Conveyances

It's been an interesting life.

All sorts of cars and trucks, a fire engine, an ambulance, a bulldozer, and a betjah. Hovercraft, ferries of all sizes, outboards, rafts, the Queen Mary, a canal barge, DC-8, DC-9, 707, 727, 737, Trident, Fokker, L-1011, 747, 757, 767, 777, Airbus, Embreaer, and BAE. An ancient prop with magneto ignition, a fast Cessna turboprop, an ultralight, ATV, utility crane, go cart, sled, and horseback. A wheelchair, a Chapman, a doorway dolly, shopping cart, and handheld leaning out of a TR-3. The parlor car on the 20th Century Limited, dining car on the Hiawatha, and the rung of a freight car. Subways, buses, British Rail, moving sidewalks, steam trains, a surgical gurney, and a parade float. Memorable taxi rides, golf carts, and Town Cars. Thousands of elevator doors opening and closing, an infinity of stairs, escalators, cobbles, asphalt, gravel, concrete, cornfields, storm drains, white sand beaches, ladders, and a bicycle built for two. My favorite destination was rural Luxembourg, but Singapore was pretty damn splendid.

If I was granted a wish, Elko beckons.

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Manhood

Some are great men. Many are average Joes. I'm about the size of half a man, a physical and moral midget. It's a valuable perspective, because the scale and scope of greatness are easily discerned, just as country folk behold an amazingly tall skyscraper and say oooo! As long as I live, I will always marvel at the Bank of China Tower, elegant glass shapes rising like a frozen pillar of crystal, a work of genius. The London Gherkin not so much. In fact there's not a single decent structure anywhere in Blighty. They have a hard time doing hotel rooms, too. The Brits are a benighted race. Generous, cheerful, industrious, honest, and talented, but no sense of design. Same thing on the Continent. Comfortable and utilitarian, never stupendous, always a headache trying to get from point A to point B.

America is the only place with good transportation, Australia first runner up, but it's unfair to compare them. There's nowhere to go in Oz. I like the Lucky Country, but they have no great men. They have folklore about highwaymen versus nitwits with a Royal license to govern.

So ... what is a great man?

Raw courage certainly seems fundamental, but many have been courageous. Clever is good, but cleverness is desirable to all men, a way to earn their way in life. Writers have a lot of trouble doing that. The courageous and clever seldom read. Horrible to consider, but radio and television supply what most men enjoy, football and cricket in particular. I find both of them to be intensely boring. Greatness has to be something bigger than golf or tennis.

A great man must hold the gift of life in his hands. He could be a neurosurgeon, a commando, the commander-in-chief of a great enterprise. Every waking moment is an urgent problem in prospect, another struggle to attack the impossible and chip away at it until it's tamed. On the radio just now, Mark Steyn said that Rush Limbaugh was "the indispensible man." Nope.  He's a talented clown, maybe a clever guy with the common touch, a postmodern Thomas Paine.

Popularlity cannot be measure of a great man. Jesus is popular, a free Get Out of Sin card, no thought necessary. Negro athletes are popular, no thought possible. Politicians are popular enough to win election with swing votes and massive media buys, one slogan per cycle. Hope and change. Make America great.

Hmm. It occurs to me that the measure of greatness is how much sorrow a man can carry, how great a burden his life becomes, embracing it as a challenge to his character. That was Lincoln in a nutshell. Davy Crockett at the Alamo. One of the most misunderstood men in American history was Jay Gould. He started with nothing, taught himself to be a road surveyor. At the end of his life he was feared, hated, sick, and friendless. Gould's crimes? -- the Union Pacific combine that stretched in all directions, Western Union, the first transatlantic cable, arbiter of a Wall Street panic. Many great men in the Gilded Age -- Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Firestone, Westinghouse, Edison. Their lives were difficult. They stood strong. Even the politicians had character, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Leland Stanford.

Most of the Civil War generals were great men, Union and Confederate. Most of the men who served in World War II were called to greatness and answered to the limit of their endurance. Admiral Lord Nelson at Trafalgar. William Wallace.

Oooo, wait a minute. Stop the presses. There was an American hero who inspired me more than all the others combined. An utterly tragic life, but pivotal in American political history, First Father of American Independence. His name is lost, no longer mentioned. A lawyer. Who cares about colonial lawyers? Did he say something important in a Crown court and be beaten so severely by tax bailiffs that he never recovered mentally, had to be replaced by Sam Adams?

"An act against natural equity is void." (James Otis)

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Liberty and force

I recently recorded a video and wrote a companion short story concerning the Executive, by which I mean a professional military compatible with anarchist theory, the rule of law, and competitive free market private enterprise.

In simple terms, the Executive is a traffic cop backed by nuclear weapons. Someone should possess the awesome power to deter aggression. I propose to make it a private firm owned by money center banks, insurance companies, pension funds, lunatic billionaires and other financial heavyweights, combined in a privately held consortium with periodic cash calls to fund national security in a fully free financial Wild West.

Ooooo! -- sounds dangerous all of a sudden. Free market capitalism, no regulators. Investors would probably go for it, let Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan direct the military and pay for it. I'll bet $100 to a donut that UBS and Deutsche Bank will want a piece of the action, too. There are numerous institutions who are hungry for freedom and prepared to pony up.

The price of civil liberty is small. A free society must have a judiciary to settle disputes and to control civilian police charged to investigate and deter street crime and murder. Matters like fraud are common law wrongs, often entailing class action and restraining orders to stop the looting and freeze funds. Money damages are the only remedy in common law jurisdictions. Shareholder suits are common. If our laissez faire judiciary is fair and objective, big financial institutions will be drawn irresistibly. Banks thrive in orderly, stable legal relationships. Every financial instrument, derivative, option, mortgage, share of stock, life insurance policy, and pension benefit is a contract. Why write bogus paper? Nothing but problems, wreck the firm and lose everything. Wall Street is loaded with lawyers to make sure that financial contracts are fair, valid, and enforceable. There are trillions of dollars backing those agreements.

Those trillions are thirsting for real security. A free society and its courts must be domiciled somewhere in the physical world. Court costs are pennies compared to national security. For instance, the Executive handles air traffic control, suppression of piracy and terrorism, armed defense of a geographic territory and sufficient clout to deter aggression by hostile foreign governments, of which there are many today and will be for the foreseeable future. Getting along with them financially involves project finance and all sorts of tax gymnastics that will remain worthwhile for traditional players like HSBC and sovereign wealth funds. Many states detest the idea of freedom, especially China, Russia, Britain, France, USA -- the permanent members of the Security Council and insatiable tax leeches. Not one of them is financially solvent or efficiently managed. Their idiotic plan for global progress is to "save the planet" and shuffle additional tens of millions of penniless migrants to Europe and America.

The Executive Branch handles immigration in a free society, requiring passports, a plausible purpose to enter the market, and enough money or sponsorship to find a place to work and reside. No special status for diplomats or divas. Common law means common law in all of the Executive activities at territorial borders, airports, seaports, etc.

Most the Executive's power is held in reserve to deal with the unexpected. There is an air force and a navy, a professional nucleus of army officers and troops, security men to guard the Commander-in-Chief and military sites. Not a penny more than essential facilities and trained personnel. That's the beauty of private funding by cheapskate bankers, who will try to trim every national defense line item, but provide enough dough to protect their golden goose, a free market without financial regulation. A good rule of thumb is 1% of GDP for national security expense including procurement and maintenance. That might translate in the financial sector to a 0.05% annual haircut, the highest "tax" rate on earth, but they get to vote as shareholders, choose directors, set policy, and control what the Executive does.

Civilian control of the military is a natural condition. Private enterprise is the engine of all value creation and free cash flow. Finance fuels the market and connects entrepreneurs to capital investors, lenders, and insurers. Successful enterprises pay the freight for national security. As old stodgy companies are displaced by new high tech market entrants, shares in the Executive might change hands. National security might grow or shrink, depending on the tenor of the times. It's impossible to predict how long freedom and security would exist, if young Turks refuse to fork over funds. No one can be compelled to support the Executive.

The one thing that threatens a free society most of all is NAP, the idea that military force is wrong, no matter what the mission or legal basis. The same complaint can be levied against law courts, police, private property, and a currency of paper bank notes. It doesn't matter what folks think or say about the use of force. War is hell. It destroys homes and factories, breaks things and kills people. No one really wants war, except the masses whipped into a frenzy by a charsimatic fool. I recommend using a weathervane. If the Commander-in-Chief starts making bizarre televised speeches about patriotism, that's the time to skeedaddle.

In modern America, we've been led by aristocrats, community organizers, schoolteachers, spooks, and jovial showmen who were democratically elected one man one vote. Every one of those plebeicites increased the size of government and waged wars. That's why I'm quits with voting. I'd rather give the job of control to a board of directors representing financial interests. No banker on earth would agree to war if he had to pay for it in cash, scarce capital squandered on destruction, markets monkeywrenched by fear.

Meanwhile, don't cross the Executive's red lines. No terrorism. No threats.

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Not notable

Easy to say, difficult to digest. I'm not notable. The term has specific meaning at Wikipedia. There is no Wikipedia article about Wolf DeVoon, and I very much doubt that my death will be noticed, except by the nice old lady who runs the general store. I owe a hefty balance.

My latest opus was issued in the size and shape of a child's coloring book, that's how little it mattered. Self-published books are invisible. I've written 23 of them. Web content doesn't count in terms of notability. I can't guess how many forum posts and blog posts I authored. Published magazine articles, radio interviews, and videos don't count, either. Wolf DeVoon won't be notable until SOMEONE ELSE decides to say something about me in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, GQ or Advertising Age. Colin Kapernik was celebrated by all of them, and he made the cover of Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Time, despite being one of the worst quarterbacks in NFL history, eleven losses before he got fired for being incredibly stupid and vain.

Doesn't seem fair. I'm just as stupid, equally vain.

Politicians get noticed. Mass murderers and evangelists get noticed. It's a coin toss whether a scientist might be notable, unless she's a guru of climate change and gender fluidity. Now that I think about it, it might be felony sexual harrassment to review a straight male novelist, universally shunned by agents and publishers. Chicks and queers rule the book trade.

I hit a million words recently, decades of effort, much of it writing full-time, because I have to have solitude, months at a stretch to conceive and execute and polish something as huge as a novel. I laugh about it some times. Facebook decided that I was a "public figure" with zero Likes and no Talking Abouts.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner this week is discount balogna, slivers of onion, and mustard. I have one pack of cigarettes left, one pack of Ol' Roy soft food for my dog. He can't eat cheap kibble or defend himself because he lost half of his teeth to a lunatic vet. I lost half of mine over the years, so we're symmetrical, old and unable to do much except to gum soft balogna and dream of boiled eggs, sharp cheddar, fried chicken, Dewar's on the rocks, hot rib eye.

Gracefully surrender the things of youth?

Okay, I suppose that my creative work was juvenile. I stood up for masculinity and gorgeous women, outlandish love stories in outer space and on the hot filthy streets of Los Angeles. I had them chase each other in Central Java and Oud Loosdrecht and Columbus Circle, places that were familiar to me, the plumes of another life, all six continents when I was young and handsome and daring. All that's left is daring to claim that what I wrote was important.

Not notable, just important. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of justice.

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Can't make this shit up

"We can chew gum and eat at the same time."
Debbie Dingle (D-Mich) on NPR, explaining Dem congressional agenda

The lame duck Republican who set up Brett Kavanaugh for public humiliation and now threatens to block all further Trump judicial confirmations is named Flake.

And the California town completely destroyed by fire was Paradise.

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Yikes!

Life suddenly became extremely bizarre. In 1997, I concocted a character name for a valiant USMC hero on Mars in the 22nd century. Today I received an email from a young woman who asked if I knew her late father, who in reality had the same name and same USMC rank.

How does one explain the inexplicable? -- and what cosmic whiplash might happen next? -- email from Lt. Janet DiMarco, or a real Col. Chris Cable married to a real Peachy?

Thank God my writing career is over, no blasphemy intended.

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Somewhat silly