At once he felt like slapping himself: Was that all he thought of his father? Just someone he “needed”? Somebody to provide him with the material artifacts of life: a bed, binoculars, books, camera, typewriter, trip to Europe? No. His needs were for things less tangible but nonetheless real. Teaching him to defend himself. Staying up with him one night when he was vomiting. Answering any question openly and intelligently. Or just being the kind of man who took time to teach him viable principles, living them himself without evasion.

Even though his father had not been stingy with the free time he had had, there had never been enough of it, so far as Elliot was concerned. During the academic year, Dr. Vreeland had worked a demanding teaching schedule, while his summers — spent with his family at their New Hampshire lodge — resultantly became his only chance for research, contemplation, and fulfilling publishing commitments.

Elliot reflected that the two of them had not been close in the stereotypical father-son sense. They had never gone camping together, played touch football in Central Park, or eaten hot dogs at Shea Stadium. Moreover, his father’s Viennese upbringing had restrained him from any open displays of affection. But Elliot now recalled sharply that, in Boston four years earlier, Dr. Vreeland had been dissatisfied with every preparatory school to which he had considered sending him. Then, while addressing a monetary symposium in New Orleans, he had met Dr. Fischer and found her adhering to an academic philosophy identical to his own. After returning north and visiting Ansonia, Dr. Vreeland — a department head at Harvard who had not yet won his Nobel Prize — accepted a less rich professorship at Columbia and moved his family to New York.

Elliot found himself taking deep gulps of cold air into his lungs as if they were oxygen-starved. He wondered what the crushing, closed-in sensation was. He wondered if what he felt was what a son was supposed to feel upon learning of his father’s death. He wondered whether he should cry — or why he was not crying — although he felt so physically wrenched apart. He wondered whether he loved his father. He felt helpless even to define the components of such a love.

This he knew: he wanted desperately to tell his father that he appreciated what he had been to him.

They were just passing the bricked-up entrance to the perpetually unfinished Central Park Shuttle, a subway that was to have linked eastside and westside IRT lines as Sixty-ninth Street, when Denise tugged at Elliot’s arm, stopping him. Behind them, unnoticed among years’ worth of graffiti and handbills, was a recently put-up poster announcing Dr. Vreeland’s appearance at a Citizens for a Free Society rally the next morning.

“Elliot, I’m sorry but I had to,” said Denise.

“Well, you didn’t have to pull off my arm. I would’ve –”

“That’s not it,” she interrupted. She paused, biting on her lower lip. “Daddy’s not dead.”

Elliot’s expressions changed from confusion, through relief, to anger as cold as the wind whipping through his hair.

“Ell, it’s not what you think. Mom told me to tell you that. She called me out of Juilliard.”

Elliot regarded his sister as though she might still be lying. Her habitual truthfulness stilled this thought. “Then what the –”

“No time to explain now. We have to get home. Fast. Which is our first problem.” Denise referred to a total transit strike in the city that encompassed not only all subways and busses but medallion taxis as well.

Elliot thought a moment, considering and rejecting an illegal walk across Central park, then motioned Denise to follow.

It took only a few minutes to walk Sixty-ninth Street the two blocks over to Broadway. They crossed to the west side, stood at the curb and waited. They waited five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes later they were still unable to find anything resembling a gypsy cab.

“Are you sure you know what a tzigane looks like?” asked Denise.

“No,” Elliot admitted. “That’s a problem. When you’re cruising illegally, you try not to look like anything in particular. A dozen might have passed us already.”

“Then how do we find one?”

“We don’t. We wait for one to find us.”

To prove his point, within a minute a black sedan stopped at the traffic light they were opposite. The tzigane — a heavyset black man — waved out the window. Elliot waved back to the driver, then told Denise in a low voice. “I’ll parley the price.”

Presently the light changed, the sedan pulling alongside. The tzigane reached back, opening the rear curbside door. “Climb in.”

Elliot shook his head just enough for Denise to catch, then walked around to the driver’s side. “First,” he said, “how much?”

The tzigane twirled a plain gold band on his right hand — a nervous habit, Elliot supposed. “Where you headed?”

“Park Avenue between Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth.”

“Two thousand blues — up front.” Elliot winced. The price was four times what a medallion taxi had charged for the same run several weeks earlier. The tzigane continued twirling his ring back and forth. Elliot walked around the car, gesturing Denise to get in, and a moment later followed her; the car remained motionless. The tzigane turned to him and said, “Blues first.”

Elliot removed his wallet and handed bills forward. They were blue-colored notes, no engraving on one side, on the other side hasty engraving proclaiming them “legal tender of the United States of America for all debts, public and private.” More than anything else, it resembled Monopoly money.

“This is a thousand,” said the tzigane.

“That’s right,” Elliot replied. “You’ll get the other thousand when we arrive.” The tzigane shrugged, revved his turbine, and with a jolt the sedan started down Broadway.

Not a minute later, when the car passed Sixty-fifth Street, Elliot suddenly leaned forward. “Hey! You missed the turnoff to the park.”

“Relax, there ain’t no meter runnin’.”

Elliot began contemplating ways for Denise and himself to jump from the car. “But why aren’t you taking the shortcut?”

“Only medallions and busses allowed through — and this is a private car, right?”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay, bro.”

Elliot did not relax, however, until the sedan pulled up in front of his address, a luxury high-rise. A uniformed doorman, Jim, came out of the building to open the car door for them. After paying his balance — with an extra three hundred New Dollars as tip — Denise and he got out. “Thanks,” Elliot said.

“Any time, my man.” The tzigane smiled then added, “Next time maybe you won’t be so tight. Laissez-faire.”

Elliot began to greet Jim with his usual smile, but Denise nudged her brother, who remembered himself at a point appropriate to someone wishing to appear pleasant under trying circumstances. As Jim opened the building door, he nodded in the direction of a half-dozen reporters — some with videotape cameras, others cassette recorders, still others with only notebooks — sitting at the far end of the lobby. “Your mother said you shouldn’t talk to them,” Jim whispered to the couple.

It was too late, though. The reporters looked up as they entered then literally pounced. “Hey, you’re the Vreeland kids, aren’t you?” one man shouted, rushing forward with his camera.

Jim blocked him. “Mrs. Vreeland said no interviews.”

A newspaper woman managed to block Elliot. “Please,” she said, “just tell us the cause of death.”

Elliot glanced at Denise helplessly. “A heart attack late this morning,” Denise told the woman.

Immediately the others began throwing out more questions, but Jim held them back as Elliot and Denise fled the lobby to the elevators. Luckily, one was waiting for them. They rode it up to the fiftieth floor and walked to their apartment, a gray steel door at the corridor’s far end with the number 50L and the Vreeland name.

It was a warm, luxurious apartment with oriental rugs, many fine antiques, body-sensing climate control, and numerous paintings — mostly acrylic gouache by their mother, Cathryn Vreeland, who had a moderate artistic following. In typical New York fashion, the windows — and a door to the apartment terrace — were covered with Venetian blinds, now lowered to darken the apartment from the afternoon sun.

As Elliot and Denise entered the apartment, they heard the muffled sound of voices coming from the master bedroom. ” . . . political suicide, sheer madness,” Elliot overheard a hushed whisper. They continued through an L-shaped hallway into the master bedroom, where Dr. and Mrs. Vreeland were bending over a large FerroFoam suitcase on the bed, trying with noticeable difficulty to close it.

Whatever doubts remained in Elliot’s mind vanished in shocking relief.

The elder Vreelands did not immediately notice their offsprings’ entrance, engaged as they were with their discussion emphasizing each attempt on the suitcase. Dr. Vreeland said, “You would think they would at least be bright enough to follow EUCOMTO’s policy, rather than this regression to further insanity.” His speech retained only a trace of his native Vienna.

“They’re trapped by their own logic,” said Mrs. Vreeland, pressing hard on the suitcase. “You predicted this and prepared for it, so stop berating yourself about something you couldn’t control.”

“I didn’t take the possibility seriously enough, Cathryn. I had no business risking my family –” Dr. Vreeland looked up. “Thank God you’re finally home. Did they give you any trouble at school?”

Denise shook her head. Elliot said with some difficulty, “No.”

Dr. Vreeland looked at his son with sudden compassion. “I’m terribly sorry, Ell. We had to catch you off guard to make my cover story credible. You know I wouldn’t have done this if it weren’t necessary.”

Elliot forced a smile. “Uh — that’s okay, Dad.”

His father smiled back. “Good. Now,” he said briskly, “do you two think you can help us get his damned suitcase closed?”

Next in Alongside Night is Chapter III.

Alongside Night
Parallel day
By fearful flight
In garish gray
Will dawn alight
And not decay
Alongside night?

Elliot Vreeland felt uneasy the moment he entered his classroom.

Everything seemed perfectly normal. Though in an old brownstone building, the classroom held several late-model teaching systems including a video wallscreen that was also used as an intercom, but it also contained a traditional chalkboard, teacher’s front desk, and a dozen tablet armchairs. All but one of Elliot’s seven classmates had attended Ansonia Preparatory with him since freshman year; by this February in his final semester their faces were loathsomely familiar.

The exception was at the window, gazing out to Central Park West, New York.

The two did not look as if they should have had anything in common — at least by the standards of previous generations. Son of the Nobel-laureate economist, Elliot Vreeland was archetypically Aryan — tall, blond, and blue-eyed — though with the slightest facial softening that precluded stereotyped Aryan imperiousness. Phillip Gross, shorter than Elliot, wirier, with black hair and silent eyes, had emigrated to Israel from the United States as an infant, being shipped back to an uncle in New York when four years later his parents had been machine-gunned by Palestinian guerrillas. The two boys had been close friends since Phillip had enrolled at Ansonia in their junior year.

Phillip spoke without turning as soon as Elliot drew near. “You didn’t do it, did you, Ell?”

“I told you I wouldn’t.”

Phillip faced his friend. “Well, you just may get away with it.”

Before Elliot could inquire further, the assistant headmaster entered the room.

Benjamin Harper dropped an attaché case onto the teacher’s desk, then began erasing the chalkboard while the students, for lack of any other ideas, took their seats. “Tobias is out sick?” Elliot whispered to Phillip as they took seats in the back. Phillip smiled secretively but did not answer.

“I have several announcements to make,” said Harper, shelving the eraser. He was a thin-boned, impeccably attired black man in his late thirties, sporting mustache, short au naturel hair, and glasses. Waiting for the students to quiet, he continued: “First. Mrs. Tobias has left Ansonia permanently. Consequently, she will no longer be teaching Contemporary Civilization.”

Elliot glanced at Phillip sharply. “You saw her walking out?” he whispered. Phillip shrugged noncommittally.

“Second,” the assistant head went on,” as it is too late in the term for Dr. Fischer and me to hire a replacement, I personally will be taking over this class.”

“I’ll bet Tobias was canned,” Elliot stage-whispered to Phillip. Several students giggled.

Mr. Harper eyed Elliot sharply. “‘Dismissed,’ ‘discharged,’ ‘fired,’ ‘removed,’ ‘let go’ — perhaps even ‘ousted.’ But not ‘canned,’ Mr. Vreeland. I dislike hearing the language maltreated.” Elliot flushed slightly. “Shall we continue?”

Mason Langley, the one-in-every-class teacher’s pet, raised his hand. Harper recognized him. “Mrs. Tobias assigned us a three-hundred-word essay last week,” he said in a nasal voice. “It’s due today. Do you want it turned in?”

Several students groaned, looked disgusted, and blew raspberries at Langley, who seemed to gain great satisfaction from all this negative attention. Elliot glared at Langley and thought, I’ll kill him. Harper looked as if he shared the students’ opinions but seemed to control his feelings. “What was the assigned topic?” he asked.

“The Self-Destruction of the Capitalist System,” said Langley.

Harper unsuccessfully concealed his disgust at the propagandistic title. “Very well. Pass them forward.”

As each student — with the single exception of Elliot — passed forward a composition, it became evident to Harper why Elliot had looked more angrily at Langley than had all the others.

After collecting seven essays, Harper said, “Your essay, Mr. Vreeland?” Elliot answered resignedly, “I didn’t do one, Mr. Harper.”

“Surely you must have some feelings on the topic?”

Elliot nodded. “I disagree with the premise.”

“Did you express this disagreement to Mrs. Tobias when she assigned the topic?” Elliot nodded again. “What was her reply?”

“She said that I can start handing out the topics when I become a teacher.”

“I see,” Harper said slowly. “All right. You may present your rebuttal in a composition due the day after tomorrow — this Friday. Let’s make it a thousand words. Is that satisfactory?”

“I guess so. If I can manage a thousand words.”

“I myself have that problem,” Harper said brightly. “Few editorial pages will buy anything longer.”

Releasing spring latches, Harper opened his attaché case and removed a New York Times, which he waved in front of the class. “Enough time wasted,” he continued. “We have few enough weeks until graduation and — heaven help you — you’ll need them. I assume you’re all expecting to start college this fall?” He did not wait for replies. “Of course you are, or you wouldn’t be here. Well, here’s some advance warning: Don’t count on it. There’s the extreme possibility that there won’t even be necessities this fall, much less operating colleges.”

All of the students — with the exception of an attractive friend of Elliot’s, Marilyn Danforth — were now turning their eyes intently forward. Harper was a good dramatist, a good teacher.

Harper waved the newspaper again. “Top of page one, today’s paper. Let’s just see what we find.

“WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — The President today vowed, in a televised address at 8:30 E.T. this evening that he will order the Federal Reserve Bank to keep the printing presses running day and night, if necessary, to ease the shortage of New Dollars.
“The President further stated that the country’s present economic difficulties are well within the government’s ability to control, charging, ‘They stem from loss of confidence in our governmental institutions due to the reckless predictions of socially irresponsible, doomsday economists.’”

Elliot noticed several students looking at him pointedly, during the reference to economists, but he pretended not to notice. Harper did notice, however, and quickly discarded the first section of the newspaper. “All right, on to the financial page,” he continued. “This dateline is official from the Office of Public Information:

“WASHINGTON, Feb. 21, (OPI) — The cost-of-living index rose 2012 percent in the final quarter of last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed today.”

Mr. Harper chuckled. “Good of them to let us in on the secret.” He set the paper down. “Now, I realize this must sound rather dry, but I cannot stress too strongly how such events affect your daily lives. We are looking at a crisis that will make the Great Depression look tame by comparison. I assume Mrs. Tobias had started discussing this in class?” There were several murmured affirmatives and a nod or two. “Good. Marilyn Danforth.”

