StinkFight.com

(click on photo to see it big.)

Trip total: 3219 miles, slept in six Wyoming cities, two Utah cities, in ten days. We got three tiny spider cracks in the windshield from pebbles thrown by trucks (two in Wyoming, one in Utah.) There was snow in one part of the state while we were there, tornado in another (we missed both). Even so, we loved every minute of being there, and feel like we left home when we came back to Los Angeles.)

Leaving Wyoming. Sad. But…”Objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear.”

=====

We packed and pumped at the Pump & Pack in Douglas:

Open carry dinner at T-Joe’s Steak House in Cheyenne:

Entering Colorado:

Entering Utah:

Our car at this amazing stop. We were the only people there:

Rainbow in Utah:

Utah, car carry only:

California. Guns back in the cases. Meh. How come the places you need ‘em the most you can have ‘em the least?:

DJ started to cry, literally, when we hit Los Angeles. It took us 90 minutes to go the last thirty miles:

Back in the nest.

Charlie cat happy to see us:

We’re trying to move to Wyoming within a month.

Doing this back where I’m from would get you a year in prison (if you weren’t shot by the cops first):

But in Wyoming, it’s legal and nifty to protect your life. That’s part of why we’re moving here!

(Note: We’re crossing our arms in all these so you can see the guns. We didn’t cross our arms the whole trip, lol, just in the pix.)

——

DAY 2: So, we left the hotel in Provo. We were really psyched to enter Wyoming, and we were not disappointed. It’s a wonderful state, we love it, and we can’t wait to move!

Provo. Pretty town. Can’t open carry though. We did see some college students marching with M1 Garand rifles, practicing drills. You’d only see that California in a Military setting. This was at a community college. But unfortunately, we couldn’t get a picture of it.

Mister Hedgie liked Provo too:

Outside of Provo (Provo Canyon):

FINALLY! Wyoming line:

Immediately, there’s lots of fireworks places. Here’s one called Pyro City!:

We stop in Evanston to put on our guns. I look down in the parking lot. I see it. I’m outside. I’m not breaking the law. I feel like I’m walking on the moon for the first time, just like I thought I would:

Debra Jean’s happy too:

We went for breakfast at the Main Street Artisans Cafe & Gallery in Evanston. It’s a fine place with a nice, hippy-ish vibe, cool art on the walls, and Bob Dylan on the stereo. We open carried. Everyone noticed our guns, no one had a problem with them.

There’s a lot we saw in Wyoming that we didn’t get pictures of: 1 wild bison, lots and lots of antelope, and for some reason, there’s a lot of seagulls in Wyoming. I don’t get that, I’ll have to ask someone. But here’s some ground squirrels prairie dogs:

Click on this next photo and see it big, see how many ground squirrels you can see standing up behind me:

I talked to two young truckers on a long haul from Wisconsin. They asked me what kind of guns DJ and I had. Only time anyone asked about them all day. They were really polite, and curious. A retired man who grew up here talked to me about ground squirrels, and about how he shoots ‘em with his .22 to help his neighbors (cows and horses break their legs in the ground squirrel’s burrow holes).

We stopped in Rawlins, open carried, no problems. Took some photos, but they were too boring to share.

We open carried at the Burger King in Casper near the intersection of the 220 and the 87 (by Evansville). People who worked there were super polite to us. We forgot to take pix though.

Below is me leaving the Kum & Go in Buffalo. (Buffalo is a BEAUTIFUL town. We could retire there. It’s wonderful and quaint and sweet.) No problems open carrying there (or anywhere we went).

On the street in Buffalo:

We were really even more polite than we usually are, we considered ourselves emissaries for open carry, and wanted to reflect well in all that we did.

Here’s a stunning scene, with Alcova Reservoir:

All in all we had a great day, and the only time we saw an Obama bumper sticker was ON A CAR BEING TOWED BECAUSE IT HAD BROKEN DOWN.

We love Wyoming!

Tune in tomorrow for more on the Open Carry Vacation to Wyoming!

CHURCHES NEED SECURITY PLANS, EXPERTS SAY

(CNN) — Churches can stop a shooter or anyone else intent on harming church members with the proper security measures in place, an expert on protecting places of worship said Monday.

“Police say the attacker walked into First Baptist Church of Maryville, Illinois, on Sunday and began firing. ‘A church is not helpless when they have a plan, and properly trained security,”‘ said Jeff Hawkins, the executive director of the Christian Security Network.”…….

This story is horribly tragic. And my heart goes out to the victims, their families and community.

However….I have a “security plan” for you. It’s called the Second Amendment. It’s called Open Carry. Random shootings like this only occur in “gun-free zones” (which we call “victim disarmament zones.”) They generally do not occur on military bases and in police stations.

I say let every honest man be armed. As they say “an armed society is a polite society.”

Violent crime is significantly lower in all open-carry states, and has consistently gone down in all states that loosened restrictions on “granting” concealed carry permits. CNN and other media never report this. Crime going down doesn’t keep eyes glued to screens. Panic does, so CNN and other major media continue to support an agenda of citizen disarmament. Yet guns are used for defense 3 to 5 times more often than they are used in crimes.

When was the last time you saw a news report about a little old lady fending off attackers with her pistol? It happens all the time, and I think that would make great news, even by “normal news standards”, but it’s almost never reported.

I’m moving to Wyoming. It’s got one of the lowest crime rates in America, partially because people can still practice their inherent right to self-defense there, and openly carry a gun.

Self-defense is not barbaric, and is not un-Christian.

From A User’s Manual for the Human Experience:

Self-defense is not harming others. It is protecting yourself from being harmed. It is refusing to accept initiations of force. Jesus said, “turn the other cheek”, but he also instructed his disciples to carry swords for protection when they traveled out to testify:

“And he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.”
–Luke 22:36-38

These swords were not metaphorical; they were literal weapons, to protect against wild beasts, both of the four-legged, and two-legged, variety.

Jesus even extended this to protecting others:

“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
–John 15:14

I don’t need to pay anyone to add “security” to my church, and I’d prefer capable citizens do it ourselves. I believe much of America has become a “nation of cowards” who are afraid to protect themselves and shirk responsibility in order to let “someone else do it.”

Respectfully,

Michael W. Dean

===

(p.s., just sent this post to Jeff Hawkins, executive director of the Christian Security Network, and to CNN.)

Win a copy of “YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts”

New book by Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean

Contest here.

You don’t need to buy Adobe Acrobat Distiller to make PDFs. CutePDF is an AWESOME freeware PDF utility, with no crapware. Info and download link here. Direct small download here. Supports Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista (x32/x64).

You install it, then you can “print” a GREAT looking PDF document directly from Microsoft Word or any other program that has a “print” option. You can export Word docs, make eBooks, even make a PDF of a webpage. (Click here for the PDF I made of this page while I was in “post-writing” admin mode.)

I almost think that it looks better than PDFs made from Distiller, at least with the one-click settings in CutePDF. (Acrobat has many many deep menus for changing various things, I’ll still use that for outputting books to send to the printer. But CutePDF opens faster, renders faster, and looks better for simple things like a book proposal or a business letter.)

You click on “print” from whatever program you’re in, then you have to pick “CutePDF writer” from your drop-down list of “printers.”

Funny little fun commercial for the Free State Project, which DJ and I recently joined.

Visit and join Free State Project:
http://freestateproject.org

(Note: The creators of this commercial are participants in FSP, but are acting on their own by posting this. This video does not represent the Free State Project as a whole, or any other individuals in the project.)

CREDITS:
Story, male voice and editing: Michael W. Dean
http://www.michaeldeanvoice.com

Story edits, female voice and haberdashery: Debra Jean Dean
http://www.debrajeandean.com

LEGAL:
Most images were grabbed from the Internet. Used with a clear understanding of Fair Use.

File, story and audio covered by Creative Commons Share and Sharealike license 3.0. Anyone may reuse, remix, repost, for any purpose.

Contact us if you would like the high-quality audio as a WAV file to use for radio broadcast, or to remix.

The stuff NRA is against didn’t make sense to me at first, but more and more it totally makes sense. Assault weapon bans? ALL guns are assault weapons. Many guns defined as assault weapons are same power as hunting rifles, but just LOOK scarier. “Assault weapon” is a term made up by politicians to make people who don’t know the difference think that semi-automatic guns are machine guns (fully automatic). They’re not. And machine guns have been illegal in the US for non-military since the 1930s.

Gun registration? Will make it easier to round up guns from honest citizens if the gov decides to do so. And almost all gun crimes are committed with UN-registered guns anyway.

Waiting periods? Women have died waiting for their gun when the restraining order doesn’t keep their stalker from trying to kill them.

“Gun-free zones”? Mass murders love ‘em. That’s why they shoot at schools and malls, because there’s no chance someone who is legally packing will fight back and end it quick. “Gun-free zones” don’t work on criminals any more than “drug-free zones” keep drugs out of neighborhood. Criminals will bring guns into a gun-free zone. Criminals do not obey laws, that is the definition of a criminal. (Note: the only place I’ve ever seen a “drug-free zone” sign is in the most drug-riddle junkie ghetto neighborhoods I’ve ever had the misfortune to live in.)

Crime goes down, not up, in states that increase issuing of concealed carry permits for law-abiding citizens.

The new thing that anti-gun politicians are pushing for is mandatory “ballistic fingerprinting”. Two firms, Smith & Wesson and Glock, are already doing it voluntarily. It was done on our new guns. Each one included one fired cartridge in a little evidence envelope, with a printed note that it had been scanned by technician number whatever. The idea being that cops can compare firing pin marks on cartridges found at a crime scene with those in the database. Only problem is, killers will hook up a baggie to catch their own shells, and get my shells or your shells, that they scooped up at a firing range, and dump them at the crime scene. Then if we don’t have an alibi, we’re gonna have to spend a lot of money on lawyers to stay out of prison. If we’re lucky.

Also, a few hits with a nail file changes the firing pin marks. Or you can replace the pin. Or barrel, if you wanna change the rifling marks. Firing pins and barrels are not considered “guns”, they are gun parts, and can be ordered through the mail, purchased at a gun store or a gun show without a waiting period or background check, and they are not used to fire a round for any database before sale.

Gun politics are something politicians use to get votes. End of story. And all politicians, even the ones who want to take guns away, are protected 24/7 by armed guards and secret service, so they’re hypocrites. They can be protected by guns but I can’t?????

I really believe in smart self-protection, not gun control. The cow is too far out of the barn for gun control. When guns are outlawed..well you know the rest.

Arm everyone without a criminal record and enact nationwide Castle Doctrine. Turn everyone into a cop, because the cops can’t be everywhere, and I wouldn’t want them to be. This works in Texas. Low violent crime rate because everyone’s packin’.

The NRA is in favor of background checks, and so am I. The NRA wants them on the spot, but the gov has squelched attempts make the databases work together to do this on the spot, because the gov likes waiting periods.

I think that the reason the NRA is against any gun control is that with politicians, if you “Give ‘em an inch, they take a mile.” Bans on “assault weapons” today can mean a ban on all guns next year.

=====-

P.S. A funny thing that store owners do in Texas is put a “No guns allowed” sign in the door. I’ve seen ‘em there a lot. But it’s only a “nod-nod wink-wink” to gun-shy people. People with carry permits in Texas can carry a concealed weapon in a business unless it has a very specific legalese wording in the sign. “No guns allowed” or a sign with a gun and a red line through it do not satisfy this requirement. Those signs are the gun-packin’ owner telling his gun-packin’ patrons “It’s OK” while assuring patrons who are nervous around an honest law-abiding armed population.

p.p.s., a very few states do allow NON-concealed carry, but I wouldn’t want to do that. In a bank robbery or mall shooting, a criminal is probably gonna shoot the one guy he knows has a gun first!

MWD

(DJ asleep wrapped in the West Virginia flag we bought online. By the way, Skip, you’ll be happy to know that the flag is made in China.)

Well, we’re not moving there for probably 10 or 15 more years. But DJ and I have put a lot of thought into trying to retire a little early, and do it somewhere else. Somewhere in the US that we could have some land, not have close neighbors, and pretty much be left the fuck alone. (Including being able to target practice off the back porch.)

We picked West Virginia by the process of elimination. Here’s what we were looking for: No earthquakes. (Eliminates the West Coast.) No hurricanes or floods. (Eliminates much of the South East, and much of Texas.) No tornadoes. (Eliminates everything from Texas up to North Dakota.) Not hot as fuck (eliminates much of the South and Southwest.)  Lots of leafy shade trees (Eliminates much of the Southwest.) Not a lot of snow. (Eliminates the north and upper east coast, including New York and New England.) Plus we want cheap land, low property taxes, and want a state with Castle Doctrine and easier-to-get pistol carry permits (Take a close look at the photo above. The flag even has two guns in the design! And dig the state motto. It means “Mountaineers are always free.”)

That whole list of our “demands” pretty much only leaves West Virginia. Plus, West Virginia has a low crime rate, it’s number 43 out of 50 lowest crime per capita in the USA.

Beautiful land is cheap in West Virginia. The price of a house with no land in our town in California (let’s say 300,000 bucks) will buy you a lot in WV.

Here’s an 85-acre farm and a cute house for $300,000:

In West Virginia, for $289,000 you can buy this 100-acre farm with a really pretty house:

If you wanna go a little more low-rent than that, here’s a house and 8 acres for $84,900:

Yay! We’re looking forward to doing this. (Let’s hope my new YouTube book does really really well!)

This is a photo of the path that used to be solid ivy. It’s from two years of me walking every other day or so to fill the birdfeeder on the back of our house. I’ve beat a lot of metaphoric paths in my life, but this is my first literal path.

I’ve lived with Debra Jean for two years today. We call it our second “nestiversary”, i.e. two years to the day from when I moved in with her (I moved in with her on 8/7/6, we got married shortly after that, and had been together almost a year when I moved in.)

It’s been a wonderful time. I love her, and I love living with her, and I love being out of the hood - being where it’s safer, and quiet enough for me to think.

I finally beat my own path in life, with someone I’m loving being with.

MEW! We’re so very happy.

(Photo by Becky Haycox.)

=========

Me and the wife seceded today. Not from the USA, but from the WORLD. We’ve declared our property a sovereign nation called NESTLANDIA.

Does anyone know what it takes to get a top-level domain? We really want .nest

Download episode 0070 of Clone The Homeless

THY WILL BE DONE. hy Will Be Done

Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean, being of sound mind and body, have a will-signing party. Their friends George Earth, Becky Haycox and Lydia Lam come over and sign as witnesses. Everyone has a great time, nibbling good food, giving each other backrubs, laughing, and chatting. They play with some electrical devices, then talk about personal stories about The Mentors, El Duce, MDC, Franco from MDC, Danny Plotnick, Moterbooty magazine, and Bomb touring with the Flaming Lips.

They talk about Jethro Tull (greatest band ever, sort of), people who don’t take care of their kids, why all humor is to stave off fear of death, fun with guns, home security and spy cameras, and they wonder if Kurt Cobain was murdered or offed himself.

You can download my template HERE, or make your own.

Enjoy your more-organized life, and tell two friends.

(Kitty in photo is Fuzzbucket McFluffernutter. Photo by Michael W. Dean)

Crocs.

Crocs were invented to make people who wear Birkenstocks look stylish.

=====

Birkenstocks:

We’ve set up a PayPal donations link where you can help us with the costs of producing all the free media we produce, in many fields. You can either make a one-time donation, or set up a monthly five-dollar automatic donation. Thanks!

Click the button below to go to the donations page:

This book is ostensibly sex advice, and has a lot of that, and it’s good. But it also goes off on some interesting rants.

Here’s a rant I particularly like:

The Pope blames pornography for the disintegration of the family unit. I blame the Roman Catholic Church for the disintegration of the family unit.

Since the Church opposes all forms of artificial birth control, the Church is directly responsible for overpopulation, which is the root of all major maladies the world over, as well as being responsible for the coming total collapse of the infrastructure of the world (some time around 2040, I’ll venture). And since the Church is to blame for unchecked multiple births by people not ready to have kids, this leads to boys being raised without fathers, or without competent fathers, which is the main cause for the generation of remorseless super criminals who will try to make your life hell in the coming technological apocalypse. These doods come in all colors, but you can easily spot them by their backwards baseball caps, cheap showy bling and very loud voices. They demand to be heard, even though they have nothing to say. (Except, “LOOK AT ME, FUCKERS!”) They have low I.Q.s, fueled with steroids, crack and malt liquor. They drop out of school at 15, the only education they receive is from “Grand Theft Auto” and Maxim. (Picture Mike from Marketing with a Glock instead of an MBA.)

These fuckers will rape your women for a laugh and slit your throat for a cigarette on Saturday night, and be absolved by a kiddie-touching priest on Sunday morning.

Defend yourself. Don’t spend your next paycheck on bling. Don’t spend it on the latest fashion. Don’t spend it on spinners. Go to WalMart, buy a shotgun, and buy a ton (literally) of ammo, now, while you still can.

Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny chat on the phone and there’s no way these two talkers could interview one or the other. So they rap together, in a concentric hypertextual parenthetical way, TCP over IP, about how to make money by releasing things for free, the coming apocalypse, a secret underground lair, and much more.

Indie media mavericks Michael W. Dean and Joseph Matheny interview each other. (Part two of two. from alterati.com)

Get the podcast here.

I’ve actually been looking for something like this for a long time.

A good program for word count of all files in a folder (not just of a single file like most programs) is Total Assistant. It’s $24.95 for the basic version, with a 14-day working free trial, here: http://www.surefiresoftware.com/totalassistant/

107 MICHAEL W. DEAN SONGS

TORRENT HERE. MUST BE OF LEGAL AGE.

“Whoever dies with their art on the most hard drives, wins.”
–Michael W. Dean
Complete BitTorrent zip of all Michael W. Dean music, 1984-2008

110 MP3s (107 songs and three interviews), plus many images and text files of all bands. 856 megs.

Michael W. Dean is the director of “D.I.Y. OR DIE: How To Survive as an Independent Artist” and the author of “$30 Film School”, among other things.

Archive contains all BOMB records, both Baby Opaque records (with Ian MacKaye on backup vocals on one song - a cover of “Long Black Veil”), all Rolling Scabs, all Deal Machine, all Mother and the Fuckers, plus several Michael Dean solo songs, and loop WAVs for song production, looped from Bomb songs by Michael Dean.

From Wikipedia: “Bomb was a San Francisco-based rock band started in 1986 by singer/bassist Michael W. Dean, guitarist Jay Crawford, and drummer Tony Fag (Anthony Paul Short, A.K.A. Blind Tony Fag). Their first show was July 4, 1986, opening for Flipper. Bomb’s sound was deep, hard rock with melodic guitars, relentless tribal drumming (reviews referred to Fag as “The Human Drum Machine”), strong pop singing, and sometimes-cryptic lyrics. Common subjects of the songs were death, sex, drugs, girls, boys, love, loss, Satan, God, cross-dressing, girls, suicide, hope and girls.”

Bomb put out one EP and four LPs from 1986-1999, on Boner Records and on Warner/Reprise. The Warner Bros. record was produced by Bill Laswell. The band was a fans’ favorite, but crashed and burned from narcotic abuse and infighting.

“D.I.Y. OR DIE: How To Survive as an Independent Artist”

Free high-quality iPhone/iPod rips, from the director. Torrent and media served from a 24/7 fat pipe.

Torrent here.

(Or here on Pirate Bay).

DVD, and all extras of “D.I.Y. OR DIE: How To Survive as an Independent Artist”. Director Michael W. Dean is giving away the entire film, encoded in high quality (30 fps, 800 kbps mp4 file, 640×480 size, with 128-bit audio, and no DRM). It looks great on an iPod, iPhone, Zune, etc., and damn good full screen on a computer.

Seven extras from the DVD (including interviews with Ian MacKaye, Steve Albini, and Lydia Lunch) are included.

FILM DESCRIPTION:

This film is a celebration of the artistic underdog! FEATURING interviews and performances from: Lydia Lunch, Ian MacKaye (Fugazi), J Mascis (Dinosaur jr.), Jim Rose (Jim Rose Sideshow), J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus), Mike Watt (Minutemen), Richard Kern (Filmmaker), Ron Asheton (Stooges), Madigan Shive (Bonfire Madigan), Dave Brockie (Gwar) and more.

