I agree with NPR

 

Let's cut 30% of U.S. fossil fuel use tomorrow. No more gasoline, diesel, natural gas, heating oil, jet fuel, lubricants, or coal-fired power production for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Baltimore, D.C., and upscale suburban Virginia. They don't produce any fossil fuel and they can fucking freeze and starve to death.

 

That was easy. Give them what they want and deserve. If we cut off Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan, that's another 20% of freeloading Democrats and murderous gangbangers gone. California will have to learn to live with less and lighten up on Kern County. Plenty of shale to frack in Monterrey, if they want to make movies and grow lettuce. Wisconsin might have an untapped oil and gas field offshore in Lake Michigan, or they can burn cow pies. I don't care what happens in the touchy feely Pacific Northwest, destroyed by antifa militancy and dysfunctional policing. Florida is offering a $5000 bonus for cops who relocate to the Sunshine State where solar might actually make sense.

 

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Africa can go to hell

 

I don't know how to make this more emphatic. We owe them nothing. Giving Africans money is like throwing napalm on a bonfire, fueling corruption and interminable economic failure. I don't care what brainless Africans or BBC liars say about climate change. The very first fossil fuel to shut down is African oil production that shovels payola to rotten tyrants and brutal armies who make life hell for women and children. African generals and politicians do nothing to stop criminal gangs, kidnappers, or incompetent idlers pretending to be public servants.

 

Wait a minute ... I've changed my mind. We owe Washington nothing. Electing Democrats to strangle liberty and throw paper money at the idle is fueling inflation and widespread shortages. I don't care what brainless academics or NPR liars say about social justice. The very first fossil fuel to shut down is the hidden cost of dirty coal in solar panels, rare earth motors, and magnets imported from China that shovel payola to Communist tyrants who make life hell for industrial slaves and Hong Kong protestors. American social media moguls, stuffy self-righteous Republicans, and unionized teachers do nothing to stop urban crime, ruthless fentanyl cartels, child abuse by LGBT and CRT propaganda, or incompetent bureaucrats pretending to be scientists.

 

I don't know how to make this more emphatic. D.C. can go to hell.

 

 

Supply problems no one wants to discuss

 

Forget everything else you've heard.

1. We are preposterously dependent on China, ceased making much of anything in USA. China supplies 90% of our electronics, antibiotics, vitamins, plumbing parts, toys, tools, clothing, furniture, you name it. If it were up to me, I would order the fleet of Chinese container ships parked offshore to go home. It's a matter of national security. We need to rebuild and expand US manufacturing.

2. Stop wiring new cars with complicated accessories. Automakers canceled orders for Chinese chips because car sales plummeted a year ago and idiot managers put themselves at the back of the line for "just in time" shipments. Has nothing to do with the container bottleneck. Chips are flown in by DHL, FedEx and scheduled airlines, international flights halted by lockdowns and flight crew quarantine. US chips made in Silicon Valley are shipped to China. How smart is that? And worse, the F-35 is equipped with Chinese chips, a back door vulnerability to enemy combat radar and targeting. We need to claw back semiconductor manufacturing pronto, roughly $200 billion in capital investment, an almost trivial sum compared to Federal spending of $7 trillion this year.

3. The bottleneck at Long Beach and San Pedro is union rules and Customs inspection. Every container has to be opened to check for fentanyl hidden in the cargo. Union longshoremen have to move every container with electric dock ferries to Customs and then to a warehouse. There are lines of California approved big rigs waiting 36-72 hours, loaded with empty containers to swap for full ones that they will haul to the state line, where lines of idle long haul diesel rigs are waiting for loads because they aren't allowed to enter California. A total clusterfuck caused by delays in ordering, delays in shipping, union rules, Air Quality prohibition of diesel engines manufactured before 2011, and Biden paying workers to stay home instead of working. In August, four million people quit or retired, mostly in food service and retail, fed up with low pay, long hours, rising crime, and stifling masks. There are 350,000 commercial warehouse and driver jobs advertised with top wages and hiring bonuses offered, no applicants.

4. Christmas hysteria is stupid. You can't buy love. Make popcorn and sing carols. Hug your kids, watch It's A Wonderful Life and turn off the damn digital crap. Every Apple product was made in China. Talk to each other for a change. Be prepared to answer kid questions honestly. If you believe in Jesus, read the story of Bethlehem aloud, or let Linus recite it in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

5. The myth of "US energy independence" is one of the most pernicious lies shouted endlessly by Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, after Biden's embargo of drilling on Federal land. In 2019, America consumed 20 million barrels a day and we produced only 14 million bpd. The rest of it was imported from Canada, Mexico, Arabia, and Brazil. The current situation is worse, producing 12 million bdp — half of it from horizontal fracturing in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and North Dakota, the other half from vertical wells in deepwater Gulf of Mexico and Kern County California. Oil frackers are making money at $80 a barrel, but they have to keep drilling because horizontal wells have steep decline curves and they are running out of rich oily shales to frack on state and private leases. Biden's order to stop auctioning new Federal leases halted investment in multibillion dollar deepwater projects in the Gulf and exploration of the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, a frozen coastal swamp hundreds of miles from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge near Prudhoe Bay (which is almost kaput as a producing field, drilled in the 1970s).

6. Coal matters more than you know. If they kill coal, we're going to have blackouts and brownouts, no power to charge a huge fleet of electric vehicles that GM and Ford are tooling up to manufacture. I don't care how many solar panels and wind turbines are mandated by the Green New Deal. Storms will wreck costly offshore wind installations. Solar produces nothing at night, in the rain, or in dim winter sun.

7. At the moment, Federal Reserve bond purchases of $2 trillion a year and 0.25% interest rate policy is floating $30 trillion of Treasury debt. The Green New Deal and lavish cradle to grave free shit will double that debt over the next two decades, $60 trillion that will cut our AAA credit rating and push up interest rates. The long term historical interest rate for Treasury debt is 4%, maybe 7% for the $20 trillion owed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 9% for a future $20 trillion of state, county, and city debt. We will hit a brick wall sooner or later, paying as much interest as Medicare and Medicaid combined. No money for new warships, new aircraft, or new missiles to counter the Chinese threat. Mild 6% inflation today will become 25% hyperinflation. Gangsters and desperados will terrorize unarmed suburban whites.

Bottom line, socialism is a speeding train wreck. Big surprise, huh?

FDR famously asked John Maynard Keynes what would happen in the long run, and Keynes answered, "In the long run, Mister President, we'll all be dead."

Mike Gallagher can't understand why nobody wants to work. They were paid to stay home, scared stiff of being exposed to Covid, don't want to be assaulted or carjacked, waiting for another Federal check, fatter SNAP, free preschool and daycare, $3,000 a year for each kid, a Social Security COLA boost, free rent and utilities, free health care, free booster shots, food pantry boxes and Meals on Wheels. It doesn't matter whether a liberal or a conservative takes charge. The road to socialism is a one-way ticket. Entitlements will never be repealed. Millions of illegal immigrants will never be deported.

Remember Mrs. Thatcher, the iron lady? She doubled the NHS budget, expanded social services, gave "job seekers" weekly benefits, free college, and free housing. Donald Trump was no better, handed tens of billions to airlines and Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J, hundreds of millions to Walgreens, CVS, WalMart, Target, General Motors, and states and localities, plus 80 million Treasury checks, up to $3,600 for a family of four — a total of $1 trillion emergency "stimulus" in freshly printed Federal debt.

Postscript to Hannity and Levin. Shut the fuck up about Nord Stream II, a second natural gas pipeline from Russia to western Europe. The first Nord Stream line was completed over a decade ago, a joint venture with Germans, who have no gas of their own. The Dutch Groningen field is kaput. Siberia has fifty times the natural gas reserves that USA does, and we can't compete with gas rich Russia or Qatar. American gas reserves are shrinking, both conventional and unconventional, barely enough to keep the lights on, make steam, and cook dinner another decade or two. Subsidizing LNG exports is idiotic.

It's hilarious that you two bozos think Keystone XL had something to do with US energy independence — a 100% Canadian funded project to sell us more Canadian crude.

 

 

Personhood

 

In previous writing I said that no one wishes to be who they are. For instance, I sorely wished that I was taller, stronger, and smarter. What happens in life is grudging acceptance of life on life's terms, or we rebel by demanding equal dignity, or think ourselves better than others, put a lot of effort into grooming and imagine that personhood is negotiable. I worked with good actors who were amazingly talented in transforming themselves into fictional characters, but Laurence Olivier, Helen Mirren, and Peter Sellers were legendary chameleons in an exclusive class by themselves. They paid a heavy price for it. Bill Cosby had a big range of transpersonal film acting ability that was shocking and unpopular, got squelched by TV producers and advertisers to play a harmless, amusing nice guy.

 

Most people squelch their range to please parents, employers, spouses, kids. Diplomats are nearly devoid of personality. Politicians and corporate CEOs are coached and polished, say carefully chosen words that they did not write. Consultants design their clothes and hairstyles. I don't want to discuss bubbly smiley evangelists like Joel Ostein or Barack Obama. The worst of the worst are clever men who play dumb: Jerry Lewis, Charlie Chaplin, Moe Howard, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, used car dealer Cal Worthington in a ten gallon hat. Women have a right to play dumb but it ends in sorrow.

 

Ascendancy of brazen LGBTQ is no different than soaring public debt and sky high P/E ratios, the make believe romance of lipstick on a pig, Liberace smiling in sequins and diamonds to disguise a crap lounge act. Bullshit pantomime and running gags don't make anyone prettier, more talented, or happier.

 

I have a modest talent, but it's honest, unrehearsed. Not pretending to be straight like Rock Hudson or faking intellectual depth like Joe Biden reading from a teleprompter. I'm old and weary, couldn't play games if I wanted to. I don't blame younger people for being deceived by clever liars and seductive fantasies. Be advised that A is A, a thing is itself, reality is real. The greatest actors suffered horribly, vomited backstage, drank heavily, and took pills to kill the pain of loneliness. Don't do it. If you were born a boy, be a boy and aspire to manhood, free of fake stage make-up and bangles.

 

All things noble are as difficult as they are rare. (Spinoza)

 

 

Heroic

 

My neighbor Don is heroic. Vietnam at age 17, plenty of bar fights, never took any shit from anyone. Father, grandfather, great-grandfather and patriarch of a big clan. His adult children are tough, hard working, decent men, their wives and children intrepid and happy. I've met some of them riding with Don, crunching gravel at 10 miles an hour over hills and dales and narrow creek slabs. A good friend to have. We're about the same age, fellow hippies. His wife is wonderful, an artist, an avid reader, has some health issues and a big humorous smile. Don tells stories, makes me laugh or listen carefully if it's grim news of another death. He's lived here a long time, armed to the teeth to deal with a dangerous world. That's why my wife and daughter have an adequate arsenal and live on a tactical hill ringed with barbed wire and a steel driveway gate, a dog and chickens to make noise if a predator intrudes. That's life on life's terms. Gardens to tend, food to be put up in Kerr jars, rabbits and deer to be harvested.

 

I sit in the tin barn and write, smoke, listen to the radio.

 

As always, NPR got it 100% wrong today in praise of a new Matt Damon movie set in medieval France — asserting that there is no truth, no reality, and everything is a matter of individual perspective. The most  insanely emotional broadcaster in America funded by politically correct pussies and public institutions happily concluded: "We are all heroes in our own mind."

 

A hero in my own mind? Hah. Everything I endeavored to do in life failed. I was a mediocre musician,  an incompetent director, hopeless entrepreneur, vaguely courageous in fair weather, totally dependent on the good graces of others, an incompetent father, a terrible employee, and perpetually ignored. I tried to be positive and flunked. I was deaf to bosses, colleagues, good counsel, celebrities, and plain common sense.

What I saw as inspiring was scoffed at and dissed. All of my wives had buyer's remorse, and in today's context, I trust that my career as a lover would be vilified. Small wonder that no one wants my literary work, a million words in defense of liberty, a wild romance of white male aggression, privilege, and pleasure. I despise spineless surrender to a mob of savages to compensate an "injustice" or their hurt feelings. Life is not fair. Of necessity and objectively, it is life on life's terms, unique and individual.

Occasionally, I've explained why I lost my temper, which doesn't matter and doesn't change anything. My social skills amount to pitching the impossible and unwanted. Given enough rope to hang myself, I issued terse orders, paid too much to get what I wanted, wrecked work opportunities, and ignored the consequences. It was not heroic. It was a formula for disaster, the road to ruin and shame.

Go ahead. Listen to a touchy feely TED talk on NPR, smile and blink. Today's theme was "revitalization" in praise of snarky black people and spiral cord injury victims, people you will never encounter if you read my tall tales or philosophical rants. My message to democrats is drop dead, there is no divine right to vote, legislate, tax, regulate, punish, or reward whatever you think would be nice for everybody.

NPR heroes are patriots of color like Colin Powell, promoted and mourned as a "pioneering" political stooge. Republicans admire Oliver North, bravely shredding documents at the White House to cover up a covert conspiracy to trade arms for hostages and fund Contra coke smugglers. I'm not heroic. I didn't fight in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan, didn't roll over with my paws folded for Hope And Change.

In the past I was quoted by anonymous anarchists, because I said that I subscribe to the Fuck You school of political philosophy. It's my life, not yours to marshal and march into battle.

That's why Don and I see eye to eye. He said fuck you to Army officers and crooked cops, willing to get his ass kicked by men twice his size and didn't care who won or lost a bar fight. That's heroism in the trenches of life on life's terms. He thinks I'm okay because I was the smallest guy in prison, bulked up in the gym and faced killers who were three times my size, fifty years ago. I have emotional and physical scars. So what? Nowadays I'm too old and frail to fight anyone. If necessary, there's a replica Ruger on the shelf loaded with bronze BBs. I don't trust myself with firearms. Writing is a tense business. Too many novelists have shot themselves.

See? — I'm not heroic. I don't even want to promote my work anymore. Too stressful in a world owned and operated by happy smiley squirrels and evil chipmunks, playing patty cake with chumps. Nobody needs or wants hardboiled fiction, an antique genre that deals with gangsters and crooked government and heroic assholes and leggy babes in high heels, Depression era life on life's terms.

 

[milwaukee]

 

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Carnality

 

I learn things listening to Eric Metaxas. He had a guest who spoke about being a dope dealer and skirt chaser as a teenager, then he broke down sobbing and found Jesus, who wasn't far away because his father was a Baptist preacher. I was never tempted to break down and follow my father's faith. He was an obsequious insurance agent who dealt with factory fires and hail damage, a job he inherited from my grandfather, who was a more interesting person. Grandpa created big industrial projects by optioning land and investing the savings of a Luxemburger farmer. When I visited Luxembourg, I spotted that farmer's family name in a church cemetery. George Patton was buried nearby.

 

Travel is carnal. Spiritual travel is essentially hooey, playing deuces wild. Excuse me. The dog wants to move to his longer chain, and I have to eject a stick insect from my open doorway. I live in the carnal world. Forest. Gravel road. Patches of overgrown weeds that I have to whack when I feel like being athletic, swinging a powerful trimmer. When I load the reel, it has to be the right length, seated properly and wound carefully, so it won't jam. More carnal reality. I have to eat sensibly. When I'm busy writing, carnal expression of carnal thoughts, I end up with a cold mug of coffee. It used to happen routinely in video production, and I came to think of it as "TV coffee" — always cold when I had a moment of rest to sip a formerly hot fresh cup. Carnal life exists in a time and place, not in some cloud cuckoo land with infinite or ultimate perspectives. I like philosophy as much as the next fellow, but it's useless without existential referent. The Old Testament is full of battles, chariots and swordsmen who fought with their neighbors for a thousand years. Zionists are still fighting their neighbors with highly carnal fighter jets and bombs. The millions trapped in Gaza, Damascus, and Beirut struggle with carnal survival, mentally crippled by allegedly holy men and religious doctrine. Their carnal incompetence killed hundreds and wrecked big chunks of Beirut because a mountain of fertilizer was seized and stored improperly in a dockside warehouse. Carnal reality routinely punishes incompetent holy men and their captive helots. Like Jezebel, the carnal princess from Phoenicia, I'm often tempted to attack holy prophets, but I have better things to do than screw with incompetents.

 

Spirituality? Plenty of spiritual virtues in production, distribution, and retail. Competition is nonstop discovery, a sharp impetus to see deeper and farther. New ideas are the holy grail. Our lives are filled by knowledge and carnal wisdom, the truth of birth and death. It doesn't matter whether God created the Singularity and shook his Finger at Judah. I'm not Jewish, just a regular guy tapping the keyboard of a laptop. A real laptop. It doesn't matter whether the New York publishing kibbutzim have a spiritual writ. Remember Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of Goldman Sachs? He told a reporter that Goldman was doing God's work — the most ruthlessly carnal outfit in history, co-located with the NYSE and front running it with supercomputing robots. That's how the Dow zoomed from 8,500 to 35,000, nose bleed P/E ratios for legacy shares and tech "unicorns" that have never made a dime of profit.

 

 

Bafflement

Mystified and stunned that I wrote Finding Flopsie. Doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, Flopsie is a triumph of storytelling. It glides effortlessly from UCLA to Laguna Beach, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, and Pasadena, then a daring chase to Singapore, Bali, Sydney, the Outback, Christmas Island, and a remote mountaintop in Central Java, nothing but grim obstacles and uncertainty, never sure of success.

 

Shaking my head, stumped by another masterpiece, Partners.

 

And then Escape!

 

Someday sooner or later, if I live that long, there will be another novel, working title Mister Blank. I asked a Bible scholar to help me find the fable of Jezebel, his nemesis. On such thin filaments of story, something compelling and astounding will emerge. When I began Escape! all I knew was its locale, a creaky space colony in solar orbit.

 

Yesterday, a neighbor asked me if I wanted her to drive me to a doctor. I said no, because if they got hold of me they'd never let me go. I don't want a stent or a pacemaker or poison. I don't care if I die in my sleep or collapse somewhere on the gravel road. My last breath will be a coda, to be reprised in the history of human affairs and hardboiled adult tales, a legacy unlike any other. I'll live forever in my video lectures on liberty and the rule of law, a new constitution to secure both, perhaps to be amplified at a future crossroads when the fake regime of worthless paper and hollow pretense implodes.

 

Baffled by how much I achieved, how far I traveled in life.

 

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A world of cruelty and pain

10,000 children killed and maimed in Yemen. Women and girls captive, raped and tortured to death in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan. Millions are starving and brutalized in Burma, Congo, Mozambique, Brazil, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, El Salvador, Haiti. Endless civil wars, assassination, genocide, criminal gangs and drug cartels of incredible cruelty. Poverty, disease, illiteracy, tyranny. No society in ancient history was exempt. "Modern" Western and Asian powers waged brutal wars against primitives and against each other, millions of Russians, Chinese, Germans, Brits, Japs, Jews, Vietnamese, Arabs, Ukrainians, Poles, and Americans killed for abstract ideals and control of oil fields, mineral deposits, cotton, grain, rubber. 10,000 are shot in Chicago every year by gangs fighting for dominance, revenge, savage rage. Public education and policing have failed.

The lesson of history is to bug out. Find your way to a peaceful, prosperous, rational community, loyal only to yourself, no obligation to religion, tribe, or tradition. Escape. Do whatever you have to, pay any price for a fresh start. Work. Study. Save. Spend every hour of every day to find a way to free yourself. Don't tell anyone what you're doing. Don't expect any help. Doors will open if you have something to offer. Go. The only fatal error in life is to despair and do nothing.