle on your camera instead, you want to have, at least:

Bore light / itty bitty teensy flashlight

Camera with manual focus

Also nice to have:

Tripod

Camera with full manual controls

A lens that can zoom in and/or otherwise provide for a DEEP focal plane

Good (bright, tungsten halogen) ambient lighting

Uncluttered background

Initial Note: I consider a half-decent photograph of the inside of a rifle's barrel to show you ALL of the following:

The first few centimeters (to inches, depending on caliber) of rifling

Condition of the muzzle's crown

Condition of the very end of the outside of the barrel

This is a marginally-acceptable muzzle end bore photograph


And here is a marginally-acceptable chamber-end bore photograph


One thing you notice right away is that these bores are orange, and that is due to the orange bore light I was working with that day. A white bore light would be highly preferred to one that has ANY color. Note that an otherwise good photo to some extent mitigates the badness of having a severe color in the bore. Keep that in mind as you scroll down, taking note of the difference in those pictures taken with blue/violet lights. Photoshop can eliminate the color your light puts out, but if you don't know what you're doing, that can start to look inauthentic or "just wrong somehow" in a hurry.

First rule of bore photography: have decent lighting and that means a bore light.

No bore light: awfully hard to see what's going on in there!!


You don't have to use a purpose-made bore light. It can be pretty much any light source, as long as you can get enough light into the barrel. A purpose-made bore light however will have the advantage of not blinding you and your camera with extraneous light outside the barrel. Your bore light should be either adjustable or fairly bright. If it is adjustable, your job is that much easier: If it's too bright, just turn it down . When your light is not adjustable, you have to improvise. When it is too bright, you can either tilt the light source relative to the bore's axis:


OR separate the light from the bore by whatever distance is required


Okay, but why does the brightness have to be turned down? Don't you want bright lights?

Yes you do, and if your bore is badly rusted, pitted, or otherwise not mirror-bright, you will need as much light going in as you can muster, just to see it out the other end.

Why wouldn't you be able to see it? Aren't you looking right at the light? How could you not see it?

You don't want to look right at the light because you won't be able to tell what you're looking at in a photograph. Your eye can do all sorts of amazing things with its own lens, but a still photo does NOT convey the information you can see in a half-second with your unaided eye in person. This is what happens when you try to shoot a photo straight down the bore:


The blue is the measuring tape holding up the bore light (scroll up if you missed it). This is a view straight down the bore of our subject rifle, and out the other side. The brightness is useable, but unless your depth of focus is several INCHES, all you get is one spot of focus in several tens of inches of subject matter. Not very useful. If you did have a super-dee-uper lens, it's still not useful. All you would see is a bunch of spiraling lines really close together. Once again, not very useful.

But all you want to show is the muzzle end, you say? Okay, then suit yourself! Shoot straight down the bore axis and focus on the crown. How much better is this?



Hint: not very.

Angle the camera a little and you get this, which is MUCH better:


Okay, so we're at an angle. But don't you want a really bright light?

Unless you like wash-out, no, you don't. Unless you have a camera with full manual controls AND decent range of adjustment, you'll get this when your light is too bright:


But all you want is to show the rifling! just speed up the shutter to cut down the glare right?

Tell me, is this


better than this?


No? Then back off or dim your light. Then you use your third hand to operate the camera. Or if you are a normal human with only 2 hands, try setting things up so you don't have to use both your hands on the setup. Leave the light where you don't have to hold it. Prop it on something or lay it so it works for your shot.



If your muzzle is not sitting high enough off the surface the gun rests on, you won't be able to look down its bore. No problem. do you have anything interesting-looking laying around you might use as a muzzle prop? I do:


Now on to the camera. If you don't have manual controls for focus but your camera DOES have a half-click on the shutter button which allows you to focus before capturing the image, you can set something next to the subject at the proper focal depth, focus on that, move the camera to look at your subject, then shoot. Almost anything can be used for a focusing target, but if it stands up at a 90 degree angle relative to your subject (in this case vertical), is flat, and has high contrast, it will be easier to pull off the shot. If you don't have manual shutter speed control, setting up your lighting intensity and angle is CRITICAL to getting good exposure. If you don't have manual aperture control, you're stuck, but once again setup is KEY to a good shot. If you can adjust the aperture, crank it as small as it gets to try to get a little more depth of field in focus. For a point and shoot camera with NO controls, a good bet is to back off as far as you can (here's where the tripod comes in especially handy) and zoom in as much as possible, which tends to increase the depth of field at the expense of angle of view.

