As I've discussed in recent articles here, the criminals have not been slow to take advantage of new technologies. The ubiquitous use of cell phones by the little gang who were trashing my life for the past year is just one example. The highway street-racer kids and their use of cellphone lookouts is another. I think that any competent bank robbery team could use that kind of technology very effectively to reduce their risk. If I were heading such a team, I'd be looking into Cell or RF vi...

This line of thinking did not originate with the meeting of Christian Apologetics which I attended recently, but the arguments presented at the meeting were so cogent as to compel me to rethink my own atheistic positions on this issue, something which I have not tried to do for a lot of years. I did not go into the meeting - my third one so far - with the intention or expectation of discussing or debating causality or free will. In fact, I was specifically invited to present what I con...

For background, see my previous coverage in my article "Life goes ON? You're kidding, right?" In brief, for about a year, my life was being trashed (literally, much of the time, as in trash left all over the place) by a little local gang which had moved into the industrial office unit next to the two units which I rent for storage and privacy for my major writing work. Finally they annoyed or intimidated so many people and made such a mess everywhere that the property management thre...

Note: (June 25th, 2005) please check the comment section, tenth comment, for Anthony Hargis's response to this article. This link should also take you directly there. Follow-up: January 31st, 2005: Well, now the receiver's office has taken possession of ALH&Co.'s website at Click here , and Anthony and his associates are essentially both under a gag order as to defending their position publically - which the court has already decided constitutes fraudulent behavior, if I understand the...

So, a woman inherits some nasty genetic defect that blocks production of some key protein. What happens? Typically little or nothing, because that defect is only expressed in 50% of her cells. Most of the time, the same is true for us men. However, if the defect is on the X chromosome, of which (most) women have two copies, but (most) men only have one, then the men who inherit it will typically die, if they even make it to term, while the women will live And (most) women do not have ...

So, with just the lucky chance of my noticing from my mailing from the Orange County Peace Coalition that the IPC was meeting locally, I drove up to Anaheim after dealing with the gang once again at my storage unit (see my article Life Goes On... .).It took a while for the IPC quorum to arrive, and there was Rafael Ranteria, with yet another resolution to create racial/ethnic quotas for programming at KPFK. He literally wanted percentages for every group in the universe, and a rule that ...

No, we don't - repeat, don't have the technology to do exactly what the movie showed. OK? However, we've been doing essentially the same thing for decades. Try the best-seller "Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." A truly good read, anyway. One of the very rare unique takes on basic questions of philosophy. Pirsig, the author, died and was reborn, essentially. He had a breakdown, and they built him a new personality, after using shock "therapy" to destroy what was left of th...

August 8, 2004. At the last moment yesterday, I discovered a notice from the Orange County Peace Coalition in my email, mentioning that today there is going to be a meeting of the KPFK/IPC (Interim Programming Council) at the Unitarian/Universalist Church in Anaheim. So, after making it to the last hour of the extended breakfast meeting of Atheists United, I then cruise by the storage place mentioned on August 7th below. I don't see any of the gang, which is not surprising, considering...

Yin Yang Quiet Bang Whisper Scream Mumble Shout "Carburators, man. That's what life is all about" * *from Phantom of the Paradise So, I decided to get a whole lot of work done on the July 4th weekend. Right. The first impediment that I ran into was the fact that I was truly exhausted from the previous week. The previous weekend I received a notice from my landlady that if she saw my motorcycle parked in front of my unit again, I would get a 30-day notice. No matter that I've...

When I first moved to Long Beach in early '76, the Carter recession was well under way and jobs were scarce. After several simultaneous part-time gigs, I finally went full time as a minimum wage security guard for Fox Security. It was not a bad job, if you didn't consider the pay, anyway. I like to read and my stack of to-be-read books was large then, altho nowhere near where it is now, and most of the Fox locations only required a fraction of an hour for rounds, after which I could kick b...

I think if was back in the late '60's that the Reader's Digest published a little economic analysis showing what percentage of the costs of everyday items was taken up by taxes, tariffs, sudsidies, etc., as opposed to the full and complete costs of manufacturing, marketing and delivery to the store shelf. At that time, a loaf of premium bread would typically be on sale at the supermarket for $.25, or 4 for a dollar, which was about half or so of the typical retail price. According to the ...

OK, I've had it with so-called "intellectual property." It's a great idea in principle, but in practice it frankly sucks big time. Please see my "Virtually Real" article for more details. The bottom line is that, far from encouraging innovation by protecting intellectual property, the way our legal system and today's patent office works is that if you are a big corporation, then you can get and protect patents and you can pretty well ignore patents owned by anyone else who doesn't ha...

The other day, I attended a meeting of young Democrats - as in, early-teen - in order to hear one of the local adult candidates speak. There were actually only a couple of kids present, both resident children of the hosts, and they were right out of Harry Potter. They actually looked the parts - the boy, with his long black wizard cloak, could easilly have done Harry, with some glasses - and the girl had that distracted eatherial quality, not to mention being quite beautiful, and was wear...

To understand the full context of this piece, you may want to go to my article "Speaking for the Dead." Do a find on "Iran." The Left - and most other political "activists" - like to talk. Ranting is the be-all and end-all, and if it boils down to a competition for a tiny core audience, then any tactic that works is justified in the name of the revolution. In point of fact, in 1980, when Reagan took office, the local left, centered around KPFK (which was just then starting the sl...

I was asked to write up my experiences as a homeless person recently for use in a possible dramatic presentation. I haven't really qualified for the title for over a decade, so much of my knowledge may be out of date, but here goes: When I moved to California in early '76 to start the revolution, I had about $1,000 total in cash, plus a large camper pickup truck full of my junk. At that time, $1,000 was five or six months rent for a decent-sized apartment or a small house in Long Beach. ...