Pick a Book

To celebrate suspension of a blog that no one reads, I'll send you a pdf book of your choice. Email wolfdevoon@gmail.com (subject line: Pick a Book) and allow a couple weeks for delivery. I have to walk a mile to use a neighbor's wifi, weather permitting. If it's too hot, too cold, raining, or muddy, it might not happen promptly, and if you don't hear from me after a couple months, I probably died. For reasons that I don't fully understand, dead authors sell more books than living ones, so I'm not opposed to it. Let's hope that everything goes swimmingly during a progressively crushing recession and my neighbor doesn't lose power or internet service. One pdf per customer. Social media buzz appreciated. Search Google or Duck Duck Go for book descriptions and reader reviews. Cable & Blount is an anthology of my first three Case Files novels. Finding Flopsie is sold separately and mysteriously difficult to find. All titles include adult ideas, graphic sex, frank language, and bold white heroism. Eventually they'll all disappear in a cloud storage purge of hate speech. Act now before Amazon figures out who I am. Thanks.

 

Google lost my videos. Try https://vimeo.com/user66655576

 

I don't regret all the effort I put into this blog. I could have been more careful with money. My daughter wants a .22 automatic and a holster for her birthday. It took me a long time to learn how to write, and it never paid more than pennies. Friends have been exceedingly kind to me, Tom and Erik in particular.

 

Whether Steam Punk is ever completed, my portrait of an ideal man, I'm satisfied that Escape was worth every hour and month of hot pursuit, every decade of reaching higher creatively.

 

In parting, I'd like to mention two life lessons that proved to be pivotal. As a 5-year-old, I rode a city bus that stopped right outside our house (the bus line was owned by my uncle) and I went to kindergarten in a new brick building funded by my grandfather adjacent to the high school where my dad graduated as president of the senior class, his portrait in the hallway. I liked the kindergarten kids, liked music class, clapping nice wooden sticks together, liked milk and graham crackers and nap time. The memorable life lesson was watching my kindergarten teacher churn cream into butter with a hand crank, which took a long time. Served to us on a saltine, it was really good butter. Learning how to do things was possible. The other pivotal life lesson was renting an office on the 10th floor of a tall modern Max Factor Building opposite the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. I signed a one-page sublease offered by an old character actor who was in partnership with a New York producer to make cheap genre films that were never released. They made money by milking investors. "If you want to get ahead in this business," the washed up B-list actor advised, "you have to learn how to steal."

 

It's so damn sad. My dog is too old to understand verbal commands. He wants to obey and can't. If I call him to Come Here, he doesn't know where I am, walks the wrong way. I have to put water right in front of him, splash it with my fingers, repeat several times as clearly as possible Here, Look, Dog Water. He suffers from skin tumors and fleas. I wash him with dish soap that works better than flea shampoo. If I don't give him cooked vegetables and oil in his food, he can't poop. I have to gently wipe his blind eyes almost hourly. In the middle of the night he was trembling and frantic, insisted on remaining outside. I think his brain is failing, a harbinger of my own fate. I'll end up like Lunch Bucket Joe, unable to frame or finish an intelligent thought, stuck in the mud of misremembered lies written by someone else.

 

Good time to quit.

 

Before I do, I have to say it again. Oil is a highly competitive business, hundreds of producers, refiners, and pipeline companies with trillions of dollars at risk, squeaking by on single digit margins. They pay corporate taxes on profits and pay lease royalties on every barrel they produce. Offshore wells are big investments, drilling down through miles of water and rock, working from billion dollar floaters. Every aspect of work is regulated and public. The price you pay at the pump is 30% inflated by Federal, state, and local taxes. Oil is used to make plastics for hospitals, home improvement, electric cable, plumbing, food packaging, aircraft, cars, buses, schools and playgrounds. Every container ship burns bunker fuel.  Natural gas cooks your food in homes and restaurants and generates a third of all U.S. electric power, 24/7, impervious to rain or snow. Fuel oil heats icy homes in winter. Natural gas is an input in fertilizer. Jet fuel flies every passenger and military plane. Diesel powers every big rig, farm tractor, bulldozer and backhoe. Discovering new oil & gas supplies is an intense scientific and engineering challenge. Drilling is dangerous and costly. The seven million men and women directly employed in U.S. oil & gas exploration and production are highly trained professionals, half of them university grads, without whom you would starve, no power, no transport, no medical testing or sterile surgery, no police or firefighters. "Green" tech is a swindle that would not exist without Chinese slave labor and lavish subsidies that oil companies do not have. We import over 1/3 of the oil we consume in America, because U.S. oil reserves are scarce and Obama made it impossible to drill the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (hundreds of miles away from ANWR). The corrupt oil kleptocracies of the Middle East, Africa, and Russia export most of their oil and natural gas to China, India, Japan, Korea, and Europe, setting the price that U.S. companies have to pay for imports. No one makes a nickel of profit from "nationalized" production except shieks, colonels, and smiling expats from England, France, Spain, and Italy. I've met them. They are incompetent bootlicks. U.S. geologists discovered and developed giant reserves in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Soviet Union, and Venezuela — all of which was expropriated and looted by corrupt kings and communist tyrants.

 

Please note that Mark Levin is a total fool. He thinks that hydraulic fracturing of shale is "clean" and it was invented by Big Oil, a high tech wave of the future. In reality, frackers are penny ante minnows, $100 billion in debt. Their wells cost 3 times more than straight holes, and all of the thick rich "core" plays have been fracked to death. High pressure shale fracturing was pioneered by an elderly drilling contractor who was unable to make a profit doing it. Without high yield debt and 0% Fed funds, there would have been no scramble for shale leases. High flyers like Chesapeake's Aubrey McClendon surfed the fracking wave to disaster, financially and personally. His company had to be bailed out by China's CNOOC. Major U.S. oil companies bought more successful frackers, never made a penny of profit by acquiring "experts" to dispose of millions of gallons of contaminated water to produce a few thousand barrels of oil and natural gas. Fracking became 100% uninteresting to Big Oil. The majors need to find and lift billions of barrels from ultradeep Gulf of Mexico or Alaska or overseas — none of which will be horizontal shale plays spewing toxic waste water, hauled away in big rig tankers to be injected under a shallow aquifer to get rid of it. The frackers are making money at $100 a barrel, but it triggered demand destruction, and if WTI sinks to $60 again (the market clearing equilibrium) frackers are out of business again. If you don't know the facts, Levin, please shut the fuck up.

Oily shale frackers produce approximately 1 million barrels per day. Sounds like a lot of oil, right? Hah. We consume 20 million bdp. The OECD industrial democracies consume 50 million bdp. Global demand is 95 million barrels per day. Fracking is 1% of global supply. Watch what happens when junk bond rates rise to 12%. Frackers make more money hedging the market with derivatives instead of oil and gas production. It's all going to die off precipitously because they've already drilled all the thick rich "core" plays. Thinner shale is a fool's errand. Natural gas? Russia has half of all known gas reserves on earth. Qatar, Iran, and Algeria are natural gas giants. America is a pipsqueak gas producer, depleting our gassy shale reserves at a gallop. Two thirds of U.S. natural gas production comes from straight holes in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, deepwater Gulf of Mexico, and California, much of it derived as an associated byproduct of conventional oil production.

 

Over and out. Oh ... wait a minute. Here's a playlist.

 

The Hollies ("Bus Stop")

Laura Brannigan ("Gloria")

Arrowsmith ("Walking In The Sand")

The Pretenders ("Brass In Pocket")

 Abba ("Take A Chance On Me")

Frank Zappa ("Fifty Fifty")

Bonny Raitt ("Something To Talk About")

Bee Gees ("Nights On Broadway")

The Pretenders ("Don't Get Me Wrong")

Devo ("Whip It")

Los Bravos ("Black Is Black")

Abba ("Money Money Money")

The Eagles ("Wasted Time")

Led Zeppelin ("In The Light")

Blood Sweat & Tears ("Go Down Gambling")

Joan Jett ("Hate Myself for Loving You")

Alice Cooper ("Only Women Bleed")

Led Zeppelin ("Black Dog")

Electric Light Orchestra ("Hold On Tight")

Huey Lewis ("I Want A New Drug")

Heart ("Straight On For You")

The Zombies ("She's Not There")

 

Notable speeches:

John F. Kennedy

Ronald Reagan

Margaret Thatcher

 

Movies:

The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness

Meet John Doe

Twelve O'clock High

Key Largo

It's A Wonderful Life

The Quiet Man

The African Queen

Sink The Bismarck

The Greatest Show On Earth

Charly

Day Of The Jackal

Anatomy Of A Murder

 

White TV:

77 Sunset Strip

The Rockford Files

Columbo

The Muppet Show

Get Smart

Kojak

 

If you're interested in satirical cinematic achievements, consider Theodore Bikel's baritone benediction in Frank Zappa's 1971 feature length movie 200 Motels: "Lord, have mercy on the people in England for the terrible food these people must eat." Highly recommended. Swell song vocals by Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (The Turtles), gifted rock drummer Ainsley Dunbar, the London Festival Orchestra, and Murakami-Wolf animation. Zappa's musical genius at the height of his vitality. Filmed in just two weeks (!) on super sharp 800-line video with trippy special effects and transferred to 35mm by Image Transform. It pushed me into a lifelong love affair with low budget production.

 

I'm in favor of gun control. Use both hands and practice.

 

 

 

Verisimilitude

 

The log cabin that Kyle and Karen used was a real place in rural Wisconsin owned by my grandfather. Becker's office on Water Street, the Voom Voom strip club, the Ham and Egger, a Winneconne resort, the rental house and coal-fired furnace were real. I drove the streets of Milwaukee and rode city buses, knew the docks, the Imperial billiard hall, Kalt's theater crowd, the Lower East Side, and spectacularly foxy babes like Liz Kelson. Rude dialogue from 1975 was authentic, real mob figures, car bombings and gunfire. I visited the Sentinel newsroom and painfully shabby inner city neighborhoods. Young tough guys smoked cigarettes. Old cops smoked cigars. Partners is mostly a true story.

 

In The Good Walk Alone, every road and vehicle was a real environment. Mars Colony took months to design and engineer in a Quake game environment. The Martian fraternal robes, oaths, and rigmarole were based on personal lodge experience. I met troubled warriors who drank to blot out the horror of killing. I have super sharp hearing like Harry Faraday does. I know what happens in a Red Light district, including private vengeance. I played poker in the back room of The Millionaires Club, a ghostly old bar that opened in 1871 and had a history of angry drunks who worked and died underground. Everything on Mars had an existential referent, including the very ill lawyer who befriended Harry.

 

Chris and Peachy went places I knew, met people I knew, fought bad guys I knew. In Escape, the hull of Spar One was a believable design, a spinning disc to create artificial gravity. Hansje and Cantwell were based on life experience. The twins in Chiseltown were real people. I worked with folks like Adele, Joe, Jonathan, Mike, Billy, and Bart. I had a driver named Andy.

 

This is all well and good, but fiction is inherently distorted and amplified for a reason. Heroism is rare in life. That's the whole purpose of taking what exists, using it to probe what might and ought to happen, with convincing verisimilitude to suspend disbelief. You can't make a movie that makes people laugh and flinch unless they accept the action and dialogue as "real world" events, no awareness of painted canvas backdrops or editorial tricks.

 

The challenge in Steam Punk is believability. Every page.

 

 

Sociopaths

 

Ever helpful Coast To Coast AM had an amateur psychologist last night, warning other ladies to steer clear of sociopaths who are selfish, heartless, clever lovers, constantly tell lies, take your money, and abandon you for another woman. Corporate CEOs and used car salesmen can't be trusted. Sociopaths are born selfish and heartless. A lot of them were juvenile delinquents and criminals later in life.

 

I saw myself in her target group. While 99% of mankind are obedient, industrious, unselfish, and full of love for everyone and everything, I'm not. The lady psychologist admitted that sociopaths are intelligent. They know what they're doing. Yes, women are equally disposed to selfish, manipulative, deceptive, abusive behavior, she conceded reluctantly. Glad that's settled. Doesn't explain Russians, Nigerians, or Democrats, but I acknowledge all the selfishness and recklessness I exhibited from an early age.

 

"Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: What is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one class of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: What is good? Esthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: What is important? An artist does not fake reality, he stylizes it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant, and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the incidental and accidental, he presents his view of existence." (Ayn Rand)

 

Yup. It's there in every word I wrote, every harebrain adventure I led, every thrill of passion I felt with women and dangerous opponents and comedy writers. Alice Cooper is a hoot. WKRP was a triumph of ensemble comedy. I directed a lot of goofball antics on film and tape, loved every minute of it.

 

What was the question? Oh, right. Damn sociopaths ignore government and fair play, explore for treasure in jungles and on the high seas (oil & gas, tuna, gold, cobalt, etc). They fight like wildcats if they're cornered, insanely brave Ukrainians and colonial American scofflaws. Live free or die.

 

Excuse me. A bumblebee bumbled in. Go outside! — I talk to bumblebees and they obey. The dog not so much. He has exaggerated notions of dignity.

 

 

Pleasure Island

 

Podcast star Matt Walsh wrote a book titled 'The Devil's Pleasure Palace' that explains how German intellectuals corrupted U.S. liberal arts. It put me in mind of innocent Pinocchio seduced by thespian Honest John, who handed him to an evil cabal that operated Pleasure Island. Boys were turned into jackasses by tempting them with total liberty — the fun of smashing windows, strong drink, cigars, and pool tables. They sprouted long gray ears and tails and transformed into braying donkeys to be roped and tamed and labor the rest of their lives as beasts of burden. Pinocchio escaped (with long ears and a donkey tail) to be swallowed by a whale and reunited with his father who was searching for him.

 

Back to Walsh. He says German critical theory caused the disaster of underachieving hippies, drug use, antiwar riots, casual sex, and loud rock concerts. That was my generation. I was slightly out of step with my socialist peers. Filmmakers are capitalists, need mountains of money to make stuff. Directing was a profound pinnacle of honor and exaltation at times. But sensible people don't fritter their lives away in low budget filmmaking. It took 20 years to figure out that Hollywood didn't need me, another 30 years to discover that self published novelists starve and sell no books. Did pleasure corrupt yours truly?

 

I don't think so. It was hell trying to make progress as a film director. Writing was worse. I'd like to edit some of my experiences with women, although I doubt anyone knows a winning formula that doesn't involve becoming a tame beast of burden, subsisting on steel cut oats and leafy green vegetables.

 

I wanted a life of pleasure. I failed to achieve it and settled for a life of adventure, waving my donkey ears at grease paint evangelists like Walsh. I carried a gun because I had to, never shot anyone, partly because they knew I was armed, alert, and angry about being threatened. Thankfully, it was only a brief season of alarm. I didn't want the job of a warrior. I write about war because it takes life twice — those who are killed and those who kill, forever changed by killing. Taxation is worse than war, no army big enough to stop the elected thespians chosen by donkeys braying for pleasure.

 

Ignore the donkeys. Pleasure Island is broken and bankrupt. The Federal Reserve is holding $7 trillion in Treasurys backed by the taxing power, plus $2 trillion more in agency bonds backed by U.S. mortgages. Everything has to be sold at a discount fairly fast before interest rates float higher.

 

Sure, I had enormous pleasure and pain, while it was available to me as a handsome young blade in a golden era of modern history, the 60s and 70s, culminating in disco. Go ahead, laugh. I had a splendid adventure in Milwaukee, Madison, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Sydney. That's how I grew donkey ears. In today's scorched earth urban combat, it's too dangerous to go anywhere as a feeble sage.

 

It's pleasant work to start an important project in a nice, quiet, rural environment. The bugs are awful and have to be fought with fly strips, swatters, tweezers, and band-aids, but that's a seasonal problem. Steam Punk will roll along through multiple seasons, the ultimate pleasure of taking my foot off the gas and driving a leisurely narrative when I feel like it. I don't even care if it finishes. That's serenity.

 

It occurs to me that pleasure is good, feeling like a jackass occasionally is good, and a spectrum of stern challenges bestows the distinct satisfaction that one's life was full to the brim. Nothing omitted or lost. There's a Sinatra song comparing life to a barrel of wine, from the brim to the dregs, which I admit will darken my final decline, unable to write. Till then, a gentle serenity of vision.

 

UPDATE 6/3 — My serenity lasted less than eight hours. A week ago, radio superstar Alice Cooper told a stupendous deadpan joke on "Nights With Alice Cooper" about American wieners and German sausages that made me laugh so hard it brought tears to my eyes. I wrote a note to say thanks and acknowledge separately that his story about a 3-year-old granddaughter was heartwarming as heck. The bum read my email on the air last night in a dull, unemotional fake German accent. I was stunned, hearing my words syndicated to 300 FM stations. After he read the email, he identified me by the sender name (wasn't in the text) and said: "Wolf DeVoon. What a great name! But it'd be better if it was Wolf Da Moon."

 

Reminds me of something P.G. Wodehouse wrote:

"Just when a chap is feeling particularly braced with things in general, Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping."

