Friday, August 20, 2021

Straightening this out

Some are demanding dismissal of U.S. generals and CIA geeks who had 20 years to figure it out that Afghan officers were corrupt and unreliable, that the Taliban were sheltered, armed, and trained in Pakistan, and that China funded it. Grown-ups ought to be able to figure out the obvious. Democrat mainstream media hiding the truth share the blame for chaos in Afghanistan, at the Mexican border, and in the White House. Fess up. Trump won reelection handily. He would have ramped up combat advisors and close air support, forced a Doha deal and evacuated U.S. citizens. Trump's generals would have blown up ammo dumps rather than let them be looted like candy stores, MRAPS and Humvees seized from Afghan Army traitors and deserters, allowing jubilant jihadis to "liberate" the terrorist monsters and IED bombers detained in lightly guarded prisons.

 

The question is what to do about any of this. I doubt that the Biden puppet masters are morally honest enough to guess what to do, beyond scripted media spin. All is well. Turn the page. Wear a mask. Make your children wear masks. Mark your calendar for a booster shot. Lock down and stay home.

 

It is my uncomfortable duty to point out that 2012 elections are not a solution. Voting got us nothing but self-inflicted hell. Los Angeles has been destroyed, Texas and Florida flooded with vicious gangsters (unaccompanied minors) and Covid positive migrant families. The Chicago bloodbath is overshadowed by worse crime in Baltimore. Pick a state, any state, look at the elected officials. Tax and spend. Ooo! Another urgent problem to fix. Hire consultants and make new rules, after endless debate and public comment. Bow to LGBTQ and people of color. Beg Congress to write omnibus pork barrel bills that no one has time to read, thousands of pages rammed through reconciliation, one party rule.

 

Let's start with the basics. Screw Haiti. Not our problem. The urgent matter is China. We have to stop bullshit social spending and build shipyards, strengthen our Navy.

 

Probably won't happen. That leaves America in a downward spiral militarily and strategically. I've argued that our daily civil experience in this country is defacto anarchy. When seconds count the police are only minutes away, prepared to deploy crime scene tape as perfectly as possible. Another word for anarchy is free market competition among private enterprises that rise and fall, go out of business. Inventors are anarchists, propounding revolutionary ideas and opportunity. Most jobs are created by small businesses. They grow or die depending on cash flow and freedom to exploit a supply chain. Refurbishing roads and bridges is pointless, if fossil fuels (gasoline, diesel, natural gas) are taxed out of existence.

 

The best thing to do now is to bug out. Find a piece of land in the Heartland, build a little house like I did, concrete and steel on a gated tactical hill, an independent water supply and a loaded rifle racked at the front door. I made an effort to meet the locals and listen to them, because they know how to make and mend and help each other. It's a tradition in Flyover Country to think locally, ignore insanity elsewhere. My neighbors are laboring in factories and fields, stockpiling canned goods and beans and coffee.

 

Let's see what President Joe says in an overdue teleprompter speech. Chug a beer if he blames Trump. Take a shot of whiskey if he feels the pain of Gold Star families. Laugh your ass off if he doesn't take any questions from the White House press corps.

 

BIDEN: We're monitoring the situation. We degraded Al-Qaeda. We have to focus on Africa. It's Trump's fault that this happened. We didn't expect everything to fall apart so fast. We gave the Afghan Army an arsenal. It's too expensive to do anything more in Afghanistan. I don't want any more U.S. soldiers to die there. I feel the pain of Gold Star families. We will speak out in favor of human rights and women. We safely shut down our embassy. We're evacuating U.S. citizens. If the Taliban attack us at the airport, I will strike back forcefully. I did the right thing. I always do the right thing.

 

He walked out, ignored questions shouted by frustrated reporters.

 

Jihadis worldwide are celebrating the great victory of Taliban defeating America. Not a good time to visit Times Square or a gay nightclub in Orlando. FBI and DHS are worried about white male Trump admirers, instead of a porous Mexican border. Don't be a victim. Bug out to the Heartland if you can.

 

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K-12 education

Not far from Dulles, the Loudoun County school board decided that their able-bodied white Christian elementary teachers were a toxic threat to LGBTQ and BLM, had to complete a questionnaire about their personal life and promise to snitch on other teachers if they said anything privately that could be construed as dissent. One of the "oppressors" was brave enough to address a closed door school board meeting. Perhaps you've heard the recording, a distraught young woman who calmly read a prepared statement after multiple years of classroom success — bright, dedicated, and white, the kind of loving, professionally qualified 4th grade teacher I wish every kid had, forced to quit her job in protest.

 

Our little mom and pop consulting business took us around the world, and it was difficult to find sane elementary schools for our daughter. I took her out of kindergarten in Tripoli because she was shoved and threatened by Arab boys. I took to her out of kindergarten in Houston because a black girl punched her. First grade in Australia was nice, gave her a chance to flower and smile for a year before she was assaulted twice in the first couple weeks of 2nd grade. Private school in Copenhagen was terrible. She tested into 3rd grade, which was combined with 4th. I had to escort her to and from the classroom door because an African diplomat's educationally retarded, crazy son shouted that my daughter was a witch and ought to be killed. I took her home and found a tutor, a lovely 23-year-old New Zealand law student who took her to libraries, ice rinks, parks, and a world class sculpture museum. My little blonde 8 year old smiled and laughed again in the care of a gentle, trustworthy tutor three days a week.

 

We got lucky in Golden, Colorado for an age-appropriate semester of 2nd grade, nice white teacher and happy kids learning arithmetic and expanding their vocabularies. 3rd grade was equally wonderful with a senior white lady, her last year of teaching before retirement. 4th grade in Houston was okay because I scoured the entire city, until I found a red brick elementary school near Rice University and Houston's world class Medical Center, 300 kids from 30 nations, children of doctors, software geeks, and university managers. To boost her musical experience, after beginner piano and violin lessons in Colorado, I found a tutor at Rice, a staff composer at the Sheppard School of Music. She learned to read and write music and used a midi interface at home to chart and play original orchestral pieces. We made a video that she conceived and voiced with marionette string Bakugan toys. I showed her how to edit video on a laptop. A couple years later, she produced a video that blew my mind, a dance interpretation of Peggy Seegar's "Song of Choice" lip synced with multiple costume changes and locales. She had dance lessons in Golden and Houston, an elegant contemporary jazz ballerina and surprisingly good actress.

 

5th grade in Colorado was a constant battle with the teacher and the principal. My daughter was bullied on the playground by the teacher's kid (!) and assigned to a group of bossy brats for an American History project, got shoved aside and outvoted. The elaborate artwork she created at home was ignored by the brats and hidden under a table. I raised hell, face to face with the teacher who didn't give a shit what was fair. We did physics experiments at home to teach empirical observation and measurement.

 

Back in Houston at an apartment chosen in a low-crime neighborhood close to where I was working full time, it was impossible to send her to a 6th grade middle school, 90% black. She studied on the internet with 6th grade University of Missouri coursework. To help her decide if she wanted to be an astronaut, she completed aviation ground school at age 12 and FAA logged five hours flying a Cessna 172 with her instructor in the co-pilot chair. She learned to taxi, take off, climb, turn, land, and recover from a stall that was deliberately caused as a practical lesson at 3000 feet. She was too young for a solo license, but she got to fly an airplane. We vacationed in Colorado and she had a week of horse riding and jumping a stallion over little fences. It was her fourth experience riding in Colorado and a Western Australia resort town. Young girls need to ride horses, control gigantic beasts with a quirt and reins and boots.

 

It was almost impossible to find a safe sane middle school in Houston, so we moved to one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the city, an apartment complex at the edge of the school district. She tested into gifted 7th and advanced placement courses, straight A's, National Honor Society. I had to raise hell with the smiling black principal about bullying by latino kids who were bused in. She got through it okay, but that was the end of her public education. She had rigorous high school online with the University of Missouri, used a big pile of textbooks and lab equipment. My wife coached her in algebra, statistics, trig, and calculus. I made a few comments about World History. She learned Latin by herself, high marks in proctored exams at a University Extension office.

 

A couple months after she sat ACT and aced it, she worked at a part-time job at the county courthouse, transcribing ancient property deeds onto a computer. She applied to a college. Then the Covid pandemic shut every school in America. I don't know what she does in her bedroom at night, but she has internet service and a fleet of screens and devices. If and when life returns to normal someday, I'd like to see her leave home for a college career, a beautiful and brilliant young woman who studied on five continents and writes as well as I can. She's also a talented graphic artist and illustrator.