“Huh?” The class joined in laughter as the pretty brunette was roused from her daydream.

“Please describe for us the antecedents of inflation.”

“Uh — do you mean what Mrs. Tobias told us?”

“If you have nothing original to say,” Harper said backhandedly, “yes.”

“Well,” she started hesitantly. “Uh — inflation — you know, — has a lot of different causes, depending, you know, on just when you’re talking about. F’rinstance, you might have a war somewhere and that will cause inflation, and just when you’re expecting it’s over, there might be a crop failure, you know?” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “At least I think that’s what she said.”

“I’m certain you remembered it perfectly. Does anyone wish to add anything?”

He recognized Mason Langley. “She left out about the greedy businessmen.”

“We mustn’t miss that, Mr. Langley. Proceed.”

“Inflation,” Langley said, drawing himself up, “is caused by greedy businessmen who force higher prices by producing less than consumer demand. They also create artificial demand by planning obsolescence into their manufactured goods so they have to be prematurely replaced.” He smiled smugly.

Harper ignored him and answered politely. “Thank you. Anyone else?”

Cal Ackerman, the class yahoo, raised his hand. Harper called on him. Looking backward directly at Elliot, Ackerman made each word a deliberate insult: “I agree with what the President said last night. All our troubles are caused by brownies” — he almost tasted the word — “following economists like Elliot Vreeland’s old man.”

Elliot’s eyes flared at Ackerman. Mr. Harper intervened quickly before a fight could start. “I think you owe Elliot an apology, Cal. Dr Vreeland’s views — while admittedly radical — are respected in many quarters. Aside from that, I do not allow name-calling in my classes.”

Ackerman stayed mute.

Elliot said, “That’s okay, Mr. Harper. Ackerman is much too fascistic to have read any of my father’s books.”

“Now stop this, both of you,” Harper said. “Elliot, do you have anything constructive to add?”

“Nothing I haven’t said a million times before.”

“Very well.” Harper noticed — gratefully — Bernard Rothman’s hand was raised. “Yes, Mr. Rothman?”

“I don’t understand any of this, Mr. Harper.”

Before Harper could reply, the video wallscreen activated with its speaker crackling. A petite but imposing woman in her sixties — silver-haired with large, piercing eyes — appeared on the screen. “Excuse me, Mr. Harper.” She spoke with a polyglot European accent. “Is Elliot Vreeland there?”

Elliot raised his head as he heard his name.

“Yes, Dr. Fischer,” Harper answered the screen.

“Would you please have him report to my office immediately?”

“He’s on his way.”

The screen cleared. Mr. Harper waved Elliot to the door with an underhand gesture.

Elliot picked up his books — nodding to Phillip Gross and Marilyn Danforth on his way out — and traced the 45-degree bend around the still-busy school cafeteria on his route to the stairs; the headmaster’s office was on the first floor, a flight down. He wondered what could be important enough for Dr. Fischer to pull him out of class. Perhaps his college applications?

He did not have to wait long before finding out. When Elliot entered the headmaster’s reception area, he found his sister seated inside with Dr. Fischer. Denise Vreeland was sixteen, a year younger than Elliot, with a strong resemblance, only at the moment she looked even younger and extremely vulnerable. Her strawberry-blonde hair was disarrayed; she looked as if she had been crying. Dr. Fischer was sitting next to her — frowning.

“Denise, what’s wrong? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at school?”

Dr. Fischer stood. “Elliot,” she said softly, “you must leave with your sister immediately.”

“What for?” he asked. “What’s all this about?”

Denise took a sharp intake of breath, looked Elliot straight in the eye, then whispered:

“Daddy’s dead.”

Next in Alongside Night is Chapter II.

Originally published March 9, 2001 in The Sierra Times

In an experiment as famous to college students as “I, Mudd” is to Trekkies, behavioral psychologists used repeated electrical shocks to induce psychosis in a laboratory animal by first conditioning the animal to avoid one part of its cage by repeated shocks when it sat there then randomly changing the location of the charge so the animal couldn’t find a safe place to sit.

Within the past week we saw 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams charged as an adult in the murders of two students and shootings of 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, California. We also saw 14-year-old Lionel Tate sentenced to life without parole in Florida prison for the first-degree murder of 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick, committed when he was twelve.

Both of these recent events reflect the dramatic shift, within my lifetime, of American attitudes toward the treatment of juveniles in the criminal justice system. When I was in school in the 1960’s it was an unspoken given that the American criminal justice system was humane and modern in that we no longer hanged or imprisoned children, as was common as recently as the nineteenth century.

Instead, we regarded juvenile offenders to be worth saving. With a loving environment and regular psychoanalysis, they could be restored to society and given a second chance. A separate court and detention system was maintained for juvenile offenders in which they would be given schooling and therapy until they were adults, then their records would be expunged and they would be released with a fresh start.

