As things fall apart, we all have to adjust. I've always enjoyed smoking cigarettes, but if they go out of production, I'll have to make do without. New Yorkers purchase "loosies" (single cigarettes sold illegally by entrepreneurial smokeleggers). It seems to me that Boris used to drive trailer loads of untaxed Canadian cigarettes into New York two decades ago. One hopes that scarce tobacco won't rise to the price of illegal pot in jurisdictions where it's still illegal, if there are any. A report from Santa Cruz indicated that Mendocino pot growers are growing less or hoarding it. One wonders what the price and availability of toilet paper might be later this year. A semi loaded with stolen institutional grade toilet paper was stopped in Maryland a couple days ago, thin single ply that most people despise, suddenly a hot commodity.
I don't worry about starving. I don't know why not. What bothers me most is dog food. I have an old dog who lost half his teeth. He needs soft meaty noodles that might disappear from WalMart any day. I don't think Ol' Roy Soft & Moist is being manufactured now. Maybe he could eat wet generic kibble, but dog food of every kind might be hard to get, probably isn't deemed an "essential service" like electricity or gasoline, which I worry will be rationed, a few hours a day of power, a few gallons of gas per week, unless you have an Essential Need certificate. Government people, mainstream press, and broadcasters will get whatever they want, including priority bandwidth, kicking the rest of America into an internet ghetto with low-res Netflix and YouTube that jitter and freeze, Instagram and Skype unavailable.
All I need is dog food. I can get by without power or web access to upload notes to this blog, which no one reads, not important enough to be censored or deplatformed. I stopped writing books, so I don't need internet to continue the agony of self publishing any more. Yesterday, I received an email from London, a nice review of Partners posted. Maybe R.K. can complete his 7-hr Audible adaptation of Galt's Gulch. No author could ask for better friends.
Dog food. Black market dog food if necessary.
While I have your attention, I'd like to straighten out a few myths. Donald Trump doesn't care whether he's re-elected or not. He knows that it was a mistake to issue guidelines on social distancing and shunning large groups, which led to the unintended disaster of Democrats closing schools and workplaces, a horrible result that threw families into a homebound viral petri dish of young kids, antsy adolescents, sullen teens, and elders imprisoned together, endangering the vulnerable and killing any hope of developing natural herd immunity. The same tragedy unfolded downtown. Suddenly, there were winners and losers, factories and businesses ordered shut because they weren't "essential." Mainstream radio, TV, and anti-Trump spin were essential, thousands of technicians and star personalities dedicated to his embarrassment, constantly plumping Democrat lies and half-truths. Trump didn't care. He gave daily press conferences. He knows that it's wrong to hand out cash or allow the Fed to devalue the dollar. Trump wants to reopen midwest schools and put people back to work in sparsely infected Flyover Country, let freedom ring. Unfortunately, he can't.
Democrat politicians are firmly in charge. The "emergency" is a political godsend, although more people will die from ordinary flu than sexy Wuhan virus. The evil bastards and bitches profit by crushing us into welfare cases, and their toadies in the media are happy to march in privileged lockstep. If it bleeds it leads -- a headline, a news item repeated endlessly on all channels, how many dead, how many infected, how much suffering and medical shortages. No travel, no playgrounds, no visitors, no birthday parties, no church services.
When the $2 trillion Democrat feedbag and $4 trillion of Fed bond payola hits, we will learn the lesson of moral hazard. Helicopter money bids the price of scarce goods higher. Dems shuttered production, forbade people to work, promised to pay them NOT to work. Loans to airlines, hotel chains, and cruise operators are no better, an incentive to mothball their idle assets, furlough idle workers, cut maintenance and marketing. Hundreds of "nonessential" privately held manufacturers and distributors will get no loans, no helicopter money.
No dog food. No tobacco. $100 toilet paper. You know what's really funny? I didn't file a tax return last year, not enough income to report. My cell phone was disconnected, no postal address. I won't get a nickel from the government, a nonessential person.
I wish more people understood monetary theory. There are three separate players, first and most familiar of which is our Bureaucracy (Federal, state, county, city, and sewage districts) who borrow, tax, and spend without producing much of anything. In wartime, governments kill people and break things at home and abroad. In peacetime, they blow big sums on goofy shit like bridges to nowhere, health and retirement benefits for bureaucrats, wars of choice, welfare handouts, regulations, farm subsidies, and so forth. Governments have been deficit financed throughout history. American bureaucrats enjoy the unique status of being rated AAA, the safest borrowers in the world because Americans (We The People) produce a lot of value and can be relied upon to pay taxes. Government insanity, like buying mortgages and selling Mortgage Backed Securities nominally rated AAA, always runs off the rails, results in huge investment bank losses worldwide, because American government securities can be "rehypothecated" (loaned, leveraged with derivatives that strip principal and interest, etc). That's what happened in 2008. Alt-A liar loans and subprime mortgages were mis-labeled AAA debt because the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to lend to low income minority home buyers who defaulted. F.O.B. ("Friends of Bill") campaign contributors like Countrywide flipped billions of dollars of junk on the bonfire to earn fees and commissions. It cost $1 trillion in new AAA public debt to clean up subprime lending and bank failures, about half as much as Shrub & Company wasted by invading Iraq.
Flash forward to 2020. If you add up Federal, state, and local debt at the moment, it's about $50 trillion, plus $200 trillion of unfunded entitlements (Social Security and Medicare) backed by nothing. That's the easy part to understand. Government blows enormous sums of money at home and overseas, burying We The People deeper and deeper in public debt.
The second player, completely unrelated to government, is the Federal Reserve, which is owned by the so-called "money center" banks, who traditionally cleared payments between city and country banks. You write a check on Bank of Podunk, payable to a depositor in East Bumfuck Savings. It has to be routed and cleared by a strong City bank. The Federal Reserve system replaced a somewhat slow, costly, and financially hazardous clearing system with a well-capitalized national system organized in regional and national Fed banks. Until the gold and silver "hard money" standard was abandoned, all Federal Reserve currency and minted coins were backed by physical metal. The NY Fed still has a vault with gold bars that back our transactions with foreign countries, but nowadays the paper money in your wallet and bank account is an IOU -- a Federal Reserve Note or electronic balance that was legislated to be legal tender by Congress. Sure, it was a bad idea, but let's accept it as plausible "money." Milton Friedman rightly taught that money could be sea shells or feathers, as long as people accept them as bankable, tradable monetary units. Pacific islanders used rocks.
The quantity of money in circulation is measured narrowly (M1) as your paper bills + savings deposits + checking balances at banks, credit unions, etc. The broadest measure of money (L) includes certificates of deposit and other contractual instruments like money market funds. How much money exists depends on lending. When a banks lends, it creates a deposit in the borrower's account and an equal bookkeeping asset on the bank ledger, backed by whatever collateral you pledged (a house, a car, or an unsecured "signature" that allows the bank to recover principal and accrued interest from any and all of your assets). Follow? When a bank lends, it creates money. The money you borrow is paid to others, and it multiplies deposits and credit in other banks. A dollar loaned creates two dollars in circulation. Banks have to be careful about lending risk, and they have to maintain adequate capital to guarantee interest on saving accounts, to cover loan losses, and participate in the Federal Reserve System that makes rules about financial institution stability. The safest, so called "Tier One" bank capital is U.S. Treasury bonds, AAA rated, backed by taxation.
Ahem. There is a third player in the United States financial system, independent of the Fed clearing system, ordinary money creation by bank lending, and feckless Federal and state governments who are constantly issuing bonds, notes, promises to spend in the future, etc. This third player is autonomous and arbitrary. It grew out of necessity, because the Treasury is perpetually bankrupt, and the safety and security of our banking system depends on the AAA rating of impossible Treasury promises to pay all debts when its various Government obligations become due and payable. Defaulting on principal or interest would bring down the entire world economy, because "safe" Treasury bonds were bought by overseas banks and private investor groups. Our dollars (i.e., government bonds and Federal Reserve IOUs) are the dominant global reserve currency. Oil, gold, commodities, and IMF debt are priced in U.S. dollars, because America is "the cleanest dirty shirt" in world monetary hokum.
To keep this fragile arrangement from blowing up, the Fed Open Market Committee has various financial tools that it can deploy. We see newspaper headlines about the Fed setting U.S. interest rates, which are mostly meaningless. The bond market moves up or down and Federal Reserve overnight interbank rates follow obediently, adding or subtracting liquidity that vaguely influences American lending behavior. Only in a panic, when the Fed cuts rates to zero, or raises them to 18% to stop all interbank lending, do headline rates mean anything as such. Where the Fed has real power is its Open Market operations in New York, buying or selling Treasury bonds. If the Fed sells, the monetary goal is to inflate (cut the value of) the U.S. dollar. If it buys, the goal is to deflate (boost the value of) the U.S. dollar. Why does this matter? Because Government spends like drunken sailors, sometimes at a gallop, and the Open Market Committee has to intervene to save our bacon. Whether the Fed purchases a few distressed corporate bonds to prop up money-losing boondoggles like GM or Boeing is unimportant. They have to backstop the U.S. Treasury, the only dinosaur that matters.
The situation today is dire but manageable. The Fed's Open Market Committee will buy up something north of $4 trillion of Treasury bonds in the next few months. Is that a good idea? No. When the Federal Reserve soaks up debt and provides liquidity to the bond market, it creates scarcity and shores up the AAA security of Treasury debt temporarily, but transmits inflation to our domestic economy, allowing the Government to get away with outrageous spending. When Congress hands out $2 trillion in "free" helicopter money, paying us not to work, it will result in $100 black market toilet paper. There is no such thing as a free lunch or free helicopter money. Production is down and there will be shortages of commodities and consumer goods. More cash in our pockets is an incentive to bid up prices. Do you know how big $2 trillion is? -- equal to 80% of Britain's GDP. Try to be grateful. Truly terrible bloodshed will explode in South Africa. Millions of paupers will starve to death in India and Bangladesh. I cannot bear to speak of Gaza or Nigeria. Say a humble prayer for Mexico, Brazil, England.
Can you stand more bad news? Big rig truckers don't want to deliver grocery supplies to New York City, fearing exposure to Wuhan virus. Worse, shippers are scanning their temperatures at loading docks, won't let them get out of their trucks to use the toilet. Manifests are thrown in their trailers after they're loaded. No restaurants on the highway. Drivers are quitting. The food wholesalers are deploying box trucks that used to deliver to restaurants. Deliveries are happening at unpredictable hours, days late, drivers refusing to get out of their cabs or goods stacked on sidewalks in the middle of the night. Federal DOT ordered Pennsylvania to reopen turnpike rest areas, so drivers can pull over to sleep. Mens rooms locked. No toilet paper in port-a-potties. Road service, tow trucks, tire and repair shops are shutting down. Helicopter money will have evil consequences, pay people to go home, avoid risk of viral exposure, not just truckers. Grocery store checkout clerks. Burger flippers. Pizza deliveries. Hospital staff. Walk-outs will multiply in L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle. People are abandoning New York and Hoboken, millions waiting to get helicopter money so they can bug out.
Look up "moral hazard" on Investopedia.
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Saturday, March 28, 2020
Money equals freedom?
No matter what bartender-in-chief Sean Hannity says, it's always the dumbest possible guff. "Money is freedom!" he crows in praise of saving $10 on a sponsor's cell phone deal. "Belief in God gives you a tremendous confidence," he riffs. "Thoughts will create feelings and then feelings create more thoughts and it never ends. You have to find a happy medium, and for me that's belief in God. I never worry what people say about me."
Bullshit. Hannity is glued to broadcast rating reports that he constantly misrepresents: #1 on radio [wrong, it's Rush Limbaugh], #1 on cable [also wrong, it's Rachel Maddow just as often]. Poor Sean, has to read from a script and say the same thing over and over. Savage calls him "The Wallbanger" and ridicules Hannity for being a high school dropout who's idiotically and irresponsibly pushing a dangerous synthetic quinine drug as a cure for Wuhan virus, available over the counter as fish tank cleaner. Two dead from drinking fish tank cleaner.
I have a different beef with Sean Hannity. He can't dance. He plays 1-3 shitkicker music as his show intro. And he likes to air endless gossip with a black woman named Thelma, sends her idiot children complicated electronic gismos, says he doesn't care that Thelma is a Democrat, and hangs on every word of her brainless admiration and personal trivia. One can imagine Hannity putting a paper napkin on the bar for her and mixing her favorite drink, a Pink Lady with an umbrella and a maraschino cherry.
I shouldn't fart on an Irishman who clears $10 million a year, after paying another $10 million in Federal, New York State, and New York City taxes. He works 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, abundantly grateful to be a prominent celebrity with a White House security pass. I can't do what Hannity does. I don't have anything to say to Trump or a TV audience.
What I have to say, contrary to Hannity's creed, is that money does not equal freedom. How much freedom does Hannity have? He has to read scripts written by others, plug sponsors as enthusiastically as a whore smiling in agreement with a drunken thug, and toe the party line, no matter how empty, calculated, or logically self-impeaching. No wonder he likes Thelma. They toss nerf balls at each other, moral midgets with nothing at risk. God bless you, Sean and Thelma say in parting, a shared theology of no harm no foul.
Funny as hell. Hannity's butt buddy Mark Levin just blew a fuse, crusty enough to yell when he suffered a nerfball smack to his schnoz. Like all broadcast personalities, Levin got a DHS card that permits him to travel. "What the hell is this?!" he railed. "Are we in East Germany? If I get stopped by a cop, I show him my card and the letter in my glovebox. See? My papers are in order!" Still laughing at him. Money isn't freedom, oh Great Jewish One, party member in good standing. By the way, Mark, you don't have a clue why $2 trillion in helicopter money is bad policy. Has nothing to do with our children and granchildren. We're going to pay for it instantly in wholesale and consumer product price inflation.
I tire of explaining the obvious.
Ooops. I beg your pardon. Levin finally snapped to the problem of inflation in Hour Three of his show. Better late than never. Fixed incomes will buy less. State budgets will go bust. The price of health care and drugs will skyrocket, he warned angrily.
Yup. $100 toilet paper, if you can find any, Mark.
News flow is not good. Chaos at Kroger stores, everything flying off the shelves as soon as they're restocked. Early closing at WalMart. Managers and checkout clerks imposing limits on purchases of peanut butter, dog food, cereal. Truckers driving long hours, seven days a week [Trucking Network report]. I don't like the mood. America is days, not weeks, from serious trouble breaking out, hijacked big rigs, fistfights in grocery store aisles, police stopping cars with out-of-state plates, police questioning people in general, where are you going? A week ago, the wholesale price of a dozen eggs was $1. This week it jumped to $3.
The Pentagon is calling up reserves to active duty for a reason.
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Bullshit. Hannity is glued to broadcast rating reports that he constantly misrepresents: #1 on radio [wrong, it's Rush Limbaugh], #1 on cable [also wrong, it's Rachel Maddow just as often]. Poor Sean, has to read from a script and say the same thing over and over. Savage calls him "The Wallbanger" and ridicules Hannity for being a high school dropout who's idiotically and irresponsibly pushing a dangerous synthetic quinine drug as a cure for Wuhan virus, available over the counter as fish tank cleaner. Two dead from drinking fish tank cleaner.
I have a different beef with Sean Hannity. He can't dance. He plays 1-3 shitkicker music as his show intro. And he likes to air endless gossip with a black woman named Thelma, sends her idiot children complicated electronic gismos, says he doesn't care that Thelma is a Democrat, and hangs on every word of her brainless admiration and personal trivia. One can imagine Hannity putting a paper napkin on the bar for her and mixing her favorite drink, a Pink Lady with an umbrella and a maraschino cherry.
I shouldn't fart on an Irishman who clears $10 million a year, after paying another $10 million in Federal, New York State, and New York City taxes. He works 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, abundantly grateful to be a prominent celebrity with a White House security pass. I can't do what Hannity does. I don't have anything to say to Trump or a TV audience.
What I have to say, contrary to Hannity's creed, is that money does not equal freedom. How much freedom does Hannity have? He has to read scripts written by others, plug sponsors as enthusiastically as a whore smiling in agreement with a drunken thug, and toe the party line, no matter how empty, calculated, or logically self-impeaching. No wonder he likes Thelma. They toss nerf balls at each other, moral midgets with nothing at risk. God bless you, Sean and Thelma say in parting, a shared theology of no harm no foul.
Funny as hell. Hannity's butt buddy Mark Levin just blew a fuse, crusty enough to yell when he suffered a nerfball smack to his schnoz. Like all broadcast personalities, Levin got a DHS card that permits him to travel. "What the hell is this?!" he railed. "Are we in East Germany? If I get stopped by a cop, I show him my card and the letter in my glovebox. See? My papers are in order!" Still laughing at him. Money isn't freedom, oh Great Jewish One, party member in good standing. By the way, Mark, you don't have a clue why $2 trillion in helicopter money is bad policy. Has nothing to do with our children and granchildren. We're going to pay for it instantly in wholesale and consumer product price inflation.
I tire of explaining the obvious.
Ooops. I beg your pardon. Levin finally snapped to the problem of inflation in Hour Three of his show. Better late than never. Fixed incomes will buy less. State budgets will go bust. The price of health care and drugs will skyrocket, he warned angrily.
Yup. $100 toilet paper, if you can find any, Mark.
News flow is not good. Chaos at Kroger stores, everything flying off the shelves as soon as they're restocked. Early closing at WalMart. Managers and checkout clerks imposing limits on purchases of peanut butter, dog food, cereal. Truckers driving long hours, seven days a week [Trucking Network report]. I don't like the mood. America is days, not weeks, from serious trouble breaking out, hijacked big rigs, fistfights in grocery store aisles, police stopping cars with out-of-state plates, police questioning people in general, where are you going? A week ago, the wholesale price of a dozen eggs was $1. This week it jumped to $3.
The Pentagon is calling up reserves to active duty for a reason.
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Wrongdoing
I've done a great deal of wrong. Some of it was the relatively innocent wrong of folly, but in the main I committed deliberate high crimes and misdemeanors, including treason, thereby disqualifying myself from public office. It worries me that men like Mitt Romney are public officials, less worried about Donald Trump who I believe crossed the line numerous times. The weakest of men never do wrong, never sweat discovery, never get their souls dirty. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were rascals, and John Hancock was a rum runner. Without their personal experience of serious naughtiness, there'd be no United States. The founder of Mormonism was a lunatic, liar, and bigamist, without whom there'd be no Utah to elect a squeaky clean poodle like Mittens.
It's very difficult to create anything new unless you skate all over the landscape, slide into filthy swamps occasionally and encounter monsters, look evil in the eye, as warriors do. You have to be willing to be wounded grievously, price no object, and quick enough to get away with sin. I wished I was braver, killed in action or executed, yet grateful to have escaped it. Danger gave me license to stand apart from other men and think for myself.
There's a brief, important introduction to The Constitution of Government In Galt's Gulch. "Children stand in the fire hose of good evidence and philosophically well formed formulas, unable to resist, unless someone takes a hatchet to the damn thing and says: Wait a minute, let me think for myself." Doing wrong is a fearsome, shameful gateway to original firsthand knowledge of liberty. Can you see Mitt Romney promoting liberty like Thomas Paine did?
Women naturally despise crime. That's why I freely agreed with Mark Twain's assessment, that there's only one good sex, the female one, and I openly advocated that women should judge men, make and enforce law in defense of innocents, mindful of the rights and best interests of children. Hopefully, women can be persuaded to honor due process, which is slightly unnatural to them. Their crimes consist of snap judgments in anger.
Men and women are not inherently law abiding and morally tame like Mitt Romney, groomed to perfection. I understand that many of my brothers are too timid to risk the adventure of crime. Very few consign their lives to the loaded gamble of treason. Without treason, there would have been no Boston Tea Party, no American Revolutionary War of Independence, no Civil War and its aftermath of an opportunistic, supremely libertine Gilded Age that lifted millions of immigrant paupers into modest prosperity, a nascent middle class. It pays to read history. In corruption and chaos and crime, America became a beacon to the oppressed, a dynamic society with opportunity for all to ignore the rules and thrive, like Carnegie, Edison, and Gould, penniless ragamuffins who became fabulously productive rascals.
Edison summed up the spirit of the Gilded Age: "All religion is bunk."
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It's very difficult to create anything new unless you skate all over the landscape, slide into filthy swamps occasionally and encounter monsters, look evil in the eye, as warriors do. You have to be willing to be wounded grievously, price no object, and quick enough to get away with sin. I wished I was braver, killed in action or executed, yet grateful to have escaped it. Danger gave me license to stand apart from other men and think for myself.
There's a brief, important introduction to The Constitution of Government In Galt's Gulch. "Children stand in the fire hose of good evidence and philosophically well formed formulas, unable to resist, unless someone takes a hatchet to the damn thing and says: Wait a minute, let me think for myself." Doing wrong is a fearsome, shameful gateway to original firsthand knowledge of liberty. Can you see Mitt Romney promoting liberty like Thomas Paine did?
Women naturally despise crime. That's why I freely agreed with Mark Twain's assessment, that there's only one good sex, the female one, and I openly advocated that women should judge men, make and enforce law in defense of innocents, mindful of the rights and best interests of children. Hopefully, women can be persuaded to honor due process, which is slightly unnatural to them. Their crimes consist of snap judgments in anger.
Men and women are not inherently law abiding and morally tame like Mitt Romney, groomed to perfection. I understand that many of my brothers are too timid to risk the adventure of crime. Very few consign their lives to the loaded gamble of treason. Without treason, there would have been no Boston Tea Party, no American Revolutionary War of Independence, no Civil War and its aftermath of an opportunistic, supremely libertine Gilded Age that lifted millions of immigrant paupers into modest prosperity, a nascent middle class. It pays to read history. In corruption and chaos and crime, America became a beacon to the oppressed, a dynamic society with opportunity for all to ignore the rules and thrive, like Carnegie, Edison, and Gould, penniless ragamuffins who became fabulously productive rascals.
Edison summed up the spirit of the Gilded Age: "All religion is bunk."
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Monday, March 23, 2020
Public health and wealth
Let's get real. Americans should prepare for 15 months of fascism, assuming that we get an affordable, safe, effective Wuhan vaccine next year and that riots and grocery store looting are relatively mild in the meantime, which is highly improbable. People are already pissed off and accusing each other of bad behavior, college kids getting stoned and frisky on Florida beaches and crowds of surfers and bikini-clad shielas smiling on Bondi Beach in Oz. Police were dispatched and beaches barricaded on three continents. The Cannes film festival was canceled and Spanish sun worshippers hustled back into mandatory confinement.
No auditor or economist could estimate the wreckage on Wall Street or Main Street. Massive government intervention, trillions injected by the NY Federal Reserve to goose bond market liquidity, a snap embargo on flights to and from Europe, and closure of all Broadway shows, giant strides toward naked fascism. Powerless sheep went bonkers. WalMart was stripped of toilet paper, Disneyland closed, all sports suspended, 90% of domestic flights canceled, Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos boarded up, tens of thousands of colleges and schools shut, all restaurants and bars emptied, millions of workers laid off. Banks are closing branches and limiting access to drive-up. America has screeched to a halt, because fake experts and fake journalists ran around in circles with their hair on fire, pointing at Italy, where thousands of Chinese textile workers returned from their Chinese New Year visits to Hunan and infected thousands of Italians. The death rate was 8%, all hospitals overwhelmed and military trucks called to carry off hundreds of body bags stacked in a church. The same tragedy unfolded in Iran. Chinese workers spread deadly Hunan infection, untold number of dead. You're next! Millions of Americans will die, according to fake U.N. worst case statistical models.
This might make sense if we had adequate evidence of a medical crisis in America, but we don't. Federal agencies bungled testing. A smattering of deaths were reported, 30 of them in a single nursing home. The Wall Street crash was less a response to the Wuhan virus than the global disaster of oil falling from $70 a barrel to $20, instantly bankrupting U.S. frackers and threatening supermajors like Exxon, BP, Chevron, and Shell. Airlines, hotels, and banks were hammered. Overvalued tech stocks cratered as traders sold positions to cover losses in blue chips. When the Fed cut overnight rates to zero, it signaled catastrophe, shattering investor confidence. NYSE circuit breakers tripped repeatedly, and no one knows how ugly the bottom might be. Martial law? Seems likely in traditionally busy gutzy New York and sunny California after a month of mass lock-down, no different than solitary confinement, forbidden to work or to travel any farther than a grocery store with empty shelves. Goldman Sachs estimated a contraction of -25% GDP in the second quarter, but that was before Cuomo ordered 100% of the NY workforce to go home, bankrupting every small business in the state and crippling big ones like General Electric, Eastman Kodak, and IBM. Sickening if the U.N. mob is deemed an "essential service" exempt from Cuomo's order to do nothing. Will it apply to Black Rock and 30 Rock? Presumably yes. Oh, shit, Connecticut has followed suit, ordering everyone home. Hartford has the largest life and casualty insurance companies in America. And now Illinois! -- John Deere, Sara Lee Kraft, Allstate, the city of Big Shoulders, industrial and commercial hub of transcontinental trade, from meat packing to interstate natural gas distribution.
Holy hell! -- a friend just told me that Boeing is still building planes in Everett, despite total lock-down in Seattle, hundreds of skilled workers jammed together in tight spaces, no air circulation in fuselages and compartments being wired and equipped, no way to wipe down and disinfect complicated surfaces. Fifteen Boeing workers already tested positive.
For an anarchist, the question is how a free society would handle the threat of an epidemic. We might as well ask how libertarians would deal with war or an invasion of impoverished, illiterate caravans from Central America. The short answer is that "sovereign government" failed to halt a multi-decade tidal wave of narcotics, dangerous migrants, urban crime, and endless bloodshed in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Sane people don't applaud incompetent government solutions. It doesn't matter how much borrowed sugar Trump pours on cruise lines, casual dining, biker bars, opera companies, and movies. None of them are productive industries. Funding airlines to transport no one, $1200 tips for furloughed bartenders, and blank checks payable to state and local bureaucrats is fiscally insane and inflationary. Why weaken the U.S. dollar? A trillion here and a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking about worthless Benjamins and wheelbarrows. A rational alternative is staring us right in the face, and it doesn't need a dime of public payola or a single word of emergency guidelines.
Private actors combined in local, regional, and national voluntary enterprises would defend their own interests, not unlike American colonial pioneers. Hostile savages were fenced out and shunned. Invading foreign armies from England and Mexico were fought. Independence was cherished, price no object. In the aftermath of our Civil War, all government Federal and state were bankrupt and easily bribed. The Gilded Age was a long interval of freedom that built cities, factories, railroads, and skyscrapers. Liberty conferred wealth and vast diffusion of knowledge. American ability to understand science and public health was bequeathed by private research, private universities, and competitive medicine that flourished during the Gilded Age when government was weak, stupid, and corrupt.
Nothing has changed except the perfidy of elevating government to supremacy, attributing to it an honorability and superhuman intelligence that it does not possess and never did. We killed two million Vietnamese for what reason? We invaded Iraq for what reason? Democrats want to eliminate internal combustion engines. Name any problem in history or the current state, and then try to justify corrupt boobs like LBJ, Shrub, or Lunch Bucket Joe as national patriarchs with plenary police powers. In 2009, Obama did nothing until 1000 people died in the H1N1 epidemic. Little was achieved by declaring an "emergency," except briefing books by bureaucrats who stumped for Obamacare that regulated and taxed private health care. 12,500 Americans died from H1N1. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi think that government should spend more and tax more and handcuff private initiatives to deal with the Wuhan virus. Stay home and put on an N95 mask, citizen. Food rations will be delivered by troops in hazmat suits. You will die if you go to work, or school, or church, or visit friends and family. All human interaction must be electronic until further notice. Your smartphone is being monitored to track where you go, who you encounter, and what you text in criticism of 15 million Federal, state, and city bureaucrats who can't be fired, have called in sick, and are cowering at home, fearful of amply deserved torches and pitchforks.
Initially, Trump did the sensible thing. He freed hospitals from regulation, enlisted private labs, Walgreens, WalMart, and Target to accelerate testing. It was clear as centrifuge glass that CDC and NIH couldn't test their way out of a paper jam. Unfortunately, Trump foolishly heeded the hysteria of CDC bureaucrats and declared a national "emergency." Mayors and governors took the bait and abolished civil liberty, echoing the panic and kindergarten logic emanating from bureaucrats. "I don't want anyone to die!" bartender-in-chief Sean Hannity wailed in surrender to wholesale suspension of common law civil rights.
Shit. Next it will be a door to door search for weapons. U.S. sporting goods and farm supply stores are 99% sold out of .223 and 9mm ammo, 99% sold out of handguns, 100% of it legal sales to experienced shooters, many of whom have had tactical training and carry concealed. They will never surrender their weapons, no matter what Congress or CDC says, about 40 million armed white people. If blacks go feral, they'll be cut to ribbons by rednecks.
With or without collapse of civil society, with or without 100,000 deaths from Wuhan virus, let's apply some public health common sense. Over half a million Americans die each year. Tens of thousands are drug overdoses, tens of thousands in car crashes, but most die from cancer, chronic diseases, and various complications of old age. Some succomb to childhood illness or accidental drowning. Construction is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. What kind of dumbshit proclaims "I don't want anyone to die!" when 80% of homicides go unsolved in Detroit, and 50,000 Americans die from ordinary colds and flu every winter?
I know it's tough, that the Wuhan virus will kill people, maybe a lot of them. Private choice matters more than dictatorial edicts. I have no desire to party in a pub, and smart barkeepers will close up. Maybe a lot of shopkeepers will pull the shade down, put a sign in the door, and disappear for a few months. Hopefully, plumbers and electricians won't. With a little extra care and less paperwork, we need big rig drivers to restock grocery stores, and we need grocers to keep their doors open, with cops and doctors and nurses on deck to save as many lives as possible. But personal safety and happiness matter, individual decisions to work overtime or walk away, to go home and wash off the filth and sorrow of duty, to embrace a loved one and rest, no matter how loudly a manager begs or threatens punishment.
Government has no right to our work, play, or spiritual life. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When a government becomes destructive of these ends, it is our right, it is our duty to throw off such tyranny.
An interesting idea popped into my mind, laughing at an idiotic Congressman on the radio who sounded like a 22 year old pajama boy. I'd like to open a Manhattan speakeasy, call it the Testing Lab. Plenty of Broadway showgirls and classy waiters out of work. Massive pent-up demand among millionaires and wise guys for nighttime entertainment, say midnight to five. All I need is a silent partner, an NYPD vice captain maybe, and an old brownstone on Huston. Not expensive to put in gaming, a bar, a showroom and stage for torch singers and muzos, no crap hip hop bullshit, Depression-era ballads and 60's show tunes, a couple big bouncers in white tie and lab coats. Screen the members and staff for negative virus test in a first floor Testing Lab office managed by an evil Jane Russell type in thigh high lace-up boots.
Bwahahaha.
I've had some experience running a private nightclub, in Nevada. Charter members were the county Sheriff, a newspaper editor, and the state Speaker of the Assembly. We had poker tables, live music, cute waitresses, a kitchen, and a well stocked bar. I also had eye-opening fun as a guest member at a private nightclub in Philadelphia, operated by Puerto Rican crime bosses, and another private club in Sydney. Interesting things happen in nightclubs. Ooo. I forgot Peter Stringfellow's nightclub in Covent Garden, dinner with Mel Gibson, half naked waitresses in tutus, bouncer at the door, a dignified maitre'd in tux, and a big mirrored disco downstairs. Ah, the Candy Store in Los Angeles, black mafia and NBA stars. The Page Four on Rodeo, hookers and Motown people. Bananarama in Amsterdam (use your imagination).
Ahem. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't matter which frankenstein drugs government toys with in "compassionate use," or how sympatico the chipmunks on NPR bemoan heroes hiding in cramped Castro flats. Moored hospital boats and converted Fantasy Island cruise ships are going to be prisons, the first 50,000 inmates homeless bums and drug addicts with every imaginable disease except Wuhan. Normal people infected by the new virus will be told to self-quarantine, talk to an unintelligible Nigerian doctor on Skype, and cough quietly on a waiting list with a couple million others, while obese black women jam the ER lobbies bellowing that they's sick and rival gangs paint the streets red in drive-by gun battles, an exceptionally high body count of innocent bystanders waiting six feet apart in front of a Rite-Aid to buy cough drops and generic Cold & Flu pills made in China. Wait and see what happens when jails are emptied to "socially distance" the correctional staff.
Good policy to steer clear of big cities or bug out. Truly awful news bulletin: Sen. Rand Paul has tested positive, the sole libertarian voice in Congress. National Guard deployed in New York, California, and Seattle, Democrat machine pols as amateur military commanders.
Now it'll be unanimous in Sacramento, Albany, Washington, Westminster, and Brussels that central banks have to print money on a truly breathtaking scale, to support industry with no customers, households with no jobs, and the entire continent of Africa which has no testing kits, laboratories, doctors, nurses, gowns, masks, intensive care units, clean water, modern sanitation, or food. Ooops. I forgot the 3 million trapped in Gaza, 20 million Syrian and Libyan refugees, a billion paupers in Venezuela, Haiti, Dominica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil; another billion devout Muslims and Hindus in southeast Asia and Indonesia; and a billion Indians who are accustomed to consulting untrained storefront quack "doctors." The Wuhan pandemic will kill hundreds of thousands in the Third World. It still remains to be revealed how many slave laborers died in Red China.
At the lowest, worst moment of my life, I said it out loud to get me and a heavy crate of tools off the roof of a hotel: "I swear by my life and my love it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine!" That was 20 years ago. I was being paid $35 a climb to risk my life, point a satellite dish at a new bird, so restaurants and banks could listen to Elton John and James Taylor, terrible crap that I despised -- and I despaired of my miserable life, 49 years old with sore feet and an aching back, driving a borrowed pick-up, a penniless wage slave. So I understand hardship and humiliation. Maybe it's different that I was a literate white American. The following year launched me around the world on a U.S. passport that became cluttered with visas and entry and exit stamps on every page, renewed at an overseas U.S. embassy in a country where wage slaves had no legal right to travel.
Most of the world is unfair, downtrodden, brutal, and heartbreakingly sad, the plaything of dictators. Americans and Europeans have done everything in their power to liberate and save every soul. Our farmers doubled world population. Our expat teachers and missionaries and doctors labored to ameliorate ignorance. Our armies and spies fought dictators and funded democrats, asking nothing in return. Sometimes it made it a difference. Arguably, we won the Cold War and freed Eastern Europe, tempted Red China to modernize and trade with us. We were chumped repeatedly -- in Turkey and South Africa and Nigeria, in Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan, in East Africa and Argentina, in Russia, Venezuela, and most of all China.
Now we're faced with global disaster, a consequence of outsourcing and decades of liberal largesse. It comes at a time when the United States and Europe are bankrupt, powerless to save ourselves or billions of primitives we couldn't save in the past with a flood of finance and goodwill and free food and university training of their best and brightest, rescuing and pampering 100 million Third World migrants in America, Germany, Britain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and France. There is no way to reverse history. A weaponized virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory made possible by Kissinger and Nixon, Bill Clinton and General Motors and Apple. Tens of millions will die. World trade has crashed, starving hundreds of millions, inflicting pain and sorrow equal to war on the poorest and least free in Brazil, Keyna, Egypt, and mainland China, whose apparatchiks lied to us for months and who continue to lie about widening infections and body bags. Wuhan is still on lock-down, a city of 11 million under martial law, forbidden to leave their apartments, nothing to read except state propaganda. Ghastly to see it happen in New York City, in glaring shame and betrayal of Lady Liberty.
It will be difficult to reassert the American Way of liberty and justice, under martial law and unending economic hardship. If you're too old (like I am) to open a speakeasy in Manhattan, your best bet is to escape, if you can, to the self-reliant, sensible, and fiercely independent Heartland, birthplace of Dwight Eisenhower and Abe Lincoln and Thomas Alvah Edison.
A personal item. A smarmy but sincere radio announcer just noted the death of a Hunan virus victim in Cincinnati, said every death was tragic, somebody who was loved by others. That doesn't apply to me. When I die, no one will mourn. It's the price one pays for autonomy, the privilege of living for my own sake. I'd prefer to be remembered for the ideas I discovered, but that's unimportant. My thoughts are simple and should be obvious to everyone.
Live free or die, the New Hampshire state motto.
Finally, I'd like to pass along something that a NYC detective told me. As a young cop, he had to report every morning for a briefing. One day on his way to work, he chased and collared a purse snatcher, brought him in. The sergeant was pissed off about this unexpected delay. "Quit creating crime!" the boss bellowed angrily. Moral of the story? Cops aren't what you think they are. They don't want to stop a car, stolen or otherwise, without back-up, not even for something as trivial as a burned out tail light. That's why you see three or four squad cars attending a fender bender. They are extremely worried about Wuhan viral exposure, being coughed or sneezed on by a suspect or a little old lady asking directions to a deli. Cops are ordinary people. In New York, they have to watch their backs constantly. During Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans police disappeared to look after their families. Three of them were caught looting. When shit comes to holler, cops put on riot gear and stand together tightly, like a football team, shoulder to shoulder, and do as little as possible, a mostly theatrical show of force, not interested in arresting protestors, unless they're attacked. Don't rely on policemen to save you when things fall apart. LAPD let Los Angeles burn during the Rodney King riots. Wilshire Blvd was defended by Korean shop owners firing rifles from rooftops.
Commercial fishing boats loaded with tuna catches have been denied permission to dock in San Diego. Wholesalers have been shuttered, no demand at empty restaurants. Bananas are rotting in Philadelphia warehouses, no schools or company cafeterias open to buy them.
This is far worse than government or media is prepared to admit, not a medical crisis, but a tragedy of pusillanimous politically correct social rot, chickens coming home to roost, trading liberty for fascism, rationality silenced by gender fluidity and infantile cries for safety. Our colonial and frontier American ancestors would be shocked and disgusted.
.
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
Michelle Obama
Unanimous hooey on all channels, Joe Biden will be nominated to face Donald Trump. Some say he'll be chosen by superdelegates to lose gracefully. Nuts. The only reason that Pete and Amy stepped aside and endorsed Joe was on orders from Barack, to deny Bernie momentum and possibility of winning a majority of convention delegates. Why? Because there's a dark horse being groomed at the starting gate.
Expect Michelle to make a public appearance in Chicago or Baltimore, deliver a long cogent speech about American history, civil rights, and family values -- something that Joe can't do and Bernie won't. Better than even odds that Michelle becomes the Democrat presidential candidate, to mesmerize the media and clean Trump's clock, a proud, tall black female with sainted husband and daughters front row center, applauding respectfully.
Look under the hood. It doesn't matter how loudly old cars honk. No one wants Joe or Bernie on a debate stage. Trump could crush them with a laugh, no contest, and Barack knows it. But his wife is bulletproof, plenty of brains and social standing to flummox Trump and force him to blink. It's imperative for Michelle to defeat Trump, to prevent her husband, Loretta Lynch, Jim Comey, and the Clintons from going to prison. Pelosi's and Schumer's assignments are to kneecap Barr, coordinate a Deep State putsch, and throw subpoena grit in the DOJ gearbox.
Three cheers for Mark Steyn, subbing for Rush 3/5/20, answering a caller's question: Who's pulling all the marionette strings? "Obama people," Steyn replied, missing it by a single word of dilution, but close enough to deserve congrats. Maybe there's hope that Trump and his allies will see through the shiny Vaseline gauze and perceive what's going on at Obama HQ. It's always good that intelligent people can spot a pile of stinking horseshit and deduce there must be a pony somewhere. Unfortunately, very little can be done to stop Michelle, if she gives a JFK-style political speech. The media will go ape shit, led by Hollywood, to draft her as the Dem's best hope to unite and kill Donald Trump stone dead. Even money that Joe will go with the flow and pledge his delegates. He knows he can't compete with Michelle.
It will start with something simple, photo op at a hospital or food pantry, a few words about income insecurity, Corona virus, or homelessness -- maybe all three.
Joe, Bernie, and the Seven Dwarfs were straw candidates, saved Michelle the indignity of a primary campaign and the horror of competition she could have easily lost by being a world class asshole. So much simpler and safer to be crowned at the convention. The Dwarfs did fine, plenty of face time and campaign cash they can roll into safe Senate sinecures, except Pocohontas, who the royal DNC staff sabotaged for the good of the party. Bernie got extra cash under the table to twist a shiv into her on national TV, good fun for all concerned. You think it was accidental that her "live mike" post-debate bitch was played far and wide? The moderator question was planted and the sound crew cued in advance.
Tulsi had to be shut out by changing the debate rules twice, because Tulsi committed the unforgivable sin of being beautiful and twice as sharp as Seriously Fugly Michelle.
.
Expect Michelle to make a public appearance in Chicago or Baltimore, deliver a long cogent speech about American history, civil rights, and family values -- something that Joe can't do and Bernie won't. Better than even odds that Michelle becomes the Democrat presidential candidate, to mesmerize the media and clean Trump's clock, a proud, tall black female with sainted husband and daughters front row center, applauding respectfully.
Look under the hood. It doesn't matter how loudly old cars honk. No one wants Joe or Bernie on a debate stage. Trump could crush them with a laugh, no contest, and Barack knows it. But his wife is bulletproof, plenty of brains and social standing to flummox Trump and force him to blink. It's imperative for Michelle to defeat Trump, to prevent her husband, Loretta Lynch, Jim Comey, and the Clintons from going to prison. Pelosi's and Schumer's assignments are to kneecap Barr, coordinate a Deep State putsch, and throw subpoena grit in the DOJ gearbox.
Three cheers for Mark Steyn, subbing for Rush 3/5/20, answering a caller's question: Who's pulling all the marionette strings? "Obama people," Steyn replied, missing it by a single word of dilution, but close enough to deserve congrats. Maybe there's hope that Trump and his allies will see through the shiny Vaseline gauze and perceive what's going on at Obama HQ. It's always good that intelligent people can spot a pile of stinking horseshit and deduce there must be a pony somewhere. Unfortunately, very little can be done to stop Michelle, if she gives a JFK-style political speech. The media will go ape shit, led by Hollywood, to draft her as the Dem's best hope to unite and kill Donald Trump stone dead. Even money that Joe will go with the flow and pledge his delegates. He knows he can't compete with Michelle.
It will start with something simple, photo op at a hospital or food pantry, a few words about income insecurity, Corona virus, or homelessness -- maybe all three.
Joe, Bernie, and the Seven Dwarfs were straw candidates, saved Michelle the indignity of a primary campaign and the horror of competition she could have easily lost by being a world class asshole. So much simpler and safer to be crowned at the convention. The Dwarfs did fine, plenty of face time and campaign cash they can roll into safe Senate sinecures, except Pocohontas, who the royal DNC staff sabotaged for the good of the party. Bernie got extra cash under the table to twist a shiv into her on national TV, good fun for all concerned. You think it was accidental that her "live mike" post-debate bitch was played far and wide? The moderator question was planted and the sound crew cued in advance.
Tulsi had to be shut out by changing the debate rules twice, because Tulsi committed the unforgivable sin of being beautiful and twice as sharp as Seriously Fugly Michelle.
.
The legal question of homicide
Likeable as he is, Michael Knowles is a dodo. He thinks murder is against the law because it's "morally" wrong, verboten by the Ten Commandments. Am I the only one on Earth who can see straight? Murder is against the law because it denies the homicide victim's due process legal rights to petition, to be represented by counsel, to appear as a witness, to sue or be sued. See Article I, The Freeman's Constitution. Murder is wrongful use of the police power, punishable by life exile, which amounts to a death penalty, excluded from future protection of constitutional standing, if conviction for murder is upheld on appeal. Article III, IV.
Morality pertains specifically to the interests, powers, and dilemmas of an individual person, epitomized by the question: "What shall I do?" Individual actions (and excuses) have nothing to do with impersonal due process of law. Motives like revealed religion, anger, mistakes in perception or insanity are irrelevant to justice. If you kill someone, you will be killed, unless it was justifiable self defense, which is seldom easy to prove beyond reasonable doubt.
An imaginary line between homicide and manslaughter does not exist, unless you convince a jury that the death was an accident. I suggest you research how the term "accident" entered the language. Aristotle coined it to explain superficial differences, like the taste and texture of various loaves of bread, concluding that all bread contained an "essence" of bread, which was imaginary epistemological hooey that Aquinas deployed to explain transubstantiation. When a priest uttered magic words, God changed the "essense" of bread into flesh, leaving bread's "accidents" of taste and texture unchanged. Why no one saw this imaginary bullshit as resulting in imaginary cannibalism puzzles rational students. Unsurprisingly, the Bible and the Koran explain nothing, carry zero weight in law or fact. If you kill, you will be killed as a matter of justice, if convicted by common law due process, jury trial, and representation by competent appellate counsel to test the validity and impartiality of conviction.
There is no obligation to imprison and care for convicted murderers at public expense. They are branded and released, with public proclamation that they have no legal right to exist. Any law abiding citizen can kill or torture them to death, arguably a civic duty. Because no judge, no jury, no appeal is 100% perfect, convicted killers are released in Montana or Mexico. Most of them beg to be released in Mexico. They're shot on sight in Montana, two seconds after they step off the bus.
.
Morality pertains specifically to the interests, powers, and dilemmas of an individual person, epitomized by the question: "What shall I do?" Individual actions (and excuses) have nothing to do with impersonal due process of law. Motives like revealed religion, anger, mistakes in perception or insanity are irrelevant to justice. If you kill someone, you will be killed, unless it was justifiable self defense, which is seldom easy to prove beyond reasonable doubt.
An imaginary line between homicide and manslaughter does not exist, unless you convince a jury that the death was an accident. I suggest you research how the term "accident" entered the language. Aristotle coined it to explain superficial differences, like the taste and texture of various loaves of bread, concluding that all bread contained an "essence" of bread, which was imaginary epistemological hooey that Aquinas deployed to explain transubstantiation. When a priest uttered magic words, God changed the "essense" of bread into flesh, leaving bread's "accidents" of taste and texture unchanged. Why no one saw this imaginary bullshit as resulting in imaginary cannibalism puzzles rational students. Unsurprisingly, the Bible and the Koran explain nothing, carry zero weight in law or fact. If you kill, you will be killed as a matter of justice, if convicted by common law due process, jury trial, and representation by competent appellate counsel to test the validity and impartiality of conviction.
There is no obligation to imprison and care for convicted murderers at public expense. They are branded and released, with public proclamation that they have no legal right to exist. Any law abiding citizen can kill or torture them to death, arguably a civic duty. Because no judge, no jury, no appeal is 100% perfect, convicted killers are released in Montana or Mexico. Most of them beg to be released in Mexico. They're shot on sight in Montana, two seconds after they step off the bus.
.
Sunday, March 1, 2020
Greatest Hits Vol.1
The End of Fukuyama
(Nosara, 2000, published by Laissez Faire City Times)
For twenty-something years, I mistakenly believed that my book manuscripts and shorter works were ignored for lack of merit. Now, thanks to Dr. Francis Fukuyama, I understand why I failed as a political pathfinder. Americans are impervious to new ideas, no matter how splendidly illuminated, because there are no new ideas which Liberal Democracy is disposed to entertain. The End of History argues that anything submitted after the Battle of Jena in 1806 is basically irrelevant. I wish somebody had told me this in 1975. I could have saved a pile of money on postage.
In his latest book, The Great Disruption, Dr. Fukuyama also advises that "social capital is not a public good" — which is both reassuring and amusing, if you think about it. However, Fukuyama's argument in The End of History makes thinking an optional accessory for aspiring social capitalists. Universal mental impairment is Francis Fukuyama's theory of history in a nutshell, and it seems to be an empirically airtight case.
Unconscionable incompetence accurately describes contemporary political debate. U.S. presidential candidates have been progressively dumbed down at an alarming rate, and carefully coached numbskulls are vying for office this time around. Why all the dead air? — partly because Newt Gingrich's Contract With America fizzled in a brainless publishing scandal, but more importantly, because a conservative Federal deputy bureaucrat, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the end of Political History.
Religious power brokers like Ralph Reed saw this preemptive obituary of new ideas to be cosmologically correct (i.e., God's Destiny for America) and, hey, presto! — foreign policy debate promptly ended in President Bush The Elder's affirmation of the Ten Commandments. He targeted Saddam with bipartisan support and bombed Baghdad to enforce Texan Old Testament law. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wellheads.
At the time, journalists were busy celebrating the triumph of liberal democracy. Poland and East Germany were sold at auction. The Soviet Union collapsed. We The People won the Cold War with God's help, although it was unclear exactly what God did on our behalf. CBS News and The New York Times proclaimed with one voice that godless communism was beaten and broken. All of humanity were saved and our future was unobstructed, aside from a few undemocratic enemies of Israel — a legacy of First and Second Wave territorial competition. But Third Wave horizontal networks would deliver us from evil, solving every problem and freeing every man, woman, child, and plankton on earth, because the Dialectic of World History decreed a happy ending for all.
Sound asleep in state university bunkers from sea to shining sea, not one pink-toed professor of history or politics challenged this doctrine or its assumptions during the past eleven years. Why all the soothing silence? — because Francis Fukuyama was preaching to an appreciative college of public servant cardinals. The schoolmen are politically constrained from cheering aloud and killing a fatted calf in his honor, because taxpayers might correctly guess which side of the public good Dr. Fukuyama is buttering.
Like my childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes, who became curious about a guard dog who did not bark when the villain came to call, I find it compelling to understand what Fukuyama quietly slipped past thirty thousand academic guardians of U.S. political philosophy. Readers who like democracy, decency, and prayer in public school have nothing to fear. Francis Fukuyama is your new standard bearer and champion of family values. He quotes Dan Quayle admiringly.
But there's a Silent Majority fly in Fukuyama's family ointment. More than half of the American electorate do not vote and do not care for anything except their personal fortune. To this dishelved rump of a free people, I bring extremely bad news. It's time to put on our Silent Majority dunce caps and do some emergency homework. If you let Fukuyama get away with his "social capital" spin on history, nothing will change. Satire and apathy, multigrain bread and video circuses in a costume drama featuring Oprah's diamond earrings and Sam Donaldson's toupee will remain your uninterrupted civic experience and your children's future — nothing freer or further evolved than a monotony of Politically Correct gossip, which folksy celebrities will indulge nonstop, repeating themselves like good boys and girls.
Despite a pretense of normalcy, the U.S. political stove is red hot. It demands our urgent attention as adult citizens. We are undeniably responsible for the safety and welfare of children, who perceive and mimic our emotional expressions — whether we are habitually glum or joyous or some smiling shadow of self. This is the power and deeper meaning of political history, believe it or not. If you feel that America is mostly free, mostly an unimpeded and open society, like a frontier full of adventure, then your kids will grow straight and tall in the conviction that life is an open road.
However, this is a profoundly uncommon sense of American history. Most of us believe that liberty exists only in the bedroom, that elections and office holders are necessary, and that the adventure of living consists of pleasing neighbors, teachers, coworkers, customers, and cops, who want nothing fundamentally changed — ever. Forty percent of U.S. national income is disbursed by government. Fukuyama in particular and the Beltway Elite in general argue that this is a happy arrangement, after sixty years of increasingly complex regulation and "strict liability" which holds U.S. citizens criminally culpable for doing something that is not morally or logically wrong, but might be displeasing to OSHA tomorrow morning, for instance. Since 1937, the Federal power to regulate commerce in constitutional law has included the prerogative to destroy commerce and quash economic liberty — a doctrine of tyranny triumphant, proclaimed in a U.S. Supreme Court footnote. Hmph. I can play just as rough, see my Historical Note, below.
Ours is a history of national shame, that Americans lost their birthright of freedom. Slaves to the perceived good of the politically numerous, our shame evokes no pride, inspires no discussion, summons no political leadership worthy of respect and admiration. It forces us to go home, to laugh at televised buffoons, and to tell bitter anecdotes of U.S. citizenship, since liberal democracy is an expensive and time consuming farce. Political knowledge is a hopelessly dull subject, deterring debate. It consists mainly of reciting names and titles of public officials and the regulations and tax tables of innumerable local, regional, state, national, and international bureaucracies. Children learned to say "I dunno" instead of asking "why?" because their parents ceased to ask why the American Experiment turned into a socialist state. It certainly didn't start that way. What happened to liberty?
It is a question of highest importance and greatest hazard. The political stove is glowing red hot with embarrassment, because America made its history of liberty into a dusty museum tour of Philadelphia, concealing an archaic relic that few U.S. citizens have bothered to study. Webslingers certainly haven't. They believe Tom Hanks defeated Adolph Hitler and played a cool role in the conquest of space. Many of my younger friends are convinced that man's best hope for a free society is in isolated space colonies. This demonstrates pretty emphatically how fanciful and cartoonish Third Wave freedom fighters are. They think virtual reality is real. Their bible, The Sovereign Individual, reads like a kid's Christmas wish list, beginning with instant personal freedom, courtesy of Fukuyama's (that is: Hegel and Marx's) Dialectic of
World Technology, an amazingly durable can of very old worms. If you mention dialectical history in conversation with second-generation Objectivists, they will spend the next two hours of life carefully debating whether a eunuch should be immortalized in feminist ballad as a Hero of Hegelian Interpretations of Ayn Rand. In today's climate of Politically Sensitive libertarian speech, nothing is fully right or wrong, except the obvious right of infants to Nintendo and Netscape, our Third Wave babysitters of first and last resort.
Human happiness is not confined to ignorance. It is a huge mistake to assume that one can forgive and forget the political world, shrinking it to the mild clowning of George Will's devotion to baseball and Bill Maher's latest chortle. As frustrating and tiresome as philosophy sometimes seems, the only way to find a political exit is to get acquainted with the intellectual furniture.
In his 1989 debut as the voice of World History past, present and future, Francis Fukuyama argued that your brain and my brain and the world of political ideas are completed — a final result which cannot be fundamentally improved. We're stuck with liberal democracy forever, whether we like it or not, Fukuyama claimed. This explains why Americans no longer care about voting, or thinking, or questioning conventional wisdom. Our social conventions are huge, and we are individually small in spirit, unable to justify our empty love of television or to explain our faith in the statistical probability of finding something really cool on the internet eventually. Humbled by their user-friendly lifestyle of electronic playthings, most folks are indeed grateful that history is over. They would be terribly upset, perhaps mentally scarred for life, unable to face the uncertain future, if a revolutionary idea crashed the Disney-ABC share price or preempted a screen of half-time stats on Monday Night Football. Conservatives, liberals, rednecks, and Jews all bow their heads at the same national prayer breakfast, petitioning God for more of the same, thank you.
Contrary to Fukuyama's happy-talk harmonium, in reality there does exist indeed a potential force of revolution, easily capable of ending the majoritarian Toys R Us Welfare State — and it is precisely this potential for political change that Fukuyama is compelled to deny. Those who praise the status quo are threatened to the bone by the existence of human potential, anything that could conceivably upset their predictable paychecks and Federal pensions. It's important to remember that Fukuyama came to intellectual prominence as a career policy wonk, employed by the State Department and its Rand Corporation contractor. Take my word for it, he's a statist.
Fukuyama depicts the end of history as our existing political institutions, directed chiefly by bureaucrats and tax-exempt scholars. It is a rare treat, to hear evil speak quite so confidently in favor of itself. Nothing has tainted democracy so fully and microscopically as the federal-state-local bureaucracy and its intramural struggle for control of "free" public education. The U.S. has hundreds of thousands of officials and state-subsidized scholars, who do nothing but marshal and publish phony evidence to demonstrate that public employment is a result of irresistible History.
Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? — a no fault fascism. Don't blame politicians, don't mock the institution, don't scold the electorate, don't cringe at clumsy campaign antics or conduct in public office that reveals an incomprehensibly shallow national character. Liberal democracy is the ultimate and final flower of History, according to Fukuyama and his extended clan of kleptocrats in socialist Europe. Certainly, that's the root of the problem. It is inaccurate to say that Fukuyama is an American thinker. He explicitly relies on Friedrich Hegel, a 19th century Prussian, whose ideas inspired Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Not a word of U.S. political history enters Fukuyama's foundations of political history. He asserts that mankind's quest for liberty and justice ended successfully at the Battle of Jena in 1806. As bizarre as it sounds, that's what this debate is all about. Fukuyama says that our potential for political change ended two hundred years ago. No wonder everyone's bored and stupefied. There is nothing further to discuss. The goal of Human History is jet aircraft, carpeted concourses, peanuts, cocktails, keyboards, cars and cocaine — a comfortable "conspicuous consumption" that America swills energetically and which every starving peasant on earth presumably envies and wants to enjoy. For this reason, the business strategies of McDonald's and Microsoft are absolutely identical, to share an unearned economic rent of family friendly brand identities in a world of ever-widening, all-inclusive consumption.
It's a distinct threat. Sometimes I think it too likely, that the End of History will be sexually inert, with millions of nerds trapped in digital realms, gawking at fantasy images and popping rave drugs like X and LSD to make indoor life interesting. I know several bright, handsome men in their mid-20's who prefer to remain closeted with computers day and night, interrupted only by DVD cartoon compilations and cheeseburger wrappers — and who are psychologically unqualified to romance a woman, no matter how cooperative the lady in question may be. It is not for lack of testosterone. The Third Wave digiratti are not homosexual. But they are sexually dysfunctional, unable to grapple with the physical reality of females, whom they worship from a safe distance like smitten schoolboys. A nerd's plight consists of feeling overwhelmed by a complex operating system he does not comprehend,
because females are neither Windows nor Linux. This is why John Gray's stand up comedy Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus became a Third Wave default faith. There is no ctrl-alt-del command to reboot a romance, and the only executable submodules are marriage and family life, success at which requires more effort than an occasional mouse click.
If it seems odd that I should speak about sex in connection with the End of History, then you do not see the central issue as I see it. Fukuyama and his conservative clan want to stop progress. Procreation is our most important progress. In the relation between private mentor and student, it is possible to coach, challenge, guide and inspire a new man or woman, based on wisdom acquired by an elder who had fewer choices and less luck. Dad's advice is usually two-thirds caution, a common sense benchmark hammered home by practical experience. Don't touch the stove. It's hot. The national dad in question is a Dead White European Male (pick one: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine). His advice to our multicultural progeny consists of a single proposition, that liberty is sacred to a free society. A society free
from what? — from government.
The goal of expanding liberty presupposes new ideas. Without new ideas, we stay stuck in the past, because today's political establishment is yesterday's solution. The last time America did anything strenuous in defense of Liberty was 1776. The War of Independence was a giant step forward. But the Declaration's premise of equality took a Civil War and two centuries of struggle to deliver something like one person, one vote, regardless of race, religion, gender, brainpower, etc. In hindsight, voting and its attendant political vanity was not a very good idea. However, it required 200 years to explore a simple idea like democracy, and it behooves us to start asking what's next. What's next will take a long time to discuss and understand. New ideas, by definition, are unconventional and risky. You have to surrender the familiar, to go forward. Standby to jetison Old Glory. Let's noodle on New Glory.
In twenty years, I've authored a quarter million words. Here, shorn of filibuster, are my Top Seven political ideas — innovative proposals that Francis Fukuyama, Ralph Reed, and many others hope to suppress by denying the existence of valid political innovation. Ready?
(1) Women should be granted by constitutional amendment a separate, co-equal branch of legislature, the entire House of Representatives, for instance. Men can keep the Senate. New laws shall require passage by both sexes.
(2) Women should be exempted from the criminal law and responsible for law enforcement. This will end male input on abortion and domestic violence. I trust women will do justice.
(3) Religion is a mental illness. Separation of church and state implies the end of tax-exempt status for those who preach the glory of God. A free society does not make the pious more tax-free than other citizens.
(4) In reality, government is an illusion. We live in actual, constructive liberty. The ultimate thing at issue is legal philosophy — not law enforcement — because it is impossible to force cowardice upon anyone. It is false to blame politicians and bureaucrats. The Sons of Liberty did not hold elections. They went directly to war and won the right of self-government. We face the same issue. It is our duty to throw off a new set of chains and roll the rock of Liberty another mile.
(5) The new constitution should consist of a single proposition. I evolved my thinking on this matter several times during the past twenty years and recently issued a final communique that I'm willing to defend. No one is legally entitled to judge his own cause of action or to punish another without due process of law and fair public trial by jury.
(6) We do not need a public treasury to provide for national defense or domestic tranquility. In point of legal fact, the U.S. government is bankrupt, and it is laughable to hear anyone speak of paying the national debt. When this becomes irrefutably obvious in 2015, I suggest that we privatize the U.S. military-industrial complex, rather than remain its tax slaves. I don't see the point of forbidding foreign ownership, since U.S. policy is driven by Israel and the Security Council, cordially treating Russia and China as equals in a balance of power. Let's talk IPO. Give the Pentagon to Merrill Lynch and let them syndicate World Cop Inc. I'm sure that Britain, Germany, Japan, and most of New England will buy a piece, to keep crude flowing northward from the slave-states of OPEC.
(7) Ayn Rand was right. It is imperative to strip from tyranny every scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial genius on earth — a strike of the men of the mind — some of whom should be deployed to nudge along the collapse of New Rome on the Potomac. Aggressive, heroic action, personal and collective, is the key to victory.
So long as you believe that politics is the art of the possible, Fukuyama wins, and radically new ideas lose. The American Revolutionary War of Independence was not an exercise in "the possible." A majority of Americans thought it was impossible to resist the King's Officers and win colonial freedom in 1776. The Declaration of Independence was an act of treason, punishable by death. Hit the books for a snap quiz. How many signers of the Declaration were put to death or imprisoned, their fortunes destroyed, their families punished? What was the total civilian economic price of freedom? How many years did we fight a Revolutionary War? How many were killed in battle or died in British prison hulks because Thomas Paine correctly predicted victory and rightly demanded action?
My discussion of Fukuyama is rapidly coming to a close. His theory is nothing but an elaborate excuse to hide in the closet, claiming that the future is foreclosed to anything unexpected, because liberal democracy is sorta okay. Better the devil we know. When Fukuyama extols the virtue of "social capital" networks, he's blowing smoke up your butt. This is a long-standing tradition in Hegelian philosophy, which Karl Marx and Chris Sciabarra adopted as well. Keep talking and talk some more. Write books full of jargon and footnotes. Coin new words and stretch the goo of rubbery neologisms to a mysteriously paradoxical form of infinity. Straddle every epistemological fence, declare victory, and call it World Destiny.
There is no such thing as an impersonal history, other than the record of personal choices of individual men. It boils down to one basic choice: to live privately and free, or to march in somebody's army, taking orders from a public official. In the United States of America today, it is uncertain if private liberty exists as an absolute right to anything. We are confronted daily, instead, with the end of some neighbor's law, some ancestor's faith, some barbarian's right to pig out. If you wish to live in freedom, it begins with the rejection of compliance. Moral necessity requires that you get environmentally unfriendly, sir. Withdraw the sanction of the victim.
Oh, dear. Another reference to Ayn Rand. See? I warned you that there would be some emergency homework involved. Fukuyama sails in William F. Buckley Jr's God Fearing Superpower Squadron, busily patrolling the sea of mainstream political debate to keep buccaneer Objectivists and atheists away from the microphone. In this respect, Fukuyama's theory is true, that history has ended. He and his shipmates suppressed any Objectivist threat to the Republican Party. Their victory inside a convention hall, however comforting to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, was not quite the same thing as ending political history for all time. Insurgents like me went underground. We're busy seducing others to quit and join us. As Sherlock Holmes once said with the whole of his intellect aroused, "The game is afoot!"
I'm sure you recall that Holmes beat Scotland Yard's bureaucracy every time. This makes a handy myth to judge whether I'm right or wrong. I say a single genius can and will compel the world to something better than liberal democracy, defining a wider and deeper conception of liberty.
Fukuyama says no individual has political power, because moral and political consciousness are impersonal "social capital" that nestled for eternity on the war slogans of the French Army in 1806. Over and out. May the best mind win.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Incredibly, wholesale repeal of U.S. constitutionally limited government was announced in a five-line footnote in the Carolene Products decision, more than 60 years ago. FDR publicly threatened to "pack the Court" with new appointees, unless sitting Supreme Court justices reversed themselves and allowed New Deal regulation of every U.S. factory and farm, which the Court had emphatically and repeatedly ruled unconstitutional. Backed into a political corner and terrified that judicial independence might be wiped out by FDR and a Democrat Congress, the Court offered an olive branch to Roosevelt in a footnote that enshrined individual "preferred freedoms" itemized in the Bill of Rights (free speech, equal protection, speedy public trial, etc) — none of which specifically mentions the common law freedom to conduct a business, or to sell products to the public, or to operate a family farm. In Carolene, all economic power was ceded to Congress. Henceforth, no exercise of Federal muscle, no U.S. regulation, no prohibition of commerce in certain articles of trade would ruffle the Supreme Court's constitutional chicken feathers. To save our so-called "preferred freedoms" from New Deal totalitarianism, the Court abandoned private property rights and made personal economic freedoms (if any) wholely dependent on the whim of Congress. When Congress created regulatory agencies like SEC, FCC, DEA, FDA, etc, bureaucratic procedures and nonsense edicts became supreme law of the land, immune to judicial review. You can't sue anyone in the Federal government for damages, no matter how painful or inane or arbitrary a regulation might be, regardless of whether that regulation was selectively and unfairly forced upon a particular trade or a single business enterprise. The will of Congress and their alphabet soup tyranny is sovereign in U.S. law. That's why elections are always such a frightful passage. The lucky winner becomes a Public Servant, and We The People remain serfs, no matter who we choose to rule us next.
This arrangement can and will be changed fairly soon. Help wanted.
.
(Nosara, 2000, published by Laissez Faire City Times)
For twenty-something years, I mistakenly believed that my book manuscripts and shorter works were ignored for lack of merit. Now, thanks to Dr. Francis Fukuyama, I understand why I failed as a political pathfinder. Americans are impervious to new ideas, no matter how splendidly illuminated, because there are no new ideas which Liberal Democracy is disposed to entertain. The End of History argues that anything submitted after the Battle of Jena in 1806 is basically irrelevant. I wish somebody had told me this in 1975. I could have saved a pile of money on postage.
In his latest book, The Great Disruption, Dr. Fukuyama also advises that "social capital is not a public good" — which is both reassuring and amusing, if you think about it. However, Fukuyama's argument in The End of History makes thinking an optional accessory for aspiring social capitalists. Universal mental impairment is Francis Fukuyama's theory of history in a nutshell, and it seems to be an empirically airtight case.
Unconscionable incompetence accurately describes contemporary political debate. U.S. presidential candidates have been progressively dumbed down at an alarming rate, and carefully coached numbskulls are vying for office this time around. Why all the dead air? — partly because Newt Gingrich's Contract With America fizzled in a brainless publishing scandal, but more importantly, because a conservative Federal deputy bureaucrat, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the end of Political History.
Religious power brokers like Ralph Reed saw this preemptive obituary of new ideas to be cosmologically correct (i.e., God's Destiny for America) and, hey, presto! — foreign policy debate promptly ended in President Bush The Elder's affirmation of the Ten Commandments. He targeted Saddam with bipartisan support and bombed Baghdad to enforce Texan Old Testament law. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wellheads.
At the time, journalists were busy celebrating the triumph of liberal democracy. Poland and East Germany were sold at auction. The Soviet Union collapsed. We The People won the Cold War with God's help, although it was unclear exactly what God did on our behalf. CBS News and The New York Times proclaimed with one voice that godless communism was beaten and broken. All of humanity were saved and our future was unobstructed, aside from a few undemocratic enemies of Israel — a legacy of First and Second Wave territorial competition. But Third Wave horizontal networks would deliver us from evil, solving every problem and freeing every man, woman, child, and plankton on earth, because the Dialectic of World History decreed a happy ending for all.
Sound asleep in state university bunkers from sea to shining sea, not one pink-toed professor of history or politics challenged this doctrine or its assumptions during the past eleven years. Why all the soothing silence? — because Francis Fukuyama was preaching to an appreciative college of public servant cardinals. The schoolmen are politically constrained from cheering aloud and killing a fatted calf in his honor, because taxpayers might correctly guess which side of the public good Dr. Fukuyama is buttering.
Like my childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes, who became curious about a guard dog who did not bark when the villain came to call, I find it compelling to understand what Fukuyama quietly slipped past thirty thousand academic guardians of U.S. political philosophy. Readers who like democracy, decency, and prayer in public school have nothing to fear. Francis Fukuyama is your new standard bearer and champion of family values. He quotes Dan Quayle admiringly.
But there's a Silent Majority fly in Fukuyama's family ointment. More than half of the American electorate do not vote and do not care for anything except their personal fortune. To this dishelved rump of a free people, I bring extremely bad news. It's time to put on our Silent Majority dunce caps and do some emergency homework. If you let Fukuyama get away with his "social capital" spin on history, nothing will change. Satire and apathy, multigrain bread and video circuses in a costume drama featuring Oprah's diamond earrings and Sam Donaldson's toupee will remain your uninterrupted civic experience and your children's future — nothing freer or further evolved than a monotony of Politically Correct gossip, which folksy celebrities will indulge nonstop, repeating themselves like good boys and girls.
Despite a pretense of normalcy, the U.S. political stove is red hot. It demands our urgent attention as adult citizens. We are undeniably responsible for the safety and welfare of children, who perceive and mimic our emotional expressions — whether we are habitually glum or joyous or some smiling shadow of self. This is the power and deeper meaning of political history, believe it or not. If you feel that America is mostly free, mostly an unimpeded and open society, like a frontier full of adventure, then your kids will grow straight and tall in the conviction that life is an open road.
However, this is a profoundly uncommon sense of American history. Most of us believe that liberty exists only in the bedroom, that elections and office holders are necessary, and that the adventure of living consists of pleasing neighbors, teachers, coworkers, customers, and cops, who want nothing fundamentally changed — ever. Forty percent of U.S. national income is disbursed by government. Fukuyama in particular and the Beltway Elite in general argue that this is a happy arrangement, after sixty years of increasingly complex regulation and "strict liability" which holds U.S. citizens criminally culpable for doing something that is not morally or logically wrong, but might be displeasing to OSHA tomorrow morning, for instance. Since 1937, the Federal power to regulate commerce in constitutional law has included the prerogative to destroy commerce and quash economic liberty — a doctrine of tyranny triumphant, proclaimed in a U.S. Supreme Court footnote. Hmph. I can play just as rough, see my Historical Note, below.
Ours is a history of national shame, that Americans lost their birthright of freedom. Slaves to the perceived good of the politically numerous, our shame evokes no pride, inspires no discussion, summons no political leadership worthy of respect and admiration. It forces us to go home, to laugh at televised buffoons, and to tell bitter anecdotes of U.S. citizenship, since liberal democracy is an expensive and time consuming farce. Political knowledge is a hopelessly dull subject, deterring debate. It consists mainly of reciting names and titles of public officials and the regulations and tax tables of innumerable local, regional, state, national, and international bureaucracies. Children learned to say "I dunno" instead of asking "why?" because their parents ceased to ask why the American Experiment turned into a socialist state. It certainly didn't start that way. What happened to liberty?
It is a question of highest importance and greatest hazard. The political stove is glowing red hot with embarrassment, because America made its history of liberty into a dusty museum tour of Philadelphia, concealing an archaic relic that few U.S. citizens have bothered to study. Webslingers certainly haven't. They believe Tom Hanks defeated Adolph Hitler and played a cool role in the conquest of space. Many of my younger friends are convinced that man's best hope for a free society is in isolated space colonies. This demonstrates pretty emphatically how fanciful and cartoonish Third Wave freedom fighters are. They think virtual reality is real. Their bible, The Sovereign Individual, reads like a kid's Christmas wish list, beginning with instant personal freedom, courtesy of Fukuyama's (that is: Hegel and Marx's) Dialectic of
World Technology, an amazingly durable can of very old worms. If you mention dialectical history in conversation with second-generation Objectivists, they will spend the next two hours of life carefully debating whether a eunuch should be immortalized in feminist ballad as a Hero of Hegelian Interpretations of Ayn Rand. In today's climate of Politically Sensitive libertarian speech, nothing is fully right or wrong, except the obvious right of infants to Nintendo and Netscape, our Third Wave babysitters of first and last resort.
Human happiness is not confined to ignorance. It is a huge mistake to assume that one can forgive and forget the political world, shrinking it to the mild clowning of George Will's devotion to baseball and Bill Maher's latest chortle. As frustrating and tiresome as philosophy sometimes seems, the only way to find a political exit is to get acquainted with the intellectual furniture.
In his 1989 debut as the voice of World History past, present and future, Francis Fukuyama argued that your brain and my brain and the world of political ideas are completed — a final result which cannot be fundamentally improved. We're stuck with liberal democracy forever, whether we like it or not, Fukuyama claimed. This explains why Americans no longer care about voting, or thinking, or questioning conventional wisdom. Our social conventions are huge, and we are individually small in spirit, unable to justify our empty love of television or to explain our faith in the statistical probability of finding something really cool on the internet eventually. Humbled by their user-friendly lifestyle of electronic playthings, most folks are indeed grateful that history is over. They would be terribly upset, perhaps mentally scarred for life, unable to face the uncertain future, if a revolutionary idea crashed the Disney-ABC share price or preempted a screen of half-time stats on Monday Night Football. Conservatives, liberals, rednecks, and Jews all bow their heads at the same national prayer breakfast, petitioning God for more of the same, thank you.
Contrary to Fukuyama's happy-talk harmonium, in reality there does exist indeed a potential force of revolution, easily capable of ending the majoritarian Toys R Us Welfare State — and it is precisely this potential for political change that Fukuyama is compelled to deny. Those who praise the status quo are threatened to the bone by the existence of human potential, anything that could conceivably upset their predictable paychecks and Federal pensions. It's important to remember that Fukuyama came to intellectual prominence as a career policy wonk, employed by the State Department and its Rand Corporation contractor. Take my word for it, he's a statist.
Fukuyama depicts the end of history as our existing political institutions, directed chiefly by bureaucrats and tax-exempt scholars. It is a rare treat, to hear evil speak quite so confidently in favor of itself. Nothing has tainted democracy so fully and microscopically as the federal-state-local bureaucracy and its intramural struggle for control of "free" public education. The U.S. has hundreds of thousands of officials and state-subsidized scholars, who do nothing but marshal and publish phony evidence to demonstrate that public employment is a result of irresistible History.
Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? — a no fault fascism. Don't blame politicians, don't mock the institution, don't scold the electorate, don't cringe at clumsy campaign antics or conduct in public office that reveals an incomprehensibly shallow national character. Liberal democracy is the ultimate and final flower of History, according to Fukuyama and his extended clan of kleptocrats in socialist Europe. Certainly, that's the root of the problem. It is inaccurate to say that Fukuyama is an American thinker. He explicitly relies on Friedrich Hegel, a 19th century Prussian, whose ideas inspired Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Not a word of U.S. political history enters Fukuyama's foundations of political history. He asserts that mankind's quest for liberty and justice ended successfully at the Battle of Jena in 1806. As bizarre as it sounds, that's what this debate is all about. Fukuyama says that our potential for political change ended two hundred years ago. No wonder everyone's bored and stupefied. There is nothing further to discuss. The goal of Human History is jet aircraft, carpeted concourses, peanuts, cocktails, keyboards, cars and cocaine — a comfortable "conspicuous consumption" that America swills energetically and which every starving peasant on earth presumably envies and wants to enjoy. For this reason, the business strategies of McDonald's and Microsoft are absolutely identical, to share an unearned economic rent of family friendly brand identities in a world of ever-widening, all-inclusive consumption.
It's a distinct threat. Sometimes I think it too likely, that the End of History will be sexually inert, with millions of nerds trapped in digital realms, gawking at fantasy images and popping rave drugs like X and LSD to make indoor life interesting. I know several bright, handsome men in their mid-20's who prefer to remain closeted with computers day and night, interrupted only by DVD cartoon compilations and cheeseburger wrappers — and who are psychologically unqualified to romance a woman, no matter how cooperative the lady in question may be. It is not for lack of testosterone. The Third Wave digiratti are not homosexual. But they are sexually dysfunctional, unable to grapple with the physical reality of females, whom they worship from a safe distance like smitten schoolboys. A nerd's plight consists of feeling overwhelmed by a complex operating system he does not comprehend,
because females are neither Windows nor Linux. This is why John Gray's stand up comedy Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus became a Third Wave default faith. There is no ctrl-alt-del command to reboot a romance, and the only executable submodules are marriage and family life, success at which requires more effort than an occasional mouse click.
If it seems odd that I should speak about sex in connection with the End of History, then you do not see the central issue as I see it. Fukuyama and his conservative clan want to stop progress. Procreation is our most important progress. In the relation between private mentor and student, it is possible to coach, challenge, guide and inspire a new man or woman, based on wisdom acquired by an elder who had fewer choices and less luck. Dad's advice is usually two-thirds caution, a common sense benchmark hammered home by practical experience. Don't touch the stove. It's hot. The national dad in question is a Dead White European Male (pick one: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine). His advice to our multicultural progeny consists of a single proposition, that liberty is sacred to a free society. A society free
from what? — from government.
The goal of expanding liberty presupposes new ideas. Without new ideas, we stay stuck in the past, because today's political establishment is yesterday's solution. The last time America did anything strenuous in defense of Liberty was 1776. The War of Independence was a giant step forward. But the Declaration's premise of equality took a Civil War and two centuries of struggle to deliver something like one person, one vote, regardless of race, religion, gender, brainpower, etc. In hindsight, voting and its attendant political vanity was not a very good idea. However, it required 200 years to explore a simple idea like democracy, and it behooves us to start asking what's next. What's next will take a long time to discuss and understand. New ideas, by definition, are unconventional and risky. You have to surrender the familiar, to go forward. Standby to jetison Old Glory. Let's noodle on New Glory.
In twenty years, I've authored a quarter million words. Here, shorn of filibuster, are my Top Seven political ideas — innovative proposals that Francis Fukuyama, Ralph Reed, and many others hope to suppress by denying the existence of valid political innovation. Ready?
(1) Women should be granted by constitutional amendment a separate, co-equal branch of legislature, the entire House of Representatives, for instance. Men can keep the Senate. New laws shall require passage by both sexes.
(2) Women should be exempted from the criminal law and responsible for law enforcement. This will end male input on abortion and domestic violence. I trust women will do justice.
(3) Religion is a mental illness. Separation of church and state implies the end of tax-exempt status for those who preach the glory of God. A free society does not make the pious more tax-free than other citizens.
(4) In reality, government is an illusion. We live in actual, constructive liberty. The ultimate thing at issue is legal philosophy — not law enforcement — because it is impossible to force cowardice upon anyone. It is false to blame politicians and bureaucrats. The Sons of Liberty did not hold elections. They went directly to war and won the right of self-government. We face the same issue. It is our duty to throw off a new set of chains and roll the rock of Liberty another mile.
(5) The new constitution should consist of a single proposition. I evolved my thinking on this matter several times during the past twenty years and recently issued a final communique that I'm willing to defend. No one is legally entitled to judge his own cause of action or to punish another without due process of law and fair public trial by jury.
(6) We do not need a public treasury to provide for national defense or domestic tranquility. In point of legal fact, the U.S. government is bankrupt, and it is laughable to hear anyone speak of paying the national debt. When this becomes irrefutably obvious in 2015, I suggest that we privatize the U.S. military-industrial complex, rather than remain its tax slaves. I don't see the point of forbidding foreign ownership, since U.S. policy is driven by Israel and the Security Council, cordially treating Russia and China as equals in a balance of power. Let's talk IPO. Give the Pentagon to Merrill Lynch and let them syndicate World Cop Inc. I'm sure that Britain, Germany, Japan, and most of New England will buy a piece, to keep crude flowing northward from the slave-states of OPEC.
(7) Ayn Rand was right. It is imperative to strip from tyranny every scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial genius on earth — a strike of the men of the mind — some of whom should be deployed to nudge along the collapse of New Rome on the Potomac. Aggressive, heroic action, personal and collective, is the key to victory.
So long as you believe that politics is the art of the possible, Fukuyama wins, and radically new ideas lose. The American Revolutionary War of Independence was not an exercise in "the possible." A majority of Americans thought it was impossible to resist the King's Officers and win colonial freedom in 1776. The Declaration of Independence was an act of treason, punishable by death. Hit the books for a snap quiz. How many signers of the Declaration were put to death or imprisoned, their fortunes destroyed, their families punished? What was the total civilian economic price of freedom? How many years did we fight a Revolutionary War? How many were killed in battle or died in British prison hulks because Thomas Paine correctly predicted victory and rightly demanded action?
My discussion of Fukuyama is rapidly coming to a close. His theory is nothing but an elaborate excuse to hide in the closet, claiming that the future is foreclosed to anything unexpected, because liberal democracy is sorta okay. Better the devil we know. When Fukuyama extols the virtue of "social capital" networks, he's blowing smoke up your butt. This is a long-standing tradition in Hegelian philosophy, which Karl Marx and Chris Sciabarra adopted as well. Keep talking and talk some more. Write books full of jargon and footnotes. Coin new words and stretch the goo of rubbery neologisms to a mysteriously paradoxical form of infinity. Straddle every epistemological fence, declare victory, and call it World Destiny.
There is no such thing as an impersonal history, other than the record of personal choices of individual men. It boils down to one basic choice: to live privately and free, or to march in somebody's army, taking orders from a public official. In the United States of America today, it is uncertain if private liberty exists as an absolute right to anything. We are confronted daily, instead, with the end of some neighbor's law, some ancestor's faith, some barbarian's right to pig out. If you wish to live in freedom, it begins with the rejection of compliance. Moral necessity requires that you get environmentally unfriendly, sir. Withdraw the sanction of the victim.
Oh, dear. Another reference to Ayn Rand. See? I warned you that there would be some emergency homework involved. Fukuyama sails in William F. Buckley Jr's God Fearing Superpower Squadron, busily patrolling the sea of mainstream political debate to keep buccaneer Objectivists and atheists away from the microphone. In this respect, Fukuyama's theory is true, that history has ended. He and his shipmates suppressed any Objectivist threat to the Republican Party. Their victory inside a convention hall, however comforting to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, was not quite the same thing as ending political history for all time. Insurgents like me went underground. We're busy seducing others to quit and join us. As Sherlock Holmes once said with the whole of his intellect aroused, "The game is afoot!"
I'm sure you recall that Holmes beat Scotland Yard's bureaucracy every time. This makes a handy myth to judge whether I'm right or wrong. I say a single genius can and will compel the world to something better than liberal democracy, defining a wider and deeper conception of liberty.
Fukuyama says no individual has political power, because moral and political consciousness are impersonal "social capital" that nestled for eternity on the war slogans of the French Army in 1806. Over and out. May the best mind win.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Incredibly, wholesale repeal of U.S. constitutionally limited government was announced in a five-line footnote in the Carolene Products decision, more than 60 years ago. FDR publicly threatened to "pack the Court" with new appointees, unless sitting Supreme Court justices reversed themselves and allowed New Deal regulation of every U.S. factory and farm, which the Court had emphatically and repeatedly ruled unconstitutional. Backed into a political corner and terrified that judicial independence might be wiped out by FDR and a Democrat Congress, the Court offered an olive branch to Roosevelt in a footnote that enshrined individual "preferred freedoms" itemized in the Bill of Rights (free speech, equal protection, speedy public trial, etc) — none of which specifically mentions the common law freedom to conduct a business, or to sell products to the public, or to operate a family farm. In Carolene, all economic power was ceded to Congress. Henceforth, no exercise of Federal muscle, no U.S. regulation, no prohibition of commerce in certain articles of trade would ruffle the Supreme Court's constitutional chicken feathers. To save our so-called "preferred freedoms" from New Deal totalitarianism, the Court abandoned private property rights and made personal economic freedoms (if any) wholely dependent on the whim of Congress. When Congress created regulatory agencies like SEC, FCC, DEA, FDA, etc, bureaucratic procedures and nonsense edicts became supreme law of the land, immune to judicial review. You can't sue anyone in the Federal government for damages, no matter how painful or inane or arbitrary a regulation might be, regardless of whether that regulation was selectively and unfairly forced upon a particular trade or a single business enterprise. The will of Congress and their alphabet soup tyranny is sovereign in U.S. law. That's why elections are always such a frightful passage. The lucky winner becomes a Public Servant, and We The People remain serfs, no matter who we choose to rule us next.
This arrangement can and will be changed fairly soon. Help wanted.
.
Greatest Hits Vol.2
Exxon's $4 billion Kosmos offer rejected
(Golden, 2010, published by Alrroya Aleqtissadiya)
In October of 2009, I noted ExxonMobil's offer to buy the privately-held Kosmos Energy 24% interest in Ghana's Jubilee oil field. Based on Tullow maps and well data, I deduced that Exxon was using a medium term $100 per barrel price model to determine how much to bid for the Kosmos stake. No surprise, it matched oil forecasts by T. Boone Pickens, Goldman Sachs, and former CIBC World Markets chief economist Jeff Rubin.
Kosmos promptly accepted the Exxon bid, in a straightforward move to monetize their Jubilee asset. They were out of pocket less than $1 billion funded by Warburg Pincus and Blackstone Capital Partners. Exxon's $4 billion offer would give them a $3 billion profit and zero their risk of development and doing business in Ghana. Kosmos previously reduced their risk by farming out stakes to Anadarko and Tullow, who did the actual work of drilling and discovery. Clever little Dallas-based Kosmos had achieved what all E&P "minnows" hope to do -- get a license, bring in experienced operators, then flip it to a fat supermajor.
Except the wheels fell off and Exxon's offer died.
Who, why, and what killed the acquisition is a convoluted story. It starts at a racetrack in Dallas involving Texas politicians, a Federal class-action settlement, and a Monte Carlo head fake that propelled attorney James C. Musselman from obscurity to VIP status at a White House state dinner for Ghana's President John Agyekum Kufour.
Musselman got his start in the oil business as an investor in Triton Energy. He became its CEO in 1998 when Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team and chairman of private equity firm Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, bought a big speculative stake in troubled Triton.
Musselman's job was to pump up reserves and sell the company, which he successfully did in 2001, after reporting an operating loss of $383 million. Hess paid a 50% premium to Triton shareholders to acquire the Ceiba oil field in Equatorial Guinea. Musselman and his team were deemed geniuses, and they briefly worked for Hess, until Hess had to declare a $530 million impairment charge and write down 70% of the Triton reserves they paid $3 billion to own.
But that's not how it played in Ghana, nor in Dallas where Musselman and his ex-Triton team founded a new company, Kosmos Energy, in 2003. They were touted as West Africa experts with a new project negotiated by Craig S. Glick, who left Hunt Oil with inside knowledge of West Cape Three Points block in Ghana. Hunt acquired 2D seismic data totalling 2,225 km and 264 square kilometres of 3D. They drilled and logged two deepwater wells. Those wells were immediately east of the future Jubilee discovery. When Hunt Oil quit Ghana in 2001, the story gets a little bizarre, clogged in multiple layers of state secrets.
Before he became President of the United States, Gov. George W. Bush was co-owner of the Texas Rangers, which he sold to Hicks. After he left the White House, Bush bought a house in the exclusive Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, down the street from Musselman's $6 million mansion. It seems likely that they knew each other in 2003, when Bush met Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufour in Dakar and urged him to do business with US backing.
Two of Kufour's trusted associates laid the groundwork for a deal with Kosmos. Dr. Kwame Barwuah Edusei, a medical doctor practicing in Washington DC, and George Owusu, a self-styled Ghanaian oil broker living in Houston, formed a company called E-O, rather hilariously registered at a chicken farm near Accra. Kosmos and E-O entered into a written agreement signed by Edusei for E-O and Glick for Kosmos, covering future exploration, production and other revenue: Kosmos 86.5%, Ghana National Petroleum Company 10%, E-O 3.5%. The agreement stated that Kosmos would carry E-O and additionally pay them $250,000 upfront. Kufour appointed Edusei ambassador to Switzerland in August 2004 (to open a numbered account?) and later appointed him Ghana’s ambassador to the White House. Owusu became Kosmos Energy's Ghana representative. Owusu's Kosmos salary, perks and other graft may have totalled $2 million before he ran afoul of anti-corruption due diligence by Anadarko.
President Kufour, after serving two four-year terms, had to step down in 2009. He and his cronies did everything possible to grease the wheels for Kosmos, Anadarko, and Tullow -- signing off on low royalties, 100% off-loading for export, and token involvement of GNPC. President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush made a 3-day goodwill visit to Ghana in February 2008, meeting all 30 tribal chiefs, promising US development aid, and stumping for Kufour's New Patriotic Party, hoping to upstage and deflate perennial opposition presidential candidate John Atta Mills. In September 2008 there was a gala White House state dinner to honor President Kufour and Kosmos boss Jim Musselman. In Ghana, NPP newspapers and radio stations celebrated their fabulous new oil wealth, thanks to Kufour and Kosmos.
All for nought. Social democrat and former national tax commissioner John Atta Mills was elected president of Ghana by a razor-thin majority, after an odd ballot re-run in a remote rural constituency. His first act in office was to appoint a special advisor on energy policy, Tsatsu Tsikata, long-serving patriarch of GNPC who was put in prison and tried for "causing financial loss to the state" when Kufour came to power in 2000. His trial lasted eight years and Tsikata was pronounced guilty, then pardoned when Mills won the 2009 presidential runoff.
Tsikata flew to Houston and visited Anadarko to pick up their Corrupt Foreign Practices file on E-O and Kosmos Ghana. Then he flew to New York and retained Morgan Stanley as financial advisors. Next on the agenda was a $10 billion line of credit from China. George Owusu's and E-O's assets were seized. Kosmos was put under investigation. In 2010, Tsikata flew to China six times, negotiating with CNOOC.
When Kosmos filed a request to sell its interest in Jubilee to Exxon, the government's reaction was slow and comical. In due course, the Energy Ministry said, they would vet ExxonMobil and consider their suitability to partner a Ghanaian oil company. We intend to produce Jubilee gas first, before oil production, because our country needs more electric generation, and we will be working with world class government engineering experts from Trinidad and Tobago. Your $4 billion Exxon deal is imaginary and illegal.
The only buyer Kosmos Energy could talk to was Tsatsu Tsikata.
.
(Golden, 2010, published by Alrroya Aleqtissadiya)
In October of 2009, I noted ExxonMobil's offer to buy the privately-held Kosmos Energy 24% interest in Ghana's Jubilee oil field. Based on Tullow maps and well data, I deduced that Exxon was using a medium term $100 per barrel price model to determine how much to bid for the Kosmos stake. No surprise, it matched oil forecasts by T. Boone Pickens, Goldman Sachs, and former CIBC World Markets chief economist Jeff Rubin.
Kosmos promptly accepted the Exxon bid, in a straightforward move to monetize their Jubilee asset. They were out of pocket less than $1 billion funded by Warburg Pincus and Blackstone Capital Partners. Exxon's $4 billion offer would give them a $3 billion profit and zero their risk of development and doing business in Ghana. Kosmos previously reduced their risk by farming out stakes to Anadarko and Tullow, who did the actual work of drilling and discovery. Clever little Dallas-based Kosmos had achieved what all E&P "minnows" hope to do -- get a license, bring in experienced operators, then flip it to a fat supermajor.
Except the wheels fell off and Exxon's offer died.
Who, why, and what killed the acquisition is a convoluted story. It starts at a racetrack in Dallas involving Texas politicians, a Federal class-action settlement, and a Monte Carlo head fake that propelled attorney James C. Musselman from obscurity to VIP status at a White House state dinner for Ghana's President John Agyekum Kufour.
Musselman got his start in the oil business as an investor in Triton Energy. He became its CEO in 1998 when Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team and chairman of private equity firm Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, bought a big speculative stake in troubled Triton.
Musselman's job was to pump up reserves and sell the company, which he successfully did in 2001, after reporting an operating loss of $383 million. Hess paid a 50% premium to Triton shareholders to acquire the Ceiba oil field in Equatorial Guinea. Musselman and his team were deemed geniuses, and they briefly worked for Hess, until Hess had to declare a $530 million impairment charge and write down 70% of the Triton reserves they paid $3 billion to own.
But that's not how it played in Ghana, nor in Dallas where Musselman and his ex-Triton team founded a new company, Kosmos Energy, in 2003. They were touted as West Africa experts with a new project negotiated by Craig S. Glick, who left Hunt Oil with inside knowledge of West Cape Three Points block in Ghana. Hunt acquired 2D seismic data totalling 2,225 km and 264 square kilometres of 3D. They drilled and logged two deepwater wells. Those wells were immediately east of the future Jubilee discovery. When Hunt Oil quit Ghana in 2001, the story gets a little bizarre, clogged in multiple layers of state secrets.
Before he became President of the United States, Gov. George W. Bush was co-owner of the Texas Rangers, which he sold to Hicks. After he left the White House, Bush bought a house in the exclusive Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, down the street from Musselman's $6 million mansion. It seems likely that they knew each other in 2003, when Bush met Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufour in Dakar and urged him to do business with US backing.
Two of Kufour's trusted associates laid the groundwork for a deal with Kosmos. Dr. Kwame Barwuah Edusei, a medical doctor practicing in Washington DC, and George Owusu, a self-styled Ghanaian oil broker living in Houston, formed a company called E-O, rather hilariously registered at a chicken farm near Accra. Kosmos and E-O entered into a written agreement signed by Edusei for E-O and Glick for Kosmos, covering future exploration, production and other revenue: Kosmos 86.5%, Ghana National Petroleum Company 10%, E-O 3.5%. The agreement stated that Kosmos would carry E-O and additionally pay them $250,000 upfront. Kufour appointed Edusei ambassador to Switzerland in August 2004 (to open a numbered account?) and later appointed him Ghana’s ambassador to the White House. Owusu became Kosmos Energy's Ghana representative. Owusu's Kosmos salary, perks and other graft may have totalled $2 million before he ran afoul of anti-corruption due diligence by Anadarko.
President Kufour, after serving two four-year terms, had to step down in 2009. He and his cronies did everything possible to grease the wheels for Kosmos, Anadarko, and Tullow -- signing off on low royalties, 100% off-loading for export, and token involvement of GNPC. President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush made a 3-day goodwill visit to Ghana in February 2008, meeting all 30 tribal chiefs, promising US development aid, and stumping for Kufour's New Patriotic Party, hoping to upstage and deflate perennial opposition presidential candidate John Atta Mills. In September 2008 there was a gala White House state dinner to honor President Kufour and Kosmos boss Jim Musselman. In Ghana, NPP newspapers and radio stations celebrated their fabulous new oil wealth, thanks to Kufour and Kosmos.
All for nought. Social democrat and former national tax commissioner John Atta Mills was elected president of Ghana by a razor-thin majority, after an odd ballot re-run in a remote rural constituency. His first act in office was to appoint a special advisor on energy policy, Tsatsu Tsikata, long-serving patriarch of GNPC who was put in prison and tried for "causing financial loss to the state" when Kufour came to power in 2000. His trial lasted eight years and Tsikata was pronounced guilty, then pardoned when Mills won the 2009 presidential runoff.
Tsikata flew to Houston and visited Anadarko to pick up their Corrupt Foreign Practices file on E-O and Kosmos Ghana. Then he flew to New York and retained Morgan Stanley as financial advisors. Next on the agenda was a $10 billion line of credit from China. George Owusu's and E-O's assets were seized. Kosmos was put under investigation. In 2010, Tsikata flew to China six times, negotiating with CNOOC.
When Kosmos filed a request to sell its interest in Jubilee to Exxon, the government's reaction was slow and comical. In due course, the Energy Ministry said, they would vet ExxonMobil and consider their suitability to partner a Ghanaian oil company. We intend to produce Jubilee gas first, before oil production, because our country needs more electric generation, and we will be working with world class government engineering experts from Trinidad and Tobago. Your $4 billion Exxon deal is imaginary and illegal.
The only buyer Kosmos Energy could talk to was Tsatsu Tsikata.
.
Greatest Hits Vol.3
Flibbet
(written a long time ago, in Scotland, I think?
reprinted in Rock And Roll Rest Home, 2016)
It was approximately 2:38 pm Thursday when suspicion began to swirl innocently, like a wisp of lazy gray stink from an old fire. Then it exploded suddenly and shook the streets of Poughkeepsie with determination because CBS News had been deceived. You can get away with a lot of stuff nowadays, including murder and self-mutilation, but you can't lie to CBS.
The unlikely eye of this storm was a shy man named Mollusk P. Molever, whose life (until Thursday) was so ordinary and predictable that neighboring Poughkeepseans were never in doubt as to the dependable progress of Thursdays, Fridays and alternate Tuesdays when Molever parked his car at the 3rd Street Municipal Garage, put 50 cents in the parking meter, looked both ways before crossing Ormand Lejun Exit and walked to a canopied entrance to join a regular foursome for dribbles and snorks upstairs at the old Oki-Doke. Molever told himself that he enjoyed snorks and rolled a fairly firm dribble. Alternatively, he supposed that these were sociable games that helped to advance his visibility in Greater Poughkeepsie Chamber and were good for business in the long run. The Oak-Dawn Hotel was a passable backdrop for this latter supposition, although its brick and marble lobby had seen happier days and fatter calves three decades ago and was currently in violation of several fire regulations. No matter. The men who played snorks and shouted too loudly upstairs in the Main Parlour gave no thought to their personal safety. When men dribble, something in our primitive hunter-gatherer DNA impels us to scoff at municipal building codes.
In truth, Molever was neither snork shark nor chamber whore. These thrice-weekly outings were an ill-conceived, shameful sacrifice, all the more corrupt because Molever’s intended victim was primarily himself. For an hour and a half every Thursday, Friday and alternate Tuesday afternoons, he led a double life of misery and deceit, trading his dignity for crumbs of false affection because Molever’s pals had been led to believe that his name was Bertram something. “Hi, Bert!” they chimed in unison upon his arrival and “See ya, Bert!” echoed across the carpeted lobby of the Oki-Doke when it was time to go home.
During their first match, nearly three years ago, Litton mistakenly got the idea that his new partner’s name was Bert. He used it in its formal entirety whenever Molever muffed a simple dribble. “Good God, Bertram!” Litton would shout on such occasions, because his partner should play better than that, for heaven’s sake. A child could have slid that shot! -- and by an eternal tradition of male hierarchy there was no way to change partners. Molever and Litton were bonded irrevocably by virtue of Adolph Potmer’s heart attack in 1992, and in Litton’s mind an inexcusably weak dribble was reprehensible no matter who replaced whom. Their evil opponents Thummwugger and Klack merely sniggered, thinking Bert What’s His Name tragic and laughing at Litton’s exasperated discomfiture, an imagined laurel of greatness shunning his dribble puck for the millionth time thanks to Bert.
Of course, Molever always burned with shame, loathing his poor play and loss of dignity. “Sorry, Neville...” he would mutter, unconsciously accomplishing a nickel’s worth of justice, because Litton’s christian name was almost certainly Newell.
At home, Molever lied to his wife and said that he dribbled well. “Oh, fine, fine...” Molever fibbed, no matter how closely she inquired. “It’s only a game, dear,” he certified. But at the dinner table his food went cold from inattention, so busily was Molever’s brain bubbling and gurgling over the problem of snorks. He used to be a fairly good dribbler, for heaven’s sake. What on earth happened? And behind his white plaster facade of wondering, there was the unspeakable treason of pretending to be Bertram Something.
“Are you all right, Mollie --?” his wife asked, shaking Molever from chronic puzzlement at dinner, which sometimes intruded a little too forcefully on her razor-sharp intuition: “-- or is my cooking just boring? We can always go back to eating microwave popcorn and sliced peaches, you know.”
So close to being found out, so vulnerable to snorkers and loved ones, Molever’s world shrank and darkened a little more each day. Little lies turned into bigger ones and soon he felt as if there was no one he could trust to hear the truth. As recently as 1997, he answered the phone with enthusiasm: “Good morning, Mollusk Molever speaking!” -- but now he was fast becoming the spent shell of a kakistocratic experiment in self-government, grunting fewer and terser monosyllables, incapable of enjoying cellular telephony. Cut from the sticky web of human agreement, Molever drifted tragically to violent crime.
An elderly neighbor lady later told CBS News: “I knew it all along. He was too normal.”
The initial flash of anger was ominous indeed. On the morning of Molever’s semi-annual sales management assessment at Mostly Modern Paper, he was irresistibly drawn to the food displayed in Deloon’s big front window -- a row of fat silver flounders and even fatter, silverer salmon, whole, giant, healthy (albeit murdered by asphixiation and disemboweled) fresh fish proudly marching on a field of crushed white ice. Call it fate. Irresistible impulse. Molever dashed inside and purchased the biggest, fattest flounder of them all. “$13.75,” the clerk warned him from the scale. “I’ll take it!” Mollie blurt with delight and, without waiting to have the muscular sea varmint wrapped more than twice, dashed upstairs to a plain brown hallway that ended at a frosted door which completely concealed the showrooms of Mostly Modern Paper, A Fortunate 500 Forward-Looking Firm.
“You’re late,” Mr. Nubbles observed.
"Yes, sir, I’m sorry, I really am, but I saw this flounder,” Molever explained, excitedly opening his package to share the wonder of God’s bounty with his District Sales Manager, because Nubbles was an enthusiastic eater (he weighed almost 400 lbs) and Molever knew for a fact that Modern Paper men as a rule were nuts about fresh fish, the fresher the better. It was the perfect way to begin a semi-annual assessment, with male bonding visual aids, since no one sang the company song any more. And a fine song it was, Molever thought: “Mostly Modern Uber Alles, Weyerhauser Eat Our Dust! Cotton Rag or Duplex Coated, Mostly Modern Won’t Go Bust! O-ooo-oh, Never Charge Deliv’ry, O-ooo-oh, Open Box No Problem. Mostly Modern Your Good Buddy! Ty-y-y-vek Gussets Only Ten Percent!”
Big Gene Nubbles frowned and scratched the side of his flabby neck, uninterested in whatever threatened to emerge from Molever’s shopping bag. “Siddown, Mollie, the fish’d better wait,” Big Gene foreshadowed.
You can guess the rest. Molever’s semi-annual assessment did not go well at all, partly because Mollie hadn’t actually sold anything for five months and partly because their parent company, Fortunate 500, elected to restructure Mostly Modern by closing its Poughkeepsie branch office. Accordingly, young Molever’s draw was being -- er -- downsized, to zero.
“WHAT ??” Mollie screamed.
“Now, now,” the boss flubbled helpfully, “I know how you feel.”
And it was too easy, too natural in the heat of anger, released like the explosion of a volcano, just grab the nearest thing and lash out. Seconds later, Nubbles was unconscious and dotted with triangular gray and silver scales, flailed by a flounder, flank after flank, until there was nothing but slippery shame in Molever’s right hand, where once he cherished an oversized blue Mont Blimp that swam proudly in a Mostly Modern order book and gaily proclaimed Molever’s life was synonymous with paper. Nevermore. All Mollusk had to show for nine and a half years of smiles and shoeleather was a stinging gash across his palm.
“Fins leave a mark!” the most senior and grumpiest detective observed at Boilerton General. But the dazed victim couldn’t remember what happened. Nubbles had been heavily sedated. A team of doctors and dieticians were working feverishly to descale and hopefully save the top of his head. It was starting to smell bad and once something smells like fish, it just never goes away, does it?
“Don’t worry, pal,” said the dour chief dick, patting Big Gene’s belly in snuffly consolation. “We’ll find the bastard who did this. He won’t get far with flounder cuts.”
* * *
Only the bold succeed. Yuck. Lateral thinking, it pays to use it. Sure. Let’s take care of our customers or somebody else will. True but trite, so -- plop -- in it went, or tried to went, but slipped from a Matterhorn of last month’s Mostly Modern motivational mailshot and sailed to the floor, landing slightly to the left of Attitude makes the difference.
Cretin Molever was cleaning, her weekly effort to bring order and reason to Mollie’s desk area in the garage. Like most intergenderal kindnesses, it was usually repaid with scorn and humiliation, because her husband was unable to find anything after she “straightened up.” But it was best for everybody in the long run. After an hour of yelling, Mollie forgot that his domain had been invaded and Cretin achieved her strategic objective of fire safety. Glossy six-color rotogravure stock was a dangerous combustible, Mollie told her nine and a half years ago when they were newlyweds, an ironic zany quip that Cretin had misunderstood as a specific warning of danger in Mollie’s line of work. She often thought of him heroically risking his life in the commercial paper trade, going in and out of deathtrap print shops to put bread on the table and keep a roof over their heads. “God bless him,” Cretin whispered as she threw her weight behind a galvanized shovel and pushed another ton of promotional Post-It pads and nudie calendars to the furnace, praying for Mollie’s occupational safety.
So that it always seems unkind and unfair that chance picks on the pure of heart when they least deserve it. Just as Cretin kicked shut the iron grate and heard a gratifying wump of ignition emanate from their Flame Hog Deluxe Compact Home Incinerator, at that precise moment her husband who was not expected to arrive until 6 p.m. some three hours later entered the garage like a beaten dog dragging his tail between his legs, mumbling a sound which Cretin did not hear because it was completely masked by the emphatic rush of gases through the stack of the aforementioned domestic crematory. Her husband therefore materialized at her shoulder out of thin air and Cretin greeted him by leaping four and a half feet vertically in apoplectic terror.
“A-A-J-!” she screamed at the incredible phantasm who had no business being there and suddenly materialized without warning, causing Cretin's resting heart rate to attempt an impromptu Olympic record for acceleration. Although they had never actually trained for competition, Cretin Molever was particularly disposed to afternoon reveries and, given the frequency and severity of being scared half to death by her husband suddenly popping into existential reality, if there were such a sport no doubt Mollie’s noiseless tread and Cretin’s hair-trigger startle reflex could have trumped the Mixed Doubles Meditation Zen Calamity Biathlon.
“MOLLIE !” she screamed at him angrily, “How many times have I told you?!”
“I said ‘ding’ -- honest!” he pleaded pathetically.
“Well, I didn’t hear you!” she shouted at him, hands clasped over her heaving breast, head dizzy with high blood pressure, elbow flopped against the Flame Hog for support, telling herself for the thousandth time it’s all right, relax, just breathe, one of these days he’s going to give me a heart attack, sneaking up on me like that!
In the first month of their marriage, upon perceiving Cretin’s susceptibility to self-hypnosis, Mollusk resolved to say “ding” every time he entered a room like a cat wearing a bell to warn an unsuspecting mouse, in case Cretin was lost in thought, thereby minimizing the risk of scaring the shit out of her. Among all husbands throughout all of History engaged in the recitation of ding, Mollusk was extremely diligent every hour, day and night, whether Cretin was actually in the room he entered or not. Better safe than sorry, he presumed. So that a quiet evening at the Molever residence normally consisted of Cretin watching TV in her bedroom, while Mollusk sauntered in and out of the kitchen, bathroom, living room and garage mumbling ding everywhere. The fault in this arrangement was tragically typical of best laid plans. Mollie had exceptionally sharp hearing and was softspoken as a consequence. His wife was a little deaf and never once heard him say “ding” during nine years of dinging.
“I’m sorry, Cretin. Are you okay?” he worried.
“What are you doing home? You’re supposed to be at work!” Cretin barked indignantly. “And what’s the matter with your hand? Don’t tell me ‘nothing,’ Mollusk Molever -- show me that hand this minute. Oh, my God! What the hell did you do to your hand?”
“Uh...” he waffled.
But Cretin knew. She saw jagged edges and dark red bolts of dry blood. “It’s a paper cut, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me, Mollie. You’ve been handling paper again!” she accused.
.
(written a long time ago, in Scotland, I think?
reprinted in Rock And Roll Rest Home, 2016)
It was approximately 2:38 pm Thursday when suspicion began to swirl innocently, like a wisp of lazy gray stink from an old fire. Then it exploded suddenly and shook the streets of Poughkeepsie with determination because CBS News had been deceived. You can get away with a lot of stuff nowadays, including murder and self-mutilation, but you can't lie to CBS.
The unlikely eye of this storm was a shy man named Mollusk P. Molever, whose life (until Thursday) was so ordinary and predictable that neighboring Poughkeepseans were never in doubt as to the dependable progress of Thursdays, Fridays and alternate Tuesdays when Molever parked his car at the 3rd Street Municipal Garage, put 50 cents in the parking meter, looked both ways before crossing Ormand Lejun Exit and walked to a canopied entrance to join a regular foursome for dribbles and snorks upstairs at the old Oki-Doke. Molever told himself that he enjoyed snorks and rolled a fairly firm dribble. Alternatively, he supposed that these were sociable games that helped to advance his visibility in Greater Poughkeepsie Chamber and were good for business in the long run. The Oak-Dawn Hotel was a passable backdrop for this latter supposition, although its brick and marble lobby had seen happier days and fatter calves three decades ago and was currently in violation of several fire regulations. No matter. The men who played snorks and shouted too loudly upstairs in the Main Parlour gave no thought to their personal safety. When men dribble, something in our primitive hunter-gatherer DNA impels us to scoff at municipal building codes.
In truth, Molever was neither snork shark nor chamber whore. These thrice-weekly outings were an ill-conceived, shameful sacrifice, all the more corrupt because Molever’s intended victim was primarily himself. For an hour and a half every Thursday, Friday and alternate Tuesday afternoons, he led a double life of misery and deceit, trading his dignity for crumbs of false affection because Molever’s pals had been led to believe that his name was Bertram something. “Hi, Bert!” they chimed in unison upon his arrival and “See ya, Bert!” echoed across the carpeted lobby of the Oki-Doke when it was time to go home.
During their first match, nearly three years ago, Litton mistakenly got the idea that his new partner’s name was Bert. He used it in its formal entirety whenever Molever muffed a simple dribble. “Good God, Bertram!” Litton would shout on such occasions, because his partner should play better than that, for heaven’s sake. A child could have slid that shot! -- and by an eternal tradition of male hierarchy there was no way to change partners. Molever and Litton were bonded irrevocably by virtue of Adolph Potmer’s heart attack in 1992, and in Litton’s mind an inexcusably weak dribble was reprehensible no matter who replaced whom. Their evil opponents Thummwugger and Klack merely sniggered, thinking Bert What’s His Name tragic and laughing at Litton’s exasperated discomfiture, an imagined laurel of greatness shunning his dribble puck for the millionth time thanks to Bert.
Of course, Molever always burned with shame, loathing his poor play and loss of dignity. “Sorry, Neville...” he would mutter, unconsciously accomplishing a nickel’s worth of justice, because Litton’s christian name was almost certainly Newell.
At home, Molever lied to his wife and said that he dribbled well. “Oh, fine, fine...” Molever fibbed, no matter how closely she inquired. “It’s only a game, dear,” he certified. But at the dinner table his food went cold from inattention, so busily was Molever’s brain bubbling and gurgling over the problem of snorks. He used to be a fairly good dribbler, for heaven’s sake. What on earth happened? And behind his white plaster facade of wondering, there was the unspeakable treason of pretending to be Bertram Something.
“Are you all right, Mollie --?” his wife asked, shaking Molever from chronic puzzlement at dinner, which sometimes intruded a little too forcefully on her razor-sharp intuition: “-- or is my cooking just boring? We can always go back to eating microwave popcorn and sliced peaches, you know.”
So close to being found out, so vulnerable to snorkers and loved ones, Molever’s world shrank and darkened a little more each day. Little lies turned into bigger ones and soon he felt as if there was no one he could trust to hear the truth. As recently as 1997, he answered the phone with enthusiasm: “Good morning, Mollusk Molever speaking!” -- but now he was fast becoming the spent shell of a kakistocratic experiment in self-government, grunting fewer and terser monosyllables, incapable of enjoying cellular telephony. Cut from the sticky web of human agreement, Molever drifted tragically to violent crime.
An elderly neighbor lady later told CBS News: “I knew it all along. He was too normal.”
The initial flash of anger was ominous indeed. On the morning of Molever’s semi-annual sales management assessment at Mostly Modern Paper, he was irresistibly drawn to the food displayed in Deloon’s big front window -- a row of fat silver flounders and even fatter, silverer salmon, whole, giant, healthy (albeit murdered by asphixiation and disemboweled) fresh fish proudly marching on a field of crushed white ice. Call it fate. Irresistible impulse. Molever dashed inside and purchased the biggest, fattest flounder of them all. “$13.75,” the clerk warned him from the scale. “I’ll take it!” Mollie blurt with delight and, without waiting to have the muscular sea varmint wrapped more than twice, dashed upstairs to a plain brown hallway that ended at a frosted door which completely concealed the showrooms of Mostly Modern Paper, A Fortunate 500 Forward-Looking Firm.
“You’re late,” Mr. Nubbles observed.
"Yes, sir, I’m sorry, I really am, but I saw this flounder,” Molever explained, excitedly opening his package to share the wonder of God’s bounty with his District Sales Manager, because Nubbles was an enthusiastic eater (he weighed almost 400 lbs) and Molever knew for a fact that Modern Paper men as a rule were nuts about fresh fish, the fresher the better. It was the perfect way to begin a semi-annual assessment, with male bonding visual aids, since no one sang the company song any more. And a fine song it was, Molever thought: “Mostly Modern Uber Alles, Weyerhauser Eat Our Dust! Cotton Rag or Duplex Coated, Mostly Modern Won’t Go Bust! O-ooo-oh, Never Charge Deliv’ry, O-ooo-oh, Open Box No Problem. Mostly Modern Your Good Buddy! Ty-y-y-vek Gussets Only Ten Percent!”
Big Gene Nubbles frowned and scratched the side of his flabby neck, uninterested in whatever threatened to emerge from Molever’s shopping bag. “Siddown, Mollie, the fish’d better wait,” Big Gene foreshadowed.
You can guess the rest. Molever’s semi-annual assessment did not go well at all, partly because Mollie hadn’t actually sold anything for five months and partly because their parent company, Fortunate 500, elected to restructure Mostly Modern by closing its Poughkeepsie branch office. Accordingly, young Molever’s draw was being -- er -- downsized, to zero.
“WHAT ??” Mollie screamed.
“Now, now,” the boss flubbled helpfully, “I know how you feel.”
And it was too easy, too natural in the heat of anger, released like the explosion of a volcano, just grab the nearest thing and lash out. Seconds later, Nubbles was unconscious and dotted with triangular gray and silver scales, flailed by a flounder, flank after flank, until there was nothing but slippery shame in Molever’s right hand, where once he cherished an oversized blue Mont Blimp that swam proudly in a Mostly Modern order book and gaily proclaimed Molever’s life was synonymous with paper. Nevermore. All Mollusk had to show for nine and a half years of smiles and shoeleather was a stinging gash across his palm.
“Fins leave a mark!” the most senior and grumpiest detective observed at Boilerton General. But the dazed victim couldn’t remember what happened. Nubbles had been heavily sedated. A team of doctors and dieticians were working feverishly to descale and hopefully save the top of his head. It was starting to smell bad and once something smells like fish, it just never goes away, does it?
“Don’t worry, pal,” said the dour chief dick, patting Big Gene’s belly in snuffly consolation. “We’ll find the bastard who did this. He won’t get far with flounder cuts.”
* * *
Only the bold succeed. Yuck. Lateral thinking, it pays to use it. Sure. Let’s take care of our customers or somebody else will. True but trite, so -- plop -- in it went, or tried to went, but slipped from a Matterhorn of last month’s Mostly Modern motivational mailshot and sailed to the floor, landing slightly to the left of Attitude makes the difference.
Cretin Molever was cleaning, her weekly effort to bring order and reason to Mollie’s desk area in the garage. Like most intergenderal kindnesses, it was usually repaid with scorn and humiliation, because her husband was unable to find anything after she “straightened up.” But it was best for everybody in the long run. After an hour of yelling, Mollie forgot that his domain had been invaded and Cretin achieved her strategic objective of fire safety. Glossy six-color rotogravure stock was a dangerous combustible, Mollie told her nine and a half years ago when they were newlyweds, an ironic zany quip that Cretin had misunderstood as a specific warning of danger in Mollie’s line of work. She often thought of him heroically risking his life in the commercial paper trade, going in and out of deathtrap print shops to put bread on the table and keep a roof over their heads. “God bless him,” Cretin whispered as she threw her weight behind a galvanized shovel and pushed another ton of promotional Post-It pads and nudie calendars to the furnace, praying for Mollie’s occupational safety.
So that it always seems unkind and unfair that chance picks on the pure of heart when they least deserve it. Just as Cretin kicked shut the iron grate and heard a gratifying wump of ignition emanate from their Flame Hog Deluxe Compact Home Incinerator, at that precise moment her husband who was not expected to arrive until 6 p.m. some three hours later entered the garage like a beaten dog dragging his tail between his legs, mumbling a sound which Cretin did not hear because it was completely masked by the emphatic rush of gases through the stack of the aforementioned domestic crematory. Her husband therefore materialized at her shoulder out of thin air and Cretin greeted him by leaping four and a half feet vertically in apoplectic terror.
“A-A-J-!” she screamed at the incredible phantasm who had no business being there and suddenly materialized without warning, causing Cretin's resting heart rate to attempt an impromptu Olympic record for acceleration. Although they had never actually trained for competition, Cretin Molever was particularly disposed to afternoon reveries and, given the frequency and severity of being scared half to death by her husband suddenly popping into existential reality, if there were such a sport no doubt Mollie’s noiseless tread and Cretin’s hair-trigger startle reflex could have trumped the Mixed Doubles Meditation Zen Calamity Biathlon.
“MOLLIE !” she screamed at him angrily, “How many times have I told you?!”
“I said ‘ding’ -- honest!” he pleaded pathetically.
“Well, I didn’t hear you!” she shouted at him, hands clasped over her heaving breast, head dizzy with high blood pressure, elbow flopped against the Flame Hog for support, telling herself for the thousandth time it’s all right, relax, just breathe, one of these days he’s going to give me a heart attack, sneaking up on me like that!
In the first month of their marriage, upon perceiving Cretin’s susceptibility to self-hypnosis, Mollusk resolved to say “ding” every time he entered a room like a cat wearing a bell to warn an unsuspecting mouse, in case Cretin was lost in thought, thereby minimizing the risk of scaring the shit out of her. Among all husbands throughout all of History engaged in the recitation of ding, Mollusk was extremely diligent every hour, day and night, whether Cretin was actually in the room he entered or not. Better safe than sorry, he presumed. So that a quiet evening at the Molever residence normally consisted of Cretin watching TV in her bedroom, while Mollusk sauntered in and out of the kitchen, bathroom, living room and garage mumbling ding everywhere. The fault in this arrangement was tragically typical of best laid plans. Mollie had exceptionally sharp hearing and was softspoken as a consequence. His wife was a little deaf and never once heard him say “ding” during nine years of dinging.
“I’m sorry, Cretin. Are you okay?” he worried.
“What are you doing home? You’re supposed to be at work!” Cretin barked indignantly. “And what’s the matter with your hand? Don’t tell me ‘nothing,’ Mollusk Molever -- show me that hand this minute. Oh, my God! What the hell did you do to your hand?”
“Uh...” he waffled.
But Cretin knew. She saw jagged edges and dark red bolts of dry blood. “It’s a paper cut, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me, Mollie. You’ve been handling paper again!” she accused.
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