Erik sent me a short email, after I shared with him the first few chapters of my work in progress. I won't quote what he said but it helped me enormously, more than I can say, to have encouragement from a profoundly good author I've admired for many years.
As far as I know, I'm a terrible writer, that's my whole experience of it. I make tons of mistakes, have to export from OpenOffice to pdf every few minutes and read it over and over and over, fixing stupid stuff like spelling errors and getting character names mixed up, fix lines with clunky grammar and those I edited on the fly and mangled. I pause, think through individual words, fact check, change tense, and tell myself repeatedly "Don't gild the lily!" -- erasing whole phrases and ideas that sounded good a few minutes ago. Every line matters, every modifier. And worse: each moment, every split second of life. I have to stay true to my people, good, bad, ugly, complicated, terse.
So far, I have avoided naming the truth. I'm the slowest and least able writer on earth. It takes me 8 hours to write a page or two, interrupted by walks outside to glean and sift what the next scene might and ought to be, a complication, a key line of dialogue, a dilemma solved badly, because people make mistakes and feel foolish, rebel or roll the dice and pay for it in tears and shame. I know about such things because what I write is always a gamble.
If it succeeds, as Erik says I do, the price is mighty fucking high, because I'm naked, transparent. The only stories I can tell are life on life's terms, full of risk and loneliness and a sort of brutal will to live, price no object. I'm soft. I let my people win, because that's part of the greater truth. I let them laugh, growl and hit back with the force of Hades if threatened. Friendship and true love take years to root and grow, no cheery guarantees. A single breach can kill everything.
It took a long time to start this novel, couldn't face writing the first word -- for weeks!
It's the most difficult thing I've ever attempted. My target is 100K or more, two stories told from two points of view, identical events related twice, although what he sees and what she sees are often separate experiences. That's how men and women survive, separately, privately, showing each other an edited best behavior. Or we try to. But real danger changes everything. Orders are shouted, guns drawn.
I'd give anything to have a different life, but that's not going to happen, so I write as I must, incapable of better work. Long winter months in a frozen barn with terrible food doesn't matter if I can pull it off, a hundred thousand words that surprise and thrill and achieve something that no one else has done before, a mountain to climb bare-handed and alone. Erik's email gave me hope, that it might be worth it, every hour, every day, price no object, so long as I live long enough to finish it. After that, I'll take whatever punishment I must.
Saturday, December 23, 2017
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Welfare
I regard welfare to be a serious, difficult topic. It began as a tragic historical fluke. Britain was a monarchy, with a small number of lords, ladies, landed gentry, and millions of serfs whose hard lot in life had been slightly improved by steam engines, industry, and coal fires in cold brick hovels. Health care was primitive and costly. Karl Marx argued for revolution. Playwright George Bernard Shaw argued for public welfare -- municipal gas, water and sewer socialism for the working class. It was practical, necessary 'Fabianism' to defuse Marxist revolution and allow the ruling elite to retain enjoyment of heriditary privilege and West End plays.
Flash forward to today's socialist Britain, free housing, free medical care, free food, rampant drug use celebrated in the movie Trainspotting -- a thuggish, sullen underclass amplified by millions of Asian and African refugees from the formerly grand global empire that the Crown was compelled to relinquish because Britain was broke, the price of socialism and nonprofit war with Germany twice in a single generation. Over a million young Brits were sacrificed in battle, good strong white working class men led by blueblood officers. The rest of the nation had been conscripted to build warships and Spitfires, to harvest and tin awful field rations for doomed troops. Without vast military resources provided by the United States, Britain might have ceased to exist as an island nation in 1944. Without trillions in U.S. Treasury bonds and derivatives to fuel City of London banking, there would be no socialist Britain in 2017.
I lived in Britain twice, a couple years in Scotland, a couple years in London, did some of my best work as a filmmaker, TV director, writer and novelist there, had great fun with stars in the swish West End and Mayfair. I hired Lady Foxwell as a publicist. I also visited NHS doctors and paid Harley Street specialists to fix my teeth. If anyone is qualified to venture an opinion of British socialism, I believe that I am. I covered a Labour Party conference for ITV and ORF. They sang 'The Internationale' with gusto -- theme song of Marxism, trade unionism, state subsidy of hapless stooges employed to build unreliable luxury cars at a loss, more free shit to support the unemployable, the elderly, a generation of red brick college students and wannabe musicians, many of whom were pretty damn good. Britain flatters itself as a fount of show business talent with dishonest justification, citing Dickens, Shakespeare, and The Beatles as national achievements. Individualism is a somewhat vague concept in Blighty. A night spent drinking in a pub is their notion of a jolly good time, standing cheek by jowl with loud chums and loose women, followed by greasy fish and chips or tandoori.
What this has to do with the United States -- so far, as described above -- is our historical role in funding British decline. It's difficult to estimate how much unearned booty we gave them. Their entire fleet of nuclear submarines and commercial aircraft were subsidized by socialist America, nonprofit world cop, following in the footsteps of English Fabians for the unearned benefit of less productive Brits and Africans and Italians and Russians. Does it sound odd that we poured tens of billions in handouts to Russia, after the fall of communism? It shouldn't. The United States knows no limit of international charity, public and private. We funded the Israeli war machine, guaranteed that Israel would always have oil, housing projects, defacto supremacy, and payola to keep blood adversaries like Egypt under the fist of dictatorship.
It does not matter that U.S. motives were 'pure of heart,' or whether that's true or false. The business of charity does not comprehend or heed right and wrong. We spent a trillion to help American blacks, wasted every penny and institutionalized a permanent welfare underclass, destroying Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Camden. Our charity in subsidizing higher education for the stupid destroyed the integrity of universities from coast to coast, groomed a U.S. President who taught communism and class war, endless and endemic white guilt. He and his welfare state pals in Congress destroyed health care by mandating perpetual dependency on Medicaid, Medicare, and FDR-era Social Security, triple ponzi schemes that cannot be sustained for more than a few years, assuming that people will continue to buy U.S. Treasury debt. Whether anyone can or will in Britain is uncertain. Their banking system is in crisis again. The Saudis are upside down financially, nearly insolvent -- another painfully good joke, since we discovered oil in Arabia, developed Ghawar, gave them a market to sell oil, armed the Kingdom, and turned a blind eye to their vicious police state. In perfect symmetry of payback, a Saudi cleric and 15 Saudi nationals attacked us on 9/11 and destroyed a nonprofit Port Authority landmark that housed Zionist-owned Cantor Fitzgerald, the global sales scam with near monopoly in trading U.S. Treasury debt.
How much more bizarre can charity get? Plenty. A trillion dollars to destroy Vietnam, then two trillion to destroy Iraq, withdrawing from both countries with no discernable benefit to America or any of the stupified survivors wandering in poisoned rubble. Three trillion more to prepare North and South Korea, Japan, China, India and Pakistan for nuclear war.
'General welfare' is mentioned in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, often cited to shove outrageously stupid legislation and regulation down people's throats and pour trillions into sewers of graft. For two centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Preamble was not a substantive grant of power, merely an etheral statement of undefinable generality. Grants of power to the Federal government were specifically enumerated by the text of Articles I-V, including a process to ratify amendments. We never ratified an amendment to make the United States a welfare state. Congress used the power to regulate interstate commerce as an excuse to cripple American commerce and American common law property rights.
In 1999, Milton Friedman gave a televised speech to an ISIL conference in Costa Rica that was sponsored by Laissez Faire City. Friedman spoke about the tired old creed of Fabianism and the profound harm it had done to America. He predicted that new principles of libertarianism would prevail and reverse the damage done by idiotic socialism. The election of George W. Bush by a hair's breadth of plurality and a controversial ballot recount in Florida was seen as a step toward sunshine, after Bill Clinton mortgaged the economy to toxic assets that would blow up investment banking and derivatives during W.'s second term in office, re-elected by acclamation after destroying Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with attacking us on 9/11. Whatever Milton Friedman fancied as global destiny to rediscover liberty was silly. America instituted a 'patriotic' police state after 9/11, which somehow includes Black Lives Matter, an excuse to kill cops and intimidate university students, keep white speakers off campus.
The upside-down world of evil triumphing over good is the grim work of charity. Whether it's done by government or private empires like Annenberg and Carnegie foundations, the result is always the same, good people punished and evil rewarded. Bill and Melinda Gates are busy rewarding evil in Africa, shoulder to shoulder with USAID and a profoundly corrupt UNESCO. Of all the calamities inflicted on mankind, nothing can top the damage done by nonprofit, tax exempt institutions of religion, the Catholic Church and Islam in particular but not uniquely. Jews and Protestants are equally guilty of bending the levers of finance, entertainment and government policy to do wrong in the guise of righteousness and piety.
America today faces the same quandry that inspired Fabianism in England over a century ago with disasterous results. Our ruling class of 'The 1%' is no different than lords and ladies who kept great estates and serving girls, while serfs begged for bread in the streets. U.S. Fabians in Hollywood and Washington DC and state legislatures wail that we have to feed the hungry and pay people to do less, to ignore the problem of labor, savings, and capital investment. "Investment" nowadays means a fat subsidy for Tesla and solar panels made in China, more debt, more overseas military operations, burning subsidized biofuel that costs twice as much as nasty old oil. The U.S. Postal Service can't be disbanded, although it loses billions annually, because USPS delivers subsidized Amazon playthings from subsidized distribution centers.
The 1% are happy to play benefactor, for the same reason that English aristocrats went along with prominent West End superstars and reformers. Warren Buffett is willing to pay more in taxes, he says, the same rate as his secretary does, which is almost nothing after deductions and exemptions. The disaster of Expanded Medicaid and Obamacare will lead irresistibly to a 'single payer' national health service like Britain, our spiritual guru of national charity. Black Lives Matter has become an institution, Federally subsidized and empowered to rule college experience forever, backed by DOJ's Civil Rights Division. By every measure, Americans are becoming sicker, more obese, and less happy. Schools are a cesspool of government failure, incapable of teaching anyone anything, serving thuggish students free breakfast, lunch and dinner partly at taxpayer expense, but most of it borrowed with Federal debt. Municipalities and states are broke, can't pay current expenses or lavish retirement for public servants.
That's the ugly career of welfare, to wreck everything. What we should do as Americans is to think of our families and loved ones, ignore whatever claim government and religion makes to rob us for the unearned satisfaction of people we despise. If you want to aid a neighbor, that's fine. Offering him work is good policy, strengthens your neighborhood or locality. It's a valid method of improving society, to employ people at whatever wage you agree together, without government telling you how and when and skimming a cut for bureaucracy -- which is the whole goddamn game of government in a nutshell, a mailed fist to extort money for drones who do as little as possible and give nothing but pain, like bent nose mafioso. Their Ivy League law degrees and balloon drops at party conventions are paid for by the sweat of your brow, the callouses on a tradesmen's hands, serfs and suckers who do physical work, a doctor's training and skilled devotion, a small business among hundreds of thousands who employ half of all Americans, the farmers and mechanics who sustain human life, utilities and rural co-ops and investor owned enterprises, roughnecks who produce oil and gas.
If you feel you must be politically active, campaign to bring the troops home, to cut welfare spending, to make government smaller. Educate your children privately, prepare them to go forward in life, learn a skilled trade to feed themselves. Discourage charity and drug use or binge drinking. Teach them to choose friends carefully, to discriminate. Never assume that a smile is benevolent. Politicians, priests, and con artists smile. Barack Obama smiled.
Flash forward to today's socialist Britain, free housing, free medical care, free food, rampant drug use celebrated in the movie Trainspotting -- a thuggish, sullen underclass amplified by millions of Asian and African refugees from the formerly grand global empire that the Crown was compelled to relinquish because Britain was broke, the price of socialism and nonprofit war with Germany twice in a single generation. Over a million young Brits were sacrificed in battle, good strong white working class men led by blueblood officers. The rest of the nation had been conscripted to build warships and Spitfires, to harvest and tin awful field rations for doomed troops. Without vast military resources provided by the United States, Britain might have ceased to exist as an island nation in 1944. Without trillions in U.S. Treasury bonds and derivatives to fuel City of London banking, there would be no socialist Britain in 2017.
I lived in Britain twice, a couple years in Scotland, a couple years in London, did some of my best work as a filmmaker, TV director, writer and novelist there, had great fun with stars in the swish West End and Mayfair. I hired Lady Foxwell as a publicist. I also visited NHS doctors and paid Harley Street specialists to fix my teeth. If anyone is qualified to venture an opinion of British socialism, I believe that I am. I covered a Labour Party conference for ITV and ORF. They sang 'The Internationale' with gusto -- theme song of Marxism, trade unionism, state subsidy of hapless stooges employed to build unreliable luxury cars at a loss, more free shit to support the unemployable, the elderly, a generation of red brick college students and wannabe musicians, many of whom were pretty damn good. Britain flatters itself as a fount of show business talent with dishonest justification, citing Dickens, Shakespeare, and The Beatles as national achievements. Individualism is a somewhat vague concept in Blighty. A night spent drinking in a pub is their notion of a jolly good time, standing cheek by jowl with loud chums and loose women, followed by greasy fish and chips or tandoori.
What this has to do with the United States -- so far, as described above -- is our historical role in funding British decline. It's difficult to estimate how much unearned booty we gave them. Their entire fleet of nuclear submarines and commercial aircraft were subsidized by socialist America, nonprofit world cop, following in the footsteps of English Fabians for the unearned benefit of less productive Brits and Africans and Italians and Russians. Does it sound odd that we poured tens of billions in handouts to Russia, after the fall of communism? It shouldn't. The United States knows no limit of international charity, public and private. We funded the Israeli war machine, guaranteed that Israel would always have oil, housing projects, defacto supremacy, and payola to keep blood adversaries like Egypt under the fist of dictatorship.
It does not matter that U.S. motives were 'pure of heart,' or whether that's true or false. The business of charity does not comprehend or heed right and wrong. We spent a trillion to help American blacks, wasted every penny and institutionalized a permanent welfare underclass, destroying Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Camden. Our charity in subsidizing higher education for the stupid destroyed the integrity of universities from coast to coast, groomed a U.S. President who taught communism and class war, endless and endemic white guilt. He and his welfare state pals in Congress destroyed health care by mandating perpetual dependency on Medicaid, Medicare, and FDR-era Social Security, triple ponzi schemes that cannot be sustained for more than a few years, assuming that people will continue to buy U.S. Treasury debt. Whether anyone can or will in Britain is uncertain. Their banking system is in crisis again. The Saudis are upside down financially, nearly insolvent -- another painfully good joke, since we discovered oil in Arabia, developed Ghawar, gave them a market to sell oil, armed the Kingdom, and turned a blind eye to their vicious police state. In perfect symmetry of payback, a Saudi cleric and 15 Saudi nationals attacked us on 9/11 and destroyed a nonprofit Port Authority landmark that housed Zionist-owned Cantor Fitzgerald, the global sales scam with near monopoly in trading U.S. Treasury debt.
How much more bizarre can charity get? Plenty. A trillion dollars to destroy Vietnam, then two trillion to destroy Iraq, withdrawing from both countries with no discernable benefit to America or any of the stupified survivors wandering in poisoned rubble. Three trillion more to prepare North and South Korea, Japan, China, India and Pakistan for nuclear war.
'General welfare' is mentioned in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, often cited to shove outrageously stupid legislation and regulation down people's throats and pour trillions into sewers of graft. For two centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Preamble was not a substantive grant of power, merely an etheral statement of undefinable generality. Grants of power to the Federal government were specifically enumerated by the text of Articles I-V, including a process to ratify amendments. We never ratified an amendment to make the United States a welfare state. Congress used the power to regulate interstate commerce as an excuse to cripple American commerce and American common law property rights.
In 1999, Milton Friedman gave a televised speech to an ISIL conference in Costa Rica that was sponsored by Laissez Faire City. Friedman spoke about the tired old creed of Fabianism and the profound harm it had done to America. He predicted that new principles of libertarianism would prevail and reverse the damage done by idiotic socialism. The election of George W. Bush by a hair's breadth of plurality and a controversial ballot recount in Florida was seen as a step toward sunshine, after Bill Clinton mortgaged the economy to toxic assets that would blow up investment banking and derivatives during W.'s second term in office, re-elected by acclamation after destroying Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with attacking us on 9/11. Whatever Milton Friedman fancied as global destiny to rediscover liberty was silly. America instituted a 'patriotic' police state after 9/11, which somehow includes Black Lives Matter, an excuse to kill cops and intimidate university students, keep white speakers off campus.
The upside-down world of evil triumphing over good is the grim work of charity. Whether it's done by government or private empires like Annenberg and Carnegie foundations, the result is always the same, good people punished and evil rewarded. Bill and Melinda Gates are busy rewarding evil in Africa, shoulder to shoulder with USAID and a profoundly corrupt UNESCO. Of all the calamities inflicted on mankind, nothing can top the damage done by nonprofit, tax exempt institutions of religion, the Catholic Church and Islam in particular but not uniquely. Jews and Protestants are equally guilty of bending the levers of finance, entertainment and government policy to do wrong in the guise of righteousness and piety.
America today faces the same quandry that inspired Fabianism in England over a century ago with disasterous results. Our ruling class of 'The 1%' is no different than lords and ladies who kept great estates and serving girls, while serfs begged for bread in the streets. U.S. Fabians in Hollywood and Washington DC and state legislatures wail that we have to feed the hungry and pay people to do less, to ignore the problem of labor, savings, and capital investment. "Investment" nowadays means a fat subsidy for Tesla and solar panels made in China, more debt, more overseas military operations, burning subsidized biofuel that costs twice as much as nasty old oil. The U.S. Postal Service can't be disbanded, although it loses billions annually, because USPS delivers subsidized Amazon playthings from subsidized distribution centers.
The 1% are happy to play benefactor, for the same reason that English aristocrats went along with prominent West End superstars and reformers. Warren Buffett is willing to pay more in taxes, he says, the same rate as his secretary does, which is almost nothing after deductions and exemptions. The disaster of Expanded Medicaid and Obamacare will lead irresistibly to a 'single payer' national health service like Britain, our spiritual guru of national charity. Black Lives Matter has become an institution, Federally subsidized and empowered to rule college experience forever, backed by DOJ's Civil Rights Division. By every measure, Americans are becoming sicker, more obese, and less happy. Schools are a cesspool of government failure, incapable of teaching anyone anything, serving thuggish students free breakfast, lunch and dinner partly at taxpayer expense, but most of it borrowed with Federal debt. Municipalities and states are broke, can't pay current expenses or lavish retirement for public servants.
That's the ugly career of welfare, to wreck everything. What we should do as Americans is to think of our families and loved ones, ignore whatever claim government and religion makes to rob us for the unearned satisfaction of people we despise. If you want to aid a neighbor, that's fine. Offering him work is good policy, strengthens your neighborhood or locality. It's a valid method of improving society, to employ people at whatever wage you agree together, without government telling you how and when and skimming a cut for bureaucracy -- which is the whole goddamn game of government in a nutshell, a mailed fist to extort money for drones who do as little as possible and give nothing but pain, like bent nose mafioso. Their Ivy League law degrees and balloon drops at party conventions are paid for by the sweat of your brow, the callouses on a tradesmen's hands, serfs and suckers who do physical work, a doctor's training and skilled devotion, a small business among hundreds of thousands who employ half of all Americans, the farmers and mechanics who sustain human life, utilities and rural co-ops and investor owned enterprises, roughnecks who produce oil and gas.
If you feel you must be politically active, campaign to bring the troops home, to cut welfare spending, to make government smaller. Educate your children privately, prepare them to go forward in life, learn a skilled trade to feed themselves. Discourage charity and drug use or binge drinking. Teach them to choose friends carefully, to discriminate. Never assume that a smile is benevolent. Politicians, priests, and con artists smile. Barack Obama smiled.
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Criminal enterprise
Bill suggested that I write a history of Laissez Faire City. I can do it in a single sentence. It was a criminal enterprise. Details would fill a shelf as big as a two-volume O.E.D., defining each aspect, utilizing nearly every word in the English language. With equal mental energy and all of my remaining days I could fill a library with crimes committed by millions of other people, including the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Founding Fathers, and every session of Congress since its inception as an institution of political compromise.
The dispossessed native Amerindians were rapacious brutes, perpetually at war with rival tribes and far worse in their treatment of women and children than the bloody Aztecs and Arabs. One cannot point to a single African tribe ancient or modern that has clean hands, or an instance of religion or philosophy that did not punish the weak. You think libertarians are innocent? Hah. Murray Rothbard was supported by taxation and tax loopholes his entire life. Walter Block laughed that a Ph.D. in economics was a $250,000 annual meal ticket to do little as a tenured party animal, funded by similar political crimes, including intellectual fraud.
I claim innocence in that regard. I was an innovator. I was also ignored, the strange karma of working outside the iron grip of tradition and scholarship of the Known and Familiar. Those who succeed intellectually, creatively, or economically are slaves to the art of extracting maximum benefit from existing arrangements. I'm typing these words on a laptop made in China, built by indentured servants from a series of stepwise improvements following basic research at Bell Labs, a monopoly, headed by an asshole guilty of multiple crimes.
I try to be generous about crime. Life is short. Few of us are born free and independent of life's little boxes. Whatever joy one finds is usually a happy accident, someone to love, far removed from the world, cloistered in a hovel or something less awkward depending on one's continent and era of history. Sexual love has existed for thousands of years, perhaps the only personal value that is discovered and earned, threatened by success and treachery, won and lost, transformed irrevocably by the purpose of sex -- children.
You were once a child, the product of sexual love, something that may have been a mistake in judgment, fogged by animal physiology, no different than other species. The bonds and boxes of family (or lack thereof) shape who we are as a people. That Austrian economics is deaf to this principle explains why libertarianism remains an inarticulate craving for high crimes and misdemeanors, baseline treason. Let's compare and contrast a life of duty. My recent fiction stars a USMC officer who resigned his commission because he was revulsed by killing, the sole mission of Marines, the "devil dogs" trained to fight as a team, to obey every command unquestioningly and immediately without flinching from peril. Marines are front line infantrymen, tasked to take real estate and hold it by force.
Without such men we would not be having this conversation. In ancient times, Marines were the backbone of maritime empire, stationed shipboard to enforce order and attack on shore, expeditionary forces to win supplies and defeat all opposition. Cannonade (in modern times aerial bombardment) cannot take, it can only destroy. Marines take territory and resources. "Boots" as they are called sarcastically by Marines are troops organized into an Army, clumsy in operation, fueled by a deluxe supply chain and leisurely, well planned deployment. The Marines land first, poorly equipped except by their fierce character as fighting men.
I speak of these matters to highlight our collective debt to crime. Whether it's Israel or USA, history is a trail of tears, unending war, political oppression, economic waste and fraudulent claims of wisdom and justice. Through it all, sex and family shaped what men did and why. Their women reared children to enter into battle with each other and for or against the men in power. Transition to a modestly peaceful postwar civil society in the late 20th century is comfortable, but little else has changed. Sex and family still determines our destiny.
The challenge of liberty is to make a choice, to join the Marines or avoid duty. I'm not certain which is more honorable. As a small and sensitive man, I was ill suited to fighting. I avoided fights as a child, as a young man, and later in life as a filmmaker. Had I been more aggressive and ruthless, I would have won a more successful career in Hollywood, I'm certain of it, and I could recite a string of incidents in which I was self-defeated by cowardice. I turned down an opportunity to make a slasher movie, fully funded and easily done. I abhored violence.
This does not make me an antiwar libertarian. The fact of the matter is that my survival and happiness depends on marines, literal U.S. Marine infantrymen and their civilian brothers in spirit who manufacture government and capital goods. Using the platform of luxury that we all share in the modern world, I am writing an article on the topic of crime. It was not a crime to fight the American Revolutionary War of Independence, nor any of the global conflicts that predated my life. What happened in Vietnam and more recently Iraq was tragedy, rather than a sudden perversion of American power. Nothing surpassed the perversion of American life by African slavery and the Civil War. There is endless suffering to come, a nation divided by DNA. The melting pot theory is rhetorical and theoretical.
It's not my purpose to complain. The goal of my work has been to advance a few ideas that could influence history, principally a new constitutional framework for the practice of law and profession of justice. It was a job I did not volunteer to undertake. I was forced to swear it as a solemn purpose, after spending two years in Federal prison and observing many cases among the men who were likewise deemed felons. I did time with Gordon Liddy. I bunked with murderers, bank robbers, drug dealers, and white collar criminals. Every one of them had families and children, enjoyed music, wanted freedom and prosperity. As a jailhouse lawyer, I freed three of them and won early parole for another guy -- but the challenge of discerning apolitical constitutional law as it might and ought to be was a difficult task.
It only took 25 years to make good on that mission, to redefine justice and frame an organic document constituting laissez faire law. The achievement was a great burden of duty that finally ended, thankfully. It was done at a time when Laissez Faire City was desperately in need of due process of law. Had it been ratified as a constitutional legal regime, it may have saved Laissez Faire City from implosion. No free society can survive without the rule of law.
We should be careful when using that phrase, the rule of law. It has nothing to do with the whims of a legislature or tyrant. I will quote an opinion of counsel I filed with the leadership of Laissez Faire City in January 2000, predating the Freeman's Constitution of August 2001, which elaborated this simple idea: "In a laissez faire community of any kind, physical or digital, the rule of law arises from and requires all of the following: a constitutional right to practice legal representation on behalf of others; the right of practicing lawyers to associate for the purpose of selecting judges who, on appointment to the bench, are barred from private legal practice; and the right of any person or organized group to obey and execute lawful orders that may be issued from time to time by the courts so created. The jursidiction of laissez faire constitutional law and the courts which duly interpret and uphold such principles exists globally and perpetually as a matter of right. Laissez faire constitutional law flows from a single proposition, which is that no one may legally judge his own cause of action or act to penalize another without fair public trial and impartial due process of law. Laissez faire law is discovered and demonstrated in the process of litigation and trial. It cannot be legislated, codified, or imposed by a 'lawgiver'."
Whether that makes sense to you or not is unimportant. What I wish to impart is extremely simple. My conception of laissez faire justice set forth in The Freeman's Constitution was an act of treason, no different than the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The quarto volume of my book Laissez Faire Law paid tribute to our gallant forefathers by choosing the Amazon retail price of $17.76. (you can get it half price at Lulu.com)
Treason describes most crimes, disobedience to established order.
The dispossessed native Amerindians were rapacious brutes, perpetually at war with rival tribes and far worse in their treatment of women and children than the bloody Aztecs and Arabs. One cannot point to a single African tribe ancient or modern that has clean hands, or an instance of religion or philosophy that did not punish the weak. You think libertarians are innocent? Hah. Murray Rothbard was supported by taxation and tax loopholes his entire life. Walter Block laughed that a Ph.D. in economics was a $250,000 annual meal ticket to do little as a tenured party animal, funded by similar political crimes, including intellectual fraud.
I claim innocence in that regard. I was an innovator. I was also ignored, the strange karma of working outside the iron grip of tradition and scholarship of the Known and Familiar. Those who succeed intellectually, creatively, or economically are slaves to the art of extracting maximum benefit from existing arrangements. I'm typing these words on a laptop made in China, built by indentured servants from a series of stepwise improvements following basic research at Bell Labs, a monopoly, headed by an asshole guilty of multiple crimes.
I try to be generous about crime. Life is short. Few of us are born free and independent of life's little boxes. Whatever joy one finds is usually a happy accident, someone to love, far removed from the world, cloistered in a hovel or something less awkward depending on one's continent and era of history. Sexual love has existed for thousands of years, perhaps the only personal value that is discovered and earned, threatened by success and treachery, won and lost, transformed irrevocably by the purpose of sex -- children.
You were once a child, the product of sexual love, something that may have been a mistake in judgment, fogged by animal physiology, no different than other species. The bonds and boxes of family (or lack thereof) shape who we are as a people. That Austrian economics is deaf to this principle explains why libertarianism remains an inarticulate craving for high crimes and misdemeanors, baseline treason. Let's compare and contrast a life of duty. My recent fiction stars a USMC officer who resigned his commission because he was revulsed by killing, the sole mission of Marines, the "devil dogs" trained to fight as a team, to obey every command unquestioningly and immediately without flinching from peril. Marines are front line infantrymen, tasked to take real estate and hold it by force.
Without such men we would not be having this conversation. In ancient times, Marines were the backbone of maritime empire, stationed shipboard to enforce order and attack on shore, expeditionary forces to win supplies and defeat all opposition. Cannonade (in modern times aerial bombardment) cannot take, it can only destroy. Marines take territory and resources. "Boots" as they are called sarcastically by Marines are troops organized into an Army, clumsy in operation, fueled by a deluxe supply chain and leisurely, well planned deployment. The Marines land first, poorly equipped except by their fierce character as fighting men.
I speak of these matters to highlight our collective debt to crime. Whether it's Israel or USA, history is a trail of tears, unending war, political oppression, economic waste and fraudulent claims of wisdom and justice. Through it all, sex and family shaped what men did and why. Their women reared children to enter into battle with each other and for or against the men in power. Transition to a modestly peaceful postwar civil society in the late 20th century is comfortable, but little else has changed. Sex and family still determines our destiny.
The challenge of liberty is to make a choice, to join the Marines or avoid duty. I'm not certain which is more honorable. As a small and sensitive man, I was ill suited to fighting. I avoided fights as a child, as a young man, and later in life as a filmmaker. Had I been more aggressive and ruthless, I would have won a more successful career in Hollywood, I'm certain of it, and I could recite a string of incidents in which I was self-defeated by cowardice. I turned down an opportunity to make a slasher movie, fully funded and easily done. I abhored violence.
This does not make me an antiwar libertarian. The fact of the matter is that my survival and happiness depends on marines, literal U.S. Marine infantrymen and their civilian brothers in spirit who manufacture government and capital goods. Using the platform of luxury that we all share in the modern world, I am writing an article on the topic of crime. It was not a crime to fight the American Revolutionary War of Independence, nor any of the global conflicts that predated my life. What happened in Vietnam and more recently Iraq was tragedy, rather than a sudden perversion of American power. Nothing surpassed the perversion of American life by African slavery and the Civil War. There is endless suffering to come, a nation divided by DNA. The melting pot theory is rhetorical and theoretical.
It's not my purpose to complain. The goal of my work has been to advance a few ideas that could influence history, principally a new constitutional framework for the practice of law and profession of justice. It was a job I did not volunteer to undertake. I was forced to swear it as a solemn purpose, after spending two years in Federal prison and observing many cases among the men who were likewise deemed felons. I did time with Gordon Liddy. I bunked with murderers, bank robbers, drug dealers, and white collar criminals. Every one of them had families and children, enjoyed music, wanted freedom and prosperity. As a jailhouse lawyer, I freed three of them and won early parole for another guy -- but the challenge of discerning apolitical constitutional law as it might and ought to be was a difficult task.
It only took 25 years to make good on that mission, to redefine justice and frame an organic document constituting laissez faire law. The achievement was a great burden of duty that finally ended, thankfully. It was done at a time when Laissez Faire City was desperately in need of due process of law. Had it been ratified as a constitutional legal regime, it may have saved Laissez Faire City from implosion. No free society can survive without the rule of law.
We should be careful when using that phrase, the rule of law. It has nothing to do with the whims of a legislature or tyrant. I will quote an opinion of counsel I filed with the leadership of Laissez Faire City in January 2000, predating the Freeman's Constitution of August 2001, which elaborated this simple idea: "In a laissez faire community of any kind, physical or digital, the rule of law arises from and requires all of the following: a constitutional right to practice legal representation on behalf of others; the right of practicing lawyers to associate for the purpose of selecting judges who, on appointment to the bench, are barred from private legal practice; and the right of any person or organized group to obey and execute lawful orders that may be issued from time to time by the courts so created. The jursidiction of laissez faire constitutional law and the courts which duly interpret and uphold such principles exists globally and perpetually as a matter of right. Laissez faire constitutional law flows from a single proposition, which is that no one may legally judge his own cause of action or act to penalize another without fair public trial and impartial due process of law. Laissez faire law is discovered and demonstrated in the process of litigation and trial. It cannot be legislated, codified, or imposed by a 'lawgiver'."
Whether that makes sense to you or not is unimportant. What I wish to impart is extremely simple. My conception of laissez faire justice set forth in The Freeman's Constitution was an act of treason, no different than the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The quarto volume of my book Laissez Faire Law paid tribute to our gallant forefathers by choosing the Amazon retail price of $17.76. (you can get it half price at Lulu.com)
Treason describes most crimes, disobedience to established order.
Friday, December 1, 2017
Civilians
I'm a civilian, too old to be anything else. Most of my friends are civilians. If I need help, I can summon civilian cops and doctors. In my travels around the world, I flew on civilian aircraft, rode in civilian vehicles and civilian trains, encountered thousands of civilians on streets and in hotels and restaurants. I consulted civilian lawyers, signed civilian rental agreements and employment contracts, bought stuff in civilian shops, directed civilian film crews and sat in civilian offices and studios.
Americans, Australians, and most Europeans have civilian governments constrained by public policy and legal processes that reflect civilian opinions and needs. Whether Britain is a civil society is debatable. Like China and Russia, they have a sovereign "civil service" that exists independently of the civilians they rule. Elsewhere, especially in black Africa, government is a tyranny, a bright line of division between power and powerlessness, no civilians as such, only masters and serfs.
I brought up this subject to talk about something else. Whether civilian life is mostly free or frustrated by government, there is an entirely separate community (for lack of a better term) worlds apart from civilians and bureaucrats. Its most benign regiments are military. I like old soldiers, Marines in particular. I understand them. War is hell. Emotional wounds are deep. Vietnam veterans have horrible stories to tell. I listen to them, treat them as equals in life, because I understand.
It would be nice (?) if the uncivil community was limited to military men, but it's not. There is a special subset of warriors who take no prisoners and have no regard for civilians or political life. They operate independently, no different than criminals or beasts of prey. From time to time these ruthless men and women are authorized to kill, deceive, change their identity and disappear, ineligible for military benefits, because they are not military. Whether American, British, Russian, French, Levantine, Arab or Israeli, secret agents are monsters.
I was never comfortable in their company. Human life is unimportant. Murder and deceit is their mission, kill or be killed. Nations do not exist for them. They change sides depending on financial opportunity, a window to crawl through, a deal, a temporary anchor in action. They have lovers, but no friends. Obligation is an alien concept -- something that loyal military men honor proudly. Covert identity is a forged passport, an assumed name, a disguise.
They began life as civilians and most have had military training. At some point they were in secret service authorized by a government agency, but had no support, no legal remit. They were given a task that stripped them of official protection. Entering into the underworld of covert operations is a one way journey, never to return home, no happy retirement. Leaders of U.S. intelligence agencies have been murdered, covert operators routinely captured and tortured and disposed of.
Why do such men (it's mostly men) exist? -- because lawful agents, whether commercial or political or military, are incapable of controlling a cruel, anarchistic world. Secret operators are the heroes and villains who struggle behind the scenes to do what civilians and armies of disciplined military forces cannot do. It is a form of deliberate suicide, temptation to throw oneself into the fires of hell and smirk at conventional authority.
It's an historic role, and it's contagious, seducing whole societies with the imperative of evil operations in private life. All's fair in love and war, right? Tens of thousands of Mexicans are dead, decapitated, burned alive, because warlords and graft were spawned by governments on both sides of the border. A wall would help, perhaps, but there is no wall that cannot be penetrated by special operators, whether criminal or formerly "official" gone rogue.
I like being a civilian, safe and snug in a community of good neighbors, folks who plow fields and harvest crops, milk cows, work in factories, operate heavy equipment, build homes and highways. I like the orderly civilian realm of banks, grocery stores, auto repair, radio stations and hospitals. Great fun to visit a restaurant, order a meal and pay for it, an implicit contract. Civilian life is cooperative and rarely cruel -- a communal gift bequeathed by secret agents and special operators whose lives were sacrificed to do hellish brutality, kill or be killed.
Americans, Australians, and most Europeans have civilian governments constrained by public policy and legal processes that reflect civilian opinions and needs. Whether Britain is a civil society is debatable. Like China and Russia, they have a sovereign "civil service" that exists independently of the civilians they rule. Elsewhere, especially in black Africa, government is a tyranny, a bright line of division between power and powerlessness, no civilians as such, only masters and serfs.
I brought up this subject to talk about something else. Whether civilian life is mostly free or frustrated by government, there is an entirely separate community (for lack of a better term) worlds apart from civilians and bureaucrats. Its most benign regiments are military. I like old soldiers, Marines in particular. I understand them. War is hell. Emotional wounds are deep. Vietnam veterans have horrible stories to tell. I listen to them, treat them as equals in life, because I understand.
It would be nice (?) if the uncivil community was limited to military men, but it's not. There is a special subset of warriors who take no prisoners and have no regard for civilians or political life. They operate independently, no different than criminals or beasts of prey. From time to time these ruthless men and women are authorized to kill, deceive, change their identity and disappear, ineligible for military benefits, because they are not military. Whether American, British, Russian, French, Levantine, Arab or Israeli, secret agents are monsters.
I was never comfortable in their company. Human life is unimportant. Murder and deceit is their mission, kill or be killed. Nations do not exist for them. They change sides depending on financial opportunity, a window to crawl through, a deal, a temporary anchor in action. They have lovers, but no friends. Obligation is an alien concept -- something that loyal military men honor proudly. Covert identity is a forged passport, an assumed name, a disguise.
They began life as civilians and most have had military training. At some point they were in secret service authorized by a government agency, but had no support, no legal remit. They were given a task that stripped them of official protection. Entering into the underworld of covert operations is a one way journey, never to return home, no happy retirement. Leaders of U.S. intelligence agencies have been murdered, covert operators routinely captured and tortured and disposed of.
Why do such men (it's mostly men) exist? -- because lawful agents, whether commercial or political or military, are incapable of controlling a cruel, anarchistic world. Secret operators are the heroes and villains who struggle behind the scenes to do what civilians and armies of disciplined military forces cannot do. It is a form of deliberate suicide, temptation to throw oneself into the fires of hell and smirk at conventional authority.
It's an historic role, and it's contagious, seducing whole societies with the imperative of evil operations in private life. All's fair in love and war, right? Tens of thousands of Mexicans are dead, decapitated, burned alive, because warlords and graft were spawned by governments on both sides of the border. A wall would help, perhaps, but there is no wall that cannot be penetrated by special operators, whether criminal or formerly "official" gone rogue.
I like being a civilian, safe and snug in a community of good neighbors, folks who plow fields and harvest crops, milk cows, work in factories, operate heavy equipment, build homes and highways. I like the orderly civilian realm of banks, grocery stores, auto repair, radio stations and hospitals. Great fun to visit a restaurant, order a meal and pay for it, an implicit contract. Civilian life is cooperative and rarely cruel -- a communal gift bequeathed by secret agents and special operators whose lives were sacrificed to do hellish brutality, kill or be killed.
Saturday, November 4, 2017
Individualism
(a golden oldie, published by Generator 21, The World's Magazine, 1999)
Married men will comprehend this dilemma instantly. You love your wife, but find yourself sexually attracted to another woman. What to do?
There are plenty of options. You can go to the nearest sports bar and watch Monday Night Football, postponing the problem of individuality. Marvel and shout and criticize in tempo with the mob. It's a no-brainer. You'll laugh it off, drink it down, and deny the existence of a unique self, separate from your spouse, individually free as a matter of moral and constitutional right. Alcohol does an excellent job of clouding the issue, drowning your brain in sentimental reverence for kith, kin, and the Broncos (without Elway, sniff!)
Or you can go to church, an all inclusive trip to the infinite and universal. New Age, Catholic, Alcoholics Anonymous, Branch Dividian, or Mormon, it's the same cheerful hymn, to merge and forget Thyself in the grace of communion and eternal predictability. Two shows a day, ample parking in rear.
Ask your lawyer for advice. He'll warn you about tax consequences. Ask your doctor. He'll smile and reassure you that there's nothing to worry about; it's normal and natural. Ask a pal. She will state exactly what you should do and not do, divined from a single moral imperative: No one may indulge a silly selfish impulse, separate from the good opinion of others. The path to Self is a minefield of unpredictable consequences. All you're likely to discover is the wisdom of the ages, which is: Keep your nose clean and be a positive role model for youth. In view of our grave social responsibilities, Thou shalt not press thy luck.
THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE
Where is this Self we think so special? Factories can predict with accuracy the number of shirts and shoes you will buy, no matter which size you wear. The daily newspaper is never irrelevant to your interests, the grocery store always provides your favorite food, and the mortuary reflects upon your existence with the certainty of a garbage collector. Every day there are more of us to carry away. What claim do you have to individuality, when every man is animal, every life a brief, predictable progress from infancy to surcease? If you wail and suffer, you wail with us all, every heart and every mind alive to the honest fact of our interchangeable mortality. Even our language mocks us, for no one who speaks is separate and unique, cut clean from the legacy of shared commonplace terms. Science proceeds in collective assent. Philosophy seeks one rule for all.
I've done my best to be an individual. In the other place [Free Market Net] my puny character was ridiculed and shunned. Elsewhere, I've been heaped with praise. Governments alternately punished me and sought my advice, which I thrust upon them unwanted and withheld when solicited. Sound familiar? No one digs his own grave enthusiastically. The first impulse to raw individualism is compounded by telling someone in authority -- a parent, a teacher, a priest -- to get bent. Do it often and you will achieve notoriety, perhaps martyrdom. But how "individual" is that? The evil choice seems a perfectly balanced trap. Heads you lose any claim to integrity; tails you lose liberty and wealth.
Individual life is not statistically significant, according to economic theory. It does not exist at all, say behavioral scientists. We entertain ourselves with delusions of uniqueness, a fantasy conducive to survival of the species. Penguins do it, recognizing the "unique" cry of their offspring on a crowded iceberg. Swans do it, swimming in pairs for life. We do it in cocktail dresses and Santa Claus suits and pajamas, swearing fidelity to our partner or employer or drinking buddy, incapable of guessing the consequences and perfectly aware of one's freedom to change his or her mind.
Obligation is a brief honeymoon, depending on whether a relationship grows or freezes, pleases or punishes. From casual observation of the world, I'd say that most folks find themselves frozen and punished, unwilling to exhibit their real Self again. We get an edited, "spun" version of who they are, a public face that conceals a locked vault. If you're observant, you can sense the weight of a hidden treasure in the presence of a big person. It takes forever to convince them that it's okay to open up, to say something deeply personal. Ayn Rand's heroes (John Galt, Howard Roark) hardly spoke at all, except to state a philosophical proof. This is no criticism of Miss Rand. She merely documented how we routinely speak to one another, how we "share" ourselves with others. We declaim facts. We declaim trivial facts, because we're not Ayn Rand.
THIS WAY OUT
Contemplating the predictable result of another social outing, Queenie recently observed that the company of others produces a litany of woe, "the wounds of the awful," she phrased it with precision. While men chuckle their war stories, women trade sadness, emptiness, resignation, and faded cheeriness.
What this demonstrates is the certainty of social pressure -- groupthink -- which flows on contact when you strap yourself to others. But subtract everyone else from your existential awareness (go somewhere in isolation by yourself) and presto! The forsaken, forbidden evidence of Self pops out like an animated, greedy truth, searching with passion and wonder in the earth of individuality, the candid Self that one never dares to reveal in public. It would be pointless and profane to reveal an inner life in public, because spectacle and noise are the twin circus masters of overfed mass communication.
In public, men twist their faces with slobbering glee over sports trivia. In public, women twitter and moan about each other and their men. Practitioners of public relations do both as a job, not unlike those who perform rituals for money and are called priests or whores. But in private, away from the public, they sober up. Put any man or woman indoors (without TV) and watch the miracle of civilization take hold. Actions become purposeful, thoughtful, self-directed. Instead of mimicking or flattering others, solitude inspires productive work.... At home there is no imam to supervise your piety, no gang of thugs at your back, no faceless victim to clean up your spilled milk or to berate with
newly imagined grievances. In private, you are intimately and exclusively confronted by the only person you have a right to obey or resent: yourself. Privacy is the situational source of all growth, improvement, education and morality. It is the fountainhead of art. It is the workshop of philosophy. [DeVoon, "Public Relations," 1991]
Try it. I dare you. Delete everything from your computer that was authored by other people, leaving only that which you created. It can't be done. You need the operating system and application software, products of industrial teamwork. You need the expressions of mathematics and English (or some other ancient, preverbal share of inherited culture). Human history will never be deleted from your knowledge. Work and family life are so deeply fundamental to our sense of purpose, that we seldom think of much else. Pay the rent. Buy the food. Sleep. Pay the rent. Buy the food. Sleep.
I am painfully aware of apparent individuality and diversity, six billion unique lifestyles and hairstyles and nicknames. That's not the problem. The problem is that no one truly wishes to be who they are. I had hoped for a life like David Lean or Stanley Kubrick. In a pinch, I would have settled for Fred Zinnemann. What I got instead was Wolf DeVoon, an isolated beatnik with a second-class brain, whose idea of a good time is a newspaper and a cup of coffee at Denny's.
I often consider the possibility of "self-improvement," in the traditional sense of study, but it seems most appropriate for teenagers. I remember studying like crazy as a youngster, trying to understand the adult world. But youth is a forge; it shapes and twists a personality forever, during the struggle for integration. By age 40, the job of Self is complete and cannot be undone. Odd, isn't it? -- that ours is the first generation in history who will live about half of our existence after age 40, a consequence of vaccines, vitamins, clean water, etc. Fully formed and settled, middle-aged adults experience no challenge or surprise, just more of the same. If youth shaped you into a gambler, then a gambler you remain. Your adult Self cannot be unlearned, only
disowned and hushed.
From age 40 onwards, life polishes and burnishes the public you, smoothing over a few superficial bumps and lumps of personality, but it seldom digs much deeper, not even by accident. Rearranging yourself in middle age is basically impossible. No wonder that Ayn Rand liked the company of younger souls who were still under construction. Young people are infinitely more interesting than fossilized elders -- a fact which Rand acknowledged explicitly in 'The Simplest Thing In The World'. Among other charming qualities, the young ask questions and listen to a thoughtful reply. Seniors ask nothing and declaim spontaneously, whether anybody's paying attention or not.
I fall into the second category. I declaim on these pages, whether anyone pays attention or not. I ask no questions except one: What lurks within the shadow of my Self, the manchild shackled and forgotten in socialized, polished life? It is a question that no one other than Self can answer (if I can persuade a recalcitrant, inarticulate Me to speak up, after a lifetime of compromise).
WILL THE REAL WOLF PLEASE STAND UP?
The real Me is not married, not middle aged. I might not even be male in the traditional sense, because the tradition in question is civilized and polite. If I rummage around deeply enough in the DNA, who knows? I might find a wild predator, an angel, or a rodent. Queenie told me that man is all the lower forms combined -- part lizard, part tiger -- and I have no reason to doubt her.
But I'm certain of two things. I am not female. And I love music.
It's embarrassing to talk about music, because it creates no wealth, does no work in the world. By music, I mean all of the arts: writing, sculpture, dance, film and canvas. I don't dance to the drama of geology and cyberspace. I thrill to the beat of blood in our mammalian physicality, the rhythm of a 12-bar shuffle, and throaty Crown power amplification. I suppose Shaw was right, that hell is full of musical amateurs. Lord knows, I've worked with too many of them, in too many ill-equipped studios and saloons on both sides of the Atlantic. My life has been a search for competence. Larry Withers had it, I think. Claude Smith, for sure. But who else?
Larry painted in Philadelphia, thrown out of the Academy of Art for insubordination. Claude quit voluntarily, shunning the organized world in search of a meaningful "dribble" (powerful abstract expressionism). Frank Zappa was so pissed off that it interfered with his ability to compose and perform. You have to sift through a hundred miles of bad-tempered crap, just to find a fragment of his authentic genius ('Peaches En Regalia' on Hots Rats, the entire Waka Jawaka album and thematic use of horn arrangements for The Grand Wazoo.) Filmmaker Joseph Losey couldn't get arrested in Hollywood, had to beg his bread in Ireland and France. Kubrick was so loopy that he refused to travel in an aircraft. The world of art is littered with human trainwrecks. Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. John Belushi. Freddie Mercury.
This is the sad realm that my real Self inhabits. There is but one God, manifest in cables and quartz lamps, raw stock and eerie blue nothingness on the program monitor, a few seconds before picture start. It rattles like a nervous beehive on the time-code display. It rolls on trucks and lifts and cranes. There is an army for God, two or three hundred deployed with military precision, so that I can sit in a chair and say "action." There is a prison and a sentence, forcing me to write a novel, so I can be freed to work again, someday maybe. I don't know any other measurement of my life, except Someday Maybe.
The panther in me is rising. I can feel it as plainly as the sun on my face and the wind in my hair. Driving my car feels like an overture, foreshadowing battle -- an old, familiar hunger to paint on the screen, to blast through the rock of groupthink and say THIS IS MINE.
An individual is unique. It would be strange and wildly inaccurate to see your Self in me. That's the point. Whoever you are, whichever star guides the deep sense of integrity that's dormant and buried within you, the truth of your life is uniquely yours to cherish or repudiate, but I don't think anyone gets away with a painless normalcy, plain vanilla citizenship, just one of the boys.
There is only one choice: to be or not to be. It's the song of individualism, never happy, never certain, until you rip off the social mask and look inside. Look hard and long, if you dare.
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Case Files of Cable & Blount ebook on Smashwords
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| $3.99 at Smashwords |
Separately, I wrote to a literary agent, as in singular, one guy whose profile indicated he was fond of heroes, real and fictional -- the only one among 80 agents that I researched in detail. Scripts & Scribes had a long list of websites for literary agencies. I knew some of them, like Curtis Brown and Writers House, but I systematically went through the entire list, took two days to study every bio. Most firms have numerous agents, each one looking for something other than me. Womens, LGBT, childrens, YA, fantasy, science fiction, narrative nonfiction (preferably a prominent public person) or pop psych motivational hooey. Can't blame them, those are the categories that sell. In fiction, it's Clive Cussler and an infinity of chick lit.
-- taps fingers on keyboard --
There is really little else to say about selling books or begging an agent to help. I invested two years in writing 135,000 words, a difficult story to tell. That it will now be ripped off by internet rodents doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is a hardcover edition and film rights. There's enough material in The Case Files of Cable & Blount for a TV series, a colorful supporting cast with Chris and Peachy in foreground, tough, funny, sexy, and smart. Ample room for a guest star each episode. No digital effects, just crime scenes and shootouts.
Monday, October 9, 2017
I need to go to Los Angeles
I'm a lucid dreamer, which means that I'm consciously present and alert when I dream. Sound asleep, I direct what I do (quelle suprise, directors direct their dreams). Last night I found myself in a dream where it was imperative to save life, and I couldn't do it, because I don't have a car. I can't dream the unreal. Being car-less and stranded prompts a larger question.
Did God ordain that I should work in a factory and never write a word? -- perhaps so.
I sold my car to buy a third novel starring Chris and Peachy. Friends sent money to help me finish and publicize it. Now the punishment intensifies, no food, no car, no book sales. God has a strange sense of humor. An encyclopedia of TV tropes quoted a passage I wrote 17 years ago, a story with hot sex scenes, murder and gunplay, private jets and limosines, no different than my recent work. I write about luxury and intrigue because I experienced it, traveled in circles of wealth and power, cruelty and kindness, the electrifying chemistry of hard men and beautiful women. I try to keep my stories realistic. Honest. Plausible.
As far as I know, no one else in my family tree ever wrote fiction. I'm not certain if they read anything other than newspaper headlines, medicine labels, tax tables, and product assembly instructions. Literature was something taught in school and suffered as an irrational duty, like Bible verses and prayers on Sunday accompanied by a pre-printed envelope, a vig for God in weekly installments. I have brothers and cousins who worked in factories, paid God, stuck at it and gained union seniority, better money, generously defined benefits.
They eat well, have nice homes and new cars. I pine for grapefruit juice, casaer salads, fried chicken, haven't had any in many months. I bought electricity, coffee, lunch meat and chili, cigarettes by the carton, so I could sit and write, listen to music on the radio until I saw what happened moment by moment in a story that seems authorless now, completed. My people stumble into situations not of their choosing (nor mine). Life happens. We try to do the best we can, or raise hell, if hell sinks to an unacceptable depth. "We only live once," Chris says in the final crisis, winning a woman's trust with something other than money.
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| $3.98 at Lulu |
There is an apogee in every creative career. Fred and Ginger, sprightly young things; Ayn Rand's second novel; Gilded Age industrialization after the adolescent tantrum of Civil War and before adult World Wars taxed everything twice, made America a nonprofit global cop. The era in which we are living now is strewn with vacant factories and plump political lies, a post-industrial welfare state that shed manufacturing jobs, became a global "consumer of last resort" on credit, no way to repay it.
I did something similar, walked away from employment, ran up credit cards I couldn't repay. Perhaps it's a national disease. As a unique American snowflake I stamped my foot and wrote what I liked, the way I liked it, first person. Hahahaha. Nothing left to do but laugh at myself, try to forgive, make a cup of coffee and think about dinner, cold chili over baked potato.
It's important to be good to myself to the extent possible. Maybe I'll mosey down the road and buy a Kit Kat and a bottle of fake orange juice. I spent the afternoon ripping out partitions in the horse barn, throat parched from decades-old straw dust and barn filth, something to do while I'm not writing. There is nothing further to write. I hit a million words recently, plenty of punishment, thanks, don't care for any extra or additional. I'd rather shovel shit.
Friday, October 6, 2017
"As independent as an insult"
I monitor conservative talk radio, not because I enjoy it, but because it delivers a series of social snapshots. In addition to being professional radio personalities who read advertising copy with perfect enthusiasm, most of them are Jews, a few are Christian, all of them 100% patriotic and pro-Israel. They loved Ted Cruz and disliked Donald Trump, but reluctantly supported Trump in the general election because they loathed and feared Hillary. Conservatives are pragmatic, go along to get along and get richer.
The worst of the pragmatists is super-sweet patriarch Dennis Prager.
Today, Dennis Prager attributed all mass murder to "loners" -- fatherless atheists who gamble, skate on the wrong side of the law, have no conscience or remorse. I took it at face value and saw myself so described.
Before I discuss it further, please keep in mind that killing is not done exclusively by loners with absent earthly or heavenly fathers. Entire nations led by enthusiastic party cheerleaders have killed tens of millions. Groups are more dangerous than isolated lone wolves. That said, it is true that the tragedy of American urban violence and crime consists primarily of angry lone wolves acting in combination with and/or competition with other lone wolves.
I spent time in prison and saw quite a few of these men. As a group they were suspicious and opportunistic, quiet about their history on earth. I'm slightly different in that respect. It has been my habit to talk, reflect, discuss ideas. Perhaps that explains why I sell so few books. No one cares to contemplate what a loner thinks. At best, it's always dark and disturbing.
-- or is it? -- compared to socially accepted product like horror movies? More than a few serial killers were warped by first person shooter video games. Why such stuff exists is pragmatic, big money for the producers and distributors of blood-soaked amusements. I can't watch it. I can't even contemplate the horrible, unless I'm trying to conceive a fictional villain, someone for a fictional hero to defeat. The hero is a far better man than I am, but not so very different, either. A hero is a loner by definition, independent of the approval of others.
It's easy to like policemen and firemen, doctors and lawyers, engineers and heavy equipment operators, auto mechanics who fight with rusted bolts. From time to time I do some of that, show a dab of physical courage, tackle projects involving practical thought and danger, swing heavy tools, balance on ladders and whatnot. If I had to, I could probably shoot to kill if my wife or daughter were threatened, no different than a cop. Years ago, I fought a forest fire, a so-called "first responder" joined by other neighbors armed with hand tools.
I've also done wrong, deliberately and remorselessly. In the past two years I ran up enormous credit card bills that I can't pay. Not the first time in life that I gambled with other people's money, a staple of filmed entertainment and artistic enterprise. I've been a cad with women repeatedly. These are real problems, primarily because I failed to produce much of anything in the world, if the measure of a man is his wallet. My wallet is empty. Women can take a lot of crap from their men, but being broke is unforgivable. Being bad tempered in defeat makes everything worse, so I make an effort to be cheerful. There is quite a lot to be happy about, so it's an authentic emotional response. I like being alive, enjoy the courage and joy of life in others, acknowledge and encourage work by talented friends and family.
However, I completely understand lone wolves -- and I chose the pen name 'Wolf' in specific acknowledgment of social demerit, a deplorable before it became fashionable. I was deeply influenced by Ayn Rand, an articulate exponent of selfishness. I took it seriously, saw life as a personal possession, mine to save or spend to the extent of my mental and physical ability, took no notice of what might be pragmatic or pleasing to others.
Without asking anyone to agree with me, I believe that it is the human condition generally to be alone, fundamentally independent no matter how often or how deeply we congregate at work or play. I know that people derive pleasure from congress. Sporting events, religion and neighborhood gatherings are fun for all concerned, and I've seen pleasure in the workplace lots of times, although there's always a dollop of artificial enthusiasm. Work is called work for a reason. Given a choice, employees and supervisors would rather be somewhere else.
It's a special condition of privilege to be a loner, which is nearly impossible to maintain as an economic activity, unless one is particularly gifted. I know for a fact that I'm not exceptionally talented, except in the matter of selfhood. When I die, I doubt anyone will mourn. That's the price of selfhood as I understand it. Few people want such a fate. I do not recommend it as a goal, unless you're an independent novelist or filmmaker, deaf and blind to pragmatism.
The worst of the pragmatists is super-sweet patriarch Dennis Prager.
Today, Dennis Prager attributed all mass murder to "loners" -- fatherless atheists who gamble, skate on the wrong side of the law, have no conscience or remorse. I took it at face value and saw myself so described.
Before I discuss it further, please keep in mind that killing is not done exclusively by loners with absent earthly or heavenly fathers. Entire nations led by enthusiastic party cheerleaders have killed tens of millions. Groups are more dangerous than isolated lone wolves. That said, it is true that the tragedy of American urban violence and crime consists primarily of angry lone wolves acting in combination with and/or competition with other lone wolves.
I spent time in prison and saw quite a few of these men. As a group they were suspicious and opportunistic, quiet about their history on earth. I'm slightly different in that respect. It has been my habit to talk, reflect, discuss ideas. Perhaps that explains why I sell so few books. No one cares to contemplate what a loner thinks. At best, it's always dark and disturbing.
-- or is it? -- compared to socially accepted product like horror movies? More than a few serial killers were warped by first person shooter video games. Why such stuff exists is pragmatic, big money for the producers and distributors of blood-soaked amusements. I can't watch it. I can't even contemplate the horrible, unless I'm trying to conceive a fictional villain, someone for a fictional hero to defeat. The hero is a far better man than I am, but not so very different, either. A hero is a loner by definition, independent of the approval of others.
It's easy to like policemen and firemen, doctors and lawyers, engineers and heavy equipment operators, auto mechanics who fight with rusted bolts. From time to time I do some of that, show a dab of physical courage, tackle projects involving practical thought and danger, swing heavy tools, balance on ladders and whatnot. If I had to, I could probably shoot to kill if my wife or daughter were threatened, no different than a cop. Years ago, I fought a forest fire, a so-called "first responder" joined by other neighbors armed with hand tools.
I've also done wrong, deliberately and remorselessly. In the past two years I ran up enormous credit card bills that I can't pay. Not the first time in life that I gambled with other people's money, a staple of filmed entertainment and artistic enterprise. I've been a cad with women repeatedly. These are real problems, primarily because I failed to produce much of anything in the world, if the measure of a man is his wallet. My wallet is empty. Women can take a lot of crap from their men, but being broke is unforgivable. Being bad tempered in defeat makes everything worse, so I make an effort to be cheerful. There is quite a lot to be happy about, so it's an authentic emotional response. I like being alive, enjoy the courage and joy of life in others, acknowledge and encourage work by talented friends and family.
However, I completely understand lone wolves -- and I chose the pen name 'Wolf' in specific acknowledgment of social demerit, a deplorable before it became fashionable. I was deeply influenced by Ayn Rand, an articulate exponent of selfishness. I took it seriously, saw life as a personal possession, mine to save or spend to the extent of my mental and physical ability, took no notice of what might be pragmatic or pleasing to others.
Without asking anyone to agree with me, I believe that it is the human condition generally to be alone, fundamentally independent no matter how often or how deeply we congregate at work or play. I know that people derive pleasure from congress. Sporting events, religion and neighborhood gatherings are fun for all concerned, and I've seen pleasure in the workplace lots of times, although there's always a dollop of artificial enthusiasm. Work is called work for a reason. Given a choice, employees and supervisors would rather be somewhere else.
It's a special condition of privilege to be a loner, which is nearly impossible to maintain as an economic activity, unless one is particularly gifted. I know for a fact that I'm not exceptionally talented, except in the matter of selfhood. When I die, I doubt anyone will mourn. That's the price of selfhood as I understand it. Few people want such a fate. I do not recommend it as a goal, unless you're an independent novelist or filmmaker, deaf and blind to pragmatism.
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
The Hollywood Pitch
Hi.
I've written a series of romantic action adventure novels, a modern Nick and Nora Charles, enough material for four or five features or a cable series, self-published to nail copyright.
Chris Cable is a black sheep, former USMC war hero, resigned his commission as an officer because he hated killing. Recruited as an LAPD homicide detective, couldn't take orders or follow rules, tried working as an investigator for the D.A. and quit, on his own as a licensed P.I. in Hollywood. Rugged, cynical, broken nose, covered in scars, not fun to be with.
Mary Blount, CPA, Stanford Ph.D., is a Silicon Valley polymath who does forensic audits for private equity and insurance companies, temporarily in L.A. to investigate a U.S.-Chinese aerospace joint venture. Confident elder daughter of a billionaire physicist, walked away from an arranged marriage, made her own way in the world.
Hot water seeks its own level. These two are made for each other.
They meet in A Portrait of Valor, cheat death again in The Tar Pit mystery, throw the world's financial system for a loop in Charity. Hard to summarize in a query. Like Nick and Nora, she inherits vast wealth when her father dies. Chris comes from a prominent military clan with NSC and CIA clout. They get forced into high society black ops in London and Hollywood.
Nice office on Sunset Strip, a beach house in Laguna, plenty of sex with multiple partners, passionate and devoted married couple who travel the world, armed and dangerous.
All rights all media in perpetuity, cash upfront, shared 'story by' credit.
Thanks,
Wolf DeVoon
not exactly famous, somewhat notorious as a public person
had contact with retired CIA and KGB
'Portrait of Valor' and 'The Tar Pit' in paperback, with a 'Charity' tease
https://www.amazon.com/Chris-Peachy-Files-Cable-Blount/dp/197392630X
'Charity' (complete novel)
Rogue traders, pallets of cash, beautiful babes, CIA black ops, and a desperate chase through Warsaw's Chopin airport in a cryptocurrency adventure wild enough to make central bankers and Swiss cops pee their pants.
$0.99 on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075KDPRJ6/
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Wolf DeVoon on Wolf DeVoon
Gentleman. Renegade. Traitor. Polygamist. Hero.
I find it difficult to conceive a readership profile for 'Charity' or Chris Cable's two previous adventures. Older men, I suppose, guys who still read. My pal Jeff is early-60s, watches TV half-heartedly, reads detective fiction (Hammett, Chandler, Kerr). How many of these old farts are there? -- maybe 20 million younger Boomers who still like to read books, of whom maybe 10% are libertarian and straight. That's a target group of 2 million. If I had CNBC and Bloomberg publicity, I'd catch 2%, sell 40,000 books. That is not a meaningful upside for book publishers. Not a big audience for movie adaptation, either. Old men? Are you kidding?
Well, think about it. It was written by an old man. The main character is a man, adult stories where he wins spectacular babes and never shuns a gunfight. If Chris was black or latino, it would sell like hotcakes -- except he's not an underclass urban antihero, he's Ivy League prep school and USMC straight white war hero. Slime from the hood doesn't stand a chance against Chris Cable's situational awareness and combat experience. That's the purpose of conceiving and/or contemplating a hero. I have to do both when I write novels, show the man in action. He has to be better than I am -- a hell of a lot better, yet human, vulnerable at times. Almost beaten, frequently confused and uncertain. "I don't know," is Cable's recurrent confession. That's why he operates mostly on intuition and a sort of relentlessness, maximum effort, as long as its takes to find an answer that makes sense, usually involving gunfire.
World travel, beautiful women, unlimited cash, multiple identities. Yup. Male fantasy. Only fifty years too late, like Fleming's Bond, although I like modern Chris Cable a lot better, the last handsome, dashing hero in an era of politically correct pussies. He emphatically does not give a damn about being nice, get the fuck out of his way, quickly please. It's a geniunely new story to tell, what it means to be armed and dangerous, completely independent, in today's lame brain gutter chatter about white privilege. There's no time to discuss it. Move or die.
I suppose a lot of fictional people, sometimes big crowds see Chris and his women in action, guns drawn, running, shooting when necessary. I never think of civilians or bystanders, never hear them unless they're making too much noise to hear anything. Frightened people run in circles and scream, scare each other, cause all sorts of chaos. Combat operators take no notice of civilians, try to avoid collateral damage but can't guarantee anyone's safety in combat.
Because that's finally what my stories are about, the courage to face evil and fight it. Not a bad thing to impart to future generations. I'd like to do that, if I can keep myself in print that long. Most likely I will not get a vote. Depends entirely on the merit of what I wrote.
'Charity' $0.99 on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075KDPRJ6/
I find it difficult to conceive a readership profile for 'Charity' or Chris Cable's two previous adventures. Older men, I suppose, guys who still read. My pal Jeff is early-60s, watches TV half-heartedly, reads detective fiction (Hammett, Chandler, Kerr). How many of these old farts are there? -- maybe 20 million younger Boomers who still like to read books, of whom maybe 10% are libertarian and straight. That's a target group of 2 million. If I had CNBC and Bloomberg publicity, I'd catch 2%, sell 40,000 books. That is not a meaningful upside for book publishers. Not a big audience for movie adaptation, either. Old men? Are you kidding?
Well, think about it. It was written by an old man. The main character is a man, adult stories where he wins spectacular babes and never shuns a gunfight. If Chris was black or latino, it would sell like hotcakes -- except he's not an underclass urban antihero, he's Ivy League prep school and USMC straight white war hero. Slime from the hood doesn't stand a chance against Chris Cable's situational awareness and combat experience. That's the purpose of conceiving and/or contemplating a hero. I have to do both when I write novels, show the man in action. He has to be better than I am -- a hell of a lot better, yet human, vulnerable at times. Almost beaten, frequently confused and uncertain. "I don't know," is Cable's recurrent confession. That's why he operates mostly on intuition and a sort of relentlessness, maximum effort, as long as its takes to find an answer that makes sense, usually involving gunfire.
World travel, beautiful women, unlimited cash, multiple identities. Yup. Male fantasy. Only fifty years too late, like Fleming's Bond, although I like modern Chris Cable a lot better, the last handsome, dashing hero in an era of politically correct pussies. He emphatically does not give a damn about being nice, get the fuck out of his way, quickly please. It's a geniunely new story to tell, what it means to be armed and dangerous, completely independent, in today's lame brain gutter chatter about white privilege. There's no time to discuss it. Move or die.
I suppose a lot of fictional people, sometimes big crowds see Chris and his women in action, guns drawn, running, shooting when necessary. I never think of civilians or bystanders, never hear them unless they're making too much noise to hear anything. Frightened people run in circles and scream, scare each other, cause all sorts of chaos. Combat operators take no notice of civilians, try to avoid collateral damage but can't guarantee anyone's safety in combat.
Because that's finally what my stories are about, the courage to face evil and fight it. Not a bad thing to impart to future generations. I'd like to do that, if I can keep myself in print that long. Most likely I will not get a vote. Depends entirely on the merit of what I wrote.
'Charity' $0.99 on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075KDPRJ6/
Saturday, September 30, 2017
Creative work
Let's talk about the creative enterprise. Cass can write magnificently, triumphs with the icky and horrible, told me last night that she hates people. Erik's characters leap off the page, as real as you or I, every moment of life in sharp focus. Kit tackled one of the greatest stories of French literature, adapted it confidently for the screen. Joey writes original screenplays full of wonder, maturity, wry humor. Jim is a rewrite man, does it for a living, creates whatever the story needs. Dave has the giddy gift of bright comedy, Gerry the grim truth of drama.
Then there's me. Slow. I plod a page at a time, often devote an hour to a single paragraph, uninterested in storyline. I throw my characters into hopeless situations, let them struggle through it. How real it is doesn't matter. I feel every inch of their predicament and heroism, let them laugh at bad jokes and grit their teeth in pain, risk life to undertake an impossible mission. My hero is average intelligence, does guesswork and takes chances. The only thing he knows how to do is shoot to kill, something he despises, having done too much of it.
There's something else I do that separates me from all of my honored colleagues. I write red hot sex scenes, because that's how I understand heroism, hunger for the challenge of success as biological animals. We've almost lost it culturally, but I remember it, want to transmit it to the future, that straight white couples can be hot creamy animals, a race of titans in love with personal power, hard man and wanton woman, magnetically drawn to each other. The world around them ceases to exist and they live for that glory, the impossible and stupendous thrill of physical romance, an irresistible union, never a dull moment.
As far as I know, I'm the only author who puts vivid hetero sex on the page, where men are bold and unafraid and women want them that way. "Old fashioned," Cass says. But there's another independent author who shall remain anonymous, a woman who sees what I see in life, because she carries a gun at work, knows how deep and wild the river of life pulsates. I could not have risked two years if it weren't for her example and quiet encouragement. Now Chris and Peachy cannot be undone. I bet my career on privileged passionate valor.
'Charity' $0.99 on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075KDPRJ6/
Then there's me. Slow. I plod a page at a time, often devote an hour to a single paragraph, uninterested in storyline. I throw my characters into hopeless situations, let them struggle through it. How real it is doesn't matter. I feel every inch of their predicament and heroism, let them laugh at bad jokes and grit their teeth in pain, risk life to undertake an impossible mission. My hero is average intelligence, does guesswork and takes chances. The only thing he knows how to do is shoot to kill, something he despises, having done too much of it.
There's something else I do that separates me from all of my honored colleagues. I write red hot sex scenes, because that's how I understand heroism, hunger for the challenge of success as biological animals. We've almost lost it culturally, but I remember it, want to transmit it to the future, that straight white couples can be hot creamy animals, a race of titans in love with personal power, hard man and wanton woman, magnetically drawn to each other. The world around them ceases to exist and they live for that glory, the impossible and stupendous thrill of physical romance, an irresistible union, never a dull moment.
As far as I know, I'm the only author who puts vivid hetero sex on the page, where men are bold and unafraid and women want them that way. "Old fashioned," Cass says. But there's another independent author who shall remain anonymous, a woman who sees what I see in life, because she carries a gun at work, knows how deep and wild the river of life pulsates. I could not have risked two years if it weren't for her example and quiet encouragement. Now Chris and Peachy cannot be undone. I bet my career on privileged passionate valor.
'Charity' $0.99 on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075KDPRJ6/
Thursday, August 31, 2017
Hammett and Me
It's always fun to talk about Dashiell Hammett. Nick and Nora Charles were his finest creation. If it weren't for the sparkling Depression-era magic of Nick and Nora (The Thin Man), their cocktail parties and speakeasies, deluxe hotel suites and inherited wealth, there'd be no Chris and Peachy. I got lucky in life several times, enjoyed every minute of first class accommodation, fine restaurants and nightclubs.Of course, Hammett was a far superior writer. That doesn't bother me. Happy to write my little adventures, a modern tale of wealth and privilege, which are not interchangeable or synonymous. The privilege in question is daring, buckets of it, personal and professional. Having money is a curse or blessing, depending on the circumstances. In my third novel of Chris and Peachy, money blows up in their faces. Won't have any in the end, flat broke, except for a beach house and an office on Sunset Boulevard. If they want to eat and drink, they'll have to go back to work as private investigators for hire, a fourth book for sure.
Last night I agreed with Cass, bemoaned my overly honest mansplaining of sexuality. It was natural to use the first person voice, a tradition of hardboiled "dicks" (take that any way you like, it's a convention of the genre to use that truncation; police detectives are "bulls"). It's a manly occupation, despite Hollywood's insistence that goofballs and OCD pooftahs can do just as well. Not true. Detectives deal in life and death, carry a gun for specific reasons.
Finally found Chris a really cool weapon, a compact SIG P320, low recoil 9x19mm, no safety, just draw and shoot. Peachy's Ruger is the sort of weapon a girl would like -- well, a girl who likewise knows no compunction about killing in self-defense or slightly ahead of the curve. People like this exist. They're difficult to get along with, unless they ignore you.
Great fun writing. Also heartbreaking, thrilling, fearful, tender, and sexy. Fifteen years ago, I had to explain without blushing that I was a modern Jefferson (never mind why). Now, it's Dashiell Hammett, an infinitely easier job :) that seems to take infinitely more time, over a year so far -- writing every day, seven days a week, hammering hard men and healthy women on the page, whether it sells or not. I expect to be banned altogether. Something amusingly noble about that, when you think about it, guilty of thought crime.
Wilda knew. "You've had sex before," she remarked, after reading A Portrait of Valor. Yup. It had to be honest, if I was to remain faithful to who Chris and Peachy were, especially Chris, a Marine Corps officer, war hero, tough guy, proud to be a man. Not overly bright but a man of action -- a far better man than I happen to be, which is the privilege of an author, to project an ideal character, someone worthy of the days and weeks and months it takes to breathe life into fiction. People don't do this for drippy shit that meanders like a slow sewer, says nothing about life on life's terms, what men want from women and are willing to fight for, if they must. Anything worth having involves fighting for it, sooner or later.
https://www.amazon.com/Chris-Peachy-Files-Cable-Blount/dp/197392630X
Friday, August 11, 2017
Never loved?
Puzzles the heck out of me. Janet loved me, but we were only 14 and it was cloying. I was too young to be loved -- excuse me, too vain and stupid, because I sent Janet away, told her that I didn't want to go steady. I believe it was the only time that a girl loved me. Had I stayed with her, my life would have been vastly different, far less crazy and reckless and idiotic -- in view of which I'm glad that lovely, innocent Janet escaped my initial senseless march to perdition as a teenager that commenced shortly after I told her we were quits.
Now I'm old and unloved, too ugly to expect any tenderness. Too evil to accept expressions of good wishes or long distance warmth. I adore women, always easy for me to partner them one way or another, to the extent that they find themselves drawn. Smart ones back away, thinking of Mary Lou in particular but not uniquely. Many women are sharp enough to want money and control. I was impossible to control, chronically broke, easily bored.
For those reasons I was almost always pleased to be married. Whether I was fit to be married is a separate question. Some wives made my life easier than others, but it was never easy for them. My best behavior was in short supply, and all four wives often made uneasy sacrifices to patch me up before, during, and after a disaster or two. Queenie stuck like glue through thick and thin, until I betrayed her. Bizarrely, she still feels some sort of admiration for me, while simultaneously blowing a raspberry of ridicule, because she knows how fragile I am. "Unfit to survive," she casually remarked in a recent email.
True enough. I was unloved and unlovable because I'm substandard, approximately half a man. Two of me pasted together might equal a normal person. I was a major chick magnet, but women soon saw how little I could do in the world. They tried to help me, then became frustrated, worried, resentful and disgusted.
It is impossible to help an artist, fumbling his way to perdition.
Why it had to be and continues to be hell is inexplicable. In fairness to the Fair Sex, it was equally painful for men to befriend me. They learned to say little and buy me a beer, have a meal together, no further artistic or financial business to transact. I praised and encouraged everyone in my life. They seldom believed that I meant it, although it was never a lie. I knew how hard it was to create something. It was easy and natural to see goodness in others, even if they were lightyears away from me, like stars in the night sky that I enjoyed and respected. I saw hundreds of them. My life was rich with stars of stage, screen, music, science, law, and the written word -- supremely talented people who achieved things I couldn't. I was a lowly director, a "plumber" as the bombastic Canadian producer scoffed, before he fired me. I was fired many times, humiliated in tabloids, blackballed at Warner, kneecapped by Columbia.
A failed director. Only half a man, remember?
The remnant of the half is now writing. Slight misstatement. I've been writing for as long as I can remember. Perhaps less awkwardly now, after 20 years of doing little else. Yet it's there in every breath and every dream when I sleep -- the deep, unquenchable thirst to direct, to paint the screen with the talent of others in front of and behind the camera. I learned to not do technical jobs, because other men are better with cameras, sound, and editing keystrokes. The only thing I can do is to direct -- and to do it, I need support staff, restaurants, hotel linen, retakes and leisure to change my mind, to see something else that asks everyone to attempt the bizarre, difficult, unlikely, often the impossible.
Now at the height of my powers, nothing has changed. Unwanted and unloved, I paint the page with the bizarre, difficult, unlikely, often the impossible and slanderous. I had to write a letter of apology to an honored friend because I lampooned the Bureau. Other friends turned two blind eyes, cheerfully bought a book that they won't read, to encourage me. Perhaps one man sees value in my work. Single digit sales are an echo of the past, films never exhibited.
Bottom line: If you have talent, any size or shape, fight for it and never quit, right or wrong, loved or unloved, until your life is ended. Artists only get one shot at life. Live as fully and freely as possible, price no object.
Saturday, July 29, 2017
Thursday, July 27, 2017
Reply to Clifton Knox
Clifton:
"intellectual property"
Broadly consists of three types: patents, copyrights/trademarks, and trade secrets, the first two of which are granted and enforced by the state, the third defended by employment covenants and nondisclosure/noncompete contracts backed by civil litigation. Coupled with the proposition that "Ownership is a type of ethical system," it is implied that you view the state as ethically justified. That's debatable, and I'll address it later after reading the entire document. For now, I'll quote two items I think you should consider:
Sadly, a moral principle never reaches beyond itself. Its ethical arms are too short, extending no farther than one man's soul, one man's purpose and lifespan. We have to look elsewhere for political guidance, because the thing at issue is "a nation of laws and not of men." [Laissez Faire Law, p.42]
The philosophy of law is a separate branch of science, independent of ethics. Moral inquiry pertains specifically to the interests, powers, and dilemmas of an individual, epitomized by the question: "What shall I do?" Legal philosophy addresses impersonal administration of public justice, litigation among parties in dispute, the combined might of a community, and custodial guardianship of certain individuals who are unable or legally prohibited to conduct their own affairs. [The Constitution of Government in Galt's Gulch, p.121]
"The argument is as follows: abstract boundaries define all property. Abstract boundaries are ideas which require moral agreement."
I believe this is erroneous twice. I owned fenced land that was defined by measurement from legally found benchmarks derived from sections, county boundaries, state boundaries, national legislation, U.S. Constitution, and (ultimately) taxation, public finance, and military strength to defend the integrity of territorial claims. Such physical boundaries are creatures of the state, right or wrong morally. The abstraction, if any, is ascribing to government police power a moral consensus that does not exist and never has.
re Locke
It is vain to advance a philosophical argument pertaining to natural rights, expressed for instance in the Declaration of Independence. I trust that you're aware it became a dead letter with ratification of the U.S. Constitution by an extremely small plurality among the 20% of colonial Americans who were eligible to vote for state politicians -- a landed minority elected by a landed minority. After the Civil War, it became settled law that Congress was uniquely entitled to define "the general welfare" and property claims of all kinds, without considering Locke, the Founders, or anything other than majority rule. Helvering v Davis, 301 U.S. 619
"In all arguments, self-ownership must be assumed"
Even in the abstract I think this is false. I'm sorry to be quarrelsome, and I trust you'll merely reflect that there are reasonable arguments for interests other than self-ownership as a first principle.
"all men act in favor of their own individual evaluation of what might serve to maximize their own personal well-being"
Patently false. It is not descriptive of history or the preponderent social mood.
"each person has property in their body as an abstract moral matter"
Agreed. The crucial question is liberty, not property.
"scarcity is no longer valid as the sole determining factor"
Sorry. You contradict yourself here. Individual life is scarce; only one. In a broader context, liberty is so scarce historically and likewise in the current state that it is impossible to say with certainty whether it exists at all, except in a defacto and unenforceable anarchy that the state cannot control.
“The moral concepts of ownership rests upon belief."
Absurd.
"rules of just and moral ownership must be agreed upon mutually and in advance"
Sigh. You say it must be so, yet never was in history and cannot be so. I wonder if you've read Madison's Federalist No. 10, that there are contending classes, landed and propertyless, and that government must be framed to balance and frustrate such interests, to deny domination by a single faction actuated by self-serving advantage.
"boundaries are ideas"
My fences are physical boundaries, defended in the first instance by vigilance and ultimately by a gun. In the context of life on life's terms in the city, boundaries are defended by locks, concrete walls, vaults, alarms, thousands of sworn LEOs and thousands of armed guards.
"a person owns his or her body in all moments through time"
An empty statement, a truism at best; patently false in the current state. I wonder if you know anything at all about the police power? (legislation, regulation, zoning, taxes)
"Labor is the most scarce of all primary means of production"
Categorically false. Capital is scarce, not labor -- not even the labor of a single genius.
"If a person were to move onto a piece of never settled land"
Irrelevant to the developed world. Even in Locke's time, it was a cruel nonsense to justify colonial conquests and expropriation.
"why is it not ethical to homestead intellectual property which is wholly abstract and is formed from abstract boundaries as well?"
I freely grant that you (any sentient being) have an absolute moral right to spend your time and talent to achieve whatever may be possible, with or without state power.
"Ownership itself is strictly a moral idea which must be seen as a means of governing the relationships and interactions between humans. It derives its usefulness from its ability to resolve conflicts."
I hope you reconsider the rights of children. As a student of philosophy, my most cherished mentor was the former chairman of the Dept. of Philosophy at the Univ. of Wisconsin, a truly wonderful man who gave me a single problem to address: The rights of children. I've written on the subject many times, but I am also a parent, charged with the custody of my daughter, not exclusively, but in combination with my wife and (however incompetent) the state. We have endeavored to protect our child from debilitation by the state, and more than others, we have succeeded in that duty. See it as such, I implore you, that parenthood is a duty. On the question of conflict resolution, I cannot share your enthusiasm for abstract law -- and I say that as an experienced legal actor and corporate counsel, intimately familiar with equity and common law. I warrant that parties do not come willingly to resolve a conflict. Never.
re Kinsella
Fucking idiot, never had a shred of respect for him.
"As more of a good is used, the marginal benefit diminishes."
What you want here is Hermann Heinrich Gossen's theory of diminishing returns; satiety. Marginal utilitarianism is the whole of modern statecraft, following Bentham, Mill, and the Fabians. Wrong crowd to follow if you care about individual life and liberty.
"Cwik points out quite adeptly the example of crude oil. On the market today, oil is a high demand resource with limited availability and limited reserves. Thus, oil is a perfect example of a so-called ‘scarce’ resource. However, it was not always scarce. For example, today oil is a scarce good. However, several centuries ago, not only was oil, not an economic good, it was an 'economic bad.' If oil were to come bubbling up from the ground, it could destroy one’s crops and result in the starvation of one’s family."
-- as would a tornado or drought. I have 15 years of experience in the Oil Patch internationally, fully appraised of the domestic market. There is not a single well anywhere on earth that's drilled or produced without government license and regulation. You really need to bone up on the police power, or at least take a gander at supply and demand with respect to the price of oil. Supply is nothing. Demand is everything in oil.
"researchers, artists, and writers must eat food to survive while they work to produce new inventions or original works"
I am intimately familiar with this problem. Original works are not automatically a source of wealth. I can show you a long list of screenplays, novels, inventions, and valid business ideas that found no market, primarily for competitive reasons and market dominance by persons and institutions hostile to new ideas ("not invented here").
"Ownership is an ethical system specifically for helping individuals to self-govern"
Again, I'm happy to acknowledge that each person is morally free to act as he thinks best. It does not translate into law, does not reflect history or the current state of affairs.
"All property then must be considered intellectual"
There are many who are propertied and have the intellectual depth of a toad.
"Communists hold that all men own property communally"
Attacking a straw man achieves nothing. You might as well argue that fascists like Hitler deprived people of their lives and property, as did FDR, and so too George W. Bush waging discretionary war in Iraq to seize their oil fields and benefit Israel. Vietnamese nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh cited our Declaration of Independence as natural rights justification for rebelling against French colonial rule, asked for U.S. support. Fact.
"A person is free to exercise any and all actions that benefit the owner up and to the point where it infringes negatively on the ownership of others"
You don't need Cwik to expound negative rights. Easily the most common shibboleth of the libertarian creed, summarized in Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). It fails for two reasons. First, it is a utilitarian proposition lacking substance, says nothing about liberty beyond an artificial equality of persons, any and all, stupid and brilliant, frightened or confident. And worse: NAP is the death knell of all legal inquiry, due process and reasoned adjudication.
" little is known about the effects of copyright protection on innovation and creativity"
Rubbish.
"objects in the world present themselves as either merely ‘present at hand’ or useful"
Subjectivism does not advance your claim of property rights. Gives screwballs and mystics equal standing, defeats rational inquiry.
"One may observe with any level of scrutiny to discern the 'property-ness' of an object and will fail to find it. The only place one may look to discover if a thing is property is within the mind of an individual."
I very sincerely regret that you elected to say that. Might as well say that lawful possession is a mental phenomenon unrelated to documentary evidence and law enforcement; that all medicine is an act of imagination, no anatomy or product labels involved; that anaesthesia and sterile surgery are all in the mind of the patient and doctors, no recourse to fact.
"the rules of ownership which establish the notion of 'property-ness' require collective agreement"
Now you have surrendered to the mob. What the fuck?
"Ownership is a moral idea"
Listen carefully. An assertion is not an argument.
"ownership of intellectual property must be considered moral and just as well, regardless of the morality of any given legal system"
I can understand that you want to assert a moral claim. I'm in favor of morality, particularly in the personal exercise of liberty, often in rebellion against or apart from mob rule expressed in social customs, legislation, and brute power of overwhelming force, whether criminal or "patriotic." There is no moral dimension in obedience, except as default evil, the cowardice of going along to get along, practically the whole of human history in a nutshell.
Personal note: I moved my family to the Missouri Ozarks a couple years ago. Perhaps you can understand why. No building permits. Salt of the earth neighbors. Well established property lines, volunteer fire department, coop electric utility, very little government.
-------------------------------------------------
COMMENT SECTION:
"People must be free to determine the conditions under which they live"
Floating abstraction. What people? Vote to enslave negroes? Vote to give negroes endless free shit like food, shelter, transportation, education? Tax de rich till theys rich no mo!
"People tend to extend certain rights to other people that they wish for themselves"
Mistaken notion, a fact not in evidence, not even in the Ozarks. Crime is crime. Child abuse is child abuse. You can't win by claiming universal concordance and fair play.
"people must be free to set up private legal/arbitration/guild/union systems"
Dear God, another assertion. What people? A fucking medieval guild? Closed shops and tyranny by union boss? Failing grade for stupidity.
"enforce IP just like financial institutions enforce commercial contracts"
Nothing happens without the state to enforce contracts.
"You cannot get loans from creditors when you engage in negative behavior with financial products."
Nor can you get loans if you have no assets, are disabled, born stupid, unemployed. Nor is property created by finance. Perhaps you don't know how new industrial projects or IP are funded. Has nothing to do with loans or financial products of any kind.
"a rivalrous good is one that can only be used or consumed by one person at a time"
I am so sorry you have been seduced by concepts like this. Whether we like it or not, all men are rivals in life, for property, women, children, market share, prestige, self-esteem and praise. Some flip into religious fervor because they can't get any traction in gainful activity, have to bullshit for a living, suck pennies from frightened sheep. Popes and bishops did more to harm humanity than armies of conquest, and Islam threatens peace like no other quack creed in history -- for a reason that will never be ameliorated -- threatened to the core by their cultural and intellectual inferiority as primitives, little better than African savages.
"private property owners must consider and obey to a great extent the particular views/culture of the society he lives in. They can not simply start enslaving people"
Echoes Machiavelli, the reigning prince must not to anything to undermine the confidence and loyalty of his subjects. The current state is a colossal clusterfuck, endless entitlements, unsustainable pledges worldwide for the unearned benefit of other nations and world trade that does not benefit any American industry or entrepreneur or average US household. We have voted ourselves onto an irredeemable gravy train of bread and circuses, all enslaved to the laughable proposition that interest rates will remain at zero forever and there will never be a day of reckoning.
"There are some basic circumstances which dictate much of human behavior. These do not change. However, my position is that once the land and property have been obtained by one set of rules in society, that society may not return and remove the property simply by creating a new round of rules."
In some abstract realm of morality, right? -- not at all what happened since the Civil War, certainly not what happened since 1965 civil rights legislation, modern affirmative action quotas, socialist mandates and penalties, eminent domain, asset forfeitures, 50% taxation, and a total of 40% GDP drained by federal, state and local payola to public workers, public contractors, public welfare, compulsory public education, and consensus that defines moral obligation as forced surrender of private property to the state, to advance the public good.
"what society entitles an individual to today cannot just be confiscated tomorrow unless the person is willing to go along with the confiscation"
What planet do you live on? The nation is divided irreconcilably, balanced on a knife edge between confused conservatives and hysterical Marxist looters -- conservatives unwilling to stand like men, say fuck you, we're going to cut government spending. They're cowards. Do you have any idea of what happened in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mexico? Expropriation.
"If this guy is a neighbor of yours this means that he is a member of the same society, i.e. you have a shared moral code."
I am appalled that you think this is true.
an orderly society absent the state
Finally you say it. Belongs in the first paragraph of the paper, not hidden in a comment. It demolishes everything you argued and explains why you want a moral consensus. You have invented nothing. Remove yourself from authorial voice, do properly neutral scholarship. George H. Smith does it, one of the most boring people you can read, CATO buffoon. Expert on everything libertarian and atheist and anarchist. Zero original contribution of thought.
"The first rule must be that coercion is not allowed."
You and I are done. It turns out that you don't care what the state does or doesn't do, because it is coercive by nature. Like communists, you'd sign off on an ideal government that did what you wished it to do -- despite what anyone else wants -- because you think morality trumps the rule of law.
I doubt you know what 'the rule of law' means. Has nothing to do with votes, or elections, or legislation, or political appointment of judges. It predates the Constitution and the Declaration of 1776. Try Magna Carta, 1215 A.D. Eight centuries of precedent, implicit in everything you think you know about property, orderly society, shared hope of justice.
Sigh.
Thirty years ago I exchanged correspondence with Milton Freidman who, at the time, was at the Hoover Institution. I alerted him to a set of ominous trends, and Dr. Friedman assured me all was well, because the rate of increasing debt was more or less in line with growth. Here is what happened instead --
Friedman was wrong and I was right. Worse, Friedman made a personal appearance at an ISIL conference sponsored by Laissez Faire City when I was LFC's poet in residence. Friedman said Fabianism was "an old worn-out philosophy" that would yield to libertarian principles (NAP).
Do you know what Fabianism is? -- municipal water, sewer, and electricity -- multiplied by Carter and Clinton and Obama to include guaranteed mortgage lending and free health care.
Freidman was wrong twice. Think about it.
Do not address me as if I was a fellow student.
Do not reiterate or explain anything.
You did not pass the examination.
"intellectual property"
Broadly consists of three types: patents, copyrights/trademarks, and trade secrets, the first two of which are granted and enforced by the state, the third defended by employment covenants and nondisclosure/noncompete contracts backed by civil litigation. Coupled with the proposition that "Ownership is a type of ethical system," it is implied that you view the state as ethically justified. That's debatable, and I'll address it later after reading the entire document. For now, I'll quote two items I think you should consider:
Sadly, a moral principle never reaches beyond itself. Its ethical arms are too short, extending no farther than one man's soul, one man's purpose and lifespan. We have to look elsewhere for political guidance, because the thing at issue is "a nation of laws and not of men." [Laissez Faire Law, p.42]
The philosophy of law is a separate branch of science, independent of ethics. Moral inquiry pertains specifically to the interests, powers, and dilemmas of an individual, epitomized by the question: "What shall I do?" Legal philosophy addresses impersonal administration of public justice, litigation among parties in dispute, the combined might of a community, and custodial guardianship of certain individuals who are unable or legally prohibited to conduct their own affairs. [The Constitution of Government in Galt's Gulch, p.121]
"The argument is as follows: abstract boundaries define all property. Abstract boundaries are ideas which require moral agreement."
I believe this is erroneous twice. I owned fenced land that was defined by measurement from legally found benchmarks derived from sections, county boundaries, state boundaries, national legislation, U.S. Constitution, and (ultimately) taxation, public finance, and military strength to defend the integrity of territorial claims. Such physical boundaries are creatures of the state, right or wrong morally. The abstraction, if any, is ascribing to government police power a moral consensus that does not exist and never has.
re Locke
It is vain to advance a philosophical argument pertaining to natural rights, expressed for instance in the Declaration of Independence. I trust that you're aware it became a dead letter with ratification of the U.S. Constitution by an extremely small plurality among the 20% of colonial Americans who were eligible to vote for state politicians -- a landed minority elected by a landed minority. After the Civil War, it became settled law that Congress was uniquely entitled to define "the general welfare" and property claims of all kinds, without considering Locke, the Founders, or anything other than majority rule. Helvering v Davis, 301 U.S. 619
"In all arguments, self-ownership must be assumed"
Even in the abstract I think this is false. I'm sorry to be quarrelsome, and I trust you'll merely reflect that there are reasonable arguments for interests other than self-ownership as a first principle.
"all men act in favor of their own individual evaluation of what might serve to maximize their own personal well-being"
Patently false. It is not descriptive of history or the preponderent social mood.
"each person has property in their body as an abstract moral matter"
Agreed. The crucial question is liberty, not property.
"scarcity is no longer valid as the sole determining factor"
Sorry. You contradict yourself here. Individual life is scarce; only one. In a broader context, liberty is so scarce historically and likewise in the current state that it is impossible to say with certainty whether it exists at all, except in a defacto and unenforceable anarchy that the state cannot control.
“The moral concepts of ownership rests upon belief."
Absurd.
"rules of just and moral ownership must be agreed upon mutually and in advance"
Sigh. You say it must be so, yet never was in history and cannot be so. I wonder if you've read Madison's Federalist No. 10, that there are contending classes, landed and propertyless, and that government must be framed to balance and frustrate such interests, to deny domination by a single faction actuated by self-serving advantage.
"boundaries are ideas"
My fences are physical boundaries, defended in the first instance by vigilance and ultimately by a gun. In the context of life on life's terms in the city, boundaries are defended by locks, concrete walls, vaults, alarms, thousands of sworn LEOs and thousands of armed guards.
"a person owns his or her body in all moments through time"
An empty statement, a truism at best; patently false in the current state. I wonder if you know anything at all about the police power? (legislation, regulation, zoning, taxes)
"Labor is the most scarce of all primary means of production"
Categorically false. Capital is scarce, not labor -- not even the labor of a single genius.
"If a person were to move onto a piece of never settled land"
Irrelevant to the developed world. Even in Locke's time, it was a cruel nonsense to justify colonial conquests and expropriation.
"why is it not ethical to homestead intellectual property which is wholly abstract and is formed from abstract boundaries as well?"
I freely grant that you (any sentient being) have an absolute moral right to spend your time and talent to achieve whatever may be possible, with or without state power.
"Ownership itself is strictly a moral idea which must be seen as a means of governing the relationships and interactions between humans. It derives its usefulness from its ability to resolve conflicts."
I hope you reconsider the rights of children. As a student of philosophy, my most cherished mentor was the former chairman of the Dept. of Philosophy at the Univ. of Wisconsin, a truly wonderful man who gave me a single problem to address: The rights of children. I've written on the subject many times, but I am also a parent, charged with the custody of my daughter, not exclusively, but in combination with my wife and (however incompetent) the state. We have endeavored to protect our child from debilitation by the state, and more than others, we have succeeded in that duty. See it as such, I implore you, that parenthood is a duty. On the question of conflict resolution, I cannot share your enthusiasm for abstract law -- and I say that as an experienced legal actor and corporate counsel, intimately familiar with equity and common law. I warrant that parties do not come willingly to resolve a conflict. Never.
re Kinsella
Fucking idiot, never had a shred of respect for him.
"As more of a good is used, the marginal benefit diminishes."
What you want here is Hermann Heinrich Gossen's theory of diminishing returns; satiety. Marginal utilitarianism is the whole of modern statecraft, following Bentham, Mill, and the Fabians. Wrong crowd to follow if you care about individual life and liberty.
"Cwik points out quite adeptly the example of crude oil. On the market today, oil is a high demand resource with limited availability and limited reserves. Thus, oil is a perfect example of a so-called ‘scarce’ resource. However, it was not always scarce. For example, today oil is a scarce good. However, several centuries ago, not only was oil, not an economic good, it was an 'economic bad.' If oil were to come bubbling up from the ground, it could destroy one’s crops and result in the starvation of one’s family."
-- as would a tornado or drought. I have 15 years of experience in the Oil Patch internationally, fully appraised of the domestic market. There is not a single well anywhere on earth that's drilled or produced without government license and regulation. You really need to bone up on the police power, or at least take a gander at supply and demand with respect to the price of oil. Supply is nothing. Demand is everything in oil.
"researchers, artists, and writers must eat food to survive while they work to produce new inventions or original works"
I am intimately familiar with this problem. Original works are not automatically a source of wealth. I can show you a long list of screenplays, novels, inventions, and valid business ideas that found no market, primarily for competitive reasons and market dominance by persons and institutions hostile to new ideas ("not invented here").
"Ownership is an ethical system specifically for helping individuals to self-govern"
Again, I'm happy to acknowledge that each person is morally free to act as he thinks best. It does not translate into law, does not reflect history or the current state of affairs.
"All property then must be considered intellectual"
There are many who are propertied and have the intellectual depth of a toad.
"Communists hold that all men own property communally"
Attacking a straw man achieves nothing. You might as well argue that fascists like Hitler deprived people of their lives and property, as did FDR, and so too George W. Bush waging discretionary war in Iraq to seize their oil fields and benefit Israel. Vietnamese nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh cited our Declaration of Independence as natural rights justification for rebelling against French colonial rule, asked for U.S. support. Fact.
"A person is free to exercise any and all actions that benefit the owner up and to the point where it infringes negatively on the ownership of others"
You don't need Cwik to expound negative rights. Easily the most common shibboleth of the libertarian creed, summarized in Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). It fails for two reasons. First, it is a utilitarian proposition lacking substance, says nothing about liberty beyond an artificial equality of persons, any and all, stupid and brilliant, frightened or confident. And worse: NAP is the death knell of all legal inquiry, due process and reasoned adjudication.
" little is known about the effects of copyright protection on innovation and creativity"
Rubbish.
"objects in the world present themselves as either merely ‘present at hand’ or useful"
Subjectivism does not advance your claim of property rights. Gives screwballs and mystics equal standing, defeats rational inquiry.
"One may observe with any level of scrutiny to discern the 'property-ness' of an object and will fail to find it. The only place one may look to discover if a thing is property is within the mind of an individual."
I very sincerely regret that you elected to say that. Might as well say that lawful possession is a mental phenomenon unrelated to documentary evidence and law enforcement; that all medicine is an act of imagination, no anatomy or product labels involved; that anaesthesia and sterile surgery are all in the mind of the patient and doctors, no recourse to fact.
"the rules of ownership which establish the notion of 'property-ness' require collective agreement"
Now you have surrendered to the mob. What the fuck?
"Ownership is a moral idea"
Listen carefully. An assertion is not an argument.
"ownership of intellectual property must be considered moral and just as well, regardless of the morality of any given legal system"
I can understand that you want to assert a moral claim. I'm in favor of morality, particularly in the personal exercise of liberty, often in rebellion against or apart from mob rule expressed in social customs, legislation, and brute power of overwhelming force, whether criminal or "patriotic." There is no moral dimension in obedience, except as default evil, the cowardice of going along to get along, practically the whole of human history in a nutshell.
Personal note: I moved my family to the Missouri Ozarks a couple years ago. Perhaps you can understand why. No building permits. Salt of the earth neighbors. Well established property lines, volunteer fire department, coop electric utility, very little government.
-------------------------------------------------
COMMENT SECTION:
"People must be free to determine the conditions under which they live"
Floating abstraction. What people? Vote to enslave negroes? Vote to give negroes endless free shit like food, shelter, transportation, education? Tax de rich till theys rich no mo!
"People tend to extend certain rights to other people that they wish for themselves"
Mistaken notion, a fact not in evidence, not even in the Ozarks. Crime is crime. Child abuse is child abuse. You can't win by claiming universal concordance and fair play.
"people must be free to set up private legal/arbitration/guild/union systems"
Dear God, another assertion. What people? A fucking medieval guild? Closed shops and tyranny by union boss? Failing grade for stupidity.
"enforce IP just like financial institutions enforce commercial contracts"
Nothing happens without the state to enforce contracts.
"You cannot get loans from creditors when you engage in negative behavior with financial products."
Nor can you get loans if you have no assets, are disabled, born stupid, unemployed. Nor is property created by finance. Perhaps you don't know how new industrial projects or IP are funded. Has nothing to do with loans or financial products of any kind.
"a rivalrous good is one that can only be used or consumed by one person at a time"
I am so sorry you have been seduced by concepts like this. Whether we like it or not, all men are rivals in life, for property, women, children, market share, prestige, self-esteem and praise. Some flip into religious fervor because they can't get any traction in gainful activity, have to bullshit for a living, suck pennies from frightened sheep. Popes and bishops did more to harm humanity than armies of conquest, and Islam threatens peace like no other quack creed in history -- for a reason that will never be ameliorated -- threatened to the core by their cultural and intellectual inferiority as primitives, little better than African savages.
"private property owners must consider and obey to a great extent the particular views/culture of the society he lives in. They can not simply start enslaving people"
Echoes Machiavelli, the reigning prince must not to anything to undermine the confidence and loyalty of his subjects. The current state is a colossal clusterfuck, endless entitlements, unsustainable pledges worldwide for the unearned benefit of other nations and world trade that does not benefit any American industry or entrepreneur or average US household. We have voted ourselves onto an irredeemable gravy train of bread and circuses, all enslaved to the laughable proposition that interest rates will remain at zero forever and there will never be a day of reckoning.
"There are some basic circumstances which dictate much of human behavior. These do not change. However, my position is that once the land and property have been obtained by one set of rules in society, that society may not return and remove the property simply by creating a new round of rules."
In some abstract realm of morality, right? -- not at all what happened since the Civil War, certainly not what happened since 1965 civil rights legislation, modern affirmative action quotas, socialist mandates and penalties, eminent domain, asset forfeitures, 50% taxation, and a total of 40% GDP drained by federal, state and local payola to public workers, public contractors, public welfare, compulsory public education, and consensus that defines moral obligation as forced surrender of private property to the state, to advance the public good.
"what society entitles an individual to today cannot just be confiscated tomorrow unless the person is willing to go along with the confiscation"
What planet do you live on? The nation is divided irreconcilably, balanced on a knife edge between confused conservatives and hysterical Marxist looters -- conservatives unwilling to stand like men, say fuck you, we're going to cut government spending. They're cowards. Do you have any idea of what happened in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mexico? Expropriation.
"If this guy is a neighbor of yours this means that he is a member of the same society, i.e. you have a shared moral code."
I am appalled that you think this is true.
an orderly society absent the state
Finally you say it. Belongs in the first paragraph of the paper, not hidden in a comment. It demolishes everything you argued and explains why you want a moral consensus. You have invented nothing. Remove yourself from authorial voice, do properly neutral scholarship. George H. Smith does it, one of the most boring people you can read, CATO buffoon. Expert on everything libertarian and atheist and anarchist. Zero original contribution of thought.
"The first rule must be that coercion is not allowed."
You and I are done. It turns out that you don't care what the state does or doesn't do, because it is coercive by nature. Like communists, you'd sign off on an ideal government that did what you wished it to do -- despite what anyone else wants -- because you think morality trumps the rule of law.
I doubt you know what 'the rule of law' means. Has nothing to do with votes, or elections, or legislation, or political appointment of judges. It predates the Constitution and the Declaration of 1776. Try Magna Carta, 1215 A.D. Eight centuries of precedent, implicit in everything you think you know about property, orderly society, shared hope of justice.
Sigh.
Thirty years ago I exchanged correspondence with Milton Freidman who, at the time, was at the Hoover Institution. I alerted him to a set of ominous trends, and Dr. Friedman assured me all was well, because the rate of increasing debt was more or less in line with growth. Here is what happened instead --
 |
| State, Local, Federal, and Government Agency debt, in trillions, over 200% of U.S. GDP (does not include household, commercial, corporate debt, unfunded entitlements, interest) |
Friedman was wrong and I was right. Worse, Friedman made a personal appearance at an ISIL conference sponsored by Laissez Faire City when I was LFC's poet in residence. Friedman said Fabianism was "an old worn-out philosophy" that would yield to libertarian principles (NAP).
Do you know what Fabianism is? -- municipal water, sewer, and electricity -- multiplied by Carter and Clinton and Obama to include guaranteed mortgage lending and free health care.
Freidman was wrong twice. Think about it.
Do not address me as if I was a fellow student.
Do not reiterate or explain anything.
You did not pass the examination.
Friday, July 7, 2017
The Superior Race
Sunni Maravillosa made the remark years ago that she was "vaguely aware" of who Wolf DeVoon was, because we were both published by the same weekly webzine, along with Pierre Lemieux, Tibor Machan, Objectivist renegade Billy Beck, and many others.
I mention it because I was "vaguely aware" of who Ilana Mercer was, until I began to poke around on Facebook recently. I was delighted to discover that she has the gift of sparkling speech, and it prompted me to search for video, to hear what Mercer sounded like. She was fascinating in several respects. I felt like I had part of my brain removed, and I'm not entirely certain that I could hold my own with Mercer in a debate. Ann Coulter? -- no problem -- but the mercurial rabbi's daughter from South Africa > Israel > Canada, who advertises herself as "paleolibertarian" in line with Walter Block and the Auburn mafia led by Lew Rockwell, is a force of nature, as spectacular as a midsummer lightning storm.
I agree with much of what Ilana Mercer thinks and says in print or video. However, she made a podcast remark that went past the pale and drew blood. I don't doubt that it was offered as honest recitation of fact, but it deserves to be discussed. Explaining why all of George Bush's neocon foreign policy advisers were Jewish (Wolfowitz, Pearle, etc) the magnetic Mercer was unruffled, said that Jews held prominent roles in government and other fields because Jews are superior beings. Forgive me if I failed to quote her exactly, but Jewish superiority came through loud and clear to my simple goy ears.
As an admirer of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, okay, I can roll with it an inch or two. Jewish heretic Baruch Spinoza gave me a moral commandment that should be chiseled in stone: "All things noble are as difficult as they as rare."
But that's it. Everything else Jews have done in America has led to ruinous pain, especially in foreign policy, monetary policy, investment banking, psychiatry, publishing, conservative talk radio, network television, and filmed entertainment (my special area of interest).
I don't doubt that Jews are superior beings. Prof. Joseph Juhasz gaily pointed to the fact that practical engineering of atomic weapons was done entirely by Hungarian Jews -- "the Chosen People," he explained. Not making it up, Joe said it to me and meant it.
Ashkenazi Jews score higher than Asians on IQ tests, top of the food chain intellectually. They are clustered in New York, Philadelphia, and Hollywood, deciding who works in showbiz, who gets published, and who doesn't. There is a pipeline from Mossad to CIA, Congress, NSC and the White House. Israel sets our foreign policy. Krugman and Krauthammer are superstars.
As a descendant of Prussian-French blockheads, I have a difficult time holding my own with sparky Jews. It took me forever to divine a simple proposition: "Justice is the armed defense of innocent liberty." Not a hope in hell it will undo the damage done by Rawls and Rothbard. I've taken it on board that my work cuts no ice, sells no books, and will die when I do.
That's fine, no problem. But what Jews did to Hollywood is unforgivable.
I mention it because I was "vaguely aware" of who Ilana Mercer was, until I began to poke around on Facebook recently. I was delighted to discover that she has the gift of sparkling speech, and it prompted me to search for video, to hear what Mercer sounded like. She was fascinating in several respects. I felt like I had part of my brain removed, and I'm not entirely certain that I could hold my own with Mercer in a debate. Ann Coulter? -- no problem -- but the mercurial rabbi's daughter from South Africa > Israel > Canada, who advertises herself as "paleolibertarian" in line with Walter Block and the Auburn mafia led by Lew Rockwell, is a force of nature, as spectacular as a midsummer lightning storm.
I agree with much of what Ilana Mercer thinks and says in print or video. However, she made a podcast remark that went past the pale and drew blood. I don't doubt that it was offered as honest recitation of fact, but it deserves to be discussed. Explaining why all of George Bush's neocon foreign policy advisers were Jewish (Wolfowitz, Pearle, etc) the magnetic Mercer was unruffled, said that Jews held prominent roles in government and other fields because Jews are superior beings. Forgive me if I failed to quote her exactly, but Jewish superiority came through loud and clear to my simple goy ears.
As an admirer of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, okay, I can roll with it an inch or two. Jewish heretic Baruch Spinoza gave me a moral commandment that should be chiseled in stone: "All things noble are as difficult as they as rare."
But that's it. Everything else Jews have done in America has led to ruinous pain, especially in foreign policy, monetary policy, investment banking, psychiatry, publishing, conservative talk radio, network television, and filmed entertainment (my special area of interest).
I don't doubt that Jews are superior beings. Prof. Joseph Juhasz gaily pointed to the fact that practical engineering of atomic weapons was done entirely by Hungarian Jews -- "the Chosen People," he explained. Not making it up, Joe said it to me and meant it.
Ashkenazi Jews score higher than Asians on IQ tests, top of the food chain intellectually. They are clustered in New York, Philadelphia, and Hollywood, deciding who works in showbiz, who gets published, and who doesn't. There is a pipeline from Mossad to CIA, Congress, NSC and the White House. Israel sets our foreign policy. Krugman and Krauthammer are superstars.
As a descendant of Prussian-French blockheads, I have a difficult time holding my own with sparky Jews. It took me forever to divine a simple proposition: "Justice is the armed defense of innocent liberty." Not a hope in hell it will undo the damage done by Rawls and Rothbard. I've taken it on board that my work cuts no ice, sells no books, and will die when I do.
That's fine, no problem. But what Jews did to Hollywood is unforgivable.
Monday, June 26, 2017
The Ugly Side of Anarchy
Conservatives are alternately disgusted and worried about young "anarchists" throwing rocks at cops in Berkeley and Portland. That's small potatoes, not a big problem.
The narcotics threat is infinitely worse. It took a strike force of 600 Feds and local crime units to round up 60 hard guys who were paid-up members of the East Coast Crips network, most of them wanted for serious felonies, connected to a NY prison gang. Multiply that by 20 states minimum, thousands of killers still at large, coast to coast. Add MS-13 and five or six Mexican cartels. There may be as many as 100,000 dangerous men on our streets, armed to the teeth, cash flow positive from drug dealing. They have a million retail customers, each of whom has to commit petty crime to fix an addict's craving to get high, or at least stave off the nightmare of withdrawl another day or two. Maybe another million are involved in the meth scene and widely-prescribed pharmaceutical opiates, some reckless morons using both.
It's difficult to estimate the number of Americans who smoke pot, maybe 20 million. These geriatric gentlefolk are easy meat for the DEA, but harder to find and not much of a public threat. Ditto millions of drunks, most of whom are employed, driving buzzed and texting a pal for laughs. Add them all together -- hardened gangsters and addled dopes -- it's perhaps 33 million (10% of U.S. population) on the wrong side of criminal law and sobriety. The impact on women and children is horrible. They suffer grievous harm financially, psychologically, and often physically. Many are destined to become permanent wards of the state.
That's not the BIG problem -- however awful drug and alcohol abuse are.
We're dumbing down the next generation at an alarming rate, a combination of "education" in American schools and endless waves of obscenity in mass media, digital connectivity, and propaganda emanating from public servants and political operatives. Many tens of millions have been hosed with hate. Their children are being raised with the conviction that America is fundamentally evil, by reason of our (somewhat) free market in finance and (somewhat) splendid military strength. Folks are apt to over-estimate how strong we are in reality. Seven of our ten aircraft carrier strike groups are in port for repairs. The Air Force is flying antique fighters and tankers. We need replacement equipment and new recruits for a U.S. Army that did too much with too little money. There are never enough Marines.
Americans are confused about who's doing what to who, specifically with respect to politics and retail democracy. Foreign powers have little impact on us. Hollywood and New York are homegrown threats to the general welfare and domestic tranquility, broadcasting evil day and night, 24/7/365. It doesn't matter whether the sauce de jour is Donald Trump, or a college sport gab fest, or the latest excuse to get high on big screen "entertainment," or crime news, sanitized to conceal a one-sided race war that's decidedly obvious and that no one wants to discuss. Much easier to feel wronged by law enforcement, courageous people who put their lives on the line to defend us, an increasingly impossible duty. It escapes notice that cops are hamstrung by paperwork and due process, spend much of their time testifying in court after a lonely shift answering calls for domestic battery, directing traffic around a car accident, while deeply worried about stopping a stolen car because odds are they'll have to kill or be killed. The life of an LEO is nonstop horror and boredom, dealing with drunks and dead babies, gang wars, raving lunatics, theft, shoplifting, fistfights, stabbings, and noise complaints.
It's important to understand that cops and U.S. military are few, about two million -- vastly outnumbered by bureaucrats, government contractors, public school teachers, doctors and nurses poorly compensated by Medicaid, Medicare, and VA appropriations. We have more postal workers than cops, a larger army of municipal garbage collectors and janitors than soldiers and sailors and airmen. Public service comprises about 40% of economic activity, if you count all the IT people involved in making government more complicated and expensive than it otherwise might be.
Does all this government achieve anything?
Yes and no. Compliance with regulations and tax accounting kills American jobs, makes us dependent on China for cheap goods, reliant on imported oil and foreign bondholders. It's nice to be "the cleanest dirty shirt" of global finance, to cover our endless stream of public borrowing and government largesse. As goofy as it sounds, U.S. Treasury instruments are considered good collateral that can be rehypothecated and leveraged, employing thousands of traders who get to skim a nice seven-figure annual income, come what may, from "dark pools" of derivatives estimated at $1 quadrillion in notional value. Hard to grasp that it's all built on Treasury debt that cannot be retired and keeps growing in size, not including our unfunded entitlement problem and a hopelessly bloated Federal Reserve balance sheet.
The positive aspect of fat U.S. federal, state, and local spending is an illusion of Normalcy, some success in assuring the American people that cops and firemen will respond when you need them to clean up a relatively small tragedy. National Guard part-time citizen soldiers can be deployed to deal with big problems, hurricane, flood, or race riots. The government is ready to handle a lot of pain, albeit too little too late to save anyone's life or property.
Does it make sense to spend 40% of our productive output on government? Oops, that's the wrong question. It's a fiction of economic theory that government spending is a component of notional Gross Domestic Product. In reality, the private sector (60% of GDP) is 100% of our productive output -- and even that's exaggerated by incomes paid to finance, insurance, and real estate scalpers. So, productive work struggles to carry the "sterile" half of GDP -- and fails to cover the total cost of lavish bureaucracy and entitlement payola. That's why government has to be deficit financed, issuing more and more debt each fiscal year. States and localities are caught in the same trap. Higher taxes kill job creation, put more people out of work.
All perfectly dire, no way to turn back the clock and put government on a diet -- however, that's not the worst of our troubles. American liberty (anarchy) is a widely spread fabric of American culture, shared by federal, state, and local government workers, because they too are private citizens just like us, determined to be as free as possible in the direction of their lives, who to marry, which home to buy, how to feed and clothe and amuse their kids. They get sick, visit the doctor, attend churches and support charities, mow the lawn, no different than anyone else. Working for a government agency doesn't make someone less anarchist or more responsible at home. They drink. They watch TV and binge on chili cheese nachos.
THE UGLY TRUTH
The fundamental problem with American anarchy, all of it, from career criminals to the cops who try to stop bad guys, is our universal displeasure in facing facts. We became addicted to flattery, brainless amusements, and sleepy indifference to American history.
Let's discuss flattery first. DId you invent iron smelting, steelmaking, internal combustion, interchangeable parts, mass production, fractional distillation, and ten thousand other ideas that put an affordable vehicle in your driveway? -- nope. Did you invent radio, television, semiconductors, digital processors, packet switching, or liquid crystals? -- nope. Most of the stuff we use in daily life was an international effort involving basic science and industrial technology that evolved over centuries of trial and error, capitalism, competition, and wars for possession of raw material, especially oil, rubber, copper, bauxite, magnesium, nickel, zinc, titanium, etc. Wars were fought over food and water, fruit, transportation corridors, religions, and something as stupid as animal pelts. You stand on the shoulders and buried corpses of hundreds of millions of warriors, thousands of scientists, tens of thousands of crackpot inventors and ruthless stock market frauds. It's still happening today, stock market manipulation in particular. Pensions and individual investors are going to be kneecapped again, depend on it. There is a quiet trade war underway for scarce rare earth metals. Your individual contribution to prosperity is zero, no matter what your job, and the purchasing power of a buck is subject to change without notice. Not that long ago a "buck" was the skin of a male deer. Doe skins were "half a buck." Could you feed yourself without the grocery store supply chain, mechanized agriculture, and imported oil? Don't flatter yourself.
Brainless amusements are so thoroughly familiar and comfy that it's almost impossible to imagine life without pro sports, movies, TV, digital games, smart phones, and social media. None of it is necessary (like food and water and sanitation are). None of it makes you any smarter or wiser. Without advertising, it all collapses, and advertising is the first thing to go in a deep recession. Same thing with higher education. A degree in sociology or urban planning is worthless if the public purse snaps shut. Folks have lost sight of what the "business cycle" and "reversion to the mean" imply for discretionary spending on Star Trek conventions, binge viewing, multiplayer fantasy warfare, gay nightclubs, and elective cosmetic surgery. You are one paycheck from losing that leased Camaro or F-150. Government jobs have a little more security, but fun and games vanish for everybody in a deep recession.
That's why American history matters. We're living in an era very similar to the Roaring 20s, or rather at the end of it, fantastically inflated market values. Uber has never made a penny of profit, and they burned through $4 billion. Same thing with Amazon, microscopic margin and loaded with unpayable debt. Ditto shale drillers, automobile manufacturers, airlines, casual dining, department stores, malls and specialty retailers. Most gas stations are independently owned no matter what the sign says in front, and they squeak by on convenience store sales of cold beer, overpriced potato chips, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and watery fountain drinks. A big dip in sales (or a flash mob of looters) would be enough to shut their doors and turn off the gas pumps, lay off the minimum wage staff. Same thing at McDonald's and Burger King, barely profitable with bargain menus during boom times, unsustainable in a crash.
The last time we had a serious recession was NOT in living memory, unless you're 100 years old, which means you were 11 or 12 years old when the market crashed in 1929, old enough to understand and remember. For the rest of us, it's a question of American history. The crash was an overture to ten years of truly awful widespread poverty and hunger. Maybe we're in a different situation today? -- okay, maybe -- but I'll remind you that the Great Depression was the cause of worldwide war, which sounds particular terrifying today because so many nutso dictatorships have (or can easily obtain) nuclear weapons.
So. The ugly side of anarchy is not so much what might happen next, but rather how we got ourselves into this mess. Americans voted for bread and circuses. No one forced it on you. We became accustomed to the best of everything, available for the asking. You don't even have to work at a job. Crime pays. Social Security pays and Medicare pays. SNAP and welfare benefits pay. I hope you know that 2/3 of federal spending is mandatory "entitlements" that can't be cut without public outrage, instantly voting into office a socialist Congress to spend and borrow our way back to the American Daydream in defiance of reality -- because a bad recession at home means economic disasters abroad. Foreign bondholders will cash in their enormous stack of Treasury bonds, while we're trying to sell more. It's a solid concrete barrier to sustained or increased domestic spending to fend off pain during a recession.
What to do about it is simple. Use your liberty to prepare, and for heaven's sake please stop watching television and bitching about Donald Trump. He had nothing to do with LBJ's Great Society, Carter's Community Redevelopment Act, or Obamacare and expanded Medicaid. It is undeniably likely that a crisis will bring another silver-tongued FDR to power, so watch out for bank holidays and public works programs, defunding military strength and readiness.
And worse, the 1930s multiplied gangsters, armed with machine guns, paying graft to cops and Democrat political bosses. Bad idea to relocate to Chicago or Philadelphia now. Detroit is already destroyed. Baltimore is next, no crisis required, and I worry about Newark, Queens, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles.
The narcotics threat is infinitely worse. It took a strike force of 600 Feds and local crime units to round up 60 hard guys who were paid-up members of the East Coast Crips network, most of them wanted for serious felonies, connected to a NY prison gang. Multiply that by 20 states minimum, thousands of killers still at large, coast to coast. Add MS-13 and five or six Mexican cartels. There may be as many as 100,000 dangerous men on our streets, armed to the teeth, cash flow positive from drug dealing. They have a million retail customers, each of whom has to commit petty crime to fix an addict's craving to get high, or at least stave off the nightmare of withdrawl another day or two. Maybe another million are involved in the meth scene and widely-prescribed pharmaceutical opiates, some reckless morons using both.
It's difficult to estimate the number of Americans who smoke pot, maybe 20 million. These geriatric gentlefolk are easy meat for the DEA, but harder to find and not much of a public threat. Ditto millions of drunks, most of whom are employed, driving buzzed and texting a pal for laughs. Add them all together -- hardened gangsters and addled dopes -- it's perhaps 33 million (10% of U.S. population) on the wrong side of criminal law and sobriety. The impact on women and children is horrible. They suffer grievous harm financially, psychologically, and often physically. Many are destined to become permanent wards of the state.
That's not the BIG problem -- however awful drug and alcohol abuse are.
We're dumbing down the next generation at an alarming rate, a combination of "education" in American schools and endless waves of obscenity in mass media, digital connectivity, and propaganda emanating from public servants and political operatives. Many tens of millions have been hosed with hate. Their children are being raised with the conviction that America is fundamentally evil, by reason of our (somewhat) free market in finance and (somewhat) splendid military strength. Folks are apt to over-estimate how strong we are in reality. Seven of our ten aircraft carrier strike groups are in port for repairs. The Air Force is flying antique fighters and tankers. We need replacement equipment and new recruits for a U.S. Army that did too much with too little money. There are never enough Marines.
Americans are confused about who's doing what to who, specifically with respect to politics and retail democracy. Foreign powers have little impact on us. Hollywood and New York are homegrown threats to the general welfare and domestic tranquility, broadcasting evil day and night, 24/7/365. It doesn't matter whether the sauce de jour is Donald Trump, or a college sport gab fest, or the latest excuse to get high on big screen "entertainment," or crime news, sanitized to conceal a one-sided race war that's decidedly obvious and that no one wants to discuss. Much easier to feel wronged by law enforcement, courageous people who put their lives on the line to defend us, an increasingly impossible duty. It escapes notice that cops are hamstrung by paperwork and due process, spend much of their time testifying in court after a lonely shift answering calls for domestic battery, directing traffic around a car accident, while deeply worried about stopping a stolen car because odds are they'll have to kill or be killed. The life of an LEO is nonstop horror and boredom, dealing with drunks and dead babies, gang wars, raving lunatics, theft, shoplifting, fistfights, stabbings, and noise complaints.
It's important to understand that cops and U.S. military are few, about two million -- vastly outnumbered by bureaucrats, government contractors, public school teachers, doctors and nurses poorly compensated by Medicaid, Medicare, and VA appropriations. We have more postal workers than cops, a larger army of municipal garbage collectors and janitors than soldiers and sailors and airmen. Public service comprises about 40% of economic activity, if you count all the IT people involved in making government more complicated and expensive than it otherwise might be.
Does all this government achieve anything?
Yes and no. Compliance with regulations and tax accounting kills American jobs, makes us dependent on China for cheap goods, reliant on imported oil and foreign bondholders. It's nice to be "the cleanest dirty shirt" of global finance, to cover our endless stream of public borrowing and government largesse. As goofy as it sounds, U.S. Treasury instruments are considered good collateral that can be rehypothecated and leveraged, employing thousands of traders who get to skim a nice seven-figure annual income, come what may, from "dark pools" of derivatives estimated at $1 quadrillion in notional value. Hard to grasp that it's all built on Treasury debt that cannot be retired and keeps growing in size, not including our unfunded entitlement problem and a hopelessly bloated Federal Reserve balance sheet.
The positive aspect of fat U.S. federal, state, and local spending is an illusion of Normalcy, some success in assuring the American people that cops and firemen will respond when you need them to clean up a relatively small tragedy. National Guard part-time citizen soldiers can be deployed to deal with big problems, hurricane, flood, or race riots. The government is ready to handle a lot of pain, albeit too little too late to save anyone's life or property.
Does it make sense to spend 40% of our productive output on government? Oops, that's the wrong question. It's a fiction of economic theory that government spending is a component of notional Gross Domestic Product. In reality, the private sector (60% of GDP) is 100% of our productive output -- and even that's exaggerated by incomes paid to finance, insurance, and real estate scalpers. So, productive work struggles to carry the "sterile" half of GDP -- and fails to cover the total cost of lavish bureaucracy and entitlement payola. That's why government has to be deficit financed, issuing more and more debt each fiscal year. States and localities are caught in the same trap. Higher taxes kill job creation, put more people out of work.
All perfectly dire, no way to turn back the clock and put government on a diet -- however, that's not the worst of our troubles. American liberty (anarchy) is a widely spread fabric of American culture, shared by federal, state, and local government workers, because they too are private citizens just like us, determined to be as free as possible in the direction of their lives, who to marry, which home to buy, how to feed and clothe and amuse their kids. They get sick, visit the doctor, attend churches and support charities, mow the lawn, no different than anyone else. Working for a government agency doesn't make someone less anarchist or more responsible at home. They drink. They watch TV and binge on chili cheese nachos.
THE UGLY TRUTH
The fundamental problem with American anarchy, all of it, from career criminals to the cops who try to stop bad guys, is our universal displeasure in facing facts. We became addicted to flattery, brainless amusements, and sleepy indifference to American history.
Let's discuss flattery first. DId you invent iron smelting, steelmaking, internal combustion, interchangeable parts, mass production, fractional distillation, and ten thousand other ideas that put an affordable vehicle in your driveway? -- nope. Did you invent radio, television, semiconductors, digital processors, packet switching, or liquid crystals? -- nope. Most of the stuff we use in daily life was an international effort involving basic science and industrial technology that evolved over centuries of trial and error, capitalism, competition, and wars for possession of raw material, especially oil, rubber, copper, bauxite, magnesium, nickel, zinc, titanium, etc. Wars were fought over food and water, fruit, transportation corridors, religions, and something as stupid as animal pelts. You stand on the shoulders and buried corpses of hundreds of millions of warriors, thousands of scientists, tens of thousands of crackpot inventors and ruthless stock market frauds. It's still happening today, stock market manipulation in particular. Pensions and individual investors are going to be kneecapped again, depend on it. There is a quiet trade war underway for scarce rare earth metals. Your individual contribution to prosperity is zero, no matter what your job, and the purchasing power of a buck is subject to change without notice. Not that long ago a "buck" was the skin of a male deer. Doe skins were "half a buck." Could you feed yourself without the grocery store supply chain, mechanized agriculture, and imported oil? Don't flatter yourself.
Brainless amusements are so thoroughly familiar and comfy that it's almost impossible to imagine life without pro sports, movies, TV, digital games, smart phones, and social media. None of it is necessary (like food and water and sanitation are). None of it makes you any smarter or wiser. Without advertising, it all collapses, and advertising is the first thing to go in a deep recession. Same thing with higher education. A degree in sociology or urban planning is worthless if the public purse snaps shut. Folks have lost sight of what the "business cycle" and "reversion to the mean" imply for discretionary spending on Star Trek conventions, binge viewing, multiplayer fantasy warfare, gay nightclubs, and elective cosmetic surgery. You are one paycheck from losing that leased Camaro or F-150. Government jobs have a little more security, but fun and games vanish for everybody in a deep recession.
That's why American history matters. We're living in an era very similar to the Roaring 20s, or rather at the end of it, fantastically inflated market values. Uber has never made a penny of profit, and they burned through $4 billion. Same thing with Amazon, microscopic margin and loaded with unpayable debt. Ditto shale drillers, automobile manufacturers, airlines, casual dining, department stores, malls and specialty retailers. Most gas stations are independently owned no matter what the sign says in front, and they squeak by on convenience store sales of cold beer, overpriced potato chips, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and watery fountain drinks. A big dip in sales (or a flash mob of looters) would be enough to shut their doors and turn off the gas pumps, lay off the minimum wage staff. Same thing at McDonald's and Burger King, barely profitable with bargain menus during boom times, unsustainable in a crash.
The last time we had a serious recession was NOT in living memory, unless you're 100 years old, which means you were 11 or 12 years old when the market crashed in 1929, old enough to understand and remember. For the rest of us, it's a question of American history. The crash was an overture to ten years of truly awful widespread poverty and hunger. Maybe we're in a different situation today? -- okay, maybe -- but I'll remind you that the Great Depression was the cause of worldwide war, which sounds particular terrifying today because so many nutso dictatorships have (or can easily obtain) nuclear weapons.
So. The ugly side of anarchy is not so much what might happen next, but rather how we got ourselves into this mess. Americans voted for bread and circuses. No one forced it on you. We became accustomed to the best of everything, available for the asking. You don't even have to work at a job. Crime pays. Social Security pays and Medicare pays. SNAP and welfare benefits pay. I hope you know that 2/3 of federal spending is mandatory "entitlements" that can't be cut without public outrage, instantly voting into office a socialist Congress to spend and borrow our way back to the American Daydream in defiance of reality -- because a bad recession at home means economic disasters abroad. Foreign bondholders will cash in their enormous stack of Treasury bonds, while we're trying to sell more. It's a solid concrete barrier to sustained or increased domestic spending to fend off pain during a recession.
What to do about it is simple. Use your liberty to prepare, and for heaven's sake please stop watching television and bitching about Donald Trump. He had nothing to do with LBJ's Great Society, Carter's Community Redevelopment Act, or Obamacare and expanded Medicaid. It is undeniably likely that a crisis will bring another silver-tongued FDR to power, so watch out for bank holidays and public works programs, defunding military strength and readiness.
And worse, the 1930s multiplied gangsters, armed with machine guns, paying graft to cops and Democrat political bosses. Bad idea to relocate to Chicago or Philadelphia now. Detroit is already destroyed. Baltimore is next, no crisis required, and I worry about Newark, Queens, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles.
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