 

 

 

more about Escape

 

Certainly the best story I've written so far. Gadant loses his equilibrium, dazed and confused by a sad desire to have a wife, a romantic partner for him only, an equal in spirit to have and to hold, a deeply personal reward for preserving and strengthening his moral character. We attain fitness for love by unrelenting effort to advance in life, not in terms of privilege but rationality, courage, self respect, and honorable ambition. He wants to pilot the Shuttle, no matter how improbable that is for Gadant as a lowly mechanic. To a 29-year-old, the future is a limitless potential, like finding a single, intelligent girl his own age or thereabouts, someone to cherish and defend.

 

Wham! —a stowaway captures his heart, and it makes him miserable because she's taken prisoner by grim security goons. Zero chance of finding her or freeing her, until Jimmy relates that he was held at gunpoint and questioned in the dogleg corridor near a medical storage room on C Deck.

 

Enter Hansje and Cantwell. Still makes me smile. Nicely done.

 

Everything sails smoothly and necessarily and at times outrageously. I allow myself to depict what men and women do with each other in hot blooded greed. Greed is good in this context because it results in pregnancy and propagation of life. Love and lust are joined for a purpose.

 

There are others who fall in love, always harder to do if you have grave responsibilities. Cantwell is an important figure. She befriends Jimmy, mentors the bright young stallion. She loves Springer, embraces him as he fades from life in a hospital bed. She thinks Pedley is an idiot, which Pedley certainly is.

 

I have trouble rereading the final chapter, titled The End. It scares me, and I love Hansje to bits. Absolute hell to see little Hansje so badly abused and threatened with death. Gadant hopes to save her, but that doesn't change the moral context. War is war.

 

Nice book. I don't think anything was extraneous. Escape was completed about a year ago. A first edition appeared on Lulu in June 2021. I fussed with typos and cover art finalized in November, six months ago. I haven't sold a single copy, as far as I know. I bought two copies, sent one to billionaire Peter Thiel and handed the other copy to a troubled drug addict covered in prison tattoos, a guy who helped me move mountains, dig utility ditches and postholes, grade everything smooth, and shake bobcat loads of 2" rock to harden a driveway. I doubt he read the book I gave him. Thiel didn't either. Real men don't read.

 

Sorry, Erik. I don't mean to imply that you're unreal. You're a saint, wise enough to celebrate whatever the world throws at us. I'm not a saint. I chain smoke cheap cigarettes and fret.

 

A very odd thing happened when I wrote a previous blog post about Escape. A hostile commenter said that I was a rat, but maybe he would read Escape. A large number of confused people believe that I had something to do with Bitcoin mining — which I never did, know nothing about it. When Laissez Faire City collapsed, I spent the next 15 years thumb wrestling with bureaucrats and oil companies. We took the net proceeds and built a little house seven years ago, a gated modern forested hilltop home that's 90% tornado proof. When my wife quit smoking cigarettes I got thrown out and moved to a tin barn on the property. From time to time it puzzles me that I ended up in an old tin barn, but I can't complain. I wrote The Case Files of Cable & Blount, Partners, Escape, and several other books cloistered in a dumpy room decorated with tarps and a laptop. It gets cold in the winter and hot in summer. No internet. No phone. There's a radio and a high gain antenna to monitor what's happening in the civilized world. The world is in serious trouble. We did the right thing, bugging out to a sparsely populated section of the Heartland where people raise cattle and crack homespun jokes around a potbelly stove at the general store.

 

I accept that my work will never make any money. Victor Hugo said that if he merely wrote for his own time, he would break his pen and throw it away. Fitzgerald received a total of $50 in book royalties for his masterpiece Tender Is The Night. Herman Melville died a pauper. Ayn Rand needed Social Security and charity medical care near the end of her life. RLS was sickly as a child and died young. I have nothing to complain about, free to write and years remaining to honor it. Escape was a big stride forward.

 

Swell. A big step forward for what? To die in obscurity. I've always been extremely willful. Unsalable as an author. No natural constituency that I could ever find, and I spent a lifetime looking for it. More than once I sold a film or TV project that meshed with the odd motives of a commercially successful, bored grifter who saw something fun to do and little risk, because I worked my butt off to put a co-production deal or cash presale on the table. I have a long history of frustration dealing with financially successful show business grifters milking pop talent and pocketbooks infinitely greater than mine. They perceived that I was rational, had a good resume and a willingness to play ball, accommodate suggestions.

 

That's what book publishers are supposed to do, perceive some merit in my work and make suggestions, but I won't play ball in New York again. Once was enough, and anyone with sense is fleeing New York. I don't want to attempt to do All Things Considered again. I'm a very poor public speaker. Book signings were painful. I did two of them, decades ago, to push a nonfiction novelty book that sold 15,000 copies. An indie publisher liked it, did a good job handling design and promotion, made some money.

 

Escape is not a novelty book with amusing graphics on every page. It's a novel. My tenth or twentieth if you count all the shorter novelettes and original scripts and adaptations, a huge pile of fiction that was self published on Amazon, Kindle, Lulu, and Ingram. Friends said nice things and supported me. I made an effort to reach higher, invested every day and every year to win more readers with better stories.

 

It may or may not be possible to author a true magnum, which I have in rough outline, take one, two, or three years (or never) to complete, an appropriate challenge for an old soul. I'm satisfied in the literary achievement of Escape, a work of world building and simple blue collar heartache and courage, about six months to draft plus a couple more months to polish. It was an intense project, plenty of sleepless nights. I don't want to do that ever again. Steam Punk will be leisurely, a long gentle narrative.

 

That makes Escape a high water mark in my canon of action adventure, hard men and hot women, lives on the line every page. I stretch suspension of disbelief. There are numerous characters. It builds slowly and inexorably to a slam bang finish, the whole weight of story shouldered by a modest hero.

 

I have a strong sense of finality with Escape.

 

 

 

Discretionary spending

 

Thanks to a supremely generous friend, I have an extra $50 to promote my work, enough to print four volumes and send them to a book reviewer somewhere. I scanned an old list that I compiled years ago, shrugged at three newspapers that might still exist and might tolerate cis-gendered romance, which is asking a lot nowadays. Syracuse? Wichita? Tampa? It would be a lot better if I wrote grisly accounts of Delta Force heroism to kill evil tribesmen who outlawed gays humming Broadway show tunes.

 

I discarded the idea of depositing a legacy for safekeeping at the British Library (I'm not British) or at the Philadelphia Free Library (doubtful they shelve paperbacks). Silly to waste $50 on my hometown public library to honor a 12 year old kid self. Dead certain that my novels would wind up in the trash, maybe a special trip to the municipal incinerator. I come from an enclave of well behaved small town burghers, and I broke every one of their rules as a juvenile delinquent, kicked out of high school at age 15.

 

No point in sending books to Barnes & Noble or Curtis Brown.

 

Hmph. Here I am with $50 burning a hole in my pocket, and I can't think of an institution or a prominent public person who might conceivably take time to read my collected novels and stories, say something nice about Partners or Escape or privileged white rascals Chris and Peachy.

 

$50 would buy a hell of a lot of good whiskey, but I'm too old to drink, and the problem of a permanent archive of my work is as parched as a three day drunk. I need to think more creatively about publicity, maybe Australia or Finland. When I search "wolf devoon" on Google, I'm baffled that most of my titles were indexed by booksellers in Taiwan, India, Germany, Japan, Holland, and South Africa. I've sold more books in England than in America. Probably had buyer's remorse. Urgent to find a kindred spirit. Tucker Carlson? Mike Rowe? Too busy to read novels. Elon Musk? Yeah, sure, nothing else to do except launch rockets to the moon and Mars, run a global car company, and bid $44 billion to take over Twitter. Rand's fictional Central Park hotel developer Kent Lansing told Roark that the shortest distance between two points was a middleman. I need a well connected social butterfly to plug my work.

 

A female? Not ideal, although they run NY publishing and literary conferences coast to coast. It would be awkward to pitch a female agent or editor, but I've had more five-star female Amazon reviews than any other kind. Men generally snarked with 1-star exasperation, except for Erik who showered lavish praise on my convoluted plots and trick endings. Good joke on Erik. He's a better writer than I am.

 

So, who are the women I admire?

 

Heather MacDonald, a busy journalist. Camille Paglia, the lesbian pop culture critic, probably 80 years old. Maria Bartoromo, Fox Business superstar working 12 hours a day. Becky Quick at CNBC. I haven't heard much from Anne Coulter recently. I wouldn't mind being dissed or ignored by the perpetually amused Coulter. She might have time to read a few pages.

 

So be it. My 10 best stories to Anne Coulter. Or Alice Cooper.