Even for adults, liberals used to argue for compassion and rehabilitation in our criminal justice system. We no longer had prisons; we had “penitentiaries.” The root word “penitence” united the Christian and the Freudian liberal in a desire not to compound the loss to a crime victim’s life with further loss inflicted upon the misguided “offender,” who was assumed to be salvageable.

Today, the above attitudes seem both quaint and ludicrously impractical to most Americans, usually regarded as an atavistic artifact of a progressive utopianism discredited by harsh reality. We have seen inner-city drug-selling gangs where elder gang members, playing the law like a violin, direct their youngest gang members to commit the most serious crimes, knowing that if caught they won’t be charged as harshly.

After the Columbine High School massacre and other school shootings, murder, even mass murder, by teenagers is no longer unthinkable; and we have even seen children as young as seven being tried for murder.

In today’s political climate, no mainstream political figure wants to be perceived as soft on crime. Liberals have conceded the criminal-justice playing field to conservatives, pausing only occasionally on sentencing inequities caused by race, or an occasional weak libertarian objection to excessive sentencing for victimless crimes, and the usual trumpeting for more gun control. Along with an attitude of “zero tolerance” towards adult criminals has come a belief that if you commit an adult crime, you should be tried as an adult no matter what your age.

The problem with this last belief is that it is wildly inconsistent with every other attitude we have about children and young adults.

Nobody who declares that a juvenile offender who commits an adult crime, and should therefore be tried and punished as an adult, turns around and suggests that a 12-year old who can pass a driver’s test should be licensed to drive.

Nobody suggests that an 11-year-old boy who can write computer code should be allowed to quit the fifth grade and go to work full-time for Microsoft.

Nobody who would want us to imprison a 13-year-old girl who shoots her classmates would want any of her non-criminal 13-year-old classmates to be legally able to consent to sex with a 25-year-old man she meets in a bar, hop in his car to marry him at the Chapel O’ Love in Vegas, pull the lever on a slot machine while she’s waiting for the minister, buy a pack of Camels and smoke one, and sign the mortgage for a condo in The Lakes.

Am I really the only person in this public policy discussion who sees the inconsistency, the double standard, the hypocrisy — the blatant injustice? We are to take a person considered too young, too inexperienced, too lacking in judgment — not an adult by any other measurement or standard — and treat that person as an adult for the purposes of punishing them, because nobody running for office can risk looking “soft on crime.”

My father’s mother, Anna, was born in 1890. She was married to my grandfather, Abraham, in 1903 and had her first baby, my uncle Bernard, in 1904. My grandfather was born in 1878. According to his autobiography, he started working as a construction laborer while still a child, came to America by himself when he was 16, and by the time he married my grandmother he was a prosperous businessman in the New York garment industry.

Do the math. At age 25 my grandfather impregnated a 13-year-old girl. By today’s legal standards my grandfather was a child molester who would have spent many years in prison and my grandmother would have been forbidden ever to see him again. This would have made it more difficult for me to be writing this, because my father was my grandparents’ fifth child.

I constantly hear that things were different then and we can’t apply the same standards today. That is certainly true. For all of human existence, up until the last few minutes, you were an adult when you could biologically reproduce. Older children had family responsibilities and younger children were given whatever responsibilities they could handle for their age. By the time you turned 13 you were an adult for all intents and purposes except, perhaps, for voting, which was considered an exceptionally important duty reserved only to elders and other wiser heads. You will find no shortage of 14-year-old boys in the annals of war; today if a teenager brings a construction-paper gun to class he is suspended from school.

We have abandoned standards regarding the transition from childhood to adulthood that served the human race well for countless millennia and replaced them with arbitrary standards based on utopian theories that for the most part have already been abandoned; yet the standards live on.

We infantalize adults, depriving them of all rights and powers; then declare that they are adult enough to be punished when they outrage us. We replace tests of adulthood based on accomplishment or ability with arbitrary, one-size-fits-all ageism; then wonder why every once in a while the most gifted and sensitive among us go crazy and decide to kill as many of the rest of us as they can manage.

If a dog can be driven insane by inconsistent patterns of electrical shocks, why are we surprised when teenagers are driven insane by an inconsistent patchwork of rules which treat them as an infant in one moment and an adult the next?

The last thing we would want to admit is that the vigilante judgment of fifteen-year-old Charles Andrew Williams, that everyone he encountered at school was representative of a criminally insane society and deserved to be put out of their misery, might have more than a grain of truth to it.

The 9th Circuit Appellate Court just upheld the words “under God” remaining in the Pledge of Allegiance. The ACLU is expected to appeal the case directly to God, since given how things are going in the United States the Almighty is likely to reverse the decision.

There is nothing innocent about any public service — even the public library … not when being late returning a DVD borrowed from the library turns a speeding ticket into being handcuffed and taken to jail. Rip up your library card. Netflix may cost more but it’s a whole lot safer.

Next up on the political horizon: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Exercise, and Fat.

Would someone please tell me when the financiers who fund movie productions decided to turn over the keys to illiterates who can’t tell the difference between an action movie and a Roadrunner-Coyote cartoon?

No, no, no! I’m sick of hearing radio ads for the U.S. Census with the socialist message, “It’s how we get our fair share of funding for the things we need.”

Here’s everything that the Constitution of the United States originally said about the census:

Article I, Section 3: “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons. The actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall be law direct. The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the state of New Hampshire shall be entitled to choose three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.”

Article 1, Section 9: “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.”

The Constitution was amended so that slavery was no longer an issue, and that taxes could be laid on incomes without respect to enumeration (though this is still controversial).

So the only remaining purpose of the census is apportionment of Congressional representatives.

Nowhere in the Constitution is anything said about passing out spoils, tax money, bribes, and goodies on the basis of the counting of heads.

You won’t find “funding” in the Constitution.

So whoever is running these ads for the census, you’re lying. Please shut your pie holes.

“The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand…”

Which, if followed today — assuming a U.S. population of around 300 million — would give us a House of Representatives with 10,000 seated Congressmen.

I say, yeah!!!!!!!

I just watched socialist Michael Moore on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, plugging his anti-capitalism DVD, Capitalism: A Love Story. Meanwhile, I’m an avowed capitalist filmmaker who can’t get on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to plug my movie, Lady Magdalene’s, which doesn’t yet have a distributor. Wouldn’t that make Michael Moore precisely equivalent to the character of tobacco publicist Nick Naylor, portrayed by Aaron Eckhart in Christopher Buckley/Jason Reitman’s, Thank You for Smoking?

It’s amazing to me that all the Greens who argue about finite resources never seem to focus on the finite resources that the State sucks up and destroys.

When all is said and done, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is a military prep school with a strong emphasis on preparing its students for college studies in hard science, and likely the military.

If I’d lived in the old West and was in the business of selling brands to ranchers to brand cattle, I think I would have called my business Brandy Brand Brands.

According to Wikipedia, ABC — which is broadcasting the Academy Awards as I write this — “first broadcast on television in 1948.” Just another failure of capitalism, since you’d think 62 years later there would be a GHI Network by now.

If only the Eighty-second Annual Academy Awards really lasted only eighty seconds. I just love Hollywood liberals twisting their brains into a pretzel voting for a film that isn’t actually anti-U.S. military just so they can screw the best film of the year — the one that actually revolutionizes making movies as much as the introduction of Sound or Technicolor — out of Best Picture and Best Director so they can have their politically correct “I am Woman” moment giving the award to the Best Picture Director’s ex-wife.

More and more I see my role as a cadmium control rod in that nuclear reactor we call America, trying to prevent a China syndrome, when the meltdown has already started.

Calls I don’t answer or return (1) Recordings; (2) Calls me by my first name; “Law offices of …” I pay for phone service for my convenience. Just because you phone me doesn’t mean I have to take any calls I consider annoying, by my arbitrary rules.

So who’s looking forward to Quentin Tarantino’s next movie being a documentary set at Sea World, San Diego — Kill Willy?

Too many books chasing too few readers.

Can someone start teaching symbolic logic again, starting with the basic Venn Diagram?

A psychiatric patient commits a violent act. Now everyone tries to disown him. Lefties say he’s a righty. Righties say he’s a lefty. Lefties and Righties try to blame him on the unaligned Libertarians.

Whatever John Patrick Bedell read it doesn’t explain his actions. There are accusations aplenty in all ideologies, sufficient to find a guilt-by-association for any faction of which one doesn’t happen to approve.

You draw the Venn Diagram, with circles for any ideological group you don’t like. There will be some inevitable overlaps with the circle of Violent Psychiatric Patients, because they seek out such groups.

The illogic of guilt-by-association of the groups themselves for the overlap with Bad People who do Bad Things has sometimes been called McCarthyism, but everyone does it, from Bill Maher to Glenn Beck.

What everyone here might consider is that setting us at each other’s throats — Caesar’s old scheme of divide and conquer — is something the really bad guys are good at to keep us away from their gates.

In reading the Supreme Court argument in the McDonald case, I wonder whether the liberal justices would be happy if First Amendment rights vanished when one left one’s own home — as they suggest is possible for the Second Amendment?

No argument about the Democratic leadership. But take some spice from Dune and look at the alternative world where John McCain won the 2008 election — and with the support of both parties leadership passed cap and trade (McCain believes in global warming), bail-outs and stimulus packages, government takeover of health insurance (McCain just introduced a bill to give the FDA the power to ban health supplements which are keeping me alive), and a Neocon foreign policy of globalization, US as world policeman, and nation-building.

You ever notice how spaceships use the moon for a “slingshot” effect to get an extra boost? Politics can work the same way.

If I had “held my nose” and voted for McCain in 2008, today we would have had both major parties pushing for increased statism and no opposition party.

Instead I voted for Obama, and the Republican rank and file are finding that they win support not by supporting bailouts, cap and trade, and more socialization of the economy, but by opposing it.

Sometimes you win by losing first.

The third Shrek sequel, Shrek Forever After, is opening the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Thank you, Robert De Niro, for financing your festival with submission fees from thousands of starving independent filmmakers like me then using our hard-found money to highlight high-budget studio sequels!

I submitted Lady Magdalene’s to all the major film festivals — sometimes more than once — which took submission fees ranging as high as a hundred and twenty bucks — some of them from thousands of filmmakers each year — then turned around and used the money to promote major studio releases.

This year it’s Tribeca opening with a Shrek sequel, but the gone-and-not-missed CineVegas took hundreds of thousands of bucks in submission fees from indie filmmakers like me … and opened its festival a couple of years back with Oceans 13 — the second sequel to a remake.

It’s disgusting.

I submitted for the 2007 and 2008 Tribeca Film Festivals, not 2010. After they took my money twice and sent me emails telling me how many swell submissions they got so they weren’t accepting my movie for festival play I decided not to throw good money after bad.

My point is, these big “indie” film festivals take submission money from thousands of indie filmmakers, pick a few to play at their festivals like they’re lotto winners, then spend the indie filmmakers moneys giving free publicity to major studio releases.

And let’s say more people attend a festival because they get to see a studio release. It does no good for the filmmakers whose money they took and didn’t accept their films. And if they sell extra tickets to fill the theater, the festival keeps all the money — not a dime of festival box office is shared with the filmmakers.

And the chances of an indie film making a sale to a distributor because of festival play are minuscule anyway.

No, there aren’t any refunds if your movie isn’t accepted for play at a festival.

It’s a real sucker play, worthy of Bernie Madoff.

I’ve been thinking a long time about how I’d run a film festival.

First, I would not charge filmmakers a submission fee. If they wanted to buy an ad for their film in the program book — not a requirement for submitting their film — they could do that. But that’s the only thing I’d consider charging a filmmaker for, since they’re providing their film to the festival for free, and the festival is selling tickets and not sharing the receipts with them. Some festivals find all sorts of things to charge filmmakers for — award banquet tickets, press conferences, premium display of posters, etc. This makes the festival concentrate on squeezing revenue out of the very people it should be supporting — the filmmakers who have already struggled with the costs of making the movie which the festival is going to sell tickets to see!.

The festival should make its money off ticket sales, sales of refreshments, sale of memorabilia.

Sponsors and advertisers should pay for the rest, and provide product placements. At the San Diego Black Film Festival all the parties were hosted by Tommy Bahama rum and vodka — which provided both free food and an open bar.

One other thing. I think there should only be one track of film programming. Films at a festival shouldn’t have to compete for audience with other films. Run the festival extra days if necessary.

A movie theater setting isn’t required, but there should be theater quality projection of films — and that means high-definition players and projectors should be used, and nowadays that means Blu-Ray disk — as well as standard-def DVD — should be the main projection formats, in addition to 16 mm and 35 mm film.

Sound is important.

And seating needs to be comfortable, when you have people sitting for entire days.

One big advantage of existing theater seating is that it can be raked — that is, you don’t have a flat floor where people can’t see over the heads of the people in front of them.

Or, the screen can be raised. But that means people will get stiff necks from looking up.

Plenty of bathrooms. Plenty of water.

And decent security, so people don’t steal the filmmakers’ posters.

Publicity, promotion, and advertising is crucial.

And this is the most important thing:

The movies selected for play have to be appealing to the audience. If it’s all depressing movies about how much everything sucks — artsy fartsy, nihilistic, evil-always triumphs stuff — don’t bother inviting me. I like uplifting movies with heroes, great music, great stories, and lots of laughter and pathos.

Prioritizing entries?

1) Every film submitted needs to be watched all the way through by someone with some cred, who will fill out a form on whether it meets the various criteria the festival is setting as its standards for selection, and add up the points in each category for a numerical score. Categories might be quality of writing, acting, directing, editing, cinematography, music — etc. Plus somewhere the viewer can notate that a film was so good it knocked them on their ass.

2) I would eliminate from consideration any film which already has distribution through a studio.

3) A film festival is a convention, and needs some experienced people running it — and probably a lot of volunteer labor.

There’s a start.

Without Facebook and the rest of the Internet I’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere and no one would even know I exist.

The truth is, a book has to be a bestseller before it gets banned. I’m still working on that.

I tried eHarmony, Chemistry.com, and Match.com … but my computer didn’t like the other computers I tried to set it up with.

When I was in seventh grade I could have written a better re-commitment to founding principles than the Mount Vernon Statement. If this list of non-specific, warmed-over clichés is the best the conservative movement can come up with, they can pack it in right now.

I’ve been in long debates making the argument that refusing to recognize property rights in material identity leads to universal identity theft — plagiarism and forgery. In the absence of a theory of property rights in Identity presenting someone else’s informational creations as your own would not be theft because no property rights would have been violated.

If you don’t regard plagiarism as a violation of the author’s property rights, don’t come back at me claiming to be a defender of anyone’s property rights in anything.

@Time.com: Global warming causes blizzards? Tell me how sticking my hand in boiling water causes frostbite. How abstinence causes pregnancy. How I can lose weight by eating 5 pounds of bacon, waffles, and ice cream every day. At a certain point this sort of mendacity becomes criminal, the sheriff is called to remove the public nuisance, the snake-oil salesman is tarred and feathered then driven out of town on a rail.

This whole climate change business is a bunch of retards trying to figure out climate using an Etch-a-Sketch.

A question for my skeptical anarchist friends. Is there anything in our worldview that makes it at all unlikely that if an extraterrestrial craft had crashed outside Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947 that the United States Army wouldn’t have been ordered to collect all crash debris and bodies, and in the name of national security threaten and discredit all witnesses into a six-decade-long ongoing cover-up?

It’s not a secret. There’s a movie about it titled Roswell. It’s part of the pop culture. But any hard evidence of an ET crash landing at Roswell — the debris and bodies that Isaac Asimov said he’d need to be convinced — is, if it happened, still being kept secret by the government, along with a new “explanation” every decade or so. The last one was a spy balloon. The trouble is, I’ve met Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., and he knows what his dad Major Marcel showed him debris from in July 1947 — and it wasn’t any sort of balloon.

Jews don’t expect anyone to be perfect. Not even God.

Precisely how do Christians expect Jesus to perfect their character? Neurosurgery? Brainwashing? Zapping with Gamma Rays? Or simply a continuation into the Afterlife of what we’re already doing here on earth: working on ourselves, trial and error, and — well — living?

Not once did God ever ask me to call him Master. Why then, in the name of God, would I ever call another mortal man Master?

If you catch me staring blankly, ignoring everything around me, for minutes at a time, don’t worry, I’m probably not dead or just had a stroke — I’m just writing.

Why was a Bobble-Head Doll placed behind President Obama during his State of the Union address yesterday? It was very distracting. Oh, wait a second. That was Vice President Biden, wasn’t it?

Aslan, in the Narnia books, tells Lucy Pevensie that one can never know what would have happened. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, one needs to be mainlining spice to see alternative timelines. Yet, Timothy Geithner has the chutzpah to tell Congress that he knows the economy would have been worse without the AIG bailout?

I’m thinking of starting a club that gets us down to one meeting a month: libertarian-science-fiction-anti-War-pro-Second-Amendment-Toastmasters-Weight-Watchers-Speed-Dating. Who’s in?

If there is life after death then there is economic life after death, because the axioms of praxeology apply to immortals equally well as they apply to mortals. Volitional consciousness, itself, necessitates the desire to act, thus Nirvana is only achievable if death is real.

Would someone tell Fox News that George Washington was the father of the country, and that you don’t get to be father of the country by being elected president? Geez. These people really do literally believe in paternalistic government, don’t they?

I just saw Hannah Montana: The Movie on Starz. It’s a cute, funny movie and Miley Cyrus has one of the best singing voices I’ve ever heard. Before anyone calls me a pervert for liking a Disney movie starring a 16-year-old girl, am I also no longer allowed to like The Jackson Five or Stand By Me?

Should Ben Bernanke be fired for looting the economy of the United States of America? Absolutely. Preceded by a blindfold, a last cigarette, and “Ready … Aim …”

The purpose for SETI is to discover life on other planets … so we can sell them shit.

Originally published in 1995 on The World According to J. Neil Schulman

You don’t have to go back further than the period surrounding the two world wars to find the Technocrats.

The Technocrats believed that the world should be run by the men who understood the technology that was transforming the world. Those who weren’t competent to do so would just have to take a back seat and let the experts decide things for them.

Interestingly, the Technocratic movement lost a lot of its luster when men such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler took their ideas and tried putting them into practice. Of course, any Technocrat still around might complain that their ideas were misunderstood and never really tried out. This is the sort of complaint one gets from obstinate followers of Karl Marx when one points out the body count every time some regime calling itself Marxist tries to put those ideas into practice, too.

But the Technocratic movement has survived; it just isn’t called that anymore, and it has some new homes.

Nowadays, you can find the Technocrats hiding out at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Note this quote from David Satcher, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, writing in the November 5, 1995 Washington Post: “Because it typically focuses on human behavior, research on the prevention of disease, injury and disability often broaches matters that are controversial and on which people feel strongly — subjects such as firearms, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, smoking, job safety, environmental hazards. If scientists cannot look deeply into such matters without having their characters impugned, research will be inhibited, and ultimately the public will suffer.”

And pay attention to this quote from Jerome P. Kassirer, