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.
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