All there is

 

I very much enjoy Peggy Lee's wonderful voice, which I get to hear occasionally in a Saturday retro program broadcast on FM. One of her most evocative refrains asks "Is that all there is?" in shades of disappointment and wonder. Many women are disappointed, and Peggy muses prettily in song and narrative vignettes. Her reaction as a child, witnessing a circus start to finish: "Is that all there is?" The thrill of adult romance, then parting, no longer in love. "Is that all there is?" she sighs.

 

So... is that all there is, for me? I don't think I can write anything until after the Olympics, with two war threats locked and loaded in Europe and Taiwan. I should expand it to three, to acknowledge a Middle East theater of war, Iran and Syria versus U.A.E., Israel, and our 5th Fleet. If a tidal wave of global trade and infectious prosperity allowed us to escape suicidal war among nuclear powers, then I could write a new novel. I would certainly like to. But the specter of World War III won't be defused by Happy Days that are not going to happen. All three players, U.S., China, and Russia are mired in economic weakness, a traditional impetus to saber rattling and unwitting accidents that trigger combat. With confused sock puppet Biden in office, no one believes a word of his foreign policy, if there is one. He will be challenged on three fronts simultaneously, not including terror attacks and uncontrollable urban crime.

 

Is that all there is? — I wrote Escape. Partners. A theory of justice.

 

I very much want to explore Steam Punk. I believe I can find a theme, but it can't be wartime hysteria and suffering. No point in writing about death and disaster. Someone else will cover it. I don't want war in my consciousness, corrosive of creativity. I don't want to weep "Is that all there is?" about life.

 

Another sorrow. No more travel. I wanted to see Victorville.

 

I hope folks realize that the problem is not people, it's governments, theirs, ours, every government in human history worldwide. Civilians are in favor of work, savings, feeding their children and their elderly kin. Civilians are okay with trade, depending on price. Governments constantly drain civilians of their liberty, their market opportunities, and the value of their paltry savings. Governments can jail anyone with or without due process. They have armies, navies, missiles, police, easily bribed allies, and multiple enemies. None of it does any good, as far as civilians are concerned. The young men who volunteer to become vigorously trained war fighters are doomed to suffer, as will their extended families, many of them robbed of future happiness after losing a valiant son for no reason, because the war was lost and tens of millions were made homeless starving war refugees. It happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. U.S. warships and troops were involved, hundreds of thousands of young American soldiers maimed, millions of women, children, troops, tribesmen, and jihadis murdered.

 

All the death and destitution was inflicted by governments unconcerned with the welfare of its civilians and tolerant of crime. There are brutal criminal gangs in every nation, especially in democracies like the U.S. and its client states who flounder endlessly with parliamentary squabbles and are supported by U.S. military spending. Governments in Asia and Eastern Europe are little better than feudal autocracies. In Africa it's worse, ruthless thugs dressed up in a lie of liberation, or a hereditary oil sheik with the power of secret assassination and prison without trial. Our government treats all dictators as equally sovereign because they hold their civilians by the throat, just like the United States does.

 

The distinguishing characteristic of America was our wealth. We were spared destruction and death in World War II because we were insulated by two big oceans, and our industrialists and factories had the power to outproduce the rest of the world combined, an infinity of ships, planes, tanks, trucks, fuel, and food supplies to support Russia, Britain, China, and anyone else who wished to wage war, including the defeated Germans, Italians, and Japanese who we fed after destroying their societies. Our government gave Russia half of Europe, half of Korea, and atomic secrets leaked by public servants. At the time, we were all public servants. Food and fuel rations were sold and swapped. Things fell off the back of trucks, and mobsters ruled the waterfront. Governments are indifferent to crime, remember? It's a stream of unreported slush funds and reliable union votes. Governments like poverty and hardship. It gives them an excuse to tax and puff up their chests like heroes, expanding their sovereign cohort of government dependents, whether dope addict, defense contractor, media tycoon, or patriotic pawn in uniform.

 

Is that all there is?

 

In a previous post I said that there is no higher office in human history than propounding a new idea. I'd like to ignore it, but once known the only way to dispose of a truth is to watch TV. I don't have a TV and I hate watching TV anywhere at any time. I joke occasionally that I worked in television and had enough of it, thanks. I know what happens behind the scenes, every set-up, every story beat, every advertiser, every newsroom, every agent. Not one person in show business is doing original work. Taking what the world offers you — past, present, and future — limits other professions and trades. People like it, follow along, well worn paths and options recited by smiling maidens. Would you like fries with that?

 

My job is to discover a new idea.

 

 

Zero tolerance of crime

 

If you lived in a totalitarian state, with one party rule, secret police, industrial oligarchs, and favored journalists who spout propaganda, you'd be justified in thinking that it was organized crime, no better than China or Russia, dangerous to speak the truth.

 

That's the situation in America today.

 

Empty store shelves. Inflation. Cancel culture. Preposterous lies. Fake elections tweaked by unionized government workers and ballot harvesters. Kangaroo courts jailing opposition figures if they refuse to testify, vilifying white protestors instead of roaming gangs of blacks who rob and kill, exempt from law enforcement because it serves the doctrine of mass obedience — commanded to stay home and cower, don't fight back, surrender your children to state schools for indoctrination, take mandatory injections and shut up, say nothing, wait in line for emergency care by government ordained protocol that treats people of color first.

 

Life is good for the oligarchs in Washington and Silicon Valley. Their children go to private schools, have a smooth path in life. High taxes on the rich? Nope. They get to deduct state income tax, travel expense, plus 501 and 504 politically advantageous payola, funding corrupt legislators and phony philanthropists who host glamorous events for the rich. Hunter Biden is exempt from investigation. His father is scripted by secret puppet masters and exempt from honest journalism. Both are owned by China, the financial hidden hand in Silicon Valley, deeply embedded in our national laboratories and state universities.

 

We are so easily seduced. "There are thousands of dollars of tax credits this year," Jackson Hewitt says in a cheery radio ad aimed at working class chumps hoping for a big refund. The IRS warns don't hold your breath, it may be six months before they'll process 2021 tax returns, if they're filed electronically. Why the delay? Cash flow. The government is broke and the Fed is slamming on the brakes. The only people who will get paid are loyal federal, state, and local Democrats including unionized teachers who don't teach, government retirees, welfare beneficiaries, congressional staff, consultants and left wing academics to lecture millions of bureaucrats coast to coast, preaching diversity, inclusion, and proper use of transgender and non-binary pronouns. Hundreds of billions in hot new IOUs will be splurged on electric cars for official government use.

 

I advocate zero tolerance of organized crime. There is no Divine Right of total power as a conspiracy of thieves, no virtue in voting ourselves into penury, praying for free pie in the sky. Liberty is the American Way, baking our own damn pies that we worked and saved for — and which no legislature, bureaucrat, or street thug has a constitutional right to steal from our kitchen tables.

 

Listen to the constitutional doctrine of Biden's puppet masters on Martin Luther King Day and take note: "Voting rights are the source of all other rights."

 

Can't make this shit up. We are in serious trouble as a nation.

 

At 9:30 a.m., a black man shoved a petite Asian woman from behind, throwing her in front of a subway train in the Times Square station, one of the most horrible deaths imaginable. The murder was explained and excused by Democrats as the act of a homeless person who needed mental health services. It was not the first time he killed, a long rap sheet for violence, wanted by police for parole violation.

 

In a recent essay, I said: "Be situationally aware. If possible, run. If not, shoot first, shoot to kill, and keep firing until the threat is ended. You will not succeed without tactical training, 100 hours minimum. The carry weapon of choice is a mid-size 9mm automatic in a gunbelt with a good holster. A normal belt is no good. Ladies have special front carry holsters."

 

Zero tolerance of crime.

 

.

Something new to say

 

I don't mind what others have achieved, however historic and liberating, monumental, holy, influential, and far superior to my simple ideas. Spinoza, Grotius, Jefferson, Ayn Rand. Titans of human genius.

 

I wouldn't have made much progress as an author without Raymond Chandler's republished magazine article that explained story, situation, and character. The rest was easy. I kept writing until I had a breakthrough with Partners — clearly drawn characters in razor sharp situations. I'm likewise proud of Escape as a work of world building with believable people that we come to care about.

 

The problem before me is simple. Apply what I've won.

 

Maddeningly, it means competing with the titans, to devise something new that supersedes the gifts bestowed by sainted exponents of reason and justice, quiet libraries of dusty literature, modernity in full flower with broadband meta immersion and hypersonic cruise missiles. It's unimportant if people have ceased to read. I don't blame them. The thing at issue is novelty in the whole of human history, original work to blow their post modern yoga pants and Crocs off. Win or lose, I have to try.

 

Rampaging savages in Walnut Creek, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Waukesha have blinded me with rage. I don't want to write about the undeclared but obvious race war. I want to write something to uplift people. Fake Biden kabuki doesn't matter. Evil is not original.

 

Everything depends on conceiving a positive statement of human potential, something to bequeath to my daughter's generation. Not that it matters, has nothing to do with me, but Feodor Dostoevsky was a pauper, sickly, exiled to Siberia. I have nothing to complain about except a lack of talent.

 

Rereading Escape, it was satisfying to see that I put Chekov's gun on page 2, as Gadant mentally recalls his experience of seeing a robocop in action, firing steel balls. The final climax is foreshadowed on page 11, when Gadant punches a defenseless man without warning. Jimmy was introduced to 3-D spaceflight simulation on page 14, and Lefler worries about an asteroid on page 16. Escape unfolds with plenty of moral crossroads, value conflicts, and calm, death defying resolve. Encourages me as a novelist.

 

At this moment, an important story seems distant.

 

I could stand pat on Partners and Escape, with Chiseltown and A Better World for amusement value, four solid Chris & Peachy adventures in the bank. I'm tempted to print a copy of each, send them to the British Library or the Philadelphia Free Library founded by Franklin, a final gesture, over and out.

 

A serious literary novel haunts me daily. I make cheap baloney sandwiches and pots of coffee, empty a bucket latrine once a week, and rub salicylic acid on flaky psoriasis. My knees are weakened and sore. Ashtrays are filled and dumped in a flimsy Walmart bag with baloney rinds and crumpled Kleenex. If I hear Elton John on the radio, it turns my stomach, stab a button to suffer creepy talk radio bullshit or squeaky basketball, push another button for Christmas carols or crap jazz. I don't know which is worse. At midnight, BBC will set a new benchmark for trivial pursuit, effusive praise for the lame.

 

As long as I breathe, each morning that I awake, the stupendous job of divining a new 1000 page novel gets dressed in winter jacket and rubber boots to escort an elderly shihtzu on the county road, so he can pee and poop without getting run over by a FedEx van. Oh, shit. Springsteen on the radio. Push a button to hear a Viagra commercial, expensive vitamins for dogs, a sushi restaurant menu in Mountain Home.

 

Something new to say, beyond boy meets girl.

 

Edwin Starr on the Arkansas Rocks radio network, belting his Top Ten hit "War" that played a significant role in ending the Vietnam War. Humbled and honored that I filmed him in 1990, performing another great original song, "I'm A Devil," a few years before he died. Chalk one mark to the good. Last night it bothered me for a sleepless hour in bed, unable to let it go that I blew an investor presentation in 2012, should have had Dianne explain the invention. $30,000 down the drain because I was tongue tied and too vain to see how vulnerable I was, a terrible pitch man. Crystal clear last night that I'm dying. I wrote a letter to my firstborn, now age 53. Haven't visited him or written to him for twenty years because he became a pious Mormon convert, finances home improvement and million dollar mortgages in D.C.

 

Oh, shit, Jesse Colin Young on the radio, crooning his insipid hit: "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now." I know his wife and son. Jesse was a total asshole, promoted by David Geffen, the pervert queen of pop crap, partnered with Katzenberg and Spielberg to make disgusting drek that killed all hope of making progress as a film director, another career I bungled, snubbed Spielberg twice, in a Lucas editing room and a Stone Canyon house party.

 

Is preposterously sexy Escape my last novel?

 

I'm willing to wait until a big story emerges, if it does. I wrote a letter to my youngest brother, asking if he had any photos of me as a child, because he scanned all the slides and snapshots my father took. The purpose? Consider the private life of a kid. There should be a clue in the photographic evidence beyond my defective recollection, fragments of memorable discoveries, age 5, age 6. What was Mick Jaggar like as a little kid? I don't want to know what swaggering Springsteen did as a child. I should flip the radio to talk. Who's on at noon? Bon Gino. The laughing cancer survivor, ex-NYPD and Secret Service agent.

 

Interviewing another Catholic, Matt Walsh, author of Johnny The Walrus. Flip to Dennis Prager, laughing about vaccines and press coverage of a Penn transgender swimmer. West Plains junk rock playlist FM: "Christmas is a time of reflection." Ava country & western: "We wish you a Merry Christmas." Local NPR affiliate playing a jaunty orchestral medley of English carols. Back to Prager: "Feminists don't care about women. They hate men. If you tweet that women need men, you'll get canceled."

 

I got up to investigate scratching noises at my door, little birds. Every time I open the door, my sleeping dog wakes up, sprawled on my bed. I patted his head, told him he was a good dog. Not good enough. He jumped to the floor and snorted at me, wants to go outside in his tartan dog sweater. Sunny, breezy and cold, snow forecast tonight and tomorrow, three feet deep in Minnesota and northern Wisconsin. John Fogerty on the radio, rubbish from the 60s recorded in a single take. Oh, god, an entire set of his fake catfish and bullfrog bullshit. Fogerty grew up in San Francisco. Then airhead Steve Winwood, the English muffin pretending to be a man, "Dear Mister Fantasy" from his Low Spark of High Heeled Boys LP.

 

Big surprise, the dog wants to come back in. He's a rational animal, unlike African academics. Shell hired a seismic survey vessel to shoot a deepwater block off South Africa because the communist thug nation is starved of oil supplies, making stinky diesel from wax. Zulus went crazy, accused Shell of killing marine animals. "Lack of evidence doesn't mean there isn't damage," a black professor of ecology sneered.

 

Meanwhile in Nigeria, 5000 convicts escaped this year in jailbreak attacks by heavily armed gangs. Fire killed three dozen more, because they strung thin electrical wire to charge their cell phones. A hundred were injured. Nigerian officials said that they would pay for medical care. One wonders what constitutes medical care in a corrupt nation of illiterate idiots, where fires, kidnapping, and murder are endemic. A friend of mine worked on an offshore Shell platform in the Niger delta, had to fire his AK-47 at pirates.

 

In a related development, Royal Dutch Shell is closing its Dutch headquarters and moving to London. It's only a matter of time before they auction and abandon their Gulf of Mexico assets, thanks to Biden and Black Lives Matter. You can't operate an oil company with affirmative action. That's how BP's Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, an unskilled black rig hand responsible for the blowout preventer. No joke. I monitored the Coast Guard hearings. Shell had nothing to do with the BP disaster that killed 11 men on the drilling floor and spilled 2.6 million barrels of oil, but Obama shut down Shell's offshore exploration operations for nine months. Biden's embargo on deepwater Federal leases was the final straw.

 

Something new to say, a positive statement of human potential.

 

I don't want to leap into the distant future again or retreat to the benevolent 50s. It has to be believable in the context of endless masking and MRNA poison and fake ballots, tens of millions quitting their jobs, hundreds of thousands of backordered Peterbilts and Freightliners, Putin and Xi threatening war.

 

I feel like Mister Rick in Casablanca. Of all the gin joints in the world, why did she have to show up here? — the harrier of modern history darkening a toothless hippie's tin barn.

 

The days tick by and the notes pile up. I might be a weakling but I'm not a chicken. Procreation is our most important product. Women know that they are at war for survival. The Sons of Liberty did not hold elections. Seven-eighths of happiness is fallow fields. A single man, vastly outnumbered, succeeds by being loved. I don't like being absurd. A first class KLM stew told me that Van Morrison was the ugliest man she had ever encountered.

 

 

Russians

 

Old Russian proverb about Germans — a fine fellow, maybe, but it's better to hang him. I agree. I'm 3/4 German by descent, often the worst kind of autocrat with an ancestral claim of nobility, and I grew up surrounded by millions of grumpy Germans, some of whom goose stepped in Nazi parades of the Bund during the late 1930s in Milwaukee. Poles lived on the downwind side of an industrial smokestack river basin. There were very few Jews, and the Italian quarter was squashed into a dozen blocks on the Lower East Side. When blacks migrated north, they were segregated in a ghetto of dilapidated rentals where they froze in the winter and sweltered in humid summers. They did not visit Wisconsin Ave.

 

Generally speaking, Germans are not nice people. They are stolid, industrious misers who think they're superior. In the 1960s, my hippie cohort respected the Mafioso, dated Polish girls, marched in civil rights demonstrations with blacks, and were baffled by brainy Jews. There were no Russians in Milwaukee.

 

Ambition took me around the world early in life, traveling with Jewish girls to New York, a brief stint working with rich gays and dangerous Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, a much longer stint in Hollywood consorting with blacks of every ethnicity (there are many) and a project in Sydney where I mingled with sexy blonde girls, rambunctious musicians, and smiling Kiwis. At a San Francisco marina bistro, I met a Scottish girl who rearranged my life for decades, traveling together to Los Angeles, Holland, England, Belgium, Luxembourg, Nevada, and Scotland. Very slowly, rising to a challenge, I was wooed into Scots enlightenment at gigantic snooker tables and became a somewhat nicer vagabond.

 

That's how I met the Russians in Costa Rica. There are distinct ethnicities, aristocratic White Russians, brainless Ukrainians, psychotic Chechens, fierce Tartars who can be trusted to follow orders and attack without hesitation if ordered to do so, and Siberian Cossacks who are tall, dignified, and slightly dim. I worked with them all, befriended some, feared others, and made a keen study of the confident ruling class White Russians who had Kremlin connections and diplomatic status. They accepted me because I used a pen name that disguised my Teutonic heritage and we met in sunny laid back Costa Rica.

 

What I want to say about Russians is simple. They are not effete, pampered Americans. They are worse than stuffy, perfidious English "old boys" and colorful Irish comedians with a festering grudge against brutal Brits. Russians are happy to exploit egotistical Frenchmen and sullen Krauts, who they see as easily manipulated chumps. They don't have to feed a billion Indians or fight with China. Sadly, Russia is a dying society, outnumbered by Western Europeans who need Russian oil and gas, the world's largest endowment of fossil fuel, 50 times larger than U.S. reserves and five times bigger than the Arab and Persian resource disasters of grasping greed and waste, doomed to decline and die like Venezuela.

 

Death is front and center in Russian history. They are partying while they can, no expectation of a happy ending, led by a cowardly and highly competent scientific elite, no different than Britain, but smoothly groomed, bankrupt Brits prevaricate, bluster, and beg. Russians never beg.

 

Without Trump, we have no hope of stopping them.

 

As a matter of justice, United States has no absolute duty to save Europe or Taiwan. It's mooted that we should contain Russia and China by arming Ukraine, Taiwan, Philippines, South Korea, who knows maybe Vietnam, Finland, India, Greece, Armenia, Bhutan, and Rockall. No ceiling in modern monetary theory. Just print more dollars and say goodbye to prosperity and fiscal solvency. That's the Democrat platform in a nutshell, tax and spend our crops and seed corn, kill U.S. pension assets with inflation. How that will make us stronger is a dumb Democrat daydream, echoed by Republican hawks who say that price is no object to arm Arabs who have oil and refinery production to power U.S. military expeditions, allegedly capable of fighting and winning two wars at the same time, except Iraq and Afghanistan, which we lost to Iran and Pakistan respectively, both of whom are Chinese client states, little more than pawns.

 

Russia and China are capable of beating us in the game of arming proxies like North Korea and Belarus, rescuing Iran by helping them to exploit more oil and gas production, subsidizing and defending Syria. Germany and France are frozen strategically, dependent on Russia for energy. Indonesia has no choice whether to export coal and appease the Chinese leviathan. We do it, too, giving China food and IOUs to build up their armed forces, training Chinese scientists at U.S. universities and idiotically funding their recombinant virus bioweapons research in Wuhan.

 

Idiocy never pays. Think. Stop trading with China. Leave Russia alone.

 

I've met quite a lot of Russians — scientists, gangsters, security teams, diplomats, and electric Russian babes incapable of love. The Russians are a melting pot of failure and cruelty, concentrated by centuries of failure and cruelty. Most everything Russians attempt is irrational, fake, paranoid, and suicidal. They are alert natural liars who lunge at opportunity if they smell fear or hear empty threats.

 

 

Let's not be idiotic

 

Joe Biden meandered through a two-hour press conference, supported by puppeteers who flashed canned talking points on his prompter. Joe repeated himself endlessly, claimed that he achieved great things, contradicted himself, and improvised that it's okay for Russia to invade Ukraine a little, insisting that his first year in office had been a brilliant success, that grocery stores are fully stocked, he solved the supply chain problem, and it's up to the Fed to tame inflation — all of which is false. Biden denied he said that Republicans were racist, but if they limit mail-in ballots or demand voter ID they're racist.

 

No mention of China. No discussion of fentanyl or the millions of border crashers transported to Florida and other states. No comment on the crisis in health care. Vague hand waving about therapeutics that FDA banned, hoarded, or delayed from production. Testing won't matter if kits are mailed to millions. Everybody is going to test positive. Mailing a billion masks made in China is an insult to our intelligence. Britain ended its mask mandate. Forcing little kids to wear masks is crippling their development. Our cities are ablaze with crime and tens of millions of Americans have quit their jobs, mainly because they don't want to use dangerous public transport or drive a car that could be carjacked. It's not on Biden's prompter as President In Name Only, idly dreaming of trillions to bribe intersectional Democrats.

 

Don't give the phony puppet a second's thought or discussion. The only reason that Joe remains in office is a poison pill threat. Kamala Harris is a moron who smiles and laughs, can't form a sentence that makes any sense. Sure, she could be scripted like Joe, and Harris can play the race card, typecast for the role by Central Casting and a casting couch, which is how she became a bit player in San Francisco, Sacramento, then U.S. Senate for an audition, voting the party line, incapable of facing Putin or Xi.

 

China owns Lunch Bucket Joe. Midterms are going to be rigged.

 

Go ahead, vote. Rally the base. Make reasoned arguments in good faith. When it fails, come back and revisit me as a framer of last resort, which is one of the chapter titles in my book about the constitution of government in Galt's Gulch, a fictional place that existed seven years in physical reality. I was there. Liberty was a widely shared value. I fought spooks and cabals, and they fought back, no different than black hats or hostile takeover by pools of dark money. That's what liberty implicitly requires. There is no free or cheap ride to freedom, politely voting for honesty and fairness. Evildoers must be fought talon and claw by physical Eagles and Kangaroos they can't print like toilet paper promissory notes.

 

 

How To Avoid Nuclear War

 

Given the pace of development and deployment of hypersonic missiles and the proliferation of atomic weapons in Islamic states, regional and intercontinental nuclear war seems certain, not a question of whether the most horrifying cataclysm imaginable will ensue, merely when. I believe we have a decade or two to avoid nuclear war by leaving Earth and colonizing the Moon.

 

I would prefer it to be a private enterprise, involving Russians and Americans. Don't invite Brits, Krauts, or Frogs to help, unless you want to pour sand in the engine. Xi could be flattered into a competition, racing against the private consortium of US and Russian billionaires. It's a big Moon, plenty of room to accommodate anyone who can get there. Competition is good.

 

An initial colony needs heavy lifting of multiple freighter missions, landed near a favorable target with lunar ice. Pending complicated planning and engineering, I'd ship a water works, nuclear power plant, residential hotel, food production, and 1000 tons of pipeline tools and plumbing supplies. Big program. Perhaps $1 trillion to be privately financed for profit in a generational perspective. You want to continue the human race? Seed your DNA into the future? Acquire the right to escape Earth? Trillions in market value will be wiped out when we spiral into grim global suicide. Invest in a moon colony pronto.

 

Let others deploy their hearts and half-truths to deter nuclear war, which will fail. The United Nations and NATO are nonprofit bureaucracies spewing cash to staff employees and assorted tribal chieftains. SpaceX has state of the art launch controls. Russians know how to launch big payloads. Finely filtering the aerospace community worldwide, a small group initially. We must be nimble and entrepreneurial. There are very few executives who could successfully lead a multinational industrial program on a tight schedule. That's the first thing to decide, who the CEO is. If he wasn't such an idiot, fussing with party politics, Donald Trump would be an ideal candidate to save mankind and send his DNA into the future. No better salesman. He's an amazingly energetic man, listened carefully to experts and made decisions of immense national and foreign impact, a routine daily agenda when Trump led the Western Alliance and sweet talked Kim into suspending his plutonium production and rocket operations.

 

I'm not certain how to distribute my proposal to appropriate people. I suppose the simplest way to start is to contact Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. They like each other, no problem discussing hard truths and stepwise collaboration. An easy cover story, publicly announced private initiative to reduce tensions for the sake of humanity, which is more or less true. The goal of meeting Putin is to explore how to get around FinCen, Egmont, and NSA. The Laissez Faire City International Trust was chartered in Moscow. It worked fine, easy to move cash worldwide. It might not be necessary to move big pallets of fiat paper. Putin has a stash of .999 banker bars to solve supply chokepoints.

 

Consortium partners should build things with their own resources of cashflow and sky high paper value of certain NYSE and Nasdaq listed holdings. Liquidate at a loss if you have to. Not a good idea to dither. Wall Street is floating on a fully inflated balloon of Fed hot air, leaking and losing altitude.

 

What would a consortium deal require? Appointment of CEO and a board of key players with skin in the game. Allocation of who builds what, who needs extra funds to expand operations, movement of paper documents in a way that doesn't attract attention. Time lines and transport of payloads and boosters to launch facilities. A lot to discuss, needs a big team, scrambled communications, unrelenting effort.

 

Are men capable of such a feat? Certainly.

 

After the basic infrastructure is installed on the moon, the next logical thing to do is to build it out and invite young people to relocate, brainy women in particular. Phase Two is an industrial plant, to explore and exploit lunar minerals, so that the colony will become a productive economy, able to maintain and expand its footprint. Now that I think about it, rumors and hard news of launching heavy payloads will excite attention worldwide. We could recoup some Phase Two expense by televising a reality TV soap opera. It'll be a huge sensation watching the first baby being delivered in 1/6 gravity by a brainy lunar midwife and two nervous astronauts, one of whom reads an OB checklist and gets told to shut up.

 

 

Dow Theory

 

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 large cap stocks and/or the tech heavy Naz goes up or down, most journalists also report Standard & Poor's 500, a broader index of medium size companies. Since the 2009 financial bail-out, upward momentum in all three indices reflects secular inflation and financial repression (0.25% cost of cash). There is a far more accurate barometer of economic health known as Dow Theory that focuses exclusively on transportation companies.

 

Historically, the transports were mostly railroads and a few steamship lines. Today the index includes trucking, air cargo, and passenger airlines. Most of them are in serious trouble, struggling to keep their noses above water. Railroads burn diesel and their intermodals are being looted in rail yards, notably in Los Angeles. Truckers are quitting, freight rates are going up on higher fuel cost, truck tires are hard to find, and trailers are in short supply. Used tractors and new big rigs are scarce, with over 300,000 costly high tech diesel tractors backordered. Airlines are limping along underwater financially, dependent on bail-outs and cheap funding. The entire category of transportation is sinking fast. It cannot be cured by consolidation, or nationalization like loss-making Amtrak and Conrail, the zombie remains of two historic transport giants — Pennsylvania RR and New York Central, bludgeoned to death by Nixon and Ford.

 

Dow Theory matters. If transport companies stumble and fail, it's an economic cancer that spreads to manufacturers, retailers, and money burning losers like Uber and Netflix. Watch 10-year Treasurys and the Fed balance sheet. They display a rear view trailing indicator of transports 18 months ago. What's happening in transportation now, today, will force tighter Fed policy and price controls next year.

 

Labor shortages. Fewer trucks on the road. Empty shelves in grocery stores. Shortage of eggs in New York, limited milk selection, no 2% or 1% skim, no lettuce. Consumer prices are rising steadily higher. Soon there will be "informal" black markets and an uptick in highway robbery, truck drivers assaulted in rest areas and fuel station parking lots.

 

There was one brief period in modern history when it was an excellent time to invest, in 1933-34, after the market crashed and assets became cheap, an era of gangsters and bread lines. Twelve years of Fed stimulus puffed up $9 trillion of overvalued paper assets that will burn in another truly historic crash.

 

 

Darn it

 

Steam Punk is drilling strong supple roots of story. I'm being dragged along against my will, perfectly happy to do something else, like, uh...

 

This is hardly fair. (Gadant: "There is no such thing as fair.")

 

I don't even want to outline it. You know how much work is involved in sketching 1000 pages of drama that has to make sense, every chapter a jewel? Hah. Makes me think of Herbert Lom, the mad genius stuffing cotton in his ears, then torturing the Professor's daughter until she screams, by screeching a blackboard with an evil looking iron gauntlet that has long claws. Her father can't stand to hear the screams and agrees to build Project Looking Glass, so Lom (former Inspector Dreyfus) can threaten the entire world with destruction unless they kill Clousseau. I can still see the movie, every scene, haven't screened it in years. That's what story can do. I'm tempted to bend the slender green shoot of Steam Punk, make it a romp with a comic spine. Comedy goes in a circle. Clousseau remains Clousseau to the very end, unchanged, a hapless nitwit, a joke on all concerned. Darn it. Comedy ain't drama.

 

In drama, as in life, characters don't remain unchanged. They are profoundly transformed by whatever their moral choices and a theme require. They face life and death decisions that cannot be made twice or undone, and if they survive there is a high price to pay. Life changes people.

 

That's not exactly what a major literary novel should be about, although it's true that people suffer.

 

"Life is a headache!" a tired gay black guy in London said, rolling his eyes at the time and heroism he expended to produce an Afro-Dizziac Hair Show that I filmed at the Empire, used the whole stage and filled runways with pro dancers and leggy girls in fabulous hairstyles and fashions, animated lighting, music, packed audience, British Afro pop stars with upbeat screenworthy comments and an edge of exasperation that black people needed special makeup. The event was sponsored by Loreal.

 

See what I'm doing? Stalling. If I don't rabbit more trivia, I'll have to start writing. The depth and length of it will be hell, 1000 pages, 250 scenes, 15 memorable characters who matter. More than a year of uninterrupted work. Time off for mental collapse once in a while. Shoulders sag in a deep sigh.