Official teaser trailer for the forthcoming futuristic thriller, Alongside Night.

The film is currently being edited and this trailer uses unfinished assets.

The full trailer won’t be produced until the movie is completed and ready to be shown, later in 2013. — JNS

It read:

This letter will serve as notification to you that (clinic name) is withdrawing you from further treatment as of the date of this letter. You are hereby discharged from care by all of our physicians and treatment locations. … We suggest that you place yourself under the care of another physician and medical facility immediately.

My doctor was firing me as a patient? What was up? Was I dying from some disease they had failed to properly diagnose, and they were hoping I was dead before I discovered their malpractice and sued? Did the nurse who couldn’t draw blood from my arm file a grievance against me as a preemptive move? Had I failed to pay a bill?

None of the above.

I phoned the doctor’s office today. They are no longer accepting any patient who doesn’t sign up for their “Concierge Service” — a yearly fee in four figures for unlimited clinic visits.

Cash only.

No medical insurance accepted, no Medicare, total opting out from any part of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — ObamaCare.

Welcome to the future of private medical practice in the United States.

Enough is enough.

The slaughter of innocent children, and of the heroic teachers and school administrators, who threw their bodies in between the children and the madman who brought high firepower into what the law dumbly calls a “gun-free school zone,” must never happen again.

Gun bans don’t work at stopping massacres. They didn’t despite strict gun-control laws in Dunblane, Scotland or at a summer children’s camp in Norway, nor in multiple gun-free zones in schools, movie theaters, trains, and malls.

We all say that insanity is defined by doing the same thing and expecting different results. Let’s act on this understanding and end the utopian fantasy that legal bans of weapons magically dispose of the weapons.

I am not going to argue the Second Amendment here. I am arguing practical common sense.

If there are to be taxpayer funded schools and taxpayer funded institutions of higher education, those who teach and administer these institutions must have the means to protect their students and the legal liability for failing to do so once granted the means. They must have what even police in this country do not have: a duty to protect.

I propose not a freedom but a responsibility.

Every public-school and public institution of higher learning must make it a requirement that every teacher and school administrator take training in handguns equivalent to the standards that police officers and pilots must qualify, renew this qualification every six months, and openly carry sidearms while on duty.

Either this, or stop pretending that government exists to protect the people and be done with this epic failure of political solutions to social problems.

The Alongside Night Official Movie Trailer was premiered at Libertopia this past weekend. — JNS

The Alongside Night Official Music Video was premiered at Libertopia this past weekend during my talk in the second video. — JNS

Over a year ago when I asked Soleil O’Neal-Schulman to compose a theme song for the Alongside Night movie based on the poem I’d written back in the 70′s for the forematter of the novel I did not specify a style for the song; and a month or so ago our discussions involved how her more recent music was more alternative and less likely to satisfy what I was looking for. I simply told her, “I trust your judgment; I trust your taste” — and left it at that.

When Soleil delivered a one-verse demo, here’s what I wrote her:

“The novel Alongside Night is dedicated to Samuel Edward Konkin III, whose vision of black-market traders developing a libertarian revolutionary code first inspired me to organize two conferences held off-season at my father’s brother and sister-in-law’s Camp Mohawk in the Berkshires in fall 1974 and spring 1975; and to begin writing Alongside Night in 1974. Sam was one of my closest friends when I was your age, living in New York City, and we not only had libertarian ideas in common but we also shared a lot of the same esthetics in books, movies, and music.

“Sam and I made it a practice always to go together on opening day to see the latest James Bond movie, and we both loved the John Barry underscores and the opening song which set the tone for the movie, often sung by female artists like Shirley Bassey (“Goldfinger,” “Diamonds are Forever,” “Moonraker”), Gladys Knight (“License to Kill”), Nancy Sinatra (“You Only Live Twice”), Lulu (“The Man With the Golden Gun”), Carly Simon (“Nobody Does It Better,” from The Spy Who Loved Me, and Sheena Easton (“For Your Eyes Only”).

“You have just given Alongside Night a James Bond theme song. It’s exactly what Sam would have wanted. It’s perfect.”

I wrote two more verses with Soleil’s close guidance so in a way this song is a three way collaboration between myself at around age 24, myself at age 59, and Soleil at age 21.

Soleil provided a first-draft full production of the song to Alongside Night‘s composer, Daniel May, and the final production is their collaboration.

Music by Soleil O’Neal-Schulman
Lyrics by J. Neil Schulman
Performed by Soleil O’Neal-Schulman
Produced by Daniel May

–J. Neil Schulman, October 11, 2012

Here are the song lyrics:

Alongside Night
Parallel Day
By Fearful Flight
In Garish Gray
Will Dawn Alight
And Not Decay
Alongside Night?

Alongside Night
Invisible Day
We hide our light
Out of the way
They bring the fight
We won’t obey
Alongside Night

Alongside Night
Agorist Day
To wake our fight
To make our way
We seize the right
So come what may
Alongside Night

Copyright © 2012 Alongside Night, LLC. All rights reserved.

At Libertopia on October 13, 2012, writer/director J. Neil Schulman talks about the evolution of Alongside Night from a novel published in 1979 to a feature film currently in production. This presentation includes some exclusive surprise content.

I came up with this during a discussion at Libertopia this past weekend. — JNS

Creating, expanding, and securing Agorist markets has a fundamental problem built in: how do you promote to a customer base products and services which by their nature require anonymity, stealth, and secrecy, all the while providing the reputations for honest dealing that businesses require to acquire customer accounts?

I think I’ve come up with a robust solution to that problem: divide Agorists into two categories, each at arm’s length from the other.

AU is the chemical symbol for gold, so I played with those letters in Alongside Night to create the concept of Agorist Undergrounds — AU‘s.

I’m going to use those two letters again, but this time with a slash between them, to define a new strategic Agorist vision.

A = Aboveground
U = Underground

Agorism Poster by thorsmitersaw

The “A” Agorists will live openly visible to the current political-economic system, and will be as compliant to laws and regulations as is possible given that many of these laws and regulations are virtually impossible to comply with — they’re too complex, confusing, and burdensome. But the “A” Agorists will protest only by word, not by deed. We will use the remnants of free expression to educate the public on Agorist theory and practice while not practicing it ourselves. We will be known by our real names and reputations and not anonymous. We will be writers, speakers, and entertainers. We will be the visible face of Agorism while being openly clear that looking to us for illegal activities is a dry well.

The “U” Agorists will be building and expanding the underground markets. They will be anonymous, masked, hidden, encrypted, and stealthy. They will not comply with laws and regulations that violate liberty as defined in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and other documents that have been the foundation for post-Enlightenment individual freedom. The “U” Agorists will practice what the “A” Agorists can only preach.

The “A” Agorists will have no contact with the “U” Agorists so authorities seeking to use the “A”‘s to trace the “U”‘s will find that a dead end.

We will live in different worlds until that day when the “U”‘s are successful enough to open the marketplaces to a visible aboveground free economy.

I am an “A” Agorist.

J. Neil Schulman
October 16, 2012

“I can’t remember ever listening to a presidential debate where I never heard a single cough from the audience.”
–Brad Linaweaver

In the half hour before Wednesday’s presidential debate between President Barack Obama and challenger Governor Mitt Romney, representatives of the Commission on Presidential Debates and moderator Jim Lehrer threatened the University of Denver audience with everything short of waterboarding if they uttered a single squeak during the debates.

Denver Presidential Debate, October 3, 2012

It’s obvious this policy is intended to suppress stocking the audience with partisans for each of the candidates who would turn this into just another campaign rally; but the problem is that this demand for absolute silence would have denatured the best moments of prior debates, particularly the 1980 debate when Ronald Reagan told Jimmy Carter, “Well, there you go again!” and in 1988 when Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle, “I knew Jack Kennedy and, Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

It foils the whole purpose of the debates if the wit of the candidate lays eggs because the audience has been forbidden to laugh.

This process is made worse by audio technology that with highly directional mikes for the candidates and moderator, combined with background noise threshold suppressors, effectively censors audience reaction for the listening TV and radio audiences.

The result as applied to this past Wednesday’s debate — despite the usual tropes from Fox News pundits that the debate format favored President Obama — is that Obama delivered two to three times as many laugh lines as Romney … and it worked to the advantage of Romney that the rules silenced not only the audience but censored one of the two candidates’ superior debate tools.

Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s Palace
3570 South Las Vegas Boulevard
Las Vegas, NV 89109
Cuisine
Buffet (Casual Dining)
Hours Of Operation
7am – 10pm daily
Dress Code Casual

The opening of the $17 million Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s Palace this week has been greatly hyped as a breakthrough in buffet dining, because the food is supposedly prepared fresh rather than just dumped in steam trays.

I decided to give it a try, arriving at 6:00 PM Friday; it was a two-hour wait in line — and a $40 check per person (using my players club card for a $3.00 discount) to get in.

That two-hour wait and entry price about double the average Las Vegas buffet colors everything about this review.

It’s a good buffet with a lot of variety. Everything I had was well-prepared, and I sampled a bite of different offerings: prime rib, rib-eye steak, lamb chop, snow crab legs, a mixed seafood salad, sushi, a hamburger bite, fish & chips, fried chicken & sweet potato fries, asparagus, broccoli, and for dessert the custard bread pudding, creme brulet, and a chocolate parfait.

It was all just fine.

But it wasn’t worth a two-hour wait and a $40 per person check.

Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s Palace

For one thing, when you walk in, the display case shows Maine lobster and Maryland soft-shell crab. Neither was offered and the crab was the same snow crab legs you can get at any Friday seafood buffet in Las Vegas. The Royal Seafood Buffet at the Rio used to have rock lobster available; if Caesar’s wanted to impress me that their buffet was special at least this would have been in the seafood section, if not the Maine lobster they display.

There was nothing really exotic among the meats. The last time I was at the Bellagio buffet they were carving venison and buffalo steak. The meat offerings at this buffet were nothing you couldn’t get at any other buffet in Vegas.

The sushi was freshly prepared but there was little variety. There’s a far superior sushi and Asian seafood buffet at Makino’s on Decatur for about $25.

There were no juices offered with the beverages, and the coffee was about Denny’s quality. The soft drink selection was no better than the cheapest buffet in Las Vegas: Pepsi or Diet Pepsi, and Iced Tea.

I will give the buffet this: I’ve never eaten better asparagus.

Everything else was fine but not markedly better than other Vegas buffets.

All in all, this buffet would be fine at half the price and without the wait. My rating: 6.5 out of 10.

I would have written this earlier on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attacks, but I was busy looking at actors’ reels all day. — JNS

Osama bin Laden and his cohorts launched the first ultra-low budget indie war. They demonstrated the Moneyball of war a year before the Oakland Athletics demonstrated Moneyball in baseball.

For the price of finding and training a small crew of fanatical acolytes to hijack and pilot four commercial jetliners, the al-Qaeda attacks produced as many casualties and physical destruction as the Empire of Japan — with a fleet of aircraft carriers, bombers, and submarines — inflicted on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

The 2011 movie Moneyball tells us the story of how Billy Beane’s under-financed 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team — whose players kept on getting raided by teams with bigger budgets, to hire away what in the movie biz we’d call A-list players — was able to produce an unprecedented series of 20 unbroken wins by hiring players not by their star reputations but by what hits they could produce on the playing field.

This may have been a genius move in baseball but it’s business as usual to indie filmmakers, who find innovative way after innovative way to make movies on a shoestring budget by concentrating on putting story and performance on the screen rather than explosions, car crashes, and CGI-driven special effects headlined by stars who get “paid-or-played” millions of bucks regardless of whether the movies they headline ever make a profit.

Indie Warmaker Osama bin Laden

So in the same way that Billy Beane showed that the under-financed Oakland Athletics could be competitive on the baseball diamond with rich teams like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, and the 2007 movie Paranormal Activity showed that a movie made for $11,500 could produce box-office revenues of $283,000,000, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda showed that a microbudget raid could produce the results only previously achieved by imperial attacks.

In the eleven years since the 9/11 attacks Republicans have chided Democrats for regarding 9/11 as a criminal matter rather than a war.

They’re both wrong. It’s not traditional war. It wasn’t a crime like a bank robbery.

The truth is, al-Qaeda rewrote the rules of engagement forever after.

They made a major war possible for the price of a low-budget movie.

The day before the shootings at a movie theater in Colorado I took issue with a screenwriter who uses his scripts as a platform for his campaign to disarm the American people of defensive firearms. My title was Aaron Sorkin, You Magnificent Bastard!

This time I’m just writing about vicious and stupid bastards.

The 24-year-old creep who bought a ticket for a first showing of the new Batman movie at a multiplex in Aurora, Colorado a couple of nights ago — and after propping open an exit door re-entered the theater protected by body armor and shot up the place with a high body-count of women and children — was not the Joker.

The Joker is an iconic comic-book character created by Bob Kane, first appearing Spring 1940 in Batman Issue No. 1 and portrayed on screen in TV and movies by actors including Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, and Heath Ledger.

You can’t blame people who write comic books, or make movies, or wear costumes of characters in their favorite comic books and movies, for what happened in a darkened movie theater.

James Holmes was not only not the Joker but he also was neither Sherlock Holmes nor John Holmes. He wasn’t a brilliant mind or a movie actor with an enormous prick.

He was just a cowardly little prick with delusions of grandeur who bought a ticket to a children’s movie and used what the theater management had declared to be a gun-free zone to shoot and kill unarmed civilians. He had potential but wasted his life. He is nothing special.

Massacres of the unarmed are not infrequent events on this planet, and every time they happen there are jokers with no ability to learn from history who use these killing fields to call for further victim disarmament. What the Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas; Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado; the Long Island Railroad; the campuses of the University of Iowa or Virginia Tech; Dunblane, Scotland; and the United States Army Base at Fort Hood, Texas all had in common is that it was illegal for the victims to carry firearms in case some demented joker who didn’t abide by gun laws decided it was their day to die.

I’ve written on guns and criminology. A lot. My first Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times, published January 1, 1992, was titled “A Massacre We Didn’t Hear About.” It was about a mass shooting in a coffee shop that was prevented by a civilian carrying a concealed handgun. I interviewed that gentleman, Thomas Glenn Terry, plus on other occasions other gun-carriers who also stopped shooting attacks.

“Buy a gun. Learn to use it safely and appropriately. Carry it with you at all times. Be prepared to defend yourself, your loved ones, and your neighborhoods.”

-J. Neil Schulman on ABC TV World News Tonight, May 2, 1992, during the Los Angeles Riots

After the Spring 1992 Los Angeles riots I applied for and received a California license to carry a concealed firearm — which I carried in California until 2007 — and as training I took California’s PC-832 course, and passed the California POST exam. My Powers of Arrest and Communications and Tactics instructor, Jim Saharek, was a retired U.S. Secret Service agent; my Firearms instructor, Barry Dineen, was an LAPD officer. I got a perfect 4.0 grade in all three modules, as well as on the final POST exam.

POST Certificate

James Holmes apparently wanted to survive his attack so he wore body armor and a gas mask and incapacitated his victims before shooting them by throwing tear gas cannisters into the theater. He was armed with a handgun, a shotgun, and a rifle.

A family member who lives in Colorado, and has a license to carry a concealed handgun, tells me every Cinemark movie theater she’s gone to has the same sign the Cinemark Century 16 Theater displayed to its customers: Firearms Prohibited. This sign informed James Holmes that the management was guaranteeing nobody would be shooting back.

Colorado Cinemark Sign
Photo by Ray Hickman

Nonetheless, Holmes was concerned enough about the possibility of an off-duty police officer deciding to take his kid to the movies that he armored up.

I’ve heard over the last day or so a lot of uninformed chatter about how nobody with a gun could have stopped James Holmes because he was wearing body armor. It’s crap. Body armor is designed to save the wearer’s life but it doesn’t stop the shock and pain of being shot. A handgun round to the center of body mass would have knocked the wind out of James Holmes and the shock might have caused him to faint. In any event, the pain of being shot would have distracted him. Further, defensive handgun courses teach head shots, and a round would have easily penetrated the plastic gas mask, making a kill shot to the head possible.

As demonstrators have learned, wrapping a shirt around your mouth and nose can slow the effects of tear gas, and by shooting at Holmes’ muzzle flash in a darkened theater, Holmes would have been stopped from randomly shooting children, and created some cover for theater patrons to escape.

James Holmes did not have to be killed with a round through his body armor to stop his shooting rampage. He just needed not to be the only one firing a gun.

Yes, some innocent person might have been shot by “friendly fire.” But the outcome would have been a lot fewer shooting victims than the dozen deaths and 58 other shooting victims that happened with no one shooting back.

Once again, the media focuses on the psychology of the shooter rather than the practical question of how to defend against these unpredictable shootings.

Here are the actual facts on Defensive Gun Use that Fox News or CNN won’t tell you in their endless moaning about how tragic and unpreventable this latest shooting gallery was.

According to the National Self Defense Survey conducted by Florida State University criminologists in 1994, the rate of Defensive Gun Uses can be projected nationwide to approximately 2.5 million per year — one Defensive Gun Use every 13 seconds.

Among 15.7% of gun defenders interviewed nationwide during The National Self Defense Survey, the defender believed that someone “almost certainly” would have died had the gun not been used for protection — a life saved by a privately held gun about once every 1.3 minutes. (In another 14.2% cases, the defender believed someone “probably” would have died if the gun hadn’t been used in defense.)

In 83.5% of these successful gun defenses, the attacker either threatened or used force first — disproving the myth that having a gun available for defense wouldn’t make any difference.

In 91.7% of these incidents the defensive use of a gun did not wound or kill the criminal attacker (and the gun defense wouldn’t be called “newsworthy” by newspaper or TV news editors). In 64.2% of these gun-defense cases, the police learned of the defense, which means that the media could also find out and report on them if they chose to.

In 73.4% of these gun-defense incidents, the attacker was a stranger to the intended victim. (Defenses against a family member or intimate were rare — well under 10%.) This disproves the myth that a gun kept for defense will most likely be used against a family member or someone you love.

In over half of these gun defense incidents, the defender was facing two or more attackers — and three or more attackers in over a quarter of these cases. (No means of defense other than a firearm — martial arts, pepper spray, or stun guns — gives a potential victim a decent chance of getting away uninjured when facing multiple attackers.)

In 79.7% of these gun defenses, the defender used a concealable handgun. A quarter of the gun defenses occured in places away from the defender’s home.

Source: “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun,” by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, Volume 86, Number 1, Fall, 1995

More gun-control could not have stopped James Holmes. The strictest gun control in Dunblane, Scotland — or even mass killings using a knife in Akihabara and Osaka, Japan — have never stopped these kinds of unprovoked massacres.

A public with a critical mass of individuals carrying handguns, ready at all times to shoot back at sudden attackers, has worked to minimize casualties from terrorist attacks in Israel. See The Israeli Answer to Terrorism by Massad Ayoob.

Israel does not have more civilians who can carry defensive firearms than the United States. We have the Second Amendment and Israel doesn’t.

But by disarming its theater patrons Cinemark accepted legal liability for their safety, and the victims disarmed by these enablers need to sue this corporation into bankruptcy for its failure to protect them from James Holmes.

The jokers who keep enabling gun massacres are the advocates of making us work, shop, and see movies in gun-free zones, and these massacres won’t stop until we stop these jokers from disarming us.

My 1994 book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns made me a celebrity to the Second Amendment movement. Charlton Heston wrote of the book, “”Mr. Schulman’s book is the most cogent explanation of the gun issue I have yet read. He presents the assault on the Second Amendment in frighteningly clear terms. Even the extremists who would ban firearms will learn from his lucid prose.”

Dennis Prager who had opposed private ownership of guns, told his national radio audience, “He has truly helped change my mind on guns and self-defense.”

Liberal Los Angeles talk-show host Michael Jackson said of me on his KABC radio show, “His research is impeccable. Nobody expresses the other side better.”

My writings on firearms have been used by witnesses on both sides of the gun-control debate in congressional hearings before the House Subcommittee on Crime.

I’m webmaster of The World Wide Web Gun Defense Clock that calculates and comparies the number of defensive-gun-uses to criminal uses, suicides, and accidents, based on peer-reviewed academic, and law-enforcement, criminological studies.

One chapter from Stopping Power was chosen to be reprinted in the book Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Health and Society, Second Edition, Edited by Eileen K. Daniel, (Dushkin Publishing Group/Brown & Benchmark Publishers, 1996), as rebuttal to “Guns in the Household” by Jerome P. Kassirer, MD, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Another chapter, “Talk At Temple Beth Shir Shalom,” was reprinted in the book, Guns in America : A Reader , Jan E. Dizard, editor (New York University Press, 1999), and my chapter was praised in the Village Voice’s review as “a tough Jew manifesto.”

Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns