Saturday, October 3, 2020

Rats!

 My masterpiece is unreadable. No doubt that Partners is brilliant, finely crafted, believable and utterly compelling. It's also sad, violent, true to the time and place in which Kyle finds a mentor, a gunslinger nearly dead to the world, and a girl who's equally courageous, destined to love Kyle as completely and deeply as two innocents can devote themselves to each other in the grit and fury of a mob war.


The language is crude and ruthless, a tough white swagger in 1975. If I had cleaned it up, the zeitgeist would vanish, none of the events would make sense. Most men who go to war swear, smoke, and shun tenderness as a debilitating threat. When a man is in love, he questions his duty to kill or be killed. No woman in love wants to lose her man or see him suffer. Kyle's gunfights and wounds are real. The end cannot be happy, icy death at the gates of hell. Told in first person voice, Kyle suffers consciously and clearly, pushes it away, explodes with callous brutality and psychological collapse repeatedly.


It's unreadable. I want to celebrate such a fine achievement, and I can't. A little laugh at the thought of something remembered. I paid an enormous emotional price to *WRITE* it! -- months of pain and daring and dramatic triangulation. The minor characters are vivid , vital, as real as you or me.


Well, rats. Forbidden to re-read my best work of fiction. I try. The opening is mostly innocent. Clever. Sometimes I can make it to Kyle's first murder, sometimes to his 2nd, 3rd, and 4th -- and the glory of a week with Karen in snowbound Door County, to live and love, alone together, one of the finest love stories wrapped in gentleness and sparkling good humor, like an island of good, a thousand miles from hell. In reality, it's only a three hour drive, and bonded together as man and wife they will endure hell together as long as they can, a matter of weeks, with increasing incisiveness and valor.


I feel like a failure, unable to re-read Partners. That's why I wrote Chiseltown, a screwball comedy that ends happily, full of preposterous fun, a little crisis fixed by friends, some insider jargon. A distinguished pal in Hollywood liked the twin sister starlets and suggested it should be a film school textbook. I can read it with pleasure, forget about the unreadable masterpiece of tragedy.


I sort of cringe when I re-read Heaven. A little too honest.


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Friday, July 17, 2020

What makes sense strategically

(The final post)

My mother always said that I was optimistic. For the past several decades, I endeavored to roll the rock of liberty another mile or two, because it mattered to me personally. Most of my work was abstract and theoretical. It's time to discuss specifications, if the United States is to reclaim its sanity, shed the burden of piggish plunder, and focus on national defense.

abbreviated as concisely as possible:


Coast Guard & Corps of Engineers (one integrated agency)
Navy to defend North America, plus strategic Trident submarines
Air Force continental tactical air defense, air traffic control
Space Command (NASA subordinated or disbanded)
DEA reinforced by Marines and Special Forces
Passports, Visas, Customs & Border Patrol
CIA, NSA, DIA (one integrated agency)
covert cooperation with Britain, Poland, and Australia
FBI to pursue fugitives, gangsters, and terrorists
commercial airlines responsible for travel security
commercial overseas consular services
State Dept disbanded, U.N. expelled from New York
Army disbanded, Commerce, Interior, and Energy privatized

Budget $200 billion a year, plus R&D, testing, procurement
(at present we have a big inventory of ships, aircraft, and nukes)

education, medical care, housing, retirement pensions privatized
charities, states, and counties can provide welfare if they wish
TVA, GSA, USDA, BLM, USPS, VA, and Amtrak to be auctioned
Judiciary reorganized, judges chosen by lawyers and term-limited
Washington DC buildings auctioned, made into museums, etc
seat of government moved to Andrews Air Force Base
IRS closed, national security funded by shareholder "cash calls"
one share one vote, to elect a term-limited board of directors
price of shares will fluctuate according to security demand
big tech, big banks, insurers, and billionaires will bid for shares
political parties and PACs will probably want shares, too
no foreign shareholders, no foreign debt, zero foreign aid
no market regulation, SEC, FDIC, GSEs, FCC, and FRB privatized

Obviously, this can't happen overnight or absent social circumstances that necessitate grim constitutional revision. Converting the U.S. Government from a $7 trillion boondoggle to a $200 billion national security enterprise will be wrenching revolutionary upheaval -- huge write-offs and millions of pink slips. How could such a terrible thing happen?

Nuclear war between (take your pick) Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, North Korea, Russia, or USA in defense of Japan or South Korea could do it. Conventional war in the Persian Gulf could do it, which seems likely enough. And we face imminent disaster at home.

I hope you understand that we're bankrupt. Two or three terms of Democrat rule will wreck the United States, no different than driving off a cliff in a crowded bus with bald tires and a drunken committee of incompetents at the wheel. Obama cut military spending and funded the "Arab Spring" that destabilized Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Arabia, and Yemen. His domestic policies crippled California, Texas, New England, and every U.S. city. A "Green New Deal" would not merely throttle the United States, it would kill it. Reelection of Trump as a last ditch, desperate, defiant rear guard war for the soul of America would be worse.

It's good to start a conversation about change. There is no divine right of stupidity, or race riots, or infinite spending on free shit at home and a world cop empire that failed in every lopsided war of choice from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The CIA didn't see the Iranian Islamic Revolution coming. No clue that a gang of Saudis would attack the World Trade Center. FBI warnings were ignored. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Mossad phony evidence and Jewish neo-cons manipulating dumbshit George W. Bush like a frightened child. Trump is no better, bamboozled by NIH and CDC bureaucrats and kneecapped by Pentagon skunks. The conspiracy of Congress, the Deep State, and Obama judges stinks worse than rotten eggs, a nonstop assault on middle class white families who fear for their children.

I know how important Social Security, Meals On Wheels, and free health care are for millions of elderly. I depend on all three of those entitlement programs to survive, because I'm old, ugly, isolated, and impoverished. It would be swell to have another check for $1200 from the Treasury. However, ponzi schemes are destined to end in disaster for everyone.

War, inflation, and chaos are only a matter of time. In 1776 the issues were similar, tyranny and tumult inflicted by a corrupt Parliament. Centuries of rivalry and warfare among France, England, and Spain roiled all of Europe, the Americas, Australia, Indochina, and Africa. The way our Founding Fathers dealt with it was to let the world go to hell, stay out of it, after we won independence. Our government was small, focused on defense of the United States, and funded by wealthy citizens. See www.robert-morris.com

The genius of federalism is a laboratory of States, free to experiment with gun ownership, taxes, abortion, LGBT, interstate pipelines, welfare benefits, renewable energy, etc. An implicit constitutional guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that a citizen can vote with his feet, move from one state to another. People are fleeing New York, Illinois, and California in droves, but the blessings of liberty have been quashed by decades of national fascism, imposing Federal laws, regulations, unfunded mandates, and taxes.

My strategy is no Federal taxes, no Federal legislation, privately funded national security. That's how the United States began and why we prospered as a formerly free society. What happens overseas is irrelevant to our national interest. Admitting millions of refugees is a policy question for the several States to consider, costly California sanctuary, for instance. Other states are equally free to request Executive deportation of illegal immigrants. Stern interdiction of narcotics should be a national priority. Mexico is nearing collapse as a civil society. I would send in the Marines, with DEA scouts and CIA interrogators.

Unfortunately, I will not live long enough to witness the cataclysm that will anguish a nation and paralyze its bankrupt government -- until a committee of moneyed patriots offer to buy the damn thing, to rescue and refocus national defense. My job is to bequeath six words to future shareholders, a simple creed that should be chiseled in stone at Andrews.

Justice is the defense of liberty.

If there's any doubt that national security can be achieved on a preposterously cheap $200  billion budget (in 2020 dollars) I will remind you that 3/4 of current Federal disbursements are entitlements, 3/4 of military spending has nothing to do with defense of North America, and 100% of the remainder is bloated bureaucracy and emergency handouts because you were forbidden to work, operate a business, or go to school. Our cities and towns have been flooded with narcotics, riots, and murder. Police recruitment collapsed. Heather McDonald summarized the domestic social situation in two words: "It's over."

The $25 trillion we owe China, Wall Street, Tel Aviv, oil sheiks, Grand Cayman, Isle of Man, and Bahamaian drug money launderers? Like Heather said: "It's over." Try and collect from a bankrupt government that was sold at auction and stiffed millions of unionized workers.

It's best to view the U.S. Government as an insurance company that became insolvent and can't provide to its beneficiaries the security and cash that it promised to deliver, having collected revenue and borrowed funds for that purpose. It's irrelevant that it was organized as a public member-owned mutual company. It has to be wound up by a receiver, its assets auctioned, and outstanding claims settled for pennies on the dollar. I would give priority to disabled military veterans who were promised medical care, and a lump sum Social Security settlement. Nothing for politicians and bureaucrats who drove government into a ditch.

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How to fight crime

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whether God given or as an assertion of constitutional principle makes no sense. It doesn't apply to dead people, the terminally ill, noncitizens, people trapped overseas, terrorists, prisoners, crime victims, or aborted babies. It's debatable whether the right of liberty applies to small children or the insane. No one is free of taxation, regulation, national sacrifice in war, or collision with others that vaporizes liberty. Your freedom ends at my property line, and no one is free in a car, an airplane, or a crowd. Personal pursuit of happiness seems remote if you work for a corporation, a family business, or a government agency. It would be more accurate to say that you have a right to die, obey, and suffer numerous unwanted consequences of cohabiting a complicated world. Fraud, divorce, cancer, rape, paraplegia, and child abuse have ruinous lifetaking impact.

When Jefferson advanced the notion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there was historical context, a King and Parliament who were distant from sparsely populated towns and homesteads in American colonies that became accustomed to democracy. Our founding fathers routinely ignored the edicts issued in London, which reached them in fair weather a couple months later. No one would have thought to declare human rights, except that Tory judges and redcoats were dispatched to Boston. Somehow the colonial Declaration of eternal human rights in 1776 evolved into a $7 trillion tyranny of our own making. It's settled custom in the U.S. today that you're guilty until proved innocent if the IRS decides to audit you, or if Democrat conspirators launch a Deep State war of lies and leaks. No one is safe at home, at work, or at school, silenced by intersectionality, gunfire, and idiotic government lockdown. The mortality rate from Covid-19 has fallen below seasonal flu. Young adults and children are immune or suffer mild symptoms, but family lockdown was fatal to elderly with pre-existing conditions and obese people of color. Total "cases" are a fake statistic, inflated with false positives, lies about 100% positivity at Florida labs, asymptomatic hospital admissions for childbirth, and multiple retests for burger flippers. Tens of thousands of drug overdoses, car wreck victims, and heart attacks were listed as Covid-19 "cause of death" because hospitals were paid a bounty every time they intubated a patient, killing them. Half of all virus deaths in New York were mass murder by Andrew Cuomo, sending infectious hospital patients to nursing homes as a political gambit, rather than use thousands of empty Navy ICU beds and Javitz Center ICU beds provided by President Trump. Human rights? Are you joking?

The way I approach rights is simple. Justice is the armed defense of innocent liberty. It has nothing to do with voting or legislation. When seconds count, the police are only minutes away, unless you live in Brooklyn, Seattle, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, or Chicago. Buy a gun, get trained in tactical defense, carry every day, and plan ahead if you have to shoot. Don't hang around and depend on lawyers to rescue you. Scram and get rid of the gun. Toss it in a lake. You can always buy another one. Stockpile ammo, which is becoming hard to find.

There is a political question to address, which Wendy McElroy answered as follows. She is morally opposed to voting, as I am, but said that she would have shot Hitler to stop him from taking office and directing Nazi genocide and conquest. This presumes that we agree with Hegel, that world historical figures and the clash of dialectical ideas shape history, therefore shooting Hitler could have prevented World War II. Killing charismatic individuals usually creates martyrs, like Jesus, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, and MLK. The world is not improved by it. Few have done more harm recently than the idiot savant from Sweden, but it would be an error to shoot Greta, amplifying her mystique. It's too late to kill Al Gore or Bernie Sanders. Neither of them are world historical figures and the crap they plopped in the public square were little turds of derivative, garbled nonsense. We have worse problems than bumbling opportunists like Pelosi, Obama, and AOC.

The fundamental problem is constitutional law. Until and unless Americans stand up as free moral agents, no obligation to God, or Gaia, or whatever government our neighbors vote to continue, there is no hope of social progress. We see ourselves as free in a defacto sense, almost secretly, evading the opinions of others as much as possible, choosing who we love and hope to cherish and defend, which work we want to do for our own satisfaction, how to spend our days so they mean something to us personally. Patriots fight for national security. Cops pit their courage and training against evil. Those are personal choices, no different than ambitious entreprenuers like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, both of whom did enormous social harm. Brave patriots and good cops do harm by defending the morally indefensible evil of political whims, whether in Afghanistan or Milwaukee.

Crime? Be situationally aware. If possible, run. If not, shoot first, shoot to kill, and keep firing until the threat is ended. You will not succeed without tactical training, 100 hours minimum. The carry weapon of choice is a mid-size 9mm automatic in a gunbelt with a good holster. A normal belt is no good. Ladies have special front carry holsters. Understand where you are and what is downrange. Bullets travel up to a mile, go through doors, windows, sheet rock. Know your weapon. Know your ammo. Know how to deal with malfunctions.

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Saturday, July 4, 2020

Food

Forgive an old man for reminiscing. As a child, there were lots of swell discoveries like devil's food (soft toffee foam covered in dark chocolate) and honest milk shakes (ice cream, whole milk, and real whipped cream), but five items from my childhood stand out so clearly that I can still taste them. Gone now and impossible to recreate. There was a Luxemburger bakery that made a unique cheesecake, tan on top, a light airy cake with raisins. Another baker had hot crisp jelly filled donuts at 4 a.m. that no longer exist anywhere on the planet. Each day Smith Bros. brought in a catch of lake perch that were fileted, breaded, and deep fried. My uncle took me to a butcher's walk-in cold room, fresh raw ground beef on saltines. As a Boy Scout, the climax of a troop meeting was bursting hot juicy sausages and fresh kaiser buns.

The Dutch know cheese better than anyone else. Miniature Gouda (HOW-da) and Edam (AE-daam) are rubbery, inferior exports. Dutchmen eat "young" cheese that's soft, smooth, and sweet, and "old" cheese, a sharp, mouth watering slab in a sliced brodje, chewy round rolls that are baked daily in the millions. Dutch ham is marvelous. I had numerous gastronomic adventures in Holland, broiled garlic escargot, clear bright boujelais nouveau, "frit saus" on french fries, and an astounding Trappist Triple that had to be poured carefully because there was thick silt at the bottom of an ancient dusty unlabeled bottle. Breakfast in Holland is a joy, especially an Uitsmieter (literally: "thrown out the window") two sunnyside eggs with hot ham and cheese on two slices of fresh bread, a hard working farmer's midmorning meal.

Some discoveries were weird, like the chicken and rice casserole prepared by my Javanese housekeeper. It had two chicken claws sticking up in the middle of it. She also used a pail to splash water all over my big tile bathroom. She didn't know what toilet paper was, or why it might be desirable to avoid soaking it with cold water. I'm trying to remember a meal that I enjoyed anywhere in Indonesia. The beer was okay, a robust Dutch lager license. Australia did not have drinkable beer, and Aussies do ghastly things to sandwiches. However, there was a French baker in Subiaco with nice baguettes and gingerbread men. I paid $35 a pound for imported Costa Rican whole bean coffee at a Greek specialty shop in Northbridge.

Oh, jeez, England. No matter how much I spent at their finest restaurants, I never enjoyed a meal there, and if you want to torture someone, make them eat breakfast at a seaside hotel. For truly excellent food everywhere, even at a train station, go to Brussels.

It was a shock coming back to America. Giant portions, enough for two people on every plate. Saltgrass in Houston was okay. That's about all that anyone can say about U.S. dining, except little out-of-the-way French provincal cafes in Forestville and Wynnewood. I liked cooking at home better than eating out in America, but it was always a challenge to find a decent fish or fresh meat. I made up for it by drinking Dewars, the only label I liked, never cared for pricey single malts or Irish whiskey. In Scotland, I sipped Bell's straight up and my favorite dinner was deep fried cod and chips wrapped in slick brown paper.

I think there should be a law against anything liquid or solid in Germany. Their pancakes are stupid, wines and spirits are intolerably sweet, and I've had better pretzels in Philly. Unless you've had a cheesesteak on Sansom St., you don't know what a cheesesteak is, and mussels in South Philadelphia come with bulletholes in the booth and Sinatra on the jukebox.

Did I mention giant prawns in Singapore?

One last anecdote of the weird. There was a corner shop in Copenhagen that had ice cream novelties in a freezer, an afterschool treat for my eight-year-old daughter. She picked what looked exactly like a thick disc of ice cream covered in dark chocolate on a popsickle stick. She took one bite and spat it out. It wasn't chocolate. It was black licorice. Those zany Danes! -- excellent neighborhood bakeries, a million bicycles that have their own traffic lanes and stop lights, big train stations, big empty trains, and a bureaucracy that makes molasses slow DMV people look like superhuman wizards. To throw away a dinky bag of trash, I had to use a key and stuff it through a locked porthole the size of a coffee can lid in a block wall garbage annex. There were six portholes that emptied into little bins, most of them jammed full. You had to get lucky after unlocking four or five portholes to find one with space for another bag.

Made perfect sense in Surakarta to have a rebar rack on a pole, to keep rats from chewing up a big thick 30-gal plastic bag of kitchen waste, papaya rinds, cigarette butts, fish guts, chicken carcasses, etc. One day during a downpour, a little brown guy on a bicycle stopped, emptied the trash on my lawn, poked holes for his head and arms, and rode away with a raincoat.

In the middle of the night, I woke in terror. A voice shouted "EE-e-e-e!" outside my window. A friend explained that it was the baker, inviting me to buy fresh roti (bread) at 3 a.m. The neighborhood night watchman came an hour later and banged on my gate with a club, to let me know he was on duty and all was well.

Less sane than Surakarta, a Fox radio bulletin just now: Atlantic City casinos are allowed to reopen. No food, no drinks, no smoking. Why the hell go there?!

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White Lives Mattered

Those who would tear down monuments, damn capitalism, and wage war on white privilege are brainwashed idiots, blind to the obvious. Every bite of food you eat is a debt you owe to private property, common law, and industrial civilization that you impede at your peril.

White lives mattered, too many to recite. You'd need an encyclopedia. Without them, no electricity, no medicine, computers, automobiles or aircraft. No iron and steel, no oil wells, dish soap, satellites, or filtration plants. White people are synonymous with civilization.

Our national monuments are few and cherished.

Robert E. Lee disliked slavery and was opposed to secession. Lincoln offered him command of the Union Army and Colonel Lee declined, respectfully, would not take up arms against Virginia, hallowed land of Jefferson, Washington, Patrick Henry, and James Madison, without whom there would have been no United States, no Constitution or Bill of Rights. It's difficult to exaggerate Jefferson's contribution, author of the Declaration, diplomat who brought France into the Revolutionary War, visionary president who doubled the size of the United States, and advocate for the separation of church and state, at a time when the Anglican Church was tax supported and Washington resisted disestablishment. Jefferson prevailed and freedom of religion allowed Catholics, Noncomformists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Enlightenment deists to make common cause as a new nation, "E Pluribus Unum."

People misunderstand why the Civil War was fought. It had little to do with slavery. It was fought over protectionist trade tariffs that enriched the North and penalized the South. The South had no factories to manufacture rifles, bullets, or blankets. One third of Confederate soldiers who fought in Gettysburg were barefoot. Slavery was not unique to the South.

Franklin had slaves, household help who were treated with dignity, like employees. Slaves labored in Massachusetts Bay Colony during the harsh, uncertain years of its settlement. No one in America wanted a slave to starve or suffer. They were housed and fed far better by Christians than by West African tribal warlords who enslaved them. Whites did not capture slaves. Bristol merchants traded gold for them, saving women and children from torture and grisly death. Slavery in white America was infinitely better than African slavery. Let's talk about a hero who owned 500 slaves and played a pivotal role in their future liberation.

Andrew Jackson was one of the most striking figures in American history. Without Jackson, there would have been no "one man one vote" democracy and no Union for Lincoln to rally and emancipate. Jackson's victory in New Orleans saved us in 1814. He vetoed construction of the Cumberland Road, declaring that Congress had no lawful power of pork barrel spending to enrich themselves, to the detriment of other Americans. When he was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning removal of Indians, President Jackson scoffed, "How many divisions does the Chief Justice have? He made an order, let him try to enforce it."

Native American Indians were tribes led by kings, many of which battled tribe versus tribe before Pilgrims landed at Plymouth and Old Boston Harbor. In Massachusetts and Georgia, Indian property rights were acknowledged, provided that they did not attack white settlers. Northern tribes became pawns of English and French rivalry. Plains war parties slaughtered white women and children or took them as slaves. Nothing turned out well in the Old West, made infinitely worse by land grants for transcontinental railroads and mines. If anyone is owed reparations, it's the Sioux, Crow, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Comanche.

Let's skip ahead and consider a cavalry charge in Cuba. Osage oil millionaires in Oklahoma, Cherokee steelworkers, Navajo code heroes of World War II, tax exempt casinos, fireworks superstores, and smoke shops were distant future horizons when a company of volunteers led by a future president charged uphill against Spanish fortifications.

Teddy Roosevelt never expected to be President, but his legacy was profound. He broke up powerful Wall Street trusts and created the first national park, in Yellowstone, a confident, cheerful champion of rugged individualism, nature conservancy, and physical fitness, the only "modern" white American president honored on Mount Rushmore.

I despise politically greasy government monuments, but they're there for a reason, like the idolatry of Crazy Horse a few miles from Mount Rushmore and a giant black fist in Detroit. Taskmasters and laborers of antiquity built pyramids, castles, and cathedrals, completed by generations of stone masons, taxpayers, and kings. America was different. Until recently, American monuments and statues were erected privately by free men and women to honor patriots like Perry, Revere, and John Paul Jones. Newly freed slaves contributed $17,000 to build the controversial statue of Lincoln and a rising black man with broken shackles. Think about it. $17,000 in 1876 was serious money, voluntarily paid in, pennies and nickels from black families who had little, except an overwhelming urge to honor the fallen Lincoln.

There are three national monuments in Washington DC that must be protected at all costs, including fixed bayonets and bullets if necessary, the Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, and Washington Monument. All the misery and shame of bankrupt Chicago and Detroit will be our grim national fate if we tarnish or disown America's great white liberators.

Mobs want to destroy something? Let them wreck the monument to a rich, laughing king of bureaucracy, lies, monetary chaos, improvised folly, brazen threats, and personal complicity in the Soviet enslavement of Europe. Fellow travelers gave them atomic bomb secrets. FDR became president for life by promising to cut the size of government 25% and growing it to more than 60% of GDP, seizing every U.S. factory and farm to supply Stalin. His legacy is a ponzi pyramid of public entitlements, regulatory paperwork, unpayable debt and inflation. White people have their share of villains who should be torn from the public square, LBJ in particular, ten times worse than FDR, killed two million Vietnamese and betrayed 10 million stable two-parent negro families. The Great Society rewarded single mothers, drunks, drug dealers, incompetent black teachers, and corrupt "community organizers."

NPR constantly advances the notion of black heroism, creativity, and scientific genius. That's shameful pandering, an absurd distortion of history. The intellectual contribution of Africa was tribal genocide, slavery, disease, starvation, drum worship, and child rape, which were incurable by European colonization or American largesse. British transportation of slaves to Brazil, the Carribean, and U.S. colonial plantations was social disaster for all concerned. 90% of African slaves went to Brazil, worked to death or perished from disease. The 6% of slaves who were transported to America were treated better. They had families and children. The Civil War and Reconstruction were ruinous and rocky, but by 1948 there was racial harmony and mutual respect in the industrial north. Count Basie was famous. Republicans enacted equal rights, over the objections and attempted filibuster by Southern Democrats, historic black oppressors and segregationists, many of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Flash forward to today: 43 million African-American citizens. After 100 years of civil liberty, followed by 60 years of lavish welfare, preferential hiring and education, blacks are 100% responsible for savage street crime, chronic illness, academic gibberish, and bankruptcy of formerly prosperous majority white cities coast to coast. It's no excuse that immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and Puerto Rico wanted a piece of the drug trade. Black mayors, black cops, and black politicians wasted decades and did nothing except to line their pockets and rant about imaginary, highly-taxed "white privilege" and the national anthem. Hollywood movies and multiple decades of jazz, Motown, rap, pro sports, and TV lavished loot on black actors, musicians, athletes; black millionaires and billionaires departed Detroit for Beverly Hills. Obama abandoned Chicago for the White House, white schools, a gated mansion, an army of loyalists in majority black Washington DC, and control of the Democrat Party.

White flight has taken on renewed urgency. Apartment dwellers in Manhattan and Brooklyn are under bombardment by fireworks every night, and Obama ordered HUD integration of the suburbs, Section 8 welfare housing erected in single family white neighborhoods.

The general election of 2020 will be a body blow to the Republic. If Trump is reelected, there will be violent insurrection by murderous black mobs. If sock puppet Joe and black nationalist Michelle triumph with an avalanche of fake ballots, our heritage will crumble to dry white dust, to be swept aside by a Green New Deal and "racial justice" intimidation. As I explained many times, justice is the armed defense of innocent liberty. It has nothing to do with race, climate, elections, entitlements, public education, protest marches, looting or arson. Cops are being targeted with gunfire and filthy verbal assault daily. If they fight back, they are suspended, smeared, investigated, indicted, financially and professionally ruined by black prosecutors and black juries, deaf to reason or respect for allegedly racist cops.

"Eventually a society becomes too stupid to survive." (Mark Steyn)

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spanneticuts

I write in my sleep, often search for words and the meaning thereof, like "spanneticuts" as I awoke from a nap. No idea what I was trying to express. The ties between people and shared notions that bind them to an illusion, I think. Short circuits that choke the truth. Bored with dumbshit bartender Hannity repeating himself again, I changed the channel. NPR announced that Reddit has rewritten its rules, banned hate speech and incitement to violence.

KILL, PUSSYCAT, KILL!   (I lack imagination today.)

Alice Cooper is 100 times sharper than I am. A record company clod challenged him to rhyme the word "orange." Without hesitation, Cooper said: "Door hinge."

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Rights and Reality

I don't know why I have to explain this repeatedly. The Declaration was a memo to George III, Parliament, and a majority of American colonists who did not like the idea of upsetting their existing relations of obligation and comfortable privilege. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine blew a raspberry at Quakers in particular -- fat, prosperous Tories. The Committee of Safety in Boston had similar problems. Merchants and the governor saw themselves as Englishmen. A handful of lawyers, tradesmen, and clergy refused to accept limitation on the freedom and self-government that was created by accident in Massachusetts Bay Colony. I don't want to discuss that in detail. Suffice it to say that all American colonies had democratic assemblies, necessitated by the great distance from English authorities, absence of representation in Parliament, and colonial circumstances that required immediate attention, like Indian wars, heretics, and trade with the West Indies. Arbitrary, bizarre taxes were imposed, withdrawn, and reimposed on the colonies by Parliament and enforced by Royal tax judges sent from London. "An act against natural equity is void," James Otis thundered in tax court. He was clubbed unconscious by tax bailiffs and suffered brain damage. Sam Adams had to replace him as leader of the Committee of Safety. Sons of Liberty threw a shipment of tea in Boston Harbor. A company of Redcoats arrived and fired on Boston protestors.

Bottom line, the Declaration was calculated to foment united action. Ignore its assertion of natural human rights, a glittering generality without definition. It relied on Biblical faith in celestial Commandments that John Locke said justified authority of moral government. The best way to read the Declaration is to study its itemized indictment of George III, who was alleged to have terminated the obligation of colonial loyalty to the Crown because he failed to preserve their rights as Englishmen. We celebrate the wrong date. The Declaration was adopted July 2, 1776 by a congress of revolutionaries, chaired by a bootlegger.

Without the French fleet, we would have lost the War of Independence. Washington was a terrible general. At the conclusion of eight years of conflict, all of the colonies and Congress were bankrupt and deeply in debt to lenders and suppliers who were paid in worthless scrip (Continental paper dollars). Each colony saw itself as an independent state, and each had a separate "foreign" policy with respect to other states. Some were friendly to England, others to France. The Articles of Confederation were a toothless, unenforceable system of levies on state governments. States refused to pay troops who fought in the Revolution. They refused to pay Continental debt. They taxed each other's commerce. Dissolution into rival alliances was threatened, and all 13 states suffered worsening economic weakness.

Two young lawyers were alarmed, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. They petitioned Washington to convene a conference in Annapolis to discuss amendments to the Articles of national government. Some states sent delegates, most did not. Those who attended had no authority to agree anything, but they pledged to meet again in Philadelphia at a convention of all 13 states. Washington chaired the convention of 1787. Madison recorded a meticulous journal of their debates. Hamilton argued for monarchy, rejected immediately, and he left in disgrace. The two other New York delegates said they had no authority to consider a new constitution and likewise left after a single week of sitting there like bumps on a log. Slave States refused to yield, despite the logic and moral authority of Northern abolishionists. If slavery was outlawed, the South would secede. Small States wanted legislative power equal to Large States. George Washington said nothing as presiding officer. Ben Franklin was too feeble to stand and speak. His ideas, generally ignored, were read aloud by a friend.

After 55 days of stifling summer heat in a closed chamber, drinking barrels of whiskey every night, they mooted compromise upon compromise, fractions of advantage to be blurred and fudged by constitutional complexity. No one wanted to sign the resulting document. Franklin spoke and implored them to sign it because the economic and political crisis was desperate, and if no constitution was adopted, the United States would fail and dissolve, easy prey for England and France to divide and conquer. Hamilton returned to sign on behalf of New York.

Public debate for and against ratification raged for two years. In New York, a special state convention voted 30-27 to ratify, a decision tipped by two swing votes. In Virginia, the vote was 89-79, another skinny margin of only six delegates. Who knows what corrupt promises were made to win those votes?

What did the U.S. Constitution provide? Slavery. A post office. Minted gold dollars. Checks and balances to frustrate legislation. Tariffs. Excise taxes. Frequent elections. No inalienable rights, other than due process and compensation for property the government might take. Did it prevent civil war? No. Did it solve the problem of Continental debt? No. The only thing it established instantly and permanently was political parties, Federalists versus Democrats, spoils of office, and "gerrymandering" by Elbridge Gerry, delegate from Massachusetts, sly architect of a salamander shaped Congressional district to guarantee his election.

It's too much to recite all the waste, fraud, idiocy, and tragedy in U.S. history. It began with unpayable debt, roiled by slim majorities who ran roughshod over nearly equal "minority" political opponents, everyone in favor of more debt, more government, more payola. In reality, the people of America had no voice, past or present, no right to resist whatever the political elite decided to impose by horse trading or expedient improvizations. Removal of Indians. Land grants for Union Pacific. Ejection of Mormons from Nevada. Carpetbaggers. Segregation. Billions for Stalin. Stalemate in Korea. Duck and cover. Assassinations. Riots. Genocide in Vietnam. Alliance with Israel. Invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

None of it was necessary. Self government is liberty. If you continue to vote for politicians, they will tax and regulate every aspect of life, borrow and spend, stupify and indoctrinate your children, throw trillions at idle "consumers" and tens of trillions at a Green New Deal, relying on a corrupt compromise that had little to do with liberty in 1787 and less today.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Peelable shims


Life has been interesting, full of memorable details, like layered aluminum shim stock pieces that could be peeled 1mm at a time to adjust the height of little lens assemblies, 48 lens to be converged, no two of which matched in prototype machining or mounting. I bought magic shop smoke powder to assess what was wrong with the cooling system. Three fans blew into the projector, no air flow, nothing but turbulence. I reversed one of the fans and installed heat dissipating fins on the inefficient glass lamp mirrors, to be upgraded with my parabolic chrome-plated design to throw more light than heat in a commercial production model.

Two Lockheed engineers came by with a section of the L-1011 cockpit windscreen. There was a layer of gold film to heat and defog the thick, curved windscreen, and most of them had to be thrown away, because the gold film ripped top to bottom randomly in the middle of the screen and wouldn't conduct current. I adjusted my 3-D video microscope to examine their defect sample, experimented with fiber optic lighting, and saw the problem. A tiny speck of dirt had created a puddle of resistance that ripped molecule by molecule in a vertical tear. I enjoyed helping them. The L-1011 was my favorite passenger plane.

Sometimes I annoyed people. I was assigned to coordinate a business presentation for LRT, the government agency that operates the London Underground system. It was proposed to install a new PA system with video news bulletins to entertain and inform folks standing on hundreds of platforms, which train was next and why it was delayed, if it was. Existing PA announcements were totally unintelligible. I worked with two other men on the proposal, both of them ruling class dignitaries. The finance guy understood and accepted my budget cuts, but the electronics wizard went ballistic. He wanted to sell LRT pricey TV monitors he manufactured. I vetoed it in favor of cheap Hitachi screens that I could get below wholesale because it advertised the brand. The other idea I pushed was sequential audio delay, so the sound marched along the platform in one wavefront, no cacophonous echo.

I was overly fussy about ethics. In 2009, I became slightly famous for busting the SEC, the oil industry, and two professional associations. Presto, I had 25,000 followers on Seeking Alpha, and Felix Salmon at Reuters publicized the story I told about fake "proved" oil reserves and black box probability modeling. Nice bright feather in my cap, but zero dollars and zero cents in consulting fees. Worse, I called the top on Petrobras, issued a Sell rating. Investors saved tens of millions of dollars and wrote glowing thanks. The rules were exasperating. Analysts have to be pure as the driven snow, no money invested, no short selling. I wrote a few more financial articles, horse laughed at BHP's $12 billion acquisition of Petrohawk, and celebrated a young Irish economist who correctly saw that it was impossible to convert and fuel the U.S. passenger car and light duty pickup truck fleet with natural gas ("the Pickens Plan"). There's not enough natural gas in the ground to do 10% of it. Eventually I got a booby prize for calling bullshit on BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster, monitoring two dozen ROVs day and night. An editor in Abu Dhabi offered me a weekly column opposite Paul Krugman, $300 for 800 words on any topic I cared to discuss. My first target was George W. Bush and a corrupt oil deal in Ghana. Then the problem of critical elements, shortages of rhenium, gold, and cadmium.

Pity that I never made the leap to digital. I was an analog expert, supply and demand curves and spockets and lighting ratios, tape recorders and vacuum tubes. As a child I assembled radio kits, used a slide rule to calculate antenna lengths, and built lightning arrestors.

* coming attraction *


I have been honored repeatedly in life, always privately, never by cheering crowds. About a year ago, an audiobook producer offered to voice my libertarian ethics, politics, and legal philosophy of due process and national security. It's been completed and will appear as an Audible release on the 4th of July. I find it slightly incredible that big rig drivers, airline passengers, and subway strap hangers will listen to six hours of Wolf DeVoon, but I'm deeply honored that my ideas were commemorated by a very capable professional narrator.

About anarchy

I was a film and TV director. Frequently, daily, hourly, minute by minute, I told people what to do. The best directors perceive what others can do (or can't do). I negotiated, but just as often I challenged them to stretch a little. Everyone does this in grocery stores, or driving a car on a busy street, or dealing with your family. We navigate a parking lot, find a nice cut of meat, choose which brand of cereal to take home. Price matters. Sometimes it's negotiable, especially buying a used car or a house, deciding which job to take (or quit), how much to bid at an auction. I was delighted to get a pine day bed in perfect condition for $5 at a furniture auction, because no one else bid for it. Sometimes it's difficult to get what you want. Please eat your spinach, honey. It's full of iron for healthy red blood cells.

All of these transactions, on a film set or at the family dinner table, are practical aspects of private anarchy, absolutely no government involved. There are some principles of law in the background, most of them physical. Unless you're over six feet tall and nimble, forget about playing competitive basketball. No matter how angry you are, cursing a stalled truck with a dead battery won't start it. Employment can be frustrating at times, hamstrung by rules or a lazy coworker, a manager who's deaf to suggestions, a client who changes her mind halfway through a job. How we deal with adversity and fatigue is a measure of our fitness to live. I was considerably less fit than others. No man is perfectly suited to all situations, but we're free to say phooey! and concentrate on strengthening our strengths. The responsibility of anarchy impels men to study, dream, explore, dare, fail, try again, and succeed in ways that others don't. They're busy building themselves as separate souls, a basic human right.

Legislation forces everyone to conform. Or rebel, which tens of millions of Americans do all the time. Liberty is a tradition with thick deep roots, all the way back to Patrick Henry, who led the fight in Virginia to reject the new U.S. Constitution. He almost succeeded, lost by six votes, 79-89. His descendants recently rallied in defense of the 2nd Amendment, thousands of armed men surrounding the statehouse. It's not an exclusively American phenomenon. British skinhead patriots fought police to stop Black Lives Matter from defacing or toppling national monuments in Westminster.

Law enforcement is selective and weak. It's impossible to regulate road rage in Los Angeles, narcotics in Philadelphia, or homicide in Chicago. Police and National Guard couldn't control riots and looting in 1968 or 1992 or 2020. Law and order is mostly voluntary, something that people do by themselves. Half of the American electorate doesn't vote and don't care what happens in Albany or Sacramento, a bicoastal conspiracy of liars and dunces. They bought guns and ammo, and they're voting with their feet, because cities are no longer affordable, fun, safe, or economically necessary. Cops are quitting, and those on duty are making fewer arrests. Tens of thousands of families have fled New York City.

Anarchy is inextinguishable. No one can force you to love someone, or do the right thing, or do the wrong thing to appease LGBT attorneys. When Target allowed men to use women's rest rooms and changing rooms, thousands of women boycotted the chain. People vote with their feet. They risk their lives to escape Guatemala and enter the U.S. illegally.

Patriots are few, patrolling the world to deter China and Russia, manning missile silos and nuclear submarines. Money can't buy their loyalty. Every good on earth is voluntary. Some of it is fatal. All of it is difficult, like raising a family and protecting your innocent children from government indoctrination, predatory urban animals, seductive internet filth, and drugs.

The only antidote to peril is independence, personal choice.

Forget about racism, political machinations, media headlines, tragedy, and fancy ideas. The meaning of private anarchy is simple. You're free to pursue your own happiness, to thrive as an individual, to care for your family and provide for the future. Declare independence.

The forces arrayed against Donald Trump are extremely powerful, including swing votes in the Senate and distinguished military figures. The possibility of a coup is no longer remote or hypothetical. Crisis serves the interests of vultures like George Soros, who made his fortune betting against the Bank of England. If constitutional government is suspended, whether by military coup, or civil disorder, or a rigged election in November, it will not alter the truth of private anarchy and personal responsibility for the safety of your loved ones. Those who can think independently and sidestep mass hysteria are pioneer citizen heroes devoted to the principles of American life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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I lack imagination


Sunday, June 7, 2020

When things return to normal

Smooth BBC liars lull me to sleep at night, an old habit.

But I hate waking up to communists on NPR. This morning it was TED radio hour, a billionaire early investor in Amazon. No, no, not good enough to give away his own loot. The only way to end income disparity, he said, was to take away everyone's wealth, a 50% tax on income and capital gains. Those who earn less than $100K to be paid time-and-a-half for 40 hours a week, a $20 minimum wage. Big round of applause from the Stanford social warrior TED audience.

What do rioters and antifa want? Destruction and looted luxury goods. Run the police ragged and attack them with rocks and fireworks. Next it will be snipers, like the guy who killed five cops at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas. Bad joke on Chicago, hiring the black chief of police who resigned his do-nothing job as top cop in Dallas. Not to be outdone in symbolic idiocy, Dallas hired a black female police chief. The murder rate in both cities increased.

George Floyd? - a dangerous felon with a long rap sheet for armed robbery and assault. He resisted arrest, too doped up to talk sense, a giant that took four cops to wrangle. Did they find a gun in his car? Crack, meth, PCP, or heroin? There was a hostile crowd to watch. No wonder they called for back-up in bulletproof vests. An official autopsy showed no airway injury, no neck injuries. George Floyd tore away in a fentanyl-amphetamine "speedball" stumble. Cops knew he was seriously stoned, held him down, waited for EMS to arrive.

"Universal condemnation!" Hannity proclaims, silencing debate. "He was a Christian man!" Metaxas yells. "No justice, no peace!" mobs of brick throwing protestors cry. In Chicago they didn't need prepositioned pallets of bricks and fire accelerants like Minneapolis, New York, and Washington DC. Looters carried bowling balls, baseball bats, and long handle shovels to smash windows in downtown Chicago, with 132 Chicago cops injured by black rioters.

200 NYPD cops injured, 40 squad cars damaged. 114 District cops and U.S. Park Police injured defending the White House. Every major and minor city in America looted and burned. 75 million white people cowering at home, forbidden to work. Target abandoning 105 looted, boarded up stores. CVS shut locations in 20 states. WalMart closing 100 stores. No fire and casualty insurance payouts for civil strife. Cops in Altanta fired for arresting black agitators. Cops in Buffalo and the Bronx run over by cars. A Vegas cop shot in the head point blank.

Our nation is dying.

Tom Gresham has the right take on it. Antifa is an organized assault funded by Democrats. Don't get involved. Cops can't tell if you're a good guy. They can't see the halo on your head. If antifa rioters try to pull you out of your car, use the skinny right pedal and floor it. If you have no other choice, windows being broken out, light 'em up. Tom carries a double stack automatic, like police do, plenty of ammo to deal with multiple assailants. Antifa thugs are equipped with weapons and firebombs. They shot cops in three states. Don't be a victim.

I hope the military can contain China, Russia, and Iran, virus or no virus. Our adversaries will try to take advantage of economic collapse at home. We might lose the White House, not in November, I mean August. Depends on how heavily armed Black Lives Matter is. I've heard it a hundred times in radio ads, cheery and confident realtors and travel agents: "This too shall pass. When life gets back to normal..."

The depth of willful Republican blindness is astonishing. 82 shootings, 19 dead in Chicago last week, unrelated to the riots. As usual, Mark Levin has everything upside down, blinkered by his brief tenure working for Ed Meese. He's a Trump flagwaver, demanding military action, and he fantasizes that FBI agents and U.S. Marshals can infiltrate antifa undercover. Middle aged tough guys in crewcuts will fit right in, no problem, huh? Jeez.

The right thing to do is to withdraw the cops. Business owners can leave town or defend their property with the 2nd Amendment. Shut down all public schools and fire brainwashed union teachers. Give the school buildings to private organizations, religious or commercial. If cops want to do something, they should attack the narcotics trade as fiercely as Elliot Ness. Either that or pack up law enforcement as a proactive enterprise. Let dope-addled gangsters kill each other. Big cities are no longer needed to conduct finance, trade, or higher ed. The future will be digital and decentralized, in small towns and well-defended enclaves of excellence, none of which will be in Nigeria or Congo. No wonder that freed slaves adamantly refused Lincoln's offer to send them home with grubstake reparations.

No virtue in voting. That's how we got into this mess. Ben Shapiro is hilarious. "We're still a civilized country!" he exclaims, urging Trump to mobilize the 82nd Airborne to tame L.A. and defend Beverly Hills synagogues, jewelers, and Jewish media tycoons. "Where the hell are the authorities?" he rants angrily about Jews being attacked by black looters in Brooklyn.

Every morning another shock. Not important that cops are being shot, four more in St. Louis. There's a far bigger problem. Amazon borrowed $10 billion at 24% annual interest. Consider what that implies, if you understand credit. It has to be a false or garbled report. The least creditworthy junk borrowers paid less than 12% last year. If it's true that Amazon is shelling out usurious 24% as a bad credit risk, then capital markets are frozen shut. I think that makes sense. Credit quality from coast-to-coast crashed. Risk rocketed to the stratosphere. The oil industry is bankrupt, hanging on with Federal bailout loans. Don't depend on refineries to continue in operation. Convert as much as you can to propane or natural gas.

Cops have warned that they can't respond to home invasion or assault. Arm yourself like the citizens of Cicero, Illinois. Curfews are meaningless. National Guard helicopters might work. But martial law and social distancing have killed any hope of normalcy or progress. Trump is indelibly painted with racism, fascism, and crony capitalism. Truth is the first casualty of war, and war was declared long before Trump took office.

Postscript to Mark Levin. Dems are done with Jews. You've been cut out of the coalition. The Republicans say they care about equal rights, but it might be empty words. They remember what happened to George W. Bush, sandbagged by Wolfowitz and Pearle. Trump is in your corner, but he's on the way out. Public service is a dead ideology. Cop recruitment collapsed, resignations up. Forget about the mainstream media. They're doomed dinosaurs. Antifa is coordinated on dark web Proton. If I were you (which I'm not) I'd move to Israel. "There was progress being made!" you moaned on June 1st, but it's over, all gone, and you know it. An endless lock-down for the Wuhan panic, half of all deaths in nursing homes, something else to wrongly pin on Trump. Now a Democrat funded insurrection, New York City smashed and bleeding. No way back from Obama's calculated civil war, and Ray Charles can't fix it.

I just heard a BBC interview with the brainless girl mayor of Rochester. I hereby certify that America is finished. It's over. We're the walking dead. California and New York lawmakers and mayors are in favor of defunding police. Their summer soldiers and midnight assassins are targeting cops, three more ambushed in Brooklyn last night. Don't underestimate the criminal conspiracy to sabotage law and order. Car dealers cleaned out in San Francisco and Chicago, keyboxes pried open, 150 new cars stolen. ATMs blown up and robbed.

The BBC asks rhetorically: "Is America ready for real change?" Change from what to what?  Merit to mush. Liberty to reparations. Mob rule.

Mark my words. Taking down the statue of Lee was only an opening salvo. They won't stop until they change the flag, fifty stars on a field of blue black, and the national anthem: "Oh, say, does our new spangled ban-aa-anner now way-ave, o'r the lan-and built by slaves and the home of George Floyd?" Black generals, black admirals, black teachers and doctors.

It's over. There will be secession.

The uptick in jobs and Wall Street share prices? Your tax dollars at work, $2 trillion poured into small business, used car sales, mail order consumer spending. What it amounts to is a near fatal shot of cocaine. Senate leader McConnell is in full panic, has to push through more borrowed paper funneled through terrified bankers, injecting more horse into the economy, pending more theft, riot, arson, cops and Marines told to stand down, unarmed, make nice with mobs who will castigate, chant obscenities, and throw things at them.

Oh. Something else to think about and take appropriate action. $10 or $12 trillion created by fiat, rather than creditworthiness, will exhibit itself in devaluation of the U.S. dollar overseas and domestic inflation, another reason to cut off lending. Save every penny you can, work if you can, and spend nothing. No new clothes, no new shoes, no kitchen remodel or roofing. Consider a rural Flyover bugout when your job goes poof. Rising prices will kill construction and socially distanced drinking and dining. Risk averse Americans are not going to fly more than once on a crowded plane suffocating in masks, exchanging nervous glances.

Don't be a chump. Boeing is still in business because they have a fat contract to build tankers based on the two-engine 757 airframe. Has nothing to do with passenger aircraft sales. Their order book is a big blank page, passenger airline orders cancelled worldwide. The 737 MAX might never be cleared to fly. It depends on what Obama decides to do. He might impose a hiring quota or simply push Boeing into bankruptcy, to punish white executives, engineers, and skilled mechanics. China would certainly prefer to have Boeing shut.

Eventually, we'll have a multi-billionaire Chinese U.S. president, er, Chairman. I don't enjoy being clairvoyant or realistic about the future. Obama always was and remains a completely treasonous foreign policy fool. Do you think Joe is capable of resisting what Barack tells him to do? A tiny hypodermic poke would promote Michelle to the Oval Office.

Unvarnished truthfulness is usually painful. The hundreds of thousands of black marchers infected each other with Wuhan Corona-19 virus. Our media embargo on who George Floyd was and why he died, from narcotics, a failed struggle to escape, and high blood pressure from a lifetime of greasy fast food and drug and alcohol abuse, is another suicidal march of death, 24/7 repetition of inflammatory lies, smearing cops as racist killers, all black people innocent victims entitled to six-figure reparations and public office.

Infinitely worse, the fabric of American life was shredded. No fair trial in Minnesota. Guilty by threat of mob violence. Ballot harvesting, one-party Democrat rule, confiscatory taxation, and a Green New Deal to silence and starve greedy whites.

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Sunday, May 24, 2020

Right as rain

I stopped to visit my pal Don after a long internet session next door. His front door was open and I tapped loudly enough to be heard over the movie, a daily afternoon event. They had a really wonderful film playing in TechniScope 2:66, letterboxed with black over and under. It was ultra sharp on a small 16x9 flatscreen, maybe a 42" LCD. Two-perf TechniScope was truly breathtaking -- loaded with visual energy and emotional power. The movie 'African Express' playing in 2:66 was a gem from the 1970s with first time ingenue Ursula Andress opposite a handsome Italian juvenile the same age, early-20s and sexy as heck. Jack Palance was the heavy, with Ozzie henchmen, stars from Down Under, convincingly tough bad guys. Shot on location in Africa, Italian color processed in Rome, a gifted Italian director and a meticulous German producer who gave his director plenty of shooting days and set-ups, nicely done.

I was fully justified when Bruno knocked aside his friend's objections, a cinematographer of considerable standing, and pushed TechniScope in my fictional tale Chiseltown. It was NOT a trivial or simple decision, and it had absolutely nothing to do with saving money. Film stock and processing are small budget items, hundreds of thousands, not millions. Chiseltown was greenlit at $12 million, typical Poverty Row starvation. By the time that Bruno was done, the negative cost of Chiseltown was $18 million, worth every penny, ultrawide comedy schtick and thrilling drama, with spectacular stunts that they had enough time to rehearse and cover from all the right angles. Skillfulness and creativity matter in low budget films.

Back to the TechniScope question. After his pal's initial objections and fussy cynicism about shooting 2-perf 35mm instead of standard 4-perf (twice as detailed), there was a passage of technical importance that did not appear in the novel Chiseltown. Tech stuff would be boring to most readers. Bruno and Ruud screened a dozen test reels, shot by a dozen TechniScope lenses. Bruno picked the three sharpest among them, limiting himself to focal lengths that determined where the camera was placed throughout the movie. The choice of a film editor was not a trivial decision, either. The producer was present in all those discussions because every aspect of a movie is always a producer's final decision. I liked my fictional producer Joe Klopp. Solid, bright, capable of managing staff, as supportive as possible to the director (with increasing frustration and worry) -- two men bonded by long experience of working together. You can't buy those kind of relationships. That's why it matters Who Knows Who, always in casting and "packaging" the money, always among the above-the-line creatives. Producers are creatives with heavy responsibilities, to actualize everything the production requires and to ultimately complete the picture. Not as easy as it sounds.

A happy day. I was right as rain about TechniScope. Looked great on a home entertainment screen. Might not be so swell in a conventional 500-seat 1970s cinema or modern multiplex, but 'African Express' was brilliant and beautiful and sharp on Don's flatscreen. Ultrawide 2:66 is a fabulous format with the right lenses, a gifted cinematographer, a talented director, and well known stars, their voices and sound effects recorded, re-recorded, and mixed nicely.

Story matters (a little). How it plays is everything.

Too bad I'm too old to direct. Oh, well. Life on life's terms. Writing was equally enjoyable and easier to complete. Cut to the starlet in his arms, successful R-rated lovers at home in robes at the kitchen counter, a happy ending. They sold popcorn at a preview in Fresno.

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Thursday, May 21, 2020

Years in the making

"A master of sly observations, of the truths hidden in words, echoes to the time when men were men, and writers weren't afraid to tell stories." (L.B. Johnson)  "The combination of courage, tenderness, integrity, brains and raw sensuality is way out of the ordinary." (Erik Svehaug)  "Uncanny ability to portray exclusively female experiences accurately." (Sunni Maravillosa)  "One part grit, a dash of over the top machismo, a pinch of womanly intuition, add heartfelt devotion, murder, and heat over a flame of erotic pleasure." (Goodreads)

I re-read Portrait of Valor this morning, cried at the ending. I can accept that literary agents and publishers dislike my stories. I do things that other authors don't. Fundamentally, I'm a patriot of a peculiar sort. My heroes and heroines blaze an independent path, no different than Crockett or Pankhurst, with a modern twist. They don't fight for glory or social justice. Given a choice, they'd rather go dancing and drinking in luxurious nightclubs, tempt others into a hot wet romance. Cable and Blount are rich, resourceful, armed and dangerous, and bonded to each other by the only thing that matters in life -- personal autonomy in action, unafraid of life on life's terms.

If I had a magic wand, I would rewrite and polish The Tar Pit, but it would be wrong to dilute its terse tension. The final chapters are a miracle of heroism and its moral price.

I'm very proud of Charity, a shorter work that spans important truths and manages to be an exhilerating tale with a comic epilogue. I don't know what to say about Finding Flopsie, the same story told twice, with Chris and Peachy separated by baffling circumstances, a global chase that seems unfair and destined to end badly. A final adventure, Who Killed John Galt, passed the torch to a new generation of lovers, spared from peril, as most people are. Chris and Peachy were uniquely bold and irreplaceable, the best of an elite ruling class, fiercely independent and whole, free to thrive as wanton wildcats who faced danger as a welcome natural challenge.

Our social media distanced nation is worse without them. As proof, I offer Finding Flopsie, which I finally re-read tonight, a day after composing the rest of this post. It was wonderful. Nothing like it in literary history. Full of warmth, determination, deceit, despair, a love so deep that it hurts, and a blockbuster finish.

An easy death, achieved so much.

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Chicks Pick Pix in Nabes and Sticks

Parody of an old Variety headline* which I'll translate for you. Girls choose which movie to see on a date night in neighborhood theaters and small towns. Past tense, of course. All 8,000 screens in America are dark. Film production has ceased, no new product. The world's longest running animation series, in Japan, has gone off the air. Australia's "Neighbours" soap opera, in production 40 years until the corona virus shutdown, might restart with social distancing (no hugging and kissing? everybody in masks?)

Chicks pick pix at home, too. Mom decides which programs the kids are allowed to watch on Netflix or Hulu or Disney. Husbands and boyfriends don't get a vote, unless pro sports are reinvented without cheering fans in the stadium. Current proposals are to use canned music, last year's crowd sound, and pre-recorded cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms for college teams, if colleges decide to reopen with social distancing in classrooms, dining halls, and locker rooms. Coaches are scratching their collective heads how to socially distance contact sports, unless they get a safe, effective CDC approved covid-19 vaccine.

Ahem. After 40 years of research, there's no HIV vaccine, and flu shots are only 40% effective. Let's talk about something else. "Chicks pick pix in nabes and sticks," Adele counsels in the final pages of Chiseltown, warning the film's director that some audience response cards at a Fresno preview screening complained that the star (his ex-wife) was too sexy. Typical Wolf, can't write a novel without erotic excess. The director's home life is decidedly nuts, married to identical twin starlets half his age. I hope you realize that Hollywood is like that and always was. Tinsel Town tolerates unconventional bedfellows and indulges a strange argot.

(* the real Variety headline said: Chick Flix Click In Nabes and Sticks, reporting success of romantic comedies at single screen venues)

Great fun to write Chiseltown, the story of a movie, from first phone call to last. If you're in show business, it might be slightly annoying, 128 pages of satire, screwballs, and skillfulness that results in a low-budget feature film that actually sounds pretty good. I wrote it with love for ordinary boys and girls who devote their lives to filmmaking, always a dice roll, always a team effort, long days and nights with grim obstacles to overcome by creative people who risk their reputations, bonded by the magic of comedy and drama and comradeship.


Friday, May 8, 2020

Very peculiar

I've been looking back at 30 something years of literary work, more than half of it nonfiction, which troubles me. I don't like it, that I had the burden of exploring the obvious. Among my too few novels, five of them were set in the future, projecting ideas into fictional lives and loves and clashes with jealous, hamhanded evil.

Five more were the sequential saga of Chris and Peachy, from first kiss to crippled elderhood. I didn't want to show them at the end of life, but it happened in Who Killed John Galt. I find it hard to re-read The Case Files of Cable & Blount, not dissatified with what was achieved, but detached and sad because I know every word.

Partners was a masterpiece, far too tragic to re-read beyond page four or five. It beckons as flawless storytelling, magnetic and terrifying and tender, the unrelenting first person song of a young man's destiny that might easily have been mine. It surprised me to write this novel. In a just world, it would be celebrated as uniquely hard-boiled hippie fiction.

That leaves two minor works written after I had resigned as a serious author. It gives me easy pleasure to savor the goofball comedy of Chiseltown and the impossible farce of Heaven, a parting salute to those I loved. On some stormy night, I'll revisit the dry romance of Cocktail and steel myself to the unlikely emptiness of living too long.

It's impossible to write more, a mixed blessing. There are no more ideas to pioneer, no more stories to conceive in a world that no longer exists. Lovers cannot wear masks and gloves.

News flash: shuttered restaurants broken into, liquor looted. No sci-fi novelist could have projected how cloddish and hostile to liberty our government has become. Private property is a thing of the past. November elections will be an exercise in lies and ballot stuffing. Oh. Wait a minute. That sounds a lot like Mars Shall Thunder. It didn't end well for most people. The hero and two women escaped in the nick of time, before Mars was destroyed.

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Two faces have I


This is a frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two, a spontaneous video close-up. Note that the ears are about the same size, not drastically out of scale or tilted. Perhaps I was leading with my right eye, characteristic of thoughtful discourse.

On a previous occasion in correspondence with a profoundly wonderful female FBI agent, I created a pair of psychographic photos, two lefts mirrored and two rights mirrored, to show her that she was two people cohabiting one skull. Her femininity and innocence was obvious in one picture, and her dark ruthlessness equally obvious in the other.

Well, having little to do, except to noodle on curiosities, I repeated the experiment utilizing the frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two. Splitting the image and mirroring two left sides and two right sides of my face produced an amazing revelation. Intellectually, Wolf DeVoon is a square shouldered champion prize fighter. Emotionally, I'm a nerdy 90 lb weakling. Very strange that my two noses are completely different.

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How humiliating. Puts me in mind of something Rex said in conversation, that his security chief thought I was a weakling. I replied: "I might be a weakling, but I'm not a chicken."

Good thing that creative writing is a highly focused intellectual literary challenge. A dollop of sensitivity helps from time to time, but it's totally debilitating when, months later, I re-read something I wrote and burst into tears. The Executive Branch is all knuckles and know how, except the family scenes, little Millie in her highchair, 9 year old Peter scolded for talking with his mouth full at dinner, and Cathy worried about her husband dressing late at night in his uniform, summoned to the base unexpectedly. Women and children choke me up. I write love stories and pay for it in spades. Much easier to fictionally kill people and break things, keep emotion at arm's length, something I can't seem to do.

Huge laugh. "I'm half a man," I said in Tin Barn Philosopher, p. 78

I think what happened is that my emotional life was battered and disowned many decades, starved and crippled. I need to be embraced and loved and honored, need to laugh and play, which seems distant and vague. Courage isn't enough. I've been sufficiently courageous to risk life and limb and humiliation repeatedly. I'm not unhappy about that, but the loneliness hurts. "You're on your way into hell, Howard," Rand warned. Were there two Ayn Rands?



A brainy anorexic wrapped in a sturdy Russian thrill seeker in 1948, after she snaggered a handsome actor (stuck her foot out and tripped him on a movie set) to become a U.S. citizen by marriage, launched The Fountainhead, buttered up C.B. DeMille, monkeywrenched two publishers, finished the novel and sold the screenplay for six fat figures in today's money.

Girls have an unfair advantage, damn it.

I have a lot of respect for Ayn Rand, did my level best to honor her repeatedly (and skewer her legendary emotional trainwrecks in Heaven). Rand's debut novel We The Living was a truth soaked truckload of dynamite, so graphic and tragic that I didn't want to read it twice. Atlas Shrugged changed my life, recounted in First Feature. The Fountainhead sent me to prison, and in the years that followed I read nearly every word she wrote. I met four of her least respectable looters -- Nathaniel Branden, John Hospers, Alan Greenspan, and Tibor Machan -- and at a NATO summit I witnessed the unshakeable power of courage that Rand bequeathed to Margaret Thatcher. "There is no such thing as society," Mrs. Thatcher said in recognition of reality, which instantly ended her political career.

That puts me in mind of today's brainless chatter, everyone talking about reviving the U.S. economy, as if "the Economy" was an anonymous animal that has to be fed and spanked by political whim. There is no economy in a totalitarian state, which is precisely what the United States has become, fulfilling the dystopia of Atlas Shrugged, a moratorium on brains, power centralized in bureaucrats and media morale conditioners, farmers dumping milk and killing livestock, unable to sell or store them. The people transported by aircraft are government officials and tame "essential" journalists forbidden to criticize psychotic Democrats.

Fortunately, I didn't have the tragic karma of Ayn Rand. I was drawn to the hard boiled tales of Raymond Chandler, a private eye investigating buried secrets. Pretty funny that Miss Rand read Mickey Spillane for relaxation, praised his literary style, and she liked James Bond. My kind of stories, with a red hot, unapologetic sexuality that Ayn Rand lived in reality, as I did likewise. A photo of Rand at age 70 would reveal the emotional price she paid, like me.

No comparison of stature intended. All I did was defend liberty and plumb the philosophy of law, a minor technical matter that the Russian and her phony acolytes never explored.

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Sunday, April 26, 2020

The virtue of auctions

NPR is relentlessly stupid. They tussled mightily and very politely for three scripted minutes on the hypothetical question of who should get the nonexistent corona virus vaccine first? There's a strong likelihood that there will never be such a thing. After 40 years of Hollywood heartache and lavish government spending, there's no HIV vaccine. Why can't anyone tell the truth on NPR?  "Corona" is a genus; this one is the Wuhan, named for place of origin. Because the Wuhan virus is similar in shell structure to HIV, it may be equally impossible to develop an effective vaccine, assuming that the virus doesn't mutate. Annual flu vaccine doesn't work very well, ineffective in many cases, because the damn flu bugs mutate frequently. Wuhan might modulate or mutate by the time there's a vaccine in a year or three.

Okay, let's play the NPR game. Who should get the vaccine first? Health care workers? Nope. Grocery store clerks? Uh-uh. Government officials, military, and cops? Wrong. Elderly and people with pre-existing morbidity? Bzzzt. NPR fails 4 for 4. Then it emerges that what they really care about is the world's poor, without mentioning how many people in the world are poor. It's 6 out of 7 billion. Where do you get 7 billion doses? NPR doesn't know and feels very distressed, according to the script they were reading. I hope you grasp that there's zero spontaneity in an NPR news broadcast. NPR talent specialize in faking improv while reading, asking each other scripted questions and expressing scripted concern for the poor. Even the "thank you" handoff is scripted. The only unscripted voices on NPR are Democrat politicians and former Obama officials who know in advance what the questions will be. NPR producers, writers, and directors run the whole news operation end to end, no different than CNN.

Be that as it may, the matter of creating 7 billion vaccine doses is simple. We auction them. The ultra rich will pay $20,000 a dose to be first in line, which capitalizes a bigger batch that sells for $1,000 to the much wider group of the world's millionaires, approximately 300,000 people worldwide, which capitalizes serious mass production that sells to ordinary middle class people in America and Western Europe, about 1 billion doses at $50, after which it goes off patent and the generic versions are so cheap that all the poor on earth get vaccinated for pennies. That's the virtue (and capitalist power) of auctions. A designer bathrobe costs $900, 30% less at Macy's, only $49 for a mass produced WalMart knock-off, and $5 in a thift shop.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way with water or toilet paper, which are ubiquitous and cheap and have to be produced locally because they're low value goods -- ludicrous luxury items if you have to transport them halfway around the world. I worked in North Africa. The tap water was filthy, and we bought drinking water bottled in Europe, an absurd economic penalty. That's Africa in a nutshell, absurdly misgoverned by tribal dictators and bureaucrats. Same problem in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, Atlanta, Savannah, Washington DC. It's insane that industrial powerhouses like Houston, Cleveland, and Minneapolis are governed by grasping thieves, a perpetual "one man one vote" swindle of free shit welfare payola, price no object because race pimps are hostile to preserving anything we need, like low taxes, liberty, and stern interdiction of narcotics, gang bangers, and voter fraud.

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Monday, April 20, 2020

Fatherhood


My daughter drew these cartoons in 2012 when I was an active member of Zoetrope. The animal characters are Pokemon "Nine Tails." Contrary to the imputation presented above, I actually am her father. I held her and fed her and read stories to her at bedtime and walked her to school hand in hand, until she became a teenager and concluded that she knew more than I did, which might be true. My Latin is sketchy, and I can't do algebra or calculus.

Video hits #1


Video hits #2


Video hits #3


Wolf DeVoon was

I gasped in shock, $11 a barrel. Cushing is full, every available Suez supertanker full, floating storage going nowhere. Frackers are bankrupt and majors are bleeding red ink. Thousands of Mom and Pop stripper fields with "nodding donkey" pump jacks don't justify the electricity it takes to produce 10 bbls a day. 90% of global transport is idle, tens of thousands of passenger jets parked at maintenance fields, tens of millions of cars parked at home. Auto plants shut. Car repair shops, dealers, and rental companies dead broke and choking financially.

My finance buddy joked ten years ago: "A gallon of gold and a barrel of silver" as a portfolio hedge. A gallon of gold was about $100,000 back then, has doubled in price since, and might double again. Printing trillions of dollars of helicopter money ignited a fire under precious metals. They can't print gold. Global production of gold peaked in 2013. Domestic production peaked in 1998 and has been declining ever since. I remember buying gold at $400 an ounce, then $800 an ounce. $2000 an ounce looms on the horizon, maybe as soon as August. This is not good news. It means a wave of inflation at the grocery store. Weeks ago, I warned about distribution fragility, big rig drivers overworked, road service and tire shops shut.

The socialists on NPR think that a conspiracy of right wing DC nonprofits prompted people to protest at state capitals, honking car horns in Operation Gridlock. They ain't seen nothing yet. As the weather warms, there will be disorganized riots and looting, unstoppable by police forces laid low by viral infection. The uptick in suicide and mass shootings will be mild in comparison to the agony brewing in Chicago, Baltimore/DC, New York.

You wanted big government, you finally got it.

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Zero dollar oil

I gasped in shock, $11 a barrel. Cushing is full, every available Suez supertanker full, floating storage going nowhere. Frackers are bankrupt and majors are bleeding red ink. Thousands of Mom and Pop stripper fields with "nodding donkey" pump jacks don't justify the electricity it takes to produce 10 bbls a day. 90% of global transport is idle, tens of thousands of passenger jets parked at maintenance fields, tens of millions of cars parked at home. Auto plants shut. Car repair shops, dealers, and rental companies dead broke and choking financially.

My finance buddy joked ten years ago: "A gallon of gold and a barrel of silver" as a portfolio hedge. A gallon of gold was about $100,000 back then, has doubled in price since, and might double again. Printing trillions of dollars of helicopter money ignited a fire under precious metals. They can't print gold. Global production of gold peaked in 2013. Domestic production peaked in 1998 and has been declining ever since. I remember buying gold at $400 an ounce, then $800 an ounce. $2000 an ounce looms on the horizon, maybe as soon as August. This is not good news. It means a wave of inflation at the grocery store. Weeks ago, I warned about distribution fragility, big rig drivers overworked, road service and tire shops shut.

The socialists on NPR think that a conspiracy of right wing DC nonprofits prompted people to protest at state capitals, honking car horns in Operation Gridlock. They ain't seen nothing yet. As the weather warms, there will be disorganized riots and looting, unstoppable by police forces laid low by viral infection. The uptick in suicide and mass shootings will be mild in comparison to the agony brewing in Chicago, Baltimore/DC, New York.

You wanted big government, you finally got it.

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Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Intellectual poverty

I monitor the BBC late at night, often a barometer of global thought, such as it is. Last night the subject was the Covid 19 crisis. Guess what was *NOT* mentioned during a one-hour panel discussion among allegedly notable thought leaders in Britain, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. Correctamundo, China. The origin of Covid 19 was animals (!) and it was serenely accepted that Nature will continually threaten humanity with new infections. HIV and Ebola were mentioned as prior viral pandemics, reprehensible in the context of stigmatizing the sick, emphatically condemned by BBC panelists. They also agreed without exception that rich European countries (there is only one: Germany) were obligated to bail out poor European countries, especially chronically bankrupt, socialist Spain and Italy. The Swiss human rights expert (?) spoke angrily about solidarity and unity. I suspected her day job was communist agitator. The editor of Lancet advised there was no cure forthcoming and therefore it's imperative for governments to impose totalitarian control of everything.

Callers asked the experts a string of softball questions. The answer was always more fascist control, more government spending, no exit from lock down. Immunity was poo-pooed as divisive and socially improper for some to be treated differently than others. We all have to suffer indefinitely, forget about weeks or months of solitary confinement. Two allegedly positive aspects of global economic disaster were an increased appreciation of nationalized health care workers and the possibility of leveraging revitalized pan-European consensus to inflict more hardship by fighting climate change. Unemployed societies produce less CO2 emissions and eat less food, proving that BBC experts can kill fossil fuel. American frackers are bankrupt, already cut 2 million barrels per day of oil production, hurrah!

No one was worried about inflation, scarce food production, or fragility of transport. The BBC panelists were like primitives or small children, unable to conceive how goods and services magically come into existence. It was merely a policy decision for governments to distribute food, medical services, and entertainment bandwidth "fairly" to 400 million rightless, idle European citizens in permanent lock down. The problem of Africa never came up, except in condemnation of European disunity concerning settlement of refugees and migrants.

Same story on NPR. Black Americans are dying from Wuhan virus at triple the rate of whites. Has nothing to do with black behavior, unanimously agreed by government spokesmice. It's racism and social disadvantage. They previously declared that AIDS had nothing to do with sodomy. Please note that no one on earth has yet to develop an effective HIV virus vaccine, after 40 years of lavish government subsidies. Outrageous and insane that homosexuality is pitched as a legally protected privilege in mandatory K-12 sex education classes. Hopefully, U.S. public schools and state universities will remain closed forever.

The NPR cure for unending isolation and economic disaster? -- "comfort music" composed by obscure, dreamy airheads, all of whom in today's broadcast were latino. The TED talks that followed were equally soporific. Discussion of 1918 Spanish flu social distancing confirmed the imperative of closing all theaters, restaurants, and religious services. Social welfare and psychological safety nets must be deployed worldwide. Vaccination, whether effective or not, should be mandatory and universal, including vaccination of bats in Peru to halt rabies infection of sleeping children. If you live in New York, put a teddy bear in your window.

Commercial radio channels are chockablock with Public Service Announcements, because advertising croaked. Go online and complete the 2020 census to provide more heath care and government education for the next ten years. Wash your hands and stand six feet apart.

You know what's profoundly sad? The lost youth of the Wilson sisters. The insolent swagger of young Chrissie Hynde, hot stud Tom Jones, the mature warmth of Robert Palmer. I don't care if a million Americans die this year, which they will, as per usual. We lost the power and poetry of boundless freedom when Bonham and Carlin died years ago. Nothing much left to save, some vinyl and CDs, a few videos. Let's nuke Beijing and call it square.

Do you have any idea of what's going on at U.S. power plants? Rows of RVs in the parking lot, crews of operators quarantined at their place of employment, working 14 days straight, then swapped with an offsite crew that had been quarantined at home and tested twice. Better paid than Chinese slave labor, but equally rightless. The supply chain of pump gaskets, light bulbs, SO2 detectors, and coffee filters is shaky. With Smithfield in Souix Falls shut down, there may be a sudden scarity of bacon. I don't think anyone can operate a U.S. power plant without bacon. Just saying. More bad news: another meat packing plant closed in Greeley. Fifty retail grocery clerks dead from "essential" viral infection.

Forced sameness, one rule for all. Stay home and wash your hands. If you go out, do yourself a favor, citizen, and leave your smartphone home. It's being monitored and located 24/7 to report where you went and who you came into contact with. Not joking. Not an exaggeration. It's hard to grasp how low we've sunk as chatty, ditzy middle brow technology users. Heart, heart, smiley face.

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Chris and Peachy are suddenly important

Under normal circumstances, becoming an obscure monk to write coloratura noir romance is a thankless task. Old fashioned, Cass says. No hope of a movie deal which, believe it or not, was my sole purpose in writing the four-volume Case Files of Cable & Blount. Do I remember it correctly? Over 600 pages of comedy, mystery, steely resolve, gunfights, and some of the hottest boy-girl sex ever presented in frank language. For fun, look up coloratura. It does not refer to "persons of color" as the expression goes, which dimly implies that I'm as white as paper and that only Africans and mestizos have meaningful color. How silly. Negroes are inky black or mahogany brown, except for mixed race people like Barack Obama. If a caucasian is mixed race like I am (French, Prussian, and a dash of Norse) we're called mutts. Mutts are more surefooted and less fractious than thoroughbreds, which is why mules were important in the Old West, pulled heavy wagons in teams.

I pulled the heavy wagon of literary drama solo. It had to be that way for an authorial voice to emerge. Why is that important? Because voice infuses story with life, if the writer is a rebel in command of original work. When I worked in Hollywood, everyone religiously repeated a tired sermon "There are no new stories" because they were incapable of original work.

I mentioned Case Files of Cable & Blount in the context of tyranny. Chris and Peachy live in a world that no longer exists. I recommend that you read it. Something very important was lost recently, and it behooves you to experience an exposition of what liberty means. Chris and Peachy never heed regulations, never follow the rules of common sense. If they did, they would be no different than the folks next door, which other novelists endeavor to celebrate, especially people of color writing about their favorite aunt or antebellum hardship. Stephen King concocts malevolent ghouls, and P.G. Wodehouse laughs at Roaring 20s English pajama boys. I write about hard white American heroes and lovers, people in trouble typically self actualized as their professional duty. Private investigators know that cops do little and solve nothing. Chris and Peachy have the advantage of ample power and unbreakable devotion to each other, keenly aware of the palpable pulse of life on life's terms, male and female.

I may be the only contemporary writer who knows what liberty is.

In a nutshell, liberty means no handouts for Africa, no matter how many millions of women and children are starving, ignored and penalized by their governments and threatened with Wuhan virus on top of rising prices, food shortages, no sanitation, widespread HIV infection, malaria, and police orders to lock down, forbidding men to work. Liberty means a bright line between self and others, no matter how others exercise their powers, or whether they are doomed. Liberty is not fair or benevolent. It is a universal legal and moral right to thrive, to the extent that one can. What Africa needs is what America needs, less government, more liberty, pandemic or murderous gangs notwithstanding. America has murderous gangs that government has failed to eradicate. Gang threats cease in the Second Amendment liberty of personal self-defense, which Chris and Peachy consistently exercise with excellence. More people could and should defend themselves instead of remaining hapless victims, hoping that government will protect them, feed them, and make life happier. Every dollar that the state gathers to itself is a dollar taken from victims that they pretend to shelter. The truth of government is arbitrary power very thinly disguised as patriotism. That's why Chris walked away from his legacy as a sprig of institutionalized power, and won personal autonomy.

How well a man lives today is less important than his liberty because liberty is an open door to a freer life tomorrow, or a higher challenge, depending on what opposes his progress. In today's Covid-19 tyranny, the human right of liberty seems distant. Hah! -- an illusion, easily sidestepped. Buy a set of surgical scrubs, a stethoscope, and a pair of paper booties. Shazam, you're an overworked neurosurgeon. If an undocumented immigrant can get a fake ID in Los Angeles, so can you. A mail carrier outfit is not hard to fabricate. Learn a foreign language.

But all such disguises are unnecessary. Your search for liberty should have begun years ago, as a teenager, right? Liberty is not a new subject to any man or woman on Earth. Tomorrow is a blank page in an unfolding drama, of which you are necessarily the author and actor. There could be a pivotal choice today, if it's time to reclaim more of your liberty, independent of whatever chains of sorrow have kept you from the pursuit of happiness, a fundamental right that no government or family can legally abridge. I realize that there are moral ambiguities and impossible conflicts. Without difficult challenges, there is no story in your story.

I like the story of Chris and Peachy, both of them challenged repeatedly by government and family pressures. They have the advantage of long experience as self-reliant rebels, seeking greater liberty and personal happiness, neither of which is easily won. The first three Case Files novels are $5 in a Smashwords edition. Charity, my favorite Chris and Peachy adventure, is available on Kindle, and the concluding double mystery Finding Flopsie is at Amazon. All four Case Files novels were revised and published together in a collector's edition. The cover photo is a fictional "Treloar Building" in salute to Ray Chandler. Chris met Peachy on the 3rd floor corridor. He was drilling into a bomb. She became curious and wouldn't go away.

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