Dean says, “People keep asking me, ‘Why are you posting the whole film when it’s still selling well on DVD? Are you CRAZY?’” Dean’s reply (in part): “It’s my gift to the world. People write me every day and tell me the film got them off their ass. I made the film to spread a message, not make money. And somehow, it still made money. That’s how I do things - it’s how I pay my rent on planet earth.”

The film on IMDB

Film site: http://www.diyordie.org

GET THE MP3.

Hilsinger wrote: On 9/4/94, Roger Water’s 50th birthday , we played a 9-song madley of Pink Floyd songs. The show was at Komotion Int’l, SF (r.i.p.), and included a custom lightshow of Mr Dean blowing cigarette smoke and waving a flashlight around in it. cool. We opened for GIFTHORSE and SUBLIME.

featuring members of BOMB, GIFTHORSE, HELIOS CREED, and M-FAKTER,
the band was:
Doug Hilsinger (lead gtr, bg vox)
Michael Dean (lead vox, rythm gtr)
Bean (bass, bg vox)
Chris McKay (keys)
Paul Delle Pelle (drums)
Jeff Mann engineered the recording live to DAT.

Friday was DJ’s shoulder surgery. She had a bone spur and torn rotator cuff. Two hours arthroscopic surgery…the doctor shaved down the bone spur and sewed the torn cuff. Should relieve the pain she’s been having for some time now.

She’s in a sling and will be off work 3 or 4 weeks. I’m taking care of her, lovingly waiting on her hand and foot. It’s fun. We’re actually enjoying the extra time together, even though it could be under different circumstances.

She’s also got a “cold therapy unit”, it attaches to her shoulder with three tubes and pumps water at 47 degrees, cools her down and helps with pain. Kinda looks like something out of Terminator 2.

I call it her “series of tubes”.

She also had a Novocaine pump, that pumped through a tube into the site…that was only for the first two days, today I had to carefully pull that out. Was interesting. Like pulling a wire out of a hole in your wife’s body. Was a little bloody, went in about five inches.

All in all, it’s going well.

Michael W. Dean
Media Consultant

So, after decades of doling out free advice to anyone who asks, I’m hanging up a shingle and starting to charge. I have to do this, I don’t have time to answer all the “help me with my project!” e-mails AND have a life AND make a living.

My rates are reasonable, and negotiable. Sliding scale. Info here:

http://www.michaelwdean.com

New 90-second song the wife and I wrote and recorded called “Dick and the Debbies”. It’s like a theme show for the Archies, if the Archies did speedballs and had lots of unsafe sex with strangers in bathroom stalls.

It’s for the upcoming Podiobook, The Plump Buffet.
Download MP3 here.

Me: bass and vocal.

Wife: vocal.

London May: Drums.
Officer Hutsskew: Guitar.

Guitar and drums recorded over the Internet.

Cory Doctorow Blogged on BoingBoing about Debra Jean Dean’s reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Yay! Spread the love.

A very cool guy named Torodd Eriksen from a town called Kirkenes (in Norway, on the Russian border) asked me to come tour the region with DIY or DIE and do Q&A and filmmaking seminars. He wrote me:

And after Kirkenes and Norway - you do the same thing in Russia. Russian societies are so hungry for artistic and political impulses. Generally speaking Russia is a safe country, but still it is one of the most unsafe countries for journalists. For that reason alone the skills and tools of citizen-journalism and documentation is very important in Russia……..

Beautiful sunny downtown Kirkenes:

I replied:

Three years ago I would have jumped to do this, and probably would have tried to meet a pretty girl there, get married, and stay.

However, now I’m married here, really happy, and feel I don’t want to travel in an unstable region where journalists get kidnapped. I basically believe I would be considered a “journalist” by some people, because I write for this well-known media company O’Reilly, for the O’Reilly Digital Media site:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3220

How about this. Why don’t you tour this region in my stead, show DIY or DIE, keep the money, and you can bring a laptop and I’ll do a Skype Webcam question-and-answer period at each show? You can hook me up to the video projector, you’ll take questions from the audience, translate to English, ask me, I’ll answer, and you can translate back.
Much respect,

MWD