 

 

 

Government

 

We need to face facts. When our creek bridge cracked and eroded, fell apart in a flood, FEMA paid to replace it. They built back worse. Now it floods in every rainstorm. The culvert they specified under five tons of concrete is too small to handle the creek flow. It jams with floating sticks and organic crap.

 

$1 trillion wasted in Afghanistan, to be defeated, abandoning a strategic airbase. Captured U.S. rockets, MRAPs, body armor, and night vision goggles fell into the hands of Taliban IED terrorists released from Baghram prison. They annihilated the Northern Alliance, killed every man, woman, and child. Corrupt U.S.-salaried Republic of Afghanistan officials and U.S.-trained Republic of Afghanistan pilots stuffed suitcases full of dollars and fled to Uzbekistan in helicopters that we gave them.

 

$2 trillion wasted in Iraq. Several billions in cash went missing. Thousands of U.S. troops killed, tens of thousands horribly maimed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. No nuclear WMD. We gave Saddam chemical weapons to help him fight the Iran-Iraq War. His stockpile was exhausted long before we went on an insane hunt to find nothing and lay waste to Iraq cities. We funded a new Republic of Iraq, trained a new Iraqi Army. They ran from battle and lost half the country to ISIS, a new enemy to attack, more U.S. special force butchery. Millions of refugees. Russia bombed our Kurdish proxies in Syria and established Russian bases to defend Assad. Lebanon was destroyed as a civil society. Total failure of U.S. diplomatic and military strategy throughout the entire region.

 

$5 trillion wasted at home, pampering and multiplying savages who can't read, can't add or subtract, and get three meals a day at unionized zombie schools, a colossal social failure measured in riots, drug dealing, smash and grab, carjacking and gunfire on U.S. city streets. Colleges turn away good students with high test scores. They abandoned all admission testing to enroll more incompetents. Every word broadcast from the White House is a lie. They lied to us about lockdowns, masks, and MRNA shots. They lied to us about election integrity. CDC shut down baby formula production months ago and didn't care that it spawned a crisis. The boy who shot up a grocery store in Buffalo had threatened to shoot up his high school graduation ceremony. Total failure of "red flag" mental health laws, police incompetence, and "gun free zones" that killed children in Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Aurora. Families are fleeing New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle. Thousands of Chinese spies are quietly doing advanced studies at U.S. universities and cleared to work in top secret national laboratories.

 

Tens of millions of illiterate peasants and gangsters are pouring across the southern border, no longer in peril of arrest or deportation, released to sign up for welfare, free housing, multilingual public schools, drivers licenses, free health care, and ballot harvesting. "Privileged" white kids are being shamed and urged to destroy themselves by gender reassignment without parental consent.

 

No Federal, state, or local government employee can be fired. No Federal, state, or local official has ever admitted to making a mistake. Now they're playing cute with nuclear war. Putin had ample reason to be alarmed. U.S. special forces were equipping and training the Ukrainian Army before Russia gathered its forces at the border. We gave them Javelin anti-tank, Stinger anti-aircraft, and Harpoon naval rockets, supplied Ukraine with vehicles, ammo, drones, and satellite targeting in a war by proxy with the stated aim of militarily defeating Russia. Federal spending is out of control. Brainless U.S. monetary and fiscal policy crippled our economy. Sky high prices, fuel shortages, U.S. oil drillers handcuffed.

 

Government is not only stupid. It's suicidal.

 

Biden read an angry teleprompter in Buffalo about people shot by a teenage "white supremacist" who was previously identified as a threat and held for observation at a hospital, but Biden had no time for or concern about the Christmas Parade massacre in Waukesha — six dead and 70 injured, many seriously, hundreds of women and small children terrorized by a negro with a long rap sheet for violence.

 

 Joe's suicidal race relations policy? White people don't matter. That's why he threw the border open, flooded the country with Mexican gangsters and fentanyl that killed over 100,000 last year.

 

I've been warning about the evil of government for 25 years.

(Death To All Flies, 1997)

 

The opposite of government is private life. I arranged for my daughter to have competent professional training in gymnastics, violin, piano, orchestral composition, contemporary jazz ballet, aviation ground school, horse riding and jumping, video production and editing, and how to drive a full size GMC pickup in city traffic and highway speed. As an 11-year-old kid, she had gun safety training at an indoor range, became a good shot with a rifle, and practiced how to fight kitchen fires.

My wife is worried that electricity will skyrocket in price, then black out. She wants me to test a manual pump to lift water. I said I could build a wood-fired steam engine to generate power. Weird karma!