Look, I was one of Sarah Palin’s first fans when she was nominated to be John McCain’s running mate. I even put up a website called “Obama-Palin” in which I quixotically suggested that since they were the fresh voices in American politics — as opposed to the politically stale John McCain and Joe Biden — the two of them would have been the ticket to beat.

So I’m hardly a Sarah Palin hater from either the left or the right.

But listening to Sarah Palin in interview after interview since her book was released on November 17th — speaking with Oprah, Hannity, and O’Reilly in particular — what has struck me is how little of political substance Sarah Palin has had to say when finally given an opportunity to speak her mind to America without being censored by John McCain’s political operatives.

Yes, we know that Sarah Palin is against abortion. That’s not breaking news.

But why in the three weeks since the mass shootings at Ford Hood has this supposed Scion of both Anti-Terrorism and the Second Amendment — the hope of many Republicans to be the next Commander in Chief — not had a single word to say about America’s largest military base being a demilitarized zone?

A few days ago whistle-blowers released thousands of emails stored on computers at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, proving that the core scientists pushing global warming have been deliberately falsifying data such that not only is there no global warming but that, since 1961, the global temperature has actually cooled by one percent. The dead weight of this Global Fraud on the American economy — restrictions on producing fossil-fuel energy to heat our homes, light our schools, and power our transportation due to the fiction of carbon footprints — can now be lifted off the backs of the American people.

Why has the great Alaskan advocate of American energy independence — Sarah Palin — not used her access to microphones to say Word One about this?

But even if Sarah Palin wanted to use her media access to talk about a single issue in the news cycle while she has another quarter hour of fame, why has she not said a word about the evil in the health-care legislation now before Congress of the federal government fining or even imprisoning Americans who choose not to become customers of the health insurance companies?

These issues are less important to a possible future candidate for President of the United States than Newsweek running a flattering photo of her in running shorts? If this offended her, where was she when Barack Obama was on magazine covers shirtless on the beach? Or why is her precious media time being spent on David Letterman telling a joke which “knocked up” the wrong unmarried daughter? If she can’t stand the heat why’s she in the kitchen?

Wait a second. She quit her “chef’s” job, didn’t she?

Is the message she wants to give out about how much of a rugged hunter she is that she was freaked out by her father’s holding moose eyes in his hand? Would she have been such a shrinking violet that she would have swooned if it had been moose testicles? Is she a pit bull with lipstick … or is she just a girl?

Is the impression we are to be left with of Sarah Palin — when she finally gets her moment in the sun not shadowed by John McCain — that this former beauty queen who parlayed her sass into a political career is actually less politically contentious than Carrie Prejean?

This past Monday, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of both those events, I was invited to give a new speech to the Karl Hess Club in Los Angeles, again by asking the question, “Are We Alongside Night?”

You can listen to the audio of my November 16, 2009 speech “Are We Alongside Night?” by clicking here.

Much thanks to J. Kent Hastings for recording and uploading the MP3!

Below is the original 1979 speech.

You can download a free copy of the 30th anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night here.

–JNS

An abridged version of this talk appeared as an afterword in the 1982 Ace paperback edition.—JNS

Let me take you back six years, and three thousand miles east, to the time and place seeds were planted that eventually grew into this skinny little book. For all intents and purposes, you are looking at those six years, when I hold this book up.

You are looking at an obsession worse than heroin to a heroin dependent, worse than a dragon to a knight, worse than Hamlet’s ghost to Hamlet, Junior. You’ve all heard C.S. Lewis’s line—or some variant of it—about the man who lives for others: you can tell the others by their hunted look. That’s the look I got used to from close friends whenever I saw them during the writing of this book…they knew I had another two-and-a-half pages written…and they weren’t getting away alive without reading them.

If this presentation seems a little lopsided at times, it’s because those six years are all crowded together, screaming to get out, and I’m not in any condition to adjudicate among them.

So what you’re getting is a sort of recollective pot luck.

Okay. We’re back six years, in late 1973, when I was a young libertarian writer living in New York City. Nixon was president, the economy was going to the dogs, and a fellow named Harry Browne was going around telling people that Armageddon was on the way—you’d better have your gold, silver, and Swiss Francs and a well-stocked bunker to put them in.

We were going to have a wheelbarrow hyperinflation, by God even Murray Rothbard said so—and anyone who didn’t prepare for it was just plain dense. Just look at the price of gold…Jesus, over a hundred dollars an ounce! You can’t count on the banks—even the safety deposit boxes; they might be confiscated by the government—and there was going to be rampant strikes, looting, vandalism, food riots, New York would be a disaster area…

And damned if that didn’t sound like a pretty good idea for a story.

Something like this. A guy who’s read Harry Browne and has made all the right preparations is somehow still stuck in New York City when the merde hits the ventilateur…pardon my French. This guy has his fallout shelter—excuse me, retreat—all stocked and ready to go in upper New York State, but he keeps his gold, silver, and Swiss Francs in a private lock box on the other side of Manhattan. And before he can go to his retreat, he has to fight his way across town, fending off youth gangs, and food rioters, and traffic is jammed, he can’t get a cabdriver to take his money, the buses are on strike…and I figured the idea was worth about four thousand words and a couple of hundred inflated bucks.

I made some notes on the story but never got excited enough about the idea to bother writing it.

We jump ahead, now, to February, 1974, when Harry Browne’s new book, You Can Profit From a Monetary Crisis, is being released by Macmillan. I manage to wangle myself an invitation to a press luncheon Macmillan is putting on in honor of Browne, and during the question period I ask Browne something related to Austrian economics…I haven’t the slightest idea what it was. Anyway, at the end of the luncheon, Browne’s literary agent, Oscar Collier, comes up to me, hands me his card, and tells me that if I ever decide to do a book, to get in touch with him… and the next thing I know, I’m pitching him the idea I had as a short story and telling him that I’m thinking of doing a novel. By the end of the conversation, we had a sort of understanding that I’d write three chapters and an outline, and he’d give a shot at selling it if they were any good.

Well, about a month later, I gave him the chapters and outline, and Oscar agreed to submit them…which is a statement about Oscar’s ability to develop writers, because looking back now at those first attempted chapters…they’re terrible. Overwritten, wordy, overly detailed. But I should also mention, on Oscar’s behalf, that the chapters that open my novel are the same chapters…after judicious editing that Oscar prompted me into.

Oscar made a number of submissions of the chapters and outline, which was to be a novel called Ice And Ashes. I later changed the title when a science fiction novel named Ice And Iron by Wilson Tucker was released. But not to digress too much, here, the project didn’t sell, so I put the project aside for a while, at that point five chapters and an outline.

Then Sam started spreading the gospel of countereconomics, as we all headed into the depression of 1974—as Murray Rothbard calls it—and I organized a couple of fairly successful conferences on countereconomics called CounterCon. For those of you who have read the novel already, you’ll understand when I mention that these conferences were held at Camp Mohawk, in the Berkshires, a children’s and ski camp owned by relatives of mine, and that Camp Mohawk is the location of the Utopia prison in my story.

And to jump ahead once again, we’re now up to summer of 1975, when Sam and I and a few others moved out here to California. On the way across Sam and I outlined a book called Counter Economics—which he is still going to write one of these days—and as another digression that book can be found on the library shelves of Aurora in my novel, so Sam is committed to writing it so my prophecy will come true. But this digression also has a point: when I decided to resume writing my novel, when I’d gotten settled out here, I redid the outline to include the update in libertarian theory that my experience with countereconomics represented.

The rest of this story involves too many personal details to get into here about finishing the book in May 1976, rewrites, and a sale of the book to Berkley Book’s science fiction paperback line—a deal that was broken off later—and changes in agents because Oscar Collier was out of the agent business…but the bottom line is that it took around eighteen rejections, eight rewrites, and five years to produce this little book. Remember that the next time you go into a bookstore and plunk down a few bucks for a book. That’s what some poor shmuck of a writer had to go through to give you a few diverting hours.

Does this sound like self pity? [Big grin] I sure hope so.

Okay. Now I’m supposed to talk here tonight about a few specifics related to the topic. Let’s see. Romantic Manifesto, arbitration, countereconomics, hyperinflation, what the world of Alongside Night looks like, where my ideas come from … Schenectady…that’s Harlan Ellison’s joke, by the way…How they developed and were dramatized…how publisher interest was developed…and the likelihood of the scenario coming true. [Deep breath] Well, you might as well get comfortable, we’re going to be here until next Thursday. I’ll tell you what. I’ll hit the high points and we can catch what I miss during the question period.

The question that I’m supposed to be addressing tonight is: Are we Alongside Night? I came up with that title in kind of the same way that Rand once asked in an essay; “Is Atlas Shrugging?” to address the question of how much of the events of her novel were coming true. So when I ask, Are We Alongside Night?, I’m asking; how much of the scenario of my novel is already coming to pass…and how much can we realistically expect?

Now this has an assumption in it that I have to make explicit and examine. Why should I ask—why should anyone care—whether a fictional scenario—a story—will come true or not? Does its likelihood of coming true make it more entertaining, or give it more artistic value? Does Lucifer’s Hammer become more entertaining when a comet is about to hit earth? Was Atlas Shrugged a better novel when the lights of New York went out in 1965? Does one have to abuse oneself in the Holland Tunnel to enjoy Portnoy’s Complaint?

No, of course not. A work of fiction finds it validity not in how well it records—or even projects—reality, but in terms of isolating universal experience in terms of metaphors.

So what I was trying to do with Alongside Night was not precisely prophecy. And, though it may be prophetic—since I painted in broad strokes based on long term trends that are almost impossible not to see—it can still be perfectly valid even if none of the specific events it portrays ever come to pass. What was I trying to do, then? Well, let me sneak up on that from a rather oblique direction.

And here’s where I sneak in the The Romantic Manifesto. That book, for any of you who haven’t read it, is a collection of essays by Ayn Rand stating her artistic credo…the artistic methodology she used in writing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

And, since in her introduction to that book, she states that “There is no romantic movement today. If there is to be one in the art of the future, this book will have helped it come into being” let me state for the record that I consider myself part of the romantic movement in fiction today, based on Rand’s criteria as stated in that book.

Now, what Rand was concerned with was portraying things and characters: as they might be and ought to be. And she is very detailed and explicit about how this is supposed to be done. To restrict myself to the fiction writer, we’re supposed to abstract essential details from the subject being portrayed, then—by a process of deductive logic—put together a model that has the universality of an abstraction but looks like a concrete.

In a character, for example, I would mention only those traits that relate to the essential nature of the kind of person that character is.

The theme of a story—the central proposition—comes about in the same way: a thesis one wants to demonstrate. And the plot is a dramatized series of interconnected events that demonstrate that theme. In terms of theme, plot, characterization, one selects only the essential. Art is a “selective re-creation of reality” and what is selected is metaphysically important merely by its fact of being included. If it weren’t important, the artist wouldn’t have put it in; if it’s not important, it shouldn’t be mentioned in the first place.

Rand uses this analogy: “If one saw, in real life, a beautiful woman wearing an exquisite evening gown, with a cold sore on her lips, the blemish would be nothing but a minor affliction, and one would ignore it. But a painting of such a woman would be a corrupt, obscenely vicious attack on man, on beauty, on all values, and one would experience a feeling of immense disgust and indignation at the artist.”

Now, if Rand were the only writer I considered to be worth a damn, I would have taken that credo and what I would have written—like so many so-called Objectivist writers—would have been imitations of Rand’s style. But that wasn’t the case. I have been a lifelong admirer of Robert Heinlein, for his science fiction, C.S. Lewis for his fantasy, and J.D. Salinger for his slick mainstream writing. And all four writers have a good deal in common, though they span the range of philosophy.

All four are moralists—though their moral codes differ widely— all four write to what Rand would call “an objective psychoepistemology” …which is another way of saying that they give you the details and let you imagine your own pictures…and all four consider themselves entertainers of a sort, as well as having serious things to say.

So armed with Romantic Manifesto, and four different writers whose writing I admired, I set out to write my own story.

And I found that by working from Rand’s basic premises— without attempting to imitate her style—I had some major disagreements with the execution of those principles.

For example. Rand says her goal was the portrayal of an ideal man, first in Howard Roark, later in the heroes of Atlas Shrugged. And she defines the essential characteristic of a man as rationality. So when she portrays John Galt, she portrays a man who is always rational. He always is right on top of it. If he has any weakness of flaw, Rand doesn’t mention it…and therefore it is metaphysically insignificant. He is, by definition and portrayal ideal and perfect.

He is also her least convincing character.

Now this in itself is not a condemnation; Rand could easily argue—and has—that anyone who objected to Galt on that basis would be declaring his own depravity…the desire to see a flaw in Galt is the desire to see perfection itself destroyed.

If one is writing epic myth, then it is perfectly okay to portray gods and goddesses. There is even a usefulness for such models: they give us a standard against which to measure our own behavior.

But human frailty is metaphysically significant. It exists in all of us, even our geniuses and heroes. And they are not made less of because of their flaws; they are made greater by it. All three of the other writers I mentioned understand this; Rand does not. But Heinlein in particular taught me this lesson. Who is more brave: the man who fearlessly charges into battle, or the man who is so afraid that he wets his pants…as he charges in anyway?

John Galt stacks up pretty well as a god. His generator even throws lightning bolts of a sort…enough to knock down an airplane, anyway. But as the portrayal of an ideal man, he falls completely flat…because if he has any weaknesses which he has had to conquer, we are never shown them.

If John Galt had some weakness—some fear—that Mr. Thompson could have used against him when he had Galt prisoner, which Galt had to overcome within himself, then Galt would have been more essentially true to the nature of Man, and the meaning of Atlas Shrugged would have been amplified.

Now, remember that woman in the evening gown with the cold sore?

Literature is not static, like a painting; it is fluid, dynamic. What a fiction writer can do that the painter can not is to portray the beautiful woman with the cold sore, and demonstrate that she regards it “as nothing but a minor affliction” that should be ignored…exactly as one would in real life. Then, the meaning becomes even clearer.

By the way, Rand’s favorite writer, Victor Hugo, did just this in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The most important thing about Quasimodo is not that he is a hunchback, but that he is a human being in spite of being a hunchback.

Okay, now to tie this up.

The naturalist writer—as Rand talks about it in Romantic Manifesto—is interested in portraying things as they are. Rand is interested in showing things “as they might be and ought to be.” And what I was interested in doing in Alongside Night was showing how things are likely to be, and what we have to do if we don’t want them to be like that. Or to put this in concrete terms: the setting of my story is the crisis that Harry Browne described…only we were ready for it.

I chose as my viewpoint character Elliot Vreeland, the seventeen-year old son of a world famous libertarian economist. His father, Martin Vreeland, is a combination of Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, Wilhelm Roepke, and a few others. But the main character is Elliot, not his father; the things that are seen are from Elliot’s vantage point, within the framework of his understanding.

Now, why did I do this? I certainly didn’t make things easy on myself. If I wanted to portray an armed uprising, a soldier would have made a better viewpoint character. If I wanted to show a business collapse, an industrialist would have been at the thick of it. Political turmoil could have best been seen by a government official on the inside, as Ben Stein did in his inflation scenario, On The Brink, or Erdman did with an international banker in Crash of 79…incidentally, both these book came out after I’d finished my own first draft.

So I had to go through a good deal of trouble, in terms of plot twists, to get my seventeen-year old into a position where he could see any of the causes of what was happening.

Now why did I do it this way?

Well, being the son of an economist, he’s had some exposure to what’s going on, so he won’t be a complete ignoramus. But being young, nobody—not even the most ardent Objectivist— could expect him to be a John Galt…to have at his command the resources of a John Galt. He would be vulnerable to the tremendous forces bulleting his world, and so if I cut him off from the only really powerful person he knows—his father— then he’s on his own, and he has to learn to cope with the world without very many resources at his command.

In other words, he’s in much the same position any of us would be in having to deal with economics catastrophe…assuming we aren’t living like a hermit in a retreat somewhere.

Throughout my story, Elliot Vreeland is pushed along by circumstances beyond his control, and very often the only choice he has is who he can trust and who he can’t trust. He has to decide—by loyalty, by friendship, by what people say and what people do—who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. His decisions aren’t made on an ideological basis, but on a personal basis…which is how most people make the choices about their lives.

In essence, his only weapon is his own moral discretion.

And so he is in precisely the position, in my novel, that most people are today when confronted with libertarians. They don’t understand all our fancy theories; all they care about is whether or not we can be trusted. They’re not interested in hearing about how perfect we are and how terrific our ideas are. They got a bellyful of that from the communists and the socialists and the utopians and the technocrats and the fascists, and each of them had the Answer…only it never seemed to work. It doesn’t make any difference that what we’re talking about would work…we have not proved it yet, and so we’re in the same position as all these others. And don’t tell me how our ideas are historically self-evident; if they were self-evident, we’d be living in a libertarian world today.

So what I did in my story was to show them a guy who has to make the same choice. He has to know who he can trust when all these things start coming down.

And here’s the important part: the libertarians in my story aren’t libertarians because they spout all the theories, and demonstrate and go to Supper Club, and read New Libertarian Strategy. They’re libertarians because they’re living their lives in accordance with libertarian principles. They have something concrete to offer: safe areas, free trade zones, communication and transportation immune from the State, ways to beat the system. Not words, but action. Not promises, but results.

And that’s precisely what will have to happen before we can deal with this nightmare that we’re “alongside.”

Shall I get to concretes?

Hyperinflation? I can’t say for sure that it’s coming, but inflation is going to be around for a while, probably in double digit and quite possibly in triple digit. And if you don’t think that’s a volatile situation, ask yourself if we’d be involved in this mess in Iran if David Rockefeller and Jimmy Carter didn’t want to get our minds off the economic problems right here.

You might also ask yourself if any of the Iranian students holding the hostages are as young as seventeen.

The counter-economy? It’s here right now. U.S. News and World Report from October 22nd—seven weeks ago. The I.R.S. already has a quarter of the American economy listed in the underground economy…half a trillion dollars a year. Twenty million Americans. And if those twenty million can’t be gotten to with the message that what they’re doing is, in fact, libertarianism in practice, then you can kiss the future of freedom goodbye: the statists will pull another hat trick and we’ll have another new “ism” to contend with.

It may already be too late on that score: those twenty million may already have libertarians pegged as a group of minor politicians trying to muscle in on the big boys. And to them, politicians are the enemy.

Arbitration? It’s so common it’s probably the only reason the U.S. court system hasn’t collapsed under its own weight. You know how long it takes to get onto a court docket? And how much business bypasses the whole mess through the American Arbitration Association and other groups like the Better Business bureau and Fair Ballot Association? Neither do I; but it’s in the millions of whatever you’re counting.

Private protection? A huge industry. Alternate money? Gold is skyrocketing at the same rate that prices are in general. Decadence and chaos? Did you hear about The Who concert a few days ago? [On December 4, 1979, eleven concert-goers were trampled to death to get through the open doors at a general-admission concert by The Who in Cincinnati.]

All the elements are already here. The revolution is already in progress. It’s simply a matter people identifying who the revolutionaries are…and for the most part, the revolutionaries don’t even know they’re the revolutionaries.

You see, we don’t have a John Galt leading us. We can contemplate him as a literary character—and maybe learn something by doing it—but the function he performs in Atlas Shrugged isn’t being performed in the real world. There’s only us. So if we want to achieve great things—our dream of a free society—we have to do it in spite of our own weaknesses, and fears, and mistakes.

But, maybe we don’t really need a John Galt after all. As libertarians, we know about the efficacy of free trade. When people trade, they parley everyone else’s production, and achieve what they could not achieve acting alone, as individuals.

The great socialist utopia has been here all along: it’s the marketplace. Or—as the ancient Greeks called it—and I picked up from Sam who picked it up from 1960’s libertarian activists— the agora.

In The Romantic Manifesto, Rand states that she writes solely for the enjoyment of living, for a while, in a universe that is “as it might be and ought to be.” Her intent is not the didactic one of teaching people how they should do things, but for the feeling of the experience of having them done. A psychological breather…soul food.

Rand used the analogy that it is not the purpose of a novel to teach its readers how to live anymore than it is the function of an airplane to teach its passengers the principles of aerodynamics.

But Atlas Shrugged—and Alongside Night, for that matter— is not a world, but a book. You can’t live in it. It is a portrait, not the thing itself—the map, not the territory. And when you come to page 1168 in Atlas Shrugged, the story is finished and you‘re stuck back in this mess which we have to live in.

So I set out, like Rand, to portray things “as they might be and ought to be” but not as an end in itself, the way it is for her.

You see, if things “might be and ought to be,” then I won’t be satisfied until they are.

My intent with Alongside Night was to show, by dramatic example, the major preconditions for the achievement of the free society.

My theme: freedom works.

My context: the political economic mess that the theories of Austria economics say must end in collapse…the sort of economic collapse that historically had led to a Man on Horseback taking over. Napoleon after the 1790s’ hyperinflation in France; Hitler after the crack-up in 1923 Weimar Germany.

My plot: the events leading up to and culminating in the collapse of the American economy, and the arising of the underground economy given conscious identity by libertarian revolutionaries.

And that’s where you all come in. On one level, I wrote my book as an adventure story—self-contained, self-satisfying, enjoyable whether or not it can actually happen.

On another level, I wrote it for you…as a teaching aid. All of us have argued endlessly, trying to tell others how libertarian ideas would work in practice and how we can achieve them. What I set out to do was give some of the fundamental necessities— the preconditions—in a form that makes it obvious what we’re talking about. Now, some of these topics are best handled in the question period. Let me just run through some of them and you can hit me about them if you‘re interested.

The idea of the General Submissions to Arbitration as a precondition to a civilized society.

Technology as a neutral element in the set…neither pro-state nor anti-state.

A centralized libertarian Cadre as a danger to liberty.

The necessity for a separation of courts and protection agencies.

Is the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre, in my novel, a libertarian protection agency or a government?

You see, I’m leaving these sorts of things out of my formal presentation, because they are the sorts of things that libertarians are going to have to debate among themselves. When you get to Page 181 (Page 255, Pulpless.com edition) of Alongside Night, and close the book, you’ll have read a road map to a libertarian society…but you’re going to have to do the driving yourself. All I was able to give you was shadows of the libertarian story that each of you can write.

Thank you.

Apparently this sort of thing had been going around the web since April 2003, when the BBC’s Big Read began the search for Britain’s best-loved novel, and asked Britons to nominate their favorite books.

The truth is that at different times in my life I’d have different books on the list.

If you’d asked me when I was in my teens and 20′s The Catcher in the Rye would have been in the top five. Also most of my books are currently still packed in boxes from my last move and if I went through them I could easily add another hundred titles. How about The Illuminatus! trilogy, or Hitchhiker’s Guide books? They easily could have been on my list.

I did an interview years ago for Science Fiction Review where I listed a whole bunch of other authors I love who influenced me.

Then there’s the books I mentioned in my Facebook profile.

Honestly, I can’t remember half of what I’ve read over the course of a lifetime so how can I remember what my favorites are?

But here’s the list I put together. I didn’t follow the BBC protocol and included both fiction and nonfiction.

First of all, my own books (11 books):
FICTION:
Alongside Night
The Rainbow Cadenza
Escape from Heaven
Nasty, Brutish, and Short Stories
Profile in Silver and Other Screenwritings
NONFICTION/OMNIBUS:
I Met God (audiobook)
Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns
The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana
Self Control Not Gun Control
Book Publishing in the 21st Century
The Frame of the Century

C.S. Lewis (17 Books):
FICTION:
The Chronicles of Narnia:

The Great Divorce
The Screwtape Letters

NONFICTION:
The Abolition of Man
Miracles
Mere Christianity
The Problem of Pain
The Weight of Glory
An Experiment in Criticism

Ayn Rand (8 books)
FICTION:
Atlas Shrugged
The Fountainhead
Anthem
NONFICTION:
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
The Virtue of Selfishness
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
The Romantic Manifesto
The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Robert A. Heinlein (26 books)
FICTION:
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Job: A Comedy of Justice
Have Space Suit — Will Travel
Citizen of the Galaxy
Glory Road
The Past Through Tomorrow
Farnham’s Freehold
Between Planets
The Puppet Masters
The Door Into Summer
Double Star
Starman Jones
Red Planet
Starship Troopers
Tunnel in the Sky
Beyond This Horizon
Friday
Time Enough For Love
Podkayne of Mars
The Rolling Stones
The Star Beast
Farmer in the Sky
NONFICTION/OMNIBUS:
Expanded Universe
Tramp Royale
Grumbles from the Grave

Aldous Huxley
Brave New World

George Orwell (2 books)
Nineteen-eighty-four
Animal Farm

Brad Linaweaver (5 books)
Moon of Ice
The Land Beyond Summer
ClownFace
Anarquia (with J. Kent Hastings)
Free Space (co-editor with Ed Kramer)

L. Neil Smith
The Probability Broach

Victor Koman (3 books)
The Jehovah Contract
Solomon’s Knife
Kings of the High Frontier

Colin Wilson (3 books)
FICTION:
The Philosopher’s Stone
NONFICTION:
The Outsider
A Criminal History of Mankind

Franz Kafka
The Trial

Mark Twain (3 books)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Huckleberry Finn
Letters from the Earth

Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol

H.G. Wells (2 books)
The Time Machine
War of the Worlds

Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange

Viktor Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning

Carl Jung
Man and His Symbols

Dale Carnegie
How to Win Friends and Influence People

S.I. Hawakaya
Language in Thought and Action

Ludwig von Mises
Human Action

F.A. Hayek
The Road to Serfdom

Murray Rothbard (2 books)
Power and Market
For a New Liberty

Samuel Edward Konkin III (2 books)
The New Libertarian Manifesto
An Agorist Primer

Harry Browne
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World

Ken Grimwood
Replay

Arthur Hailey
Airport

Robert LeFevre
The Philosophy of Ownership

I think it’s actually true.

If you have a very long perspective the twentieth century was, as President Obama might well put it, a teachable moment. By its end everyone pretty well understood Lord Acton’s point that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that in the long run dictatorship is impractical even for the dictator. World domination proved a chimera even to the totally committed dictator willing to spill any amount of blood in the attempt.

So the powers that be — billionaire bankers, heads of state, generalissimos — rethought and retooled.

People everywhere have a reasonable fear and loathing of government gone wild with their wars and planned famines, concentration camps and exterminations, lost families and broken lives. But libertarians sometimes conclude from this that in escaping from Big Brother people are also seeking freedom.

Occasionally that’s true. A bad experience with government can leave one quite cynical about it.

But as soon as most people get away from the jackboots as often as not they miss the softer side of tyranny: the guaranteed jobs, room and board, the socialized medicine, the lowered expectations.

So if one belongs to a power elite seeking global government, the first lesson learned from the twentieth century was different strokes for different folks.

In the parts of the world still run by dictators, a globalist seeking a worldwide democracy might come across as a liberator.

In a third world overrun by warlords who commandeer any relief brought in for their own uses, a globalist might well be seen as a bringer of food, medicine, and order.

In Europe a globalist might advocate lifestyle changes so small as to be seen as an advocate of business as usual.

But in the United States of America, whose people have not completely forgotten the uncompromising libertarian challenges of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, a globalist needs to be a chameleon advocating whatever policy is necessary to move institutions away from true liberty.

A globalist in the U.S. might be seen as a secular liberal, a compassionate conservative, a post-9/11 patriot, an environmentalist, even an Ayn-Rand-spouting capitalist.

Globalism is populist government. Most of the world’s people are even more afraid of living without the safety net of a nanny state than they are of a Hitler, Stalin or Osama bin Laden.

What the power elite want — a “kinder, gentler” world nanny state with themselves as the nannies — is what the vast majority of the world’s people also want.

There is one, and only one, fly in this prescribed ointment. Americans with long memories.

Americans who read Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin, Spooner and Mencken, Rand, Rothbard, and Konkin.

Americans who know that while the United States was never free all the way, we got close enough that the flavor of liberty is still on our tongues, and the aroma of freedom is burnt into our nostrils.

America is and always has been the square peg in a round world. What we want is not what they want. What we dream about is not what they dream about.

But they have a problem. They need us.

Individualists are the geese laying golden eggs.

They don’t want us dead. They want us compliant.

But the globalists are smart enough to know that they need to maintain the illusion of liberty in order to keep the golden eggs coming.

For Americans, unlike the rest of the world, the globalist strategy is akin to stage magic: distraction with one hand while they trick us with the other.

The most important component of this strategy is their domination of entertainment.

They’ve had only limited success with controlling public education and universities, defining public agendas for people whose ideology overcomes common sense.

In America, it’s even more important to control the late-night comic’s monologue than it is to control the cable news network. You only need one or two well-launched jokes to effect more of a political impact than a dozen books, editorials, or blogged rants.

I don’t know whether planet earth will ever be free. But I do think America is still the best hope for freedom on this planet.

The anthem of the American nation might not be found so much at the beginning of baseball games as in the song lyrics of an old British rock band: we won’t get fooled again.

So keep paying attention. Look where they don’t want you to look. There’s where those of us who want freedom stand a chance of finding it.

But keep in mind: the world might not thank you if you find it.

Part II

Read Part I here.

Here Come the Paperless Books!, 1987

The inability of my literary agent to sell my already-sold-to-the-movies novel-outline-and-chapters to a New York publisher to be my third published novel — and a six-month-long Writers Guild strike that killed a movie deal I had in development with a production company for CBS — left me frustrated that my chosen career as a writer was entirely subject to the whims of major corporate-owned media. I observed that the bottleneck was always distribution. The distributors — book publishers and book-store chains in printed media, and movie studios, TV networks, and theater chains for movies and television productions — were in between me and the audience I wanted to reach. What if — I asked myself, not as a plot device but as a real-world business model — I could find a way to take out the middle-men and be able to offer myself as a writer directly to readers?

In 1987 there was not yet a World Wide Web, but there were home computers that could transfer files to each other by using telephone modems. There were many “bulletin boards” — which were computers set up to receive incoming calls from other computers — and there were several large companies — The Source, Compuserve, and GEnie among them — which had thousands of subscribers who logged on to share files with each other. File transfer speeds were slow as molasses and usage both of telephone lines and of the commercial computer services were expensive –so file-sizes had to be kept extremely small. But using new file-compression techniques, a book-length text file could be transferred relatively cheaply.

I saw an entry point into a market whereby instead of having to sell my book to a publisher who would attempt to get it shelved in bookstores where readers might consider buying it, authors such as myself could offer our books directly to readers as compressed text files, and readers could then print them out and read them at home or in their offices.

But, being an experienced science-fiction writer, I was able to use the same techniques I’d used to build fictional futures to extrapolate what a developed market for what I called “paperless books” would look like in a few years, as all phases of computer technology and data transfer progressed.

In doing so — beginning in 1987 with a self-published booklet I handed out at the American Booksellers Convention, titled Here Come the Paperless Books! — and in comprehensive detail in a course I gave in 1989 through the New School/Connected Education — I outlined what in just a few years would become today’s World-Wide-Web-based Amazon.com, utilizing online catalogs with browsing, samples, and reader reviews of downloadable text-and-graphics books, music, and movies — Kindles and iPhones to download them onto — and easy direct access from creative author/producer to readers and audiences.

Nothing supernatural about it.

I did found and operate two companies to implement these ideas. But that’s an article for another day.

The Frame of the Century?, 1999

Beginning with his criminal trial then closely studying new evidence brought out in his civil trial, I became convinced that all that might have been proven in two trials was that at some time after the murders and before the police arrived, O.J. Simpson had driven to the murder scene of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and an unfortunate waiter, Ronald Goldman, and transferred a few drops of blood to his Bronco and from there to his Brentwood home. To me everyone was always asking the wrong question about O.J. Simpson’s claim that he was framed. His defense team accused a racist and corrupt LAPD of framing Simpson — never an implausible scenario if you’re familiar with LAPD history — but the question that had never been asked nor answered was whether the killer — or an accomplice — could have diverted suspicion away from himself by planting evidence against Simpson.

In my book I examined a number of Brown-Goldman murder scenarios, but the one which has become the most prophetic is where I suggested that even the DNA blood evidence against O.J. Simpson could have been manufactured in a laboratory, really needing only the knowledge that it was possible.

I wrote,

But there was one additional possibility I discovered. If you didn’t have enough of O.J.’s blood, Dr. Frankenstein could make more for you.

Dr. Frankenstein, as it turns out, could be anyone with a high school diploma and a job in a biochemistry lab. Any lab doing criminalistics would do. So would most university labs. It just required a device called a thermal cycler used for PCR testing of DNA, and common lab equipment such as a blood centrifuge.

Five thousand bucks worth of lab equipment that could be ordered on an 800 line, paid for by credit card, and delivered by mail, anonymously—and another couple of hundred dollars in chemicals. The techniques had been in use for a decade, and everybody who worked in the field knew it could be done.

Any policeman who’d ever spent any time talking to a lab technician, or had to be briefed on DNA procedures for a criminal case, would know about it, too.

He’d need a drop of O.J.’s blood, as a reference sample. Type the red blood cells for ABO and enzymes. Do PCR on the white blood cells to clone the DNA—as much as you need. Shipp wouldn’t even necessarily need a drop of O.J.’s blood as a reference sample. If he had a lab blood report giving O.J.’s ABO type, ESD, and PGM subtype—used in case O.J. needed a blood transfusion— then all he would need is a sample of O.J.’s DNA—and he could get that from a used Kleenex, or a fingernail clipping, or a follicle from O.J.’s hair.

Now you get a test tube of blood of the same ABO type. Centrifuge the blood to separate the red and white blood cells. Heat the red blood cells carefully to destroy the enzymes, while preserving the ABO typing, and pour in enzymes matching your reference sample. Then take the white blood cells and subject them to X-rays or short-length ultraviolet to destroy the DNA. Do PCR testing on the white blood cells to make sure none of the DNA is left. If it is, give them more radiation.

Then take the DNA you’ve cloned using PCR and mix well with the now DNA-free white blood cells, and mix it back with the red blood cells.

Voila. Instant O.J., suitable for use at the crime scene of your choice.

–J. Neil Schulman, The Frame of the Century,
Pages 93-94, Pulpless.Com, June, 1999

Nobody at the time I wrote this took it seriously. Crazy Neil.

Nobody, that is, until August of this year when Forensic Science International: Genetics — reported on in The New York Times described in detail precisely how DNA blood evidence could be created in a laboratory and planted at a crime scene.

According to The New York Times article,

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Supernatural? Nopers. I was just being thorough — exploring all possibilities — and my training as a science-fiction writer cut in again.

I’m not even the first writer to get this idea of planted DNA produced. Next Wednesday’s episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is titled “Perverted” and you can see a preview of the episode here.

So if not in my novels and non-fiction writings, where are my supernatural prophecies?

I talk about them in my audiobook, I Met God.

So far they aren’t earth shattering prophecies that will rock the world.

Two quick examples.

In 1970 I got psychic inklings that my paternal grandfather was going to die half a day early. He was old but was in great health and robust spirits the last time I’d seen him at a family gathering several weeks earlier. All day — starting around eight in the morning — I was anticipating every time the phone rang that it was a phone call telling me my grandfather was dead. That call came around four in the afternoon — and he’d died around one in the afternoon, hours after my first premonition.

And in 1982 during a Halloween party at a friend’s, I saw a woman dancing when a clear Voice in my head said, “If you ask her to dance, you will marry her.”

I asked her to dance and twenty-one months later I married her.

The Voice hadn’t mentioned anything about our divorce eight years later.

(Part II continues here tomorrow.)

If you look at my official bio I list “unemployed prophet” as one of my professions.

I wrote my own bio and obviously my tongue is firmly in my cheek there. I’ve written science-fiction set in the future and to create the thought experiments our profession’s literature requires we need to engage in futurism so detailed that, often enough, it’s actually of concern to security analysts, and of use to think tanks like the Rand Corporation. One of the famous stories of our profession is how Astounding Science Fiction editor, John W. Campbell, was paid a visit by FBI agents in 1944 because the short story “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill was perilously close to outing atomic-bomb research being conducted by the ultra-secret Manhattan Project. And, of course, in 1945, Arthur C. Clarke described the deployment of geosynchronous orbital communication satellites in such detail, years before Echo and Telstar, that if he had but published on a patent application, rather than in the magazine Wireless World, he might have ended up richer than Bill Gates.

To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only high-profile published-and-produced science-fiction writer who admits that he has supernatural psychic powers including precognition, mediumship with the dead, OBE/astral travel, and the Big One — direct communication with God.

Writing science-fiction using the literary techniques of speculation and extrapolation puts me firmly in the tradition of nineteenth and twentieth century authors like H.G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and the aforementioned Arthur C. Clarke.

Claiming I have foreseen the future puts me in the literary tradition of the sixteenth century author, Michel de Nostredame, better known today as Nostradamus, whose 1555 book The Prophecies has been a bestseller in the subsequent four-and-a-half centuries. Al Gore, eat your heart out!

Crossing back and forth as I do between rationalist authors whose projections of the future claim no supernatural basis, and those who do, I thought it was time I took a look at my prophetic writings and separate the technical from the psychic.

Alongside Night, 1979

This relates to the 1979 edition. I did some updates in the 1999 trade-paperback re-issue — and that’s the text used in the current 30th anniversary PDF edition — so I’m only discussing the 1979 original.

In Alongside Night I portrayed a “near future” in which the U.S. dollar has been inflated to the point of near-worthlessness. As a consequence, economic and political chaos have followed. Foreigners have bought up much of the real assets in the United States. The United States has dropped out of NATO and the remainder of the NATO allies have combined with the European Common Market to form the European Common Market Treaty Organization — EUCOMTO — which has issued a gold-backed currency called the Eurofranc. Possession of gold bullion has once again been prohibited in the United States, as it was from May 1, 1933 to December 31, 1974. The real-estate market has collapsed and abandoned buildings are being lived in by squatters. Street crime is rampant. An organization called Citizens for a Free Society is staging mass rallies in favor of a return to hard money and free markets. Radicals are being secretly arrested without charges or warrants and sent to hidden federal prisons. And the underground Revolutionary Agorist Cadre is using the inability of the United States government to pay its troops with money that anyone will accept to recruit them to protect its own hidden merchant trade routes and marketplaces. At the time of my story the Soviet Union still exists. The technological advances I portray in the book are very modest. I portrayed videophones, video-intercoms, video-capable notebook computers and the use of electronic documents and identification, computer banking, digital movies and music stored on small discs, plus the use of lasers and masers for communications that can’t be intercepted … but nobody carries cell phones or iPods.

None of this required any supernatural precognitive powers. All of it — no matter how much it resembles current situations and news stories — is based on nothing more than looking at existing historical cases of what happens when nations hyper-inflate their paper money. I didn’t do anything that a political think tank couldn’t do. The only difference is that, as a fiction writer, I took the history and theoretical projections and applied them to the country I was then living in.

And that’s what makes Alongside Night so scary — that it didn’t take any supernatural powers to write it.

The Rainbow Cadenza, 1983

The Rainbow Cadenza takes place approximately two centuries in the future from when I wrote it. I created a “future history” (a concept John W. Campbell applied to a cycle of stories Robert A. Heinlein was writing for Astounding Science Fiction in the late 1930′s and early 1940′s) then started writing the events of my story having established a history of prior events. In the story, as I begin it, due to cheap drugs that allow males to select for male children, planet Earth has a population of males that outnumber the female population by seven males for every female. Affordable space flight has made it possible for millions of people to live off the earth — mostly in immense space habitats based on the theoretical designs of physicist Gerard K. O’Neill in his 1978 book The High Frontier — but the bulk of the human race still lives on earth. The United States in my future has combined with Mexico, Canada, and Cuba into a North American Concord, but by the time my story begins the earth has a one-world government. Because of the relative scarcity of women, rape was a major social problem in the future history I’d created. To “solve” the problem the government drafts young women for a three-year term of service in government-run brothels — but it’s not prostitution because, like universal health care — it’s a free government service available to all men on a rationed basis. Men who are exclusively gay and don’t partake of that universal service have become politically powerful — and have allied with women who are veterans of the service — plus the most politically powerful social group, Lesbians — to form a major element of the governing class. Gay marriage is not only legal, it’s encouraged — it takes men off the roster needing to be “serviced.”

Christianity — being intolerant of this social institution — has either fled off earth to the space colonies or has gone underground. Both female draft evaders and male rapists share the common fate of having their “immunity” to the rape laws stripped away, and they live in ghettos where during the night they are “Touchables” subject to legal rape by hunters known as “Marnies.”

To implement the technology of distinguishing legal citizens from Touchables, everyone has been implanted with body-heat-powered RFID chips that can be scanned from miles away. Other technological advances portrayed in the novel are satellite TV with DVRs and videophones, household robots, flying cars and flying belts (the latter used by Marnies who fly in packs like motorcycle gangs), printed books being replaced by digital books, and of course the aforementioned space flight and space colonies.

The future history and social institutions I portrayed in The Rainbow Cadenza weren’t even intended as necessary extrapolations from current trends, though I was well aware that the availability of a cheap gender-selection birth-control pill — if men could control its use — would be used to create more male babies in patriarchal cultures that don’t value females. But this was, for me, just working backwards to create a logical reason why a future society would draft women into public brothels instead of drafting young men into armies. I was trying to highlight the evil of utilitarian ends-justify-the-means thinking trampling individual rights by taking the emotional issue of national defense out of the equation. All the other social projections I made were simply logical extrapolations of the history I’d created to be able to tell that story.

Nothing supernaturally precognitive there, even when China started having villages with many more males than females for many of the same reasons I’d used to build my future history. And half my technological predictions were so mild that they’ve come to pass in less than three decades, much less twenty.

All the Kings Horses, 1983

This was intended to be my third novel but it was sold first as a treatment to Vista Films, a production company that had made movies including Time After Time, The Wind and the Lion, Demon Seed, and Motel Hell.

This was in 1983, just two years after the biggest television and tabloid event ever — the royal marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Lady Diana Spencer. At a time when all the supermarket tabloids were still writing fairy tale stories about their perfect marriage and the birth of their first son, I wrote and sold to a movie company a story about the future separation and divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

I’m told that the reason you never got to see it was that when the project got submitted to the studios, the Royal family found out about it and used leverage to bury it. No studio picked up the rights. No New York publisher would touch the manuscript. By the time the rights had reverted back to me, my projections had already become fact. This may well be the first time I was black-listed. I know of black-lists I got put on further forward in my career.

Was this some sort of supernatural crystal-ball-looking on my part?

Hardly. I simply thought it would be a funny way to make fun of the tabloid media to write a story in which the British Royal Family had to put up with the divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales — and custody of the future heir to the British throne — played out in a Los Angeles courtroom.

Karl Marx didn’t pull his scientific theory of working-class exploitation out of a hat. It was a logical extrapolation from the “labor” theory of value. This originates with the second-most influential economist in human history, Adam Smith — generally considered the father of capitalism and of economics as a science, itself — with publication in 1776 of Smith’s book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Adam Smith argued that a product’s value comes from how much labor went into making it. Marx took that a step further and postulated, therefore, that if someone other than the person who made a thing was getting more back for selling it than the person whose labor went into making it, there was a gap which Marx termed “surplus labor value” — and the difference between a sale price and how much went back to the laborer was “exploitation” of the worker — a systematic robbery.

It was to close this exploitation gap and restore equity to the worker that Marx developed his class theories and divided the world into productive exploited classes and non-productive exploiter classes.

Now, it’s not at all uncommon throughout human history for a scientific theory to become widely adopted even if it’s dead wrong. The classic example is the cosmological theory that the earth was the center of the universe (because it was created by God) and therefore the rest of the universe rotated around the earth. Those who made astronomical observations which disproved this theory took a lot of heat for suggesting what is now regarded as scientific orthodoxy: that the earth is but one planet revolving around a star, one of many stars in a galaxy made up of billions and billions of stars, one of a universe made up of billions and billions of galaxies … and don’t even get me started about whether there might be billions and billions of universes.

The counter of Marxist theory comes from more-modern economists who started from scratch and decided that Adam Smith’s theory of value was obviously wrong — that you could spend years as a laborer making a grandfather clock that is worth less to you than a bottle of water if you happen to be dying of thirst — and came up with the idea that a thing’s value is only what you’re willing to trade for it at an exact moment in time. Deductive logic follows from there and ends up with a holistic argument for unfettered free trade so everyone gets precisely what they want most.

But that’s actually a side-argument for me at the moment.

Regardless of going about it all the wrong way because everything they were doing was based on what today can be regarded as outmoded crackpot science, Marxism has its heart in the right place: justice for the productive class. When Marxism identifies freeloaders on the backs of the productive worker, it sees it as its job to free the worker from the freeloader … not burden the worker with more freeloaders.

That is the exact opposite of what’s going on in what is seen as left-wing politics today, which claims to be the workers’ friend but burdens their productivity with taxes, regulations, and setting up workers to go to war against each other by dividing them into “unionized” workers and “scab workers.”

Scab workers are independent workers willing to work for less than the government-protected price for labor the unions have negotiated for themselves. Businesses like to hire the cheaper guys because if they don’t, other businesses elsewhere (like China) who don’t have to pay union rates can undersell them and drive them out of business.

With most U.S. manufacturing now having gone elsewhere, keeping labor prices artificially high creates a new ex-working class that now organizes to tax workers so they can get their food, rent, and healthcare paid for.

If Marx were alive to see this, he’d have to go back to the drawing board and ask himself if ex-workers are now the biggest burden on the diminishing working class.

Marx wasn’t nearly as hostile to capitalism as most Marxists. Marx saw capitalism, exploitation of the worker and all, as a necessary evolutionary phase on the way to a stateless utopia in which nobody had to exploit anybody else. Once again, if Marx had managed to live long enough to see how his theories worked out in practice — Marx died in 1883, 34 years before the first Marxist revolution in Russia — he might have gone back to the drawing board.

Regardless, when conservatives and Republicans — Glenn Beck being the best example — constantly harp on members of the American Democratic/progressive movement being Marxists, they’re giving far less credit to Marx than Marx deserves, and far too much honor to the American Democratic/progressives than they deserve. They should be so Marxist as actually to care about productive people and want to get the free riders off their asses.

Veterans — according to Al King’s idea for this holiday — are soldiers who managed to get back from one of the Unites States’ wars alive. We in the United States honor those who didn’t get back from a war alive on Memorial Day at the end of May. And, however much you might want to thank a man or woman currently serving, Veterans Day is not yet their holiday. That would be like giving out high-school diplomas to sophomores.

I’m not sure whether Al King contemplated the idea of his holiday honoring servicemen and women who never went to war, but served during peacetime. Not that there’s ever been all that much of that.

The thing about war veterans is that they know from personal experience the fragility and preciousness of life, and why it’s better to settle things without fighting if that option is on the menu. That sort of experience used to be called wisdom. It’s what some older people have that most younger people don’t.

Veterans also know what they were told they were fighting for, and that has a definite flavor and smell to them. So a lot of them tend to get grouchy when what they thought they were fighting for is treated cavalierly by the people entrusted to keep it going.

For their wisdom, and knowing that liberty is worth fighting for, I like many others take this opportunity to thank veterans for their service.

Of all the veterans I’ve known in my life, the one I like best didn’t actually wear the uniform of the United States during a war. He was disabled out of the Navy — which he expected to make a lifetime career after graduating from the United States Naval Academy — before World War II broke out, and his service during World War II was as a civilian engineer. He told people — including me, when I interviewed him — that he couldn’t get back into the service because of his health. That wasn’t quite true.

His biographer, Bill Patterson, discovered that he’d been politically active in the California Democratic Party before the War and was considered too much of a pinko to be trusted. That’s pretty ironic considering that many years later he wrote a science-fiction novel which is generally regarded about as right-wing, pro-military, and even fascist as any ever written: Starship Troopers.

In the movie Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay Neil Patrick Harris — playing himself — is given a total pass under ridiculously suspicious circumstances by an ultra-right-wing military officer because Neil played a role in Starship Troopers, which is this douche bag’s favorite movie. That’s pretty much all that Hollywood types imagine they understand about the political thinking of author Robert A. Heinlein.

In Heinlein’s novel, a veteran doesn’t have to be a military veteran but can be a veteran of any government service — and most of them are non-military jobs. The deal is, you sign up, the government gives you tests to figure out what you do best and where you’re needed, and that’s what your service job consists of. If war breaks out you might end up with a weapon in your hand but otherwise probably not. There are no draftees in Heinlein’s novel — government service is 100% voluntary. At the end of your term of service — and not a second before — you get the right to vote. Currently serving personnel have no franchise, so voting is entirely by civilians … but civilians who have chosen to place their social group above themselves for part of their lives.

Now, I’m not down with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers qualification for voting because I don’t go along with taxation without representation. On the other hand, Heinlein never specified in the novel whether taxes could be levied on non-voters. So he finessed my possible objection by not dealing with it.

But Heinlein’s science-fictional thought experiment does have the advantage that the people who are voting are of net value to the people around them rather than being net burdens. Heinlein always considered, from his reading of history, that the downside of unrestricted democracy was the masses voting themselves benefits on the backs of a productive minority who were then enslaved to the power of the majority. He considered that a re-invention of slavery and opposed it.

For his opposition to working-class slavery Robert A. Heinlein has been branded a fascist by generations of morons who have no moral problem with picking the pockets of people who work harder and smarter than they feel like doing.

Mr. Heinlein passed into the next world over two decades ago, but I believe in life-after-death and he may be reading this.

This might not be apparent to those of you who know me only by word. Also, if you’ve met me in person, in the right decade, you could have known me when I was thin. There was a time I wore size 32 waist/34 length slacks and a 40 Long jacket.

I don’t need a reminder that I’m fat. I remember it quite well every time I get up from a chair or look in the bathroom mirror.

But I was reminded that I’m fat when an old pal of mine from my AnarchoVillage days — fellow Prometheus-laureate Victor Koman, perhaps best known for his 1996 novel (of which I was the first publisher) Kings of the High Frontier, recently published a new book titled Dr. K’s Sure-Fire Instant Weight-Loss Secrets.

Unusually, Koman simultaneously released his book not as an audiobook but as a videobook you can watch free on YouTube.

Spoiler Warning: Dr. K has only one “sure-fire instant weight-loss secret.” It’s “Eat less, exercise more!”

I’ve known Victor Koman since 1975. At no time in the 34 years I’ve known Victor Koman was he ever fat. Oh, he might have put on a few pounds in recent years when due to knee problems he couldn’t be as active as he used to be, but even at his most sedentary it never would have crossed my mind to think of him as fat.

Victor Koman was not fat the last time I saw him in person in spring of this year. Victor Koman is not fat appearing in the brand-new videobook edition of Dr. K’s Sure-Fire Instant Weight-Loss Secrets.

If you’re going to buy a book on weight-loss (or a funny book on the subject of weight loss) an author’s photo of Victor Koman will sell a hell of a lot more copies than an author’s photo of me.

If our face was the same, I’m the “before” picture and Victor Koman is the “after” picture.

I’m the Biggest Loser they show you in the promos. Victor Koman is the guy they trot out hugging everyone on the season finale.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Viewed as a thermodynamic paradigm, Victor Koman is absolutely correct about his weight-loss secret. It’s sound chemistry and physics. Restricting the availability of fuel while simultaneously increasing the consumption of fuel, for any thermodynamic engine, will result in a net depletion of the fuel supply. The human body is a thermodynamic engine. Excess fuel is stored on the human body as fat. Restricting intake of new fuel while simultaneously increasing the consumption of stored fuel will deplete an engine’s stored fuel supply.

I’m not stupid. I’m also not particularly weak-willed. You can’t be weak-willed and several times in your lifetime stick to a regime of diet (under 1000 calories, under 40 grams carbohydrate) and exercise (both cardio and weight training) sufficient to lose over 100 pounds, and a dozen other times lose over 50 pounds, plus faithfully sticking to Weight Watchers for over six months which resulted in a loss of only ten pounds. For several years of my life I walked over three miles every day. For close to a year I worked out at Bally’s for an hour four days a week.

I’ve also written books — including three novels which each took me years to complete. I also have written scripts and articles to deadline, and wrote, directed, produced, and post-produced an independent film. I also entrepreneured several businesses for years at a time. I’m not known as a quitter.

Yet, I’m fat. I suffer from Type II Diabetes, a disease that would be better controlled were I to become thinner.

Why hasn’t Victor Koman’s thermodynamic weight-loss secret worked to keep me fit?

This isn’t a problem just for me. Obesity has become more the rule than the exception in the United States and other parts of the developed world. Pundits blame fast foods, sugary drinks, candy machines, kids texting and playing with their Wii’s rather than biking and jumping rope, and of course the inevitable laments that the taxpayers aren’t being sucked dry enough to pay for school and after-school physical education and sports.

Look. I hardly ever eat fast food. I don’t eat candy. I don’t consume drinks with calories in them. When I eat dessert it’s Sugar Free Popsicles, Sugar Free Jello, and no-fat/no-sugar added “ice cream.” The bread I eat has 40 calories a slice and has low net carbs. I take the skin off my chicken and eat as much fish (not breaded and fried!) as I can afford.

I know how to diet. I’ve done it my entire life.

I know how to exercise. I know about cardio and weight-training and stretching.

I’ve tried diet aids and diet foods and diet supplements and diet plans. My body can’t tolerate most diet aids. They’re either stimulants that give me a racing and sometimes irregular heartbeat or they’re blockers that give me chronic lower-intestinal problems. (I won’t be more graphic than that.)

Durk Pearson, Sandy Shaw, and Will Block are personal friends I’ve talked to about my health problems, and I regularly read Life Enhancement. I’ve tried most of their recommended supplementing.

I’ve also had “the talk” with every primary-care physician who’s treated me over the years.

We’ve eliminated hypothyroidism as the cause of my weight gain.

I keep up with biological research. I read about genetic body types — ectomorphs, endomorphs, and mesomorphs — and genetic propensities to weight gain based on one’s ancestry. I read about ghrelin/leptin cycles, and lab experiments being done on rats. I read about theories that obesity can possibly be an actual disease spread by a virus.

Is obesity caused by a disease or a series of bad lifestyle habits? Is overeating an addiction like alcohol or cocaine?

If I’m so smart and strong-willed, why am I still fat?

Why, indeed?

I can tell you this much. I am deconditioned. At my current weight any attempt to exert myself runs the risk of overexertion leading to hyperventilation. Attempts to exercise result in painful muscle cramping.

Every attempt to restrict food intake makes me lethargic and sleepy.

In other words: my body appears to have a will of its own. It fights me and hurts me when I try to “Eat less, exercise more!”

Matching my ancedotal data, the medical research shows that 95% of patients who lose weight regain it within five years. Medical science has less of a handle on dieting and health than it does on how to treat cancer.

Diet and exercise is so ineffective a long-term treatment for so many obese patients that many doctors won’t even prescribe it anymore, and if you read medical literature as I’ve done you discover that invasive and often painful bariatric surgery — followed by weeks of a liquid diet then by a diet more restrictive than any I used to lose hundreds of pounds — is the only medical treatment doctors are willing to recommend to their severely obese patients.

Late-night TV has a lot of commercials and infomercials for various diet plans — Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Nutrasystem, cookie diets — plus no end of diet supplements. There isn’t a single one that doesn’t sport a disclaimer something like, “Results Not Typical.”

Yeah. How far would a car manufacturer get if next to the city and highway mileage figure on the sticker it had the disclaimer, “Results not typical”?

So what’s my recommendations for weight-loss success? Eat less and exercise more — if your body doesn’t try to kill you doing it.

And please, could the next Jonas Salk come up with an effective, non-invasive, and not painful or cognitively adverse treatment for obesity which doesn’t need that damned disclaimer?

Here’s one thing the AMA won’t tell you. Back when almost everybody smoked — and those were also the days when everybody typically ate butter, cheese, and red meat as staples — obesity, Diabetes, and even heart disease were far less common.

I suspect nicotine might be the cure for obesity, but who’s going to fund the research?

Maybe I should just pull a Nutty Professor on myself and even though I’m not a smoker try the nicotine patch.

But I’m just not that brave.

As for my recommendation for Victor Koman, it’s that his next book be Dr. K’s Sure-Fire Secrets For Getting Rich Quick.

It’s not even a debatable question. Whomever Christians believe betrayed Jesus — Herod, the Pharisees, or Judas — it was monotheists far closer to Jesus in their beliefs than the Romans who come in for the most criticism.

And of course. The Romans were cosmopolitan barbarians — educated, smart, and sophisticated, but savage, cruel, and superstitious.

The Hebrews and the messianic Judaic offshoot we now call Christianity were supposed to be better than that, so when they fall it recapitulates the story of the brightest, most beautiful, and best loved of the angels who became the darkest and most dangerous of God’s enemies.

An honest and noble enemy can be respected and admired even while we endeavor to destroy him for his evil ways. A friend who’s supposed to know better is held to a higher standard and therefore comes in for harsher criticism when he leaves the path of righteousness.

So it will be today when I call out the corrupt bastards who are handing over my country to my enemies.

I believe in individual liberty as did the men we call the Founding Fathers. When I read about the noble revolution they fought to free this continent from a mean, spiteful, and likely insane tyrant, my heart soars. Thomas Jefferson’s idealistic pragmatism in the Declaration of Independence hits my eyes like a rainbow and my ears like Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. The irreverent wit of Benjamin Franklin sets the tone for a style of skeptical humor handed down to us through Mark Twain and today the meat and potatoes of Vegas rooms and late-night TV. George Washington set a principled standard for leading a free people that we can only hope to duplicate; I doubt it can be surpassed. And it wasn’t just these three. Just listing the heroes and geniuses who crafted and fought history’s only libertarian revolution would turn this article into a book.

When I am critical of the Constitution of the United States it is not because my heart differs all that much from the men who engineered it as an experiment in foiling this low part of human nature that will warp any organization to steal their brothers’ hard-earned bread; it’s only because I see the failure of that experiment to cage the beast that I wonder whether a few centuries might have shown us the cracks in its foundation and offered us what Jefferson called “new guards.”

But I would happily live in the house the Framers built if only the damned roof wasn’t leaking buckets.

Seventy-four years after the Constitution was ratified, and the experiment in preserving American liberty had begun, a second American revolution variously called a civil war or a war between the states found a fissure in the Constitution, and ruptured it. It’s possible by the end of that second revolution the calendar days left for liberty on this continent were already numbered.

But nine decades later, when I was born, it was still generally believed that despite setbacks Americans enjoyed more liberty than anywhere else on planet earth — and if some Americans did not enjoy as much liberty as they used to, other Americans were winning liberties historically denied them.

If you read what I was writing only five years ago I still wrote that this was true. But if it is still true today the coming time when it will not be true can be measured in months, weeks, or even days.

Our country is made up of fifty states whose sovereignty is a whisper of what it used to be. As currently constituted no state — or county, city, or township within one — can resist the will of the federal government in any significant way. So the three branches of the federal government will now decide what liberties the American people do and don’t have.

We have a Supreme Court — the final arbiter of what is and is not allowed by the Constitution since Marbury v Madison in 1803 — that is on the verge of nullifying Article VI of the Constitution by making international law superior to the Constitution as the supreme law of the United States.

We have a Congress which passes laws with no constitutional authority to do so, and has usurped powers forbidden them by the Constitution.

We have an executive branch comprising departments having no constitutional authority, and that in conspiracy with Congress now seeks totalitarian control over the most personal aspects of our individual lives.

The Founding Fathers would have rebelled against this state of affairs long ago. Their spirits, if they still roam the earth and speak to us in our dreams, must wonder whether the American continent still has any Americans on it.

I do not blame the leadership of the Democratic Party for this degradation of my country. Since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt began in 1933 the Democratic Party’s objectives have been, openly and plainly, to reverse the principles of the American Revolution and smash the Constitutional limit on powers so that the federal government may enter into every sphere and realm of the American people’s lives. In this policy they are in union with much of the rest of the world which never understood or adopted the principle of individual sovereignty and limited agency which was the foundation of the American experiment; instead they would deliver America to the older principles that have governed the rest of the world — the principle that sovereignty rests with the State — whether monarchy, aristocracy, or plutocracy — and that the common man only has those privileges granted by his betters.

Communism, socialism, and fascism were democratically utopian in theory but in practice have always proved plutocratic, aristocratic, and technocratic. In the name of the common people dictators and their minions have acted with ruthless imperiousness that no Caesar or Khan ever surpassed.

Democrats are the party of returning America to the rest of the world, of sounding the death knell to the American Revolution, of making America Sunset-View Atlantic again.

The Republican Party, and the conservative movement that has fueled whatever political success it has ever achieved, often used the Founding Fathers’ libertarian language to distinguish themselves from the Democrats. Honest conservative Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan meant it, too. But even Reagan did not understand how the conservative movement had been hijacked by persons whose principles were deaf to the American Revolution.

A few days ago when a Muslim Army Psychiatrist went on a murderous shooting spree on a domestic American army base, those who are called conservative pundits spent their air time and print space debating whether the shooter was a Muslim terrorist or merely a stressed-out whack-job. They did not ask why during the eight years of a conservative Republican administration — most of it following the worst domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history, and much of it when conservative Republicans also had a majority in Congress — never authorized members of the American military and their families to carry guns with them wherever they went on a daily basis to defend our country against terrorist attacks. It never crossed their minds that the disarmament of American soldiers — much less the citizen militia — would be the first issue the Founding Fathers would have addressed.

What was it that these conservatives were supposed to be conserving? Are they less concerned with American deaths than they are with containing Islam so Israel can last long enough for Jews to rebuild the Temple so the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse can saddle up?

A year before that — when the nominee of the Republican Party in the 2008 election suspended his campaign to lobby his fellow senators — in cahoots with the Republican President of the United States — to bail out private bankers on the credit of the United States taxpayer — no major Republican governors, senators, mayors, or congressional representatives who called themselves conservatives considered this a breaking of faith sufficient enough to repudiate their support for the nominee.

Or — a few months before that — when the leadership of the Nevada Republican Party suspended their state party’s presidential nominating convention because they knew a complete count of the ballots would send a delegation pledged to a candidate who by his voting record had proved that he actually believed in the Constitution of the United States — no prominent conservative Republican spokesman protested.

Before that when the Republican President of the United States suspended habeas corpus, expanded Medicare, ballooned federal spending beyond all previous limits, and like so many previous Republican presidents levied war without seeking a Declaration from Congress — that Congress would have given him — conservatives remained loyal to the Republican Party.

Now, today, when the Congress of the United States passed a bill that would nationalize medicine and penalize American citizens for refusing to purchase a commercial product — Repubicans calling themselves conservatives spoke as if the worst aspect of this monstrous invasion of the lives of every American was that taxpayer money could be spent on abortion.

Abortion.

That word is not in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States.

One could be a Soviet commissar and oppose abortion on the grounds that the State needs more cannon fodder.

One could be a Pope who has no problem with a communist world economy and oppose abortion.

Yet today’s litmus test of whether or not one is a conservative is not whether one supports the individual liberty to which our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, but whether or not one favors invading a hospital operating room with the drawn guns of a sheriff to usurp a woman’s conscientious moral decision as to whether ending gestation is violating God’s will.

It is not whether one believes that terrorism is best fought by arming the entire citizenry as the Founders told us to do, but by obsessing whether a criminal shooting up a military base of the United States is a committed enemy or just a madman.

I know Democrats have no use for the America handed down to us. They have been working for the better part of a century to undo it

But when that moment comes that this writer can no longer brag that Americans are freer than the citizens of any other country, it will not be the Democrats that this writer blames.