 

Most people can't give their children the range of opportunities that we gave our daughter, but I've met a lot of working class home school parents and their homeschooled children. Nice people. It doesn't have to be expensive to educate kids. Most of my friends were educated by Catholic nuns and became intelligent, gentle guys who like and care about children. I'm an atheist, and I didn't say much about my daughter's Christian youth group expeditions. What she discovers and decides to value in the world is up to her. Perhaps she'll read my body of work someday, after I'm gone, a legacy intended for adult ears.

 

Other dads bequeath trades like plumbing or legal practice or engineering. My father was a capable block layer, carpenter, and insurance agent. I got to see a foundry fire and hailstorm damage in my hometown. My uncle had a bus line and a totally cool maintenance garage with acetylene torches and chain lifts I explored as a kid. My grandfathers on both sides were successful businessmen, fascinating elders. I had challenging toys as a kid, a microscope, an Erector set, model rockets, a big Lionel railroad layout, a Visible V-8, a CB radio antenna on the roof, and a shortwave receiver I built from a kit.

 

It's a white tradition, to mentor and challenge our children. It can be as simple and difficult as a family farm in Iowa or Wisconsin, tending crops and milking cows, studying books and practical mathematics, driving a huge tractor at age 12, plenty of physical education. If you like television, it was invented by a farm boy. He found and fashioned materials, persuaded investors to do something that no one had ever done before, and he did it successfully, the world's first TV camera. Look it up. Philo T. Farnsworth.

 

Whether our children become inventors or anthropologists or stay at home moms with two or three kids and a husband to care for and a house to keep tidy, no one is served by woke administrators and hordes of dangerous gangsters who can't read or do simple arithmetic after they "completed" high school with a low attendance record and failing grades, excused by unionized Democrats of color.

 

Jesse Kelly is correct. We're experiencing a national divorce. His hope is that conservatives will migrate to so-called "red states" which are turning purple as people flee New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, California — bringing gun free LGBTQ open border bilingual pre K-14 education with them.

 

We moved to the Ozarks in tactical alliance with adequately armed hillbillies and farmers who know how to make and mend and harvest and keep a watchful eye on strangers in a 99% white region that spans numerous counties, including Branson and the northern Arkansas headquarters of Walmart. People go to church, grateful and positive. The sheriffs and state troopers are stern and alert.

 

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Thursday, August 5, 2021

Rescuing the language

Basic terms. "Supply" is stuff on the shelf, already produced. "Demand" is cash money in a potential buyer's hand. There's a curve that describes how many people will pay a low price for something and how many will pay more to outbid them. A few decide that price is no object, which I did many times, paid top dollar to get instant delivery of goods and services in very limited supply (scarcity).

 

"Productivity" has nothing to do with human labor. It expresses how capital multiplies the somewhat puny input of workers. Take a 7-Eleven for instance, hundreds of thousands of dollars invested 30 years ago when the dollar had 30% more purchasing power. Real estate and zoning, construction plans and permits, plumbing, electrical, fixtures, tanks and pumps and refrigeration, a huge body of regulatory law concerning handicapped access and cleanliness. If sales are soft in a recession, the profit margin shrinks. Businesses close if they lose money. Wages are low until you qualify for promotion to shift manager, store manager, supervisor of several locations, or franchisee (if you buy your way in). Jobs at 7-Eleven are not good career choices or secure investment opportunities, especially in rough neighborhoods. A middle-aged blue collar customer in an F-150, grabbing a donut and a cup of coffee on his way to work, is not going to flatten a hillside barehanded. He needs a bulldozer, diesel, grease, qualified mechanics, spare parts, construction management, lawyers, developers, bank loans, and workers comp if he gets hurt on the job. He can't work as a heavy equipment operator without Caterpillar. That's capitalism.

 

Which brings us to "investment." It has nothing to do with Wall Street speculation in shares. Bidding up the shares of Pets.com or GameStop or Uber doesn't make a company profitable or investment grade, destined to pay dividends and gain share value in the future. Early investors in a start-up sometimes have a fantastic windfall. Most do not. Many ideas are stupid. They fail, and everybody loses their paid-in venture capital and founder contributions. Almost 80% of all successful investments are retained earnings (profits) from successful enterprise, used to expand operations, buy better machines, or buy another business from a failing competitor. After the Bell System break-up, AT&T was a high tech giant. It went broke, acquired by Southwest Bell for $1 and assumption of AT&T debt and pension liabilities. Bell Labs was spun off as Lucent, never made a profit, merged with Alcatel. The merged telecom device manufacturer went stupid and lost market share, a failure of leadership and lack of innovation.

 

"Innovation" has nothing to do with big operations like FedEx or WalMart. Rather, it means inventing something basic and revolutionary, like the transistor invented at Bell Labs in the 1950s, which made vacuum tubes obsolete. The first computers used vacuum tube logic. Transistors became integrated circuits by stepwise improvement of the invention. A large number of competitors worldwide raced to make transistors smaller and smaller, until chips were etched by robots in nanometers. What FedEx did was to compete effectively against molasses slow UPS and the Post Office, charging a premium price that customers were willing to pay to get stuff in a hurry, expanding the business model of "just in time" shipment of industrial freight, most of it delivered by long haul 18-wheelers deployed by hundreds of trucking companies and thousands of individual owner operators who make payments on a Peterbilt.

 

The only reason WalMart exists is cheap goods in China, daily arrival of container ships in Los Angeles, and hundreds of rail, truck, distribution, and maritime companies. None of those players are innovators like Bell Labs and RCA once were, both of which were disbanded long ago. Big screen LCD and plasma displays were Asian innovations. Whether Facebook invented anything is debatable. Google amped up Alta Vista, which was pioneered by DEC, long gone as a computer manufacturer. The computer mouse was invented by Xerox, an innovator who made important leaps and faded away. So did Commodore and Lotus. Commercial operators like WalMart and FedEx work relentlessly to increase productivity by deploying more efficient machines (bigger container ships, new planes for FedEx, digital devices and networks). Profits attracted competitors like Dollar General, Costco, UPS air hubs, and USPS tracking of 2nd day Priority delivery. Competition, cash flow, retained earnings invested in capital expenditure for faster, better service, and lean management pushes down prices paid by consumers like you and me.

 

Consumption does not produce anything, unless you buy tools and equipment, or a new suit to make yourself more presentable as a salesman, or medical care to stay in action as an economic actor of some sort, producing something of value or selling your labor to the highest bidder, unless you're a dodo like me. I invested my labor in doing work that nobody ordered. My consumption of food, shelter, transport, raw stock, film crews, labs, television cameras, and oodles of computers produced nothing that people wanted to buy. Presto! I was out of business as a film director.

 

"Government spending" is a shell game. They borrow, throw trillions around, earn zero profit, and the dollar is devalued. Prices rise because everything costs more to produce, burdened by taxes and market distortion, subsidizing incompetents and the idle to consume without producing anything, especially the tens of millions who are directly employed by government. You like to think that government keeps us safe and orderly. It's a lie. Our armies kill people and break things, always a costly disaster. Our cities are hollowed out. They were built by generations of private actors, private savings, technology innovators, and private investment in factories and small enterprises that are no longer viable in murderous urban jungles created and worsened by lavish government spending. Riots do not promote equity.

 

When I feel like it, I'll explain equity. It has nothing to do with racism.

 

In defense of pornography

Eric Metaxas and John Zmirak had a pious stereo rant, broadcast on Salem, damning porno as an evil threat to marriage and family life, citing as evidence widespread use of pornography and the declining birthrate in Japan and USA. They mocked libertarians who allegedly want to possess nuclear weapons privately, bashed LGBT, compared them to people eating styrofoam, blamed abortion on Marquis de Sade and Simone de Beauvoir, and sobbed that women were degraded by pornography that robbed them of their dignity, created in God's image to wear modest clothing and flat shoes, like men do.

 

Just for fun, let's start with nuclear weapons. They were a private invention. There is no collective or bureaucratic genius. Nuclear secrets were leaked to Russia and to Israel by private citizens. You could build one in your garage, if you have access to enriched uranium. The guys who create and consume pornography are not likely to stockpile nuclear weapons. That's something that appeals to militarized Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Communists, who jointly threaten 99% of the world population. Goofy libertarians are a small minority. It's hilarious that Sock Puppet Joe thinks white supremacy is a threat. In reality, many thousands are killed and carjacked by blacks like clockwork. The obvious threat to American society is heroin imported from Europe, cocaine imported from Columbia, and fentanyl imported from China, all of it smuggled through a porous Mexican border that Joe opened for political advantage. Porno has nothing to do with human trafficking, sexual assault, teen pregnancy, fatherless homes, EBT, fake mail-in ballots, or racial inclusion. Porno is 99% white, over 18, and consensual.

 

I know a great deal about pornography. The very hottest porno of all is self-produced with a wife, not intended for distribution. Generally speaking, there is very little money in porno, except where it is prohibited or heavily taxed, creating an underground market. Same thing with narcotics. People pay top dollar for that which is forbidden. There's big money in bootleg cigarettes, moonshine, pharmaceutical opiates, identify theft, and stolen hand guns. I don't consume or promote any of those life crushing but profitable underground commodities. I smoke legal cigarettes, drink legal whiskey, use a legal passport identity, and elected not to carry a gun because I labor in a verklempt foxhole as an indie novelist who writes sex scenes that make readers blush and who thereafter resolve to ignore me. My nonfiction titles on liberty and justice attracted ridicule and one-star Amazon reviews. I don't like death threats. Some men walk tall and thrive on violence. I've met such men, had to deal with it, hated it.

 

That's why I like women. Not teenagers. Not spoiled soccer moms, business women, or ugly tramps. No evangelicals, Jews, or social justice warriors, please. Just normal babes who like normal men for intimate progress from first kiss to high voltage bedroom experiments involving photography. I've been married several times and I always enjoyed it — ten years, fifteen years, twenty years at a crack. Whether any of them liked being married to me is debatable. It's difficult to keep a wife happy if you fail to earn ample money on a regular basis.

 

Perhaps porno cost me a profitable career as an attorney or a broadcaster or some other kind of male prostitution that involves smiling and bumping fists with strangers. If so, it was a salutary influence. I got to lay some exceptionally beautiful women, including a blonde Playboy centerfold, making real that which was merely fantasized by millions of teenagers gawking at photos. I was free to speak the truth in my novels, that hot water seeks its own level at age 25 or slightly earlier for the bold and beautiful.

 

Older now, unable to make good use of pornography or willing partners, I think it's important to pass along what I know about men and women. There are 7 billion of them. Explore.

 


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Guilt by denunciation

The New York Attorney General (an intersectional black female) denounced Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a masher. Schumer, Pelosi, and Biden said that Cuomo should resign. Every conceivable sound bite and speculation is playing on all channels, because "women should be believed." This is exactly like a wall newspaper smear during the murderous Maoist Cultural Revolution, denouncing a prominent person without due process of law. No grand jury indictment. No criminal complaint. No civil lawsuit. Guilt by decree of a political rival who wants to replace Cuomo, prompting a hurricane of media gossip coast to coast, 24/7, because Cuomo is a white male, presumed toxic. Intersectional female political authority cannot be doubted, and to hell with due process or fair trial by jury.

 

Jesse Kelly, the new kid in talk radio, protégé of Houston "tsar" Michael Berry, has mooted the notion of national divorce. Red states should quit, like retreating to Taiwan after losing mainland China to Mao. That's how serious this is becoming. Redneck veterans are locked and loaded. If the insane intersectional Democrats attempt to disarm America, there will be war. The millions of illegal immigrants flooding into Texas and bussed to Florida to seed infection and sabotage Red State political and economic success is surpassed by the threat of strangling domestic energy supplies. Florida is a big energy consumer. Texas is a primary producer and refiner of oil to power passenger cars, jet aircraft, heavy equipment, and big rigs. The Green New Deal pending in Congress is an economic death sentence for everyone except social media content moderators and an obese Federal establishment that physically occupies all 50 states.

General Services Administration

210,000 vehicles and 9,600 buildings, 407 million sq ft

Dept of Transportation

69,500 bldgs and structures, plus Amtrak rail and rolling stock

FEMA

500,000+ housing units deployed

TVA

dams, power plants, schools, shops, 147 offices

Veterans Administration

1,424 hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, total 9,220 bldgs

Dept of Justice

4,200 bldgs, 70 million sq ft

USDA Forest Service

373,000 miles of roads, 40,000 bldgs, 12,645 bridges

Dept of Energy

National laboratories, waste dumps, 18,354 structures

US Postal Service

33,264 facilities, unknown number of vehicles and contractors

Dept of Defense

696,470 bldgs worldwide, plus 8 million sq ft in DC

NASA

4,660 offices and structures, 44 million sq ft

Corps of Engineers

650 dams, 12,000 miles of channel, 926 harbors, 4,000 bldgs

Dept of Agriculture

49,000 offices and bldgs, 58 million sq ft

EPA

249 offices

Homeland Security

30,725 bldgs, 48 million sq ft

Dept of State

15,743 bldgs, plus 1,200 USAID offices and warehouses

HUD

officials in every city, millions of subsidized homes

 

Total: 912,000 structures, 20 million Federal employees and contractors

 

Democrats want more power. Some say it openly, like Obama, pledging to fundamentally transform America. Who do you think runs the White House? Doddering figurehead Joe has trouble reading a teleprompter. Bankrupting us will put us at the mercy of government, to become perpetually Democrat because they steal elections, lie through their teeth, own the media, and plan to make D.C. a 51st state. Mandating masks and MRNA shots that can't stop viral infection is a gambit to separate and silence us with unconstitutional public health orders to justify mail-in ballots again that they can fiddle with ease, poll watchers socially distanced or ejected again while scanners are fed buckets of extra ballots.

 

Republicans have no right to complain, complicit in foreign wars and lavish spending. Trump tried to stop the madness and was kneecapped by both parties. His judicial nominees were wobbly, weak kneed "moderates" who know damn fine it's settled law that Congress can do whatever they want to do. The election of 2022 will seal the deal and shut the exits. Nothing will be done about black smash and grab, murder and mayhem, Mexican cartels, inclusion quotas, or triumphant LGBTQ cuddling our kids.

 

White masculinity is verboten. Accusation is proof.

 

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for Bill Wheatley

My view of life was colored by experience and adequately authenticated evidence. There are many innocent, respectable, honorable, disciplined, trustworthy, decent men in the world. I have always sought and enjoyed their company. Good men are not difficult to find. Many are Catholic. Some are courageous. It is equally true that evil is commonplace. I have a particular horror of evil, and I am incapable of contemplating it or including it in my fictional stories. There are parts of the globe I regret having seen. History is mostly an uninterrupted pageant of vicious brutality, conceit, and tragedy that extends into the modern world. Pakistan. Sudan. Mexico. Syria. Nigeria. Hollywood. Israel. I don't even want to discuss LGBTQ. The worst unforgivable evil today is public broadcasting, especially BBC and its promotion of "modern monetary theory" ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy). Paying people not to work is organized crime, inspired by British Fabians and Keynesians. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was a conspiracy of Mossad, neo-con Jews, Downing Street, and The New York Times, faking "evidence" of yellowcake supposedly shipped to Iraq. The price we paid was 79,000 grievously crippled soldiers and surrender of Iraq to Iran, no different than abandoning Vietnam after killing 2 million Vietnamese. Our covert agenda in both wars was a strategic play for oil. The recent death of Donald Rumsfeld put me in mind of a photograph of Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam Hussein on the occasion of supplying Saddam with U.S.-made missiles and U.S. chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War.

 

Today, there is a further depth of evil afoot, to bankrupt us and starve our progeny, because a crackpot British Climate Centre faked a global warming "hockey stick." We handed tens of billions to an Israeli to build electric cars that no one can afford, and hundreds of billions are earmarked for charging stations. When we celebrated American freedom on the 4th of July this year, it was a shambles of denial and entropy, $30 trillion of unpayable Federal debt, perhaps another $10 trillion in state and local debt, conventional military readiness rotting and our strategic nuclear forces antique, outgunned 4 to 1 by Russia. We are incapable of restraining China. Where do you think solar panels come from?

 

I'm focused on writing fiction because men need inspiration. We do not need talking heads and true believers regurgitating old crap dressed up as "new content" that surprises no one.

 

The motor of inspiration is a genuinely new idea, the unexpected and unique. It is intensely difficult work. Professor Tibor Machan once shouted at me: “It's important to be right!” to which I replied “It's more important to be original.” Whether anyone likes it is irrelevant. How dangerous it is and how much it costs doesn't matter. Creativity can't be legislated or regulated or hectored. Nor can a genuinely new idea be defeated. There is no higher office in human history than propounding an original idea.