A let­ter I wrote to the Yoshi­noya company:

Today I vis­ited the Yoshi­noya on Wilshire in Los Ange­les, which is located near my apart­ment. To my dis­may, I dis­cov­ered that all of the soy sauce at that loca­tion had been replaced by “lite” soy sauce which adver­tised “50% less sodium.” I can believe the claim, because it didn’t taste very good. Soy sauce is sup­posed to be salty!

If you wish to offer this faux soy sauce as an option for those health food fanat­ics who think they can live for­ever through dietary self-flagellation, that’s fine. But please con­tinue to offer real soy sauce for the rest of us!

Hybrid Mar­i­juana Plant Found in Mex­ico.

Mark Steven­son at Asso­ci­ated Press — there’s a new strain of Cannabis hemp being cul­ti­vated in Mex­ico. It’s her­bi­cide resis­tant, and peren­nial. Hemp has always been annual before, mean­ing you need to grow it from seeds. Now it will grow back from the roots if you cut it off at ground level. Yay! May hemp cover the earth. [claire­files]

[End the War on Free­dom]

Sounds like it would be really hard to get rid of, espe­cially if the roots go very deep. Now, if I were the pro­ducer of this strain or had access to a sup­ply of seeds for it, I would find it pretty amus­ing to spread the seeds around at every gov­ern­ment build­ing and gov­ern­ment employee’s home that I could find–especially those involved in some way with the legal system.

Do you deserve your high school diploma?

What gaps in knowl­edge do col­lege pro­fes­sors notice that their incom­ing fresh­man have? Can you answer these ques­tions bet­ter than the aver­age sev­en­teen to eigh­teen year old?

What was your high school edu­ca­tion worth? Answer these sim­ple ques­tions that the aver­age high school grad­u­ate should know and see if you can pass.

I saw a cou­ple of sub­stan­tial prob­lems with this quiz, both relat­ing to the way scores are given.

My result was, “You paid atten­tion dur­ing 97% of high school!” In point of fact, the cor­rect per­cent­age was prob­a­bly closer to 3%. But more impor­tantly, I’m pretty sure that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of the ques­tions are not cov­ered at all in Amer­i­can high schools.

U.S. Mint bans melt­ing pen­nies, nick­els. Given ris­ing metal prices, the pen­nies and nick­els in your pocket are worth more melted down than their face value — and that has the gov­ern­ment worried.

U.S. Mint offi­cials said Wednes­day they were putting into place rules pro­hibit­ing the melt­ing down of 1-cent and 5-cent coins. The rules also limit the num­ber of coins that can be shipped out of the country.

[…]

A nickel is 25 per­cent nickel and 75 per­cent cop­per. The metal in one coin costs 6.99 cents for each 5-cent coin. When the Mint’s cost of pro­duc­ing the coins is added, the total cost for each nickel is 8.34 cents.

Mod­ern pen­nies have 2.5 per­cent cop­per con­tent with zinc mak­ing up the rest of the coin. The cur­rent cop­per and zinc in a penny are worth 1.12 cents. The cost of pro­duc­tion dri­ves the cost of each penny up to 1.73 cents.

Pen­nies made before 1982, which are still in cir­cu­la­tion, would be even more lucra­tive to melt down because they con­tain 95 per­cent cop­per and only 5 per­cent zinc. The metal value in those coins is 2.13 cents per coin, Mint offi­cials said. [Busi­ness Week]

At this point the profit on each indi­vid­ual coin is so low that you’d have to melt tons of them for it to be worth­while. For ordi­nary peo­ple, this should be con­sid­ered a warn­ing to hold onto all the nick­els and pen­nies you can get for the future, because they’ll only be get­ting more valu­able. For exam­ple, a 1964 quar­ter is now worth over $2, because it was made of silver.

The Gun in the Room. One of the most dif­fi­cult – and essen­tial – chal­lenges faced by lib­er­tar­i­ans is the con­stant need to point out “the gun in the room.” In polit­i­cal debates, it can be very hard to cut through the end­less windy abstrac­tions that are used to cover up the basic fact that the gov­ern­ment uses guns to force peo­ple to do what they do not want to do, or pre­vent them from doing what they do want to do. Lis­ten­ing to non-libertarians, I often wish I had a “euphemism umbrella” to ward off the con­tin­ual oily driz­zle of words and phrases designed to obscure the sim­ple real­ity of state vio­lence. We hear non­stop non­sense about the “social good,” the “redis­tri­b­u­tion of income,” the “edu­ca­tion of chil­dren” and so on – end­less attempts to bury the naked bar­rel of the state in a moun­tain of syrupy metaphors.

[…]

Although lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered a rad­i­cal doc­trine, the pri­mary task of the lib­er­tar­ian is to con­tin­u­ally rein­force the basic real­ity that almost every­one already is a lib­er­tar­ian. If we sim­ply keep ask­ing peo­ple if they are will­ing to shoot oth­ers in order to get their way, we can very quickly con­vince them that lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is not an abstract, rad­i­cal or fringe phi­los­o­phy, but rather a sim­ple descrip­tion of the prin­ci­ples by which they already live their lives. If you get fired, do you think that you should hold your man­ager hostage until he gives you back your job? No? Then you already hold a lib­er­tar­ian posi­tion on unions, tar­iffs, and cor­po­rate sub­si­dies. If you find your teenage son in your base­ment smok­ing mar­i­juana, would you shoot him? No? Then you already hold a lib­er­tar­ian posi­tion on the drug laws. Should those who oppose war be shot for their beliefs? No? Then you already hold a lib­er­tar­ian posi­tion with regards to tax­a­tion. [LewRockwell.com]

The author has also writ­ten a fol­lowup arti­cle.

I decided to dis­able track­backs here, as they were 100% spam (and lots of it). I get plenty of com­ment spam too, but there are also occa­sional legit­i­mate com­ments, so I’m leav­ing that on (although with an authen­ti­ca­tion fea­ture enabled).

Arm­bands and Tat­toos. D.C. radio host Jerry Klein thought he’d play a hoax on his lis­ten­ers by sug­gest­ing  Mus­lims be iden­ti­fied with “a crescent-shaped tat­too or arm­band.”  He made the sug­ges­tion, then waited for the phone lines to explode with out­rage.

Unfor­tu­nately, many of his lis­ten­ers agreed with him.

The first caller to the sta­tion in Wash­ing­ton said that Klein must
be “off his rocker.” The sec­ond con­grat­u­lated him and added: “Not only
do you tat­too them in the mid­dle of their fore­head but you ship them
out of this coun­try … they are here to kill us.“

Another said
that tat­toos, arm­bands and other iden­ti­fy­ing mark­ers such as cres­cent
marks on driver’s licenses, pass­ports and birth cer­tifi­cates did not go
far enough. “What good is iden­ti­fy­ing them?” he asked. “You have to set
up encamp­ments like dur­ing World War Two with the Japan­ese and
Germans.”

Klein con­cluded the show by reveal­ing the hoax, then berat­ing his own listeners:

“I can’t believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one
sec­ond with any­thing I said,” he told his audi­ence on the AM sta­tion
630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which cov­ers Wash­ing­ton, North­ern
Vir­ginia and Maryland

“For me to sug­gest to tat­too marks on
people’s bod­ies, have them wear arm­bands, put a cres­cent moon on their
driver’s license on their pass­port or birth cer­tifi­cate is dis­gust­ing.
It’s beyond disgusting.

“Because basi­cally what you just did was
show me how the Ger­man peo­ple allowed what hap­pened to the Jews to
hap­pen … We need to sep­a­rate them, we need to tat­too their arms, we
need to make them wear the yel­low Star of David, we need to put them in
con­cen­tra­tion camps, we basi­cally just need to kill them all because
they are dangerous.”

Sound like Michelle Malkin has the topic for her next book.

[Hit and Run]

I’m not at all sur­prised. It’s been obvi­ous for a long time now that there are very strong sim­i­lar­i­ties between the Bushe­viks and the Nazis of the early 1930s.

Live Tar­gets. A lover of live music since his teens, Jamie Howard began shoot­ing con­certs in Gal­way, Ire­land over ten years ago. After hon­ing his skills, he began sell­ing to local clubs and acts, lead­ing to his cur­rent posi­tions as a house pho­tog­ra­pher at the Roisin Dubh in Gal­way and as reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to Hot Press, Ireland’s famed music mag­a­zine. Howard also free­lances in other areas of pho­tog­ra­phy (por­trai­ture, still-life, and fine art) and has had sev­eral exhi­bi­tions. In this arti­cle, he describes in detail how he tack­led three very dif­fer­ent con­certs and how he made his shots at each. [PopPhoto.com]

A good arti­cle on con­cert pho­tog­ra­phy in medium-sized venues. The author’s advice also applies to shoot­ing in the smaller venues, where there is less light and what there is sel­dom changes.

FBI acti­vates cell phones’ micro­phones for sur­veil­lance when no call is being made?. [Politech]

The U.S. Com­merce Department’s secu­rity office warns that “a cel­lu­lar
tele­phone can be turned into a micro­phone and trans­mit­ter for the
pur­pose of lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sa­tions in the vicin­ity of the phone.” An
arti­cle in the Finan­cial Times last year said mobile providers can
“remotely install a piece of soft­ware on to any hand­set, with­out the
owner’s knowl­edge, which will acti­vate the micro­phone even when its
owner is not mak­ing a call.”

Another rea­son why it’s a bad idea to own a cell phone. Not only can the gov­ern­ment (or any­one else with access to the cell phone company’s records) track you every­where you go, they can also spy on every­thing you and those around you are saying.

RFID Shield for pro­tect­ing e-passports and smart cards. MORE EXPENSIVE THAN TINFOIL but also con­sid­er­ably more dig­ni­fied, the RFID Shield will pro­tect the data on your e-passport or smart cards when you’re car­ry­ing them around. Not to men­tion you’ll look less like a para­noid weirdo and more like a globe-hopping sophis­ti­cate when you slide your doc­u­ment out of its sleeve than when you unwrap that crinkly sil­ver stuff while dart­ing your eyes in all direc­tions like Ralph in Reefer Mad­ness: The Movie Musi­cal. (Thank you to r. for the find.) [Wolfes­blog]

This seems like a rather nice way to keep peo­ple from track­ing you with RFID chips hid­den in cards or pass­ports. It wouldn’t do any good for bugged cloth­ing, though.