If your camera really stinks, lighting is that much more important, as you will have guessed by now. Ambient lighting that dims or brightens to suit your need can be a real help. This is something you will have to experiment with.

Sometimes you can't have it all in one photograph. Note in this series, how different lighting yields VASTLY different results. At first glance, this old Marlin looks worn, but okay. A rusty bore looks like nothing much from a shallow angle with a flash AND a bore light, or with just the (violet) bore light, but give it a steeper angle and only a flash, and the rust POPS out at you.



That's another thing: rust. If you are trying to play to a gun's strengths, dont use a flash if you can avoid it. A flash highlights rust and other surface flaws like a Hi-Liter. Don't conceal a gun's condition by light trickery if you (like me) are trying to sell it, because that's dirty pool. But don't break a sale by showing the gun in its worst possible light. Your goal for a photograph to help a sale should be an image that approximates what your buyer would see in person, with reasonable ambient and bore lights available. If there is noteworthy rust but your images don't show it, remember to make a note of rust in your description. Heavy rust is often a deal-killer. In most cases, I prefer to show heavy rust even if it takes a flash or some other trickery to do it. If you do end up with rust that looks worse in a picture than in person, I say you're justified in using Photoshop to reduce it.

It may be of some use to note that an adjustable-intensity flash may change color temperature as you turn it brighter or more dim. You will have to experiment with your equipment to find this out for yourself. If it turns yellow when you turn the flash down, that will bring the rust out even more. You might be able to adjust ambient lighting to mitigate this effect somewhat, but you may just have to back away, zoom in, and turn the flash back up. The other thing you can do to compensate for the colors imparted by a yellow flash, is speed and stop up the lens. F2.8/ and 1/60 second is a default flash-is-on setting on one of my cameras regardless of flash intensity. Stop that aperture to F8 and speed up to 1/125 second and the yellow magically disappears (along with some other, potentially interesting details in the image). If you are getting the idea that a lot of experimentation may be in order for you to find the right camera and lighting settings, you are right.

Note: sometimes zooming out gives a much more interesting photograph, as well as conveying more information about a gun's material condition. Consider how many words you can eliminate with this one shot:


Sometimes you can't win for losing. Here's a micro-uzi with a frikken BEAUTIFUL bore. When you go look in this barrel with your eye, you will appreciate it in an instant. Shooting a photo of it was a bit confusing, until I realized that the lines coming out in the photos are actually reflections


The Uzi's bore is so mirror-bright that it reflects itself back to itself repeatedly. This looks strange, so once again you will want to make a note of it in whatever text accompanies the photographs. Turning the light down reduces the reflections, but to eliminate them outright you need darkness, which is not helpful for taking photographs inside a hole.

Sometimes you will have some funky texture in the bore. I find that a different angle can be useful. You can't see very far down a narrow bore at a larger angle, but you can definitely show a prospective new owner just what he needs to know (in this case, pitted rifling):


That goes for bad, as well as good:


If you want to photograph a shotgun barrel, good luck. If it's mirror-bright, all you get is glare.


. . . and if it's not, it looks worse


You have already seen some handgun barrels in the mix, but not any specific commentary about shooting photographs of a handgun's bore. The reason is that handguns present all the same challenges, but they are much easier to deal with than on a long gun.

In the list of nice things to have, I included an uncluttered background. This one is just a "nice to have" but think: do you really want a distracting floral print taking eyes off your new masterpiece?

A note on shooting the chamber, instead of the rifling: Good luck. Most of the tips I have given for rifling photos will not help much with chamber shots. You can't illuminate from the muzzle because there will usually be long shadows cast by the shoulder in the chamber. So it's bright direct lighting or none. You'll have to play with your flash a lot. If you had a ring flash around your lens it would help. If you have a separate light shining from close to stright-on, and shoot at a bit of an angle you might be able to pull it off. That's a deep hole to illuminate well. Unless you are a) far away and zooming in a lot or b) shooting straight-in (you wouldn't do that, would you?), any lighting not directly beside your lens is likely to wash out the breech face and not reach all the way to the end of a chamber, especially long chambers in higher-powered rifles. That said, unless you are concerned with showing damage, or showing off your madd photo skillz yo!, chamber shots may not be as important to a sale as rifling shots. Chamber problems may be fixable by a competent gunsmith; rifling problems, not so much.

The last tip I'll give you is to experiment as much as you can in the time you have available for photography. You will be surprised how much difference you can find in just a few degrees' difference in relative angles when you move your camera, lighting, or subject. Play with the manual controls on your camera. Adjust your lights. Try shooting freehand or on a tripod. If all else fails, take a break and come back. You may think of something while you are downing your triple mocha latte venti with a twist of pistachio (or whatever).

[Update 02/09/2011:]

This article was intended for beginners with low-end cameras, and a few more notes may be useful for a somewhat more-advanced photographer or one with better equipment. Here are a few notes from the same author/photographer, a couple of years farther down the road:

It turns out to be a big help to have a diffuse light source, go figure. I slapped a bit of scotch tape over the end of my little baby LED light. That turned it into a source of diffuse light, from the glare-O-matic it was before:



The resulting bore shots in a smooth shotgun bore (worst case) are somewhat less-bad than before. I have a feeling a 3/4" diameter translucent white ball on the end of the light would be as good as it gets for lighting a shotgun bore from the "other" end.



When using even an intensely-colored bore light, also using the flash and proper camera settings can yield good results. The colors surprisingly disappeared without having to do anything in Photoshop - the bore light in the following shots is the same violet light as before. This is what I got with a the aperture as small (F8) and the shutter as fast (1/2000sec) as possible. The camera was as close to the muzzle as the on-body flash would allow, which did fun things with the angle of the light from the flash, and was braced against the edge of the table. The background is moderately bright (around 500FC) near the muzzle, and it's by far the brightest shooting area in the house with hot spots around 1000FC. The background came out DARK, that's how much I used the camera's manual controls to crank down on the light input to the camera with these shots.



[/Update]

Moral of the story:

Shooting guns is fun, with bullets. Shooting guns with cameras can be frustrating. I don't claim to be the best photographer out there, and my equipment is a far cry from the best, but I hope this article is of some help to you.

Note for the safety commandos: it should be obvious from the fact that a light is shining through the barrel that the weapons in these images were unloaded when they were taken. Don't hassle me about Rule 1 and 2 violations thanks.

Originally posted 06/23/2009, updated 02/09/2011

First Principles: The Rights To Life and Property

Prologue:

First, let us get one thing straight: rights belong to people only, and are against other people, organizations, and governmental entities. The only natural and just limit on your rights are the rights of other people. If you begin to violate my rights, you have overstepped the just exercise of your rights. Governments and corporations have no rights of their own. They may be granted privileges, and they may receive special legal standing, but these are not rights.

Rights belong only to people, and they are both inherent and immutable. A man may give up the exercise of his rights, but he cannot give up his rights. The alternatives may be grim indeed, but no one can force a person not convicted of any crime to abandon his rights.

********

Your life is not your own, but it belongs to God. Genesis teaches us that man only came to life when God put his breath into man. The state and a corporation did not give you life. Unless you waive it, you have to the right to be the sole caretaker of your own life. You may live under a tyrant whose regime takes your life but has no right to it. You may commit a crime so severe that the law states you must be killed for it, but that crime you committed was voluntary.

You are the only one with a right to say whether you live or die.

If you have not been born yet, that does not give your mother the right to kill you. If you are inconvenient to her, she should have kept her legs crossed. If your existence causes her mental anguish because of the conditions of your conception or the identity of your sperm donor, she does not have the right to kill you, any more than a neo-nazi has a right to kill a jew whose mere existence offends the neo-nazi. In extremely rare instances, a child being borne to term would pose a hazard to the continued life of the mother. In such a case, with prayer and much consideration, that woman and she alone has the right to choose whose life will persist.

If you are deathly ill and your life is only extended by the intervention of doctors with machines and medications without which you would surely die, and you demand the removal of the intervention, that is not suicide. That is allowing nature to take its course. The State, your family, and your doctor, have no right to prevent your allowing yourself to die. Cutting your own life short is another matter. If you would live even a day longer, you should not take your own life. Your doctor says you have 2 months to live, and those months will be painful? Get a prescription from a pain management doctor and live out the life that was given to you (and is, remember, not your own).

If you have made it through that, you may find the rest of my arguments easier to agree with, so keep reading.

The right to life is fundamental to your other rights. Because you have a right to life, you also have a derivative right to sustain your life by whatever means you can find, so long as your means do not infringe on the rights of others. That means you have a right to work at a job for which you are qualified as long as your employer is willing to give you the job. When you go to work, you have the right to enforce your employment agreement against your employer and demand the wages which are your due. Another way to say it is, you have a right to wages you have legitimately earned for yourself.

Compensation at a job these days mostly means some form of currency (dollars) are given to you in consideration of your having given an employer your time and/or services. To rephrase the foregoing, you have a right to trade hours out of your lifespan for money. Those hours were yours to trade because your life is yours to care for. It is not illogical or improper to say then that your money is a converted form of time you took away from doing something else in your life while you worked for your employer.

Your money is your life, converted into a medium of exchange so that you may more easily acquire things necessary to the maintenance of your life.

It is entirely beside the point to ask how much money you make. You and your employer both consider that your wages and your time are traded at a fair rate. Everyone else in the world can feel free to take a long walk off a short pier if they think you are being given too much - or too little - media of exchange (money) for your life.

I will take you one step further and then we will be through for now.

You have a right to your money. Unless you consent to it, nobody else has a right to your money, any more than they have a right to your life. Because you have an absolute right to your money, you have the right to buy with it what you wish. We have seen that your money is a different form of your life, and here we go one step further. What you buy with your money is a converted form of your money. Therefore:

The things you purchase are a converted form of your life, and all the ways you may defend your own life may be legitimately used to defend your

Property.

Hold on there.

Did I just say I am in favor of killing people for petty theft? No.

If someone offers you a minor threat to your life, such as a simple assault, it may be that you decide the threat to your life is not worth answering with lethal force. Perhaps all that is required to preserve yourself is a gentle word to sooth someone's anger. It should be obvious that you should not reach for the shotgun in every circumstance where some other person's desire bumps into your rights! It should also be apparent that in almost every case, the only person with a right to decide what level of force is an appropriate response is the individual who has been threatened.

Let us suppose that you knew that you would die exactly one year from today. If someone tried to kill you today, would you quietly allow them to cut your life short by one year? Let us suppose that you are driving a car that cost you a full year's wages to purchase. That car, in a very real sense, IS one year of your productive life. Would you allow some car thief to take it? The answers to both of those questions, if you are honest with yourself and following my logic, should be the same. Perhaps you would allow someone to steal a year of your life. I think I would not, if I could prevent them, and that goes all the way to the extreme of being willing to end their life for their attempt to take mine.

Is it "worth it" to kill someone over a car? A computer? A pair of shoes? You are the only person with the right to decide for yourself how much of your life is worth the rest of a theif's life. I submit for your consideration that the life of someone who makes his living by stealing little pieces of others' lives, is worth as close to nothing as can be, if you insist that they must have some value. It could also be said that such a one is a net drain on society, and the value of his life is negative. I won't go so fare as to say we should kill all career criminals outright for the general good of society - though some people might - but if we would keep them safely locked away from the good people of the world, we would all be much better off.

Pain Free by Pete Egoscue

I used to wake up with a knife in my left knee. Now, it only gives me a twinge when I do something really dumb. For a while, every few weeks I would get a crick in my neck that would not go away. Now it's gone for good.

Yesterday my Darling Wife's back was hurting to the point that she could not live a normal life anymore. As I predicted she would, she finally broke down and asked me to go through the routine described in Pain Free for her back pain. We did the e-cises for knees that are rotated inward.

Hold on there.

Knees for back pain? Yes. If you read Pain Free, you will know why.

At any rate, last night was a typical result. After only one session of the zero-impact, no/low effort therapy laid out in Pain Free, her sciatic nerve is un-pinched and the only pain is residual from low-back muscles that are sore from cramping (seizing) trying to keep her from falling over sideways.

If your bones hurt for any reason. If your muscles hurt for any reason. If you have strange unexplainable pain and doctors are starting to throw around terms like "cortisone injections" "thousand dollar joint braces" and "surgery" then do yourself a favor and spend $15 on this book. You don't have to live with a stiff neck, sore knees, or bulging or herniated vertebral discs. You probably don't need to spend $400 on an orthotic shoe insert.

Don't be so stubborn. You know it's something simple the doctors are missing (or would, if you would go to a doctor). Get Pain Free.

If you absolutely insist on "being seen" you have that option as well. Heck, it's even expensive so you don't have to feel like you took the cheapskate route. Go to the Find a Clinic webpage at www.egoscue.com and see which of their 24 Egoscue Clinics is nearest you!

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Yes it's a sales pitch. No, I have no dog in this fight. I derive no benefit of any sort if you buy a copy of Pain Free or visit one of the Egoscue Clinics.

I just want you to stop living in pain.

Don't you?