這張照片會勾起很多人的回憶----the wrapper from a pack of ROC military cigarettes, roughy 1980.

Langalje 排灣連杯 joined cups, Paiwan tribe; 臺灣櫸木Taiwan zelkova zelkova formosana

As I mentioned, in Waco, Texas, hundreds of bikers (tattooed fat guys in black Ts, jeans, and colors) were determined to protect their lifestyle and what they see as their freedom, by violence if necessary. They are certainly accustomed to violence.

Forewarned, eighteen local police and four state troopers were on hand. As five biker clubs gathered, friction was inevitable, fighting broke out, and in five minutes the party was over, with nine bikers were dead and 170 arrested. Police killed at least four of the dead. Fortunately, no innocent bystanders were harmed.

Recently )HERE( I discussed guns and freedom. Yes, yes, yes, we know you think you need guns to protect your freedom, but nobody has explained to me how guns protect freedom. If someone is attacking you and you have no brighter method, you may shoot the attacker to protect yourself. If someone is “taking away your freedom,” who do you shoot to protect your freedom?

Even violent bikers who outnumbered the police over ten to one were subdued within five minutes. If armed groups start fighting to “protect their freedom,” the outcome will be pretty much like what happened in Waco, and recall that this is not the first time something like this has happened in Waco. You’d think somebody’d learn: guns may be fun, but they are less than useless in “protecting freedom and rights.” Brighter people find more intelligent ways than providing moving targets for police.

Anyway, here’s a pretty good commentary on the fracas, or fiasco::HERE::

Bikers in Waco, TX had a big ruckus and, with police assistance, nine died and 170 were arrested. What I find hard to believe about this all is that nobody got it on video. Usually every time someone stumbles and drops something, you get a dozen videos on YouTube, with repeats and slow motion replay. All this going on and nobody had a cell phone? The police didn’t have dashboard cameras to collect evidence? 

However, I have been informed that there is a video on YouTube HERE:::

二0一五年五月十五日星期五五點五十五無誤，烏烏！5:55, Friday May 15, 2015, woo woo! …. it works better in Chinese.

A great cultural phenomenon from 1966: HERE
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這有點無聊~~~ My old daypack is, well, pretty old. Today we passed a North Face shop and some packs caught my eye. Now we all know that North Face has gone commercial, but they still have some good stuff. I quickly found a very nicely designed 29 liter pack, priced 25% off. The only color it came in was brick red, and usually I buy grey or blue packs, but okay, let’s get it.

Yeah, commercial, like I bet most people who wear North Face products don’t even know which North Face that is, or what the logo is about, just like people who wear Hang Ten don’t know what it means to hang five or hang ten. Some of my students I asked about it seriously thought it meant to hang ten people. Nice brand name.

I was thinking, the last time I bought a red pack was a Sac Millet I bought when I was 17, preparing to leave the US for Viet Nam. Mom gave me some money to buy good supplies, so when I went to San Francisco for my visa, I asked my sister to drive me across the Bay to Berkeley. There was a very good, very small mountain supply store almost unknown to the general public, but held in high esteem in the climbing community. It was called The North Face. 

What goes around, comes around.

看得到我嗎？Can you see me?

黃口攀蜥、雌；female yellow mouthed japalura, Japalura polygonata xanthostoma; in Pinuyumayan(卡大地步卑南語), dangkarang (thanks to Sangpuy!)

Okay, so you’re shipping a bunch of orphans from Ireland to Australia, so what can you do for entertainment? Hey, let’s paint the kids black. WHAT???

To quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up. LINK

The United States is the most armed nation in the world. There are 90 guns for every 100 Americans. LINK

I would want to see that figure doubled and more – 2 guns for every American – if my goal were to conquer the United States in ten years. If I wanted to do the job in five years, I would encourage the growth of local militias.

I am not here to discuss how absurd it is to imagine that freedom can be protected by guns in a computerized world. The government hardly needs to confiscate guns to take away freedom, and corporations take your money and your rights with your consent. The point is that some Americans believe they can protect their freedom with firearms, or say they do. (Interesting. People say the ISIS are mad dogs because they think they can enforce Sharia law with guns, and still some people think freedom can be protected by guns.)

So, if I were out to conquer the US, it would be easy to provoke some confrontation in which guns were drawn to “protect freedom.” Protect it from who? The authorities, of course, who do not take kindly to that sort of behavior. They would necessarily take immediate steps to put down the insurrection. This would most likely lead to something like the confrontation between the authorities and the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas. Remember who won that one?

This might possibly incite widespread insurrection (all Waco did was lead to the Oklahoma City bombing and police departments beefing up their weaponry). Here is where the authorities have the upper hand: established centralized authority. No matter how loopy some law enforcement agencies are, a firefight between the sheriffs of County A and the police in County B is almost inconceivable. Groups of armed shooters “protecting their freedom” are under no such constraints; two groups of armed shooters might cooperate with each other, but broad alliances are almost inconceivable, and local militias would make the fight even more exciting. (My reasoning is thus: anybody who would shoot other people and turn his own homeland into a warzone in order to “protect his own rights” does not tolerate different opinions; in the absence of a fighting institution such as the Army or Marine Corps, if he is to be led at all, he will be led only by an alpha male who has fought his way to the top by eliminating anybody who does not follow his commands; such a leader does not tolerate other leaders in his territory.)

Several events could follow. A very unlikely event would be that once the “freedom protectors” had slaughtered enough of each other, sort of like the eliminations in a championship, a strong figure would emerge who could hold the fighting factions in line enough to conquer the authorized government of the United States. It is almost unthinkable that such a person would restore power to the government and hold free elections. More likely, he would then proclaim himself Savior or King or Dear Leader, and if you think he would return your rights to you, you must also believe in the tooth fairy.

A greater possibility is that the authorities would quash all the rebellions. For your safety’s sake, they would declare martial law, make the Patriot Act even stricter, and in effect revoke the Bill of Rights. People would buy it, because security is valued more than freedom. After enough gun battles, people would be eager to exchange their freedom of speech for safety from bullets. They would also be very likely to admire a strong man who could hold everything together, no matter what the cost.

We should also consider the possibility of the united states disuniting, making a patchwork of feuding states from sea to shining sea. Some might offer a modicum of freedom, but by their nature they would be permanently at war with each other, so freedom would be about as common as the California condor.

Another extremely probable outcome is that the groups would not stay focused. To protect their freedoms, they could easily branch into collecting “donations” from unarmed citizens to buy ammunition. It is practically impossible to imagine that these groups will merge racially. Some White groups would go wipe out those nasty Latino gangs, which would unify all the Hispanics to protect themselves against marauders. Some would start lynching Blacks or just shooting them on sight, and others would go after illegal immigrants, and then immigrants. Moslems would hardly remain untouched, so they would band together for protection. I find it very easy to see how people firing guns to “protect their freedom” would start ethnic cleansing. The Amerindians survived the last genocide; would they survive the next?

The most likely possibility would be that the government of the United States would be embroiled in continuous fighting with militants, until such time as both sides had killed each other to a stalemate, at which time Beijing would call in the money owed them. They might even step in earlier to protect Chinese citizens and Chinese interests in the US. By this time, the US would be in shambles and unable to provide basic public services, much less pay the astronomical debt we already owe the People’s Republic of China. If the US failed to pay, the Chinese would have a good enough excuse to move in and take over, and as Americans would have proven themselves unable to govern themselves responsibly, they would do the task for you. If you kept your noses clean, they might let Facebook keep running.

Some Americans quote Chairman Mao: “Power comes out of gun barrels”(槍管出政權)；if I remember correctly the quote was popularized in the US by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers.

Now, if you want to learn how to govern a country from a man who killed tens of millions of his own citizens, you might want to study your model a bit more carefully. First, that means exactly what it says: Power comes out of gun barrels, certainly not freedom. Second, Mao may have said that, but he knew that if that were true, he would never have been able to wrest power from the Nationalist Army, which was much better armed. Rather, his actions were guided by a concept which is actually much more common and better known in greater China: “I’d rather fight with my wits than with my power:寧鬥智、不鬥力,” said by Liu Bang, one of the very few men in Chinese history who fought his way from the lowest levels of society to found a dynasty (the Han, 2^nd Century BCE to 2^nd Century CE). Liu and Mao and practically everyone else won their power through manipulation, not fighting toe to toe.

And no matter what, what really comes out of gun barrels is bullets.

So just as I support people’s rights to have cars once they have proven themselves capable of driving them safely and responsibly, I support people’s rights to have guns once they have proven themselves capable of using them safely and responsibly. But the idea that guns can protect freedom simply does not bear scrutiny. 

Wasin Paiwan. 排灣部落耆老傳統苧麻手編繫刀繩，感謝鹿樣！Thanks to Lyuyan, I am now the proud owner of a Paiwan knife belt, made of ramie by tribal elder

s.

whale of a tale

Wow! Look who stopped in to say hello!

Today we commemorate (or totally forget about, as the case may be) the 150^th anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House, which placed an end to the Civil War.

No matter how involved State’s Rights got involved in the conflict, the primary cause was slavery, the concept that some people are inferior and may be treated as chattel. There is no way to say that the Confederacy would have been formed, or Civil War fought, without the impetus of slavery and abolition.

The surrender document was copied out by General Grant’s military secretary, Lt Cl Eli Samuel Parker, chosen because his handwriting was so good. Okay, big deal, right? The interesting point is that Parker’s birth name was Hasanoanda; he was an Onőndowága, or Seneca Iroquois Amerindian. (In this painting so generously provided to me by Google, he is the dark skinned man standing to Grant’s left.) He recorded that at the surrender, Lee extended his hand to him and said, “’I am glad to see one real American here.’ I shook his hand and said, ‘We are all Americans.’”

In the spirit of Parker, Lincoln, and Washington, let us all remember that the United States was conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. It doesn’t matter whether you like my religion, my politics, what I eat, whether your family arrived in the US earlier or later than mine, what kind of visa they came on, where I live, how I dress, what is important is that, as Hasanoanda reminded us, “We are all Americans.”

Maybe we can go beyond that, and in the spirit of Confucius and Jesus say, We are all people. We are all created equal, so we should all be given respect and a fair chance.

Maybe we can go beyond that, and in the spirit of the Buddhas, say, We are all living beings. We are all created equal, so we should all be given respect and given a fair chance.

Actually, the surrender took place on April 9^th, but I misremembered the date. Oh well. After a hundred fifty years, a couple days give or take shouldn’t matter too much.

A man fleeing on horseback was tasered and beaten after he was flat on the ground with his hands behind his back. The only really surprising thing here is that the police didn’t shoot the horse.
LINK

More gunshots. An unarmed man, fleeing slowly, is gunned down by a policeman. What was possibly going through the policeman’s mind? The victim was running so slowly the policeman could have grabbed him within two steps, but instead he chose to slaughter him.

We won’t even go through how coldly the officer tried to blame everything on the victim.

LINK

今晚月全蝕，很意外的是，烏來看得到月亮！本以為八點開始，而七點已蝕角。全蝕仍清楚，但朏時黮䨴黑雲吞月。後來雲散月出，觀畢，快哉！Amazingly enough, we had clear skies for the first part of tonight’s total eclipse. After totality, clouds swallowed the moon, but fortunately spat it out a while later, allowing us to view the end of the eclipse without obstruction.

達彥的「月蝕」幾乎被遺忘的詞：qwayan smabu na mnkum qu byajing: ‘eclipse’ in Tayal, an almost forgotten term recovered from tribal elders.

We went to hear the great Pinuyumayan singer Sangpuy and our Tayal neighbor Yulaw Yugan in concert. 今晚到大佳河濱公園聽卑南巨星桑布伊與老鄰居阪治演唱，不虛此行。桑布伊唱的，不必說，就是美、粗曠、真。阪治唱了他弟弟Bulang Yugan的遺著，Spi，這首對我意義特別深。Bulang寫作時常跟我敘述他怎麼寫這首，未定版唱了很多次給我聽，本來說等他定了他教我怎麼唱。沒想到，我來不及學，Bulang已經離我們而去了。聽歌歌唱很棒，中間還穿插Bulang的錄音，Bulang, usa su la makun la, byaray kwara, sunun su balay.
臺灣主流的流行音樂最大的特色是：沒有特色。一點也聽不出「臺灣」味：說是巴西、法國、菲律賓、加拿大、阿根廷的流行樂，都可以，只知道如千篇一律的流行樂。今天好幾個原住民樂團，與主流音樂唯一不同的是，有的歌用族語唱。如果不知道這個語言的差異，說是德國、德州的流行樂都可以。還是愛聽有味道的歌，如桑布伊、阪治唱的是也。

Time to confess about the Wulai Brindle Squirrel, Verestultum Scirius Uraymsiawsus. The photo comes from the web, and the species name comes from an online Latin translator. Vere = spring, stultum = fool, scirius = squirrel; Uray is the Tayal pronunciation of Wulai, and msiaw means nonsense in Tayal. Cheers, let’s see what we can come up with next year. 

今早拍到一個非常少見的珍禽異獸，烏來虎斑鼠. This morning when I went outside, I managed to get a photo of a very, very rare animal, the Wulai Brindle Squirrel, Verestultum Scirius Uraymsiawsus.

Got a boat to take the family out on the water? You’d better pay your taxes, through the nose! Got an ostentatious yacht? Well, if you spent enough millions on it, the State of New York feels your pain and wants to help you out.
This is not an April Fool's joke, I'm not making this up. I wish I were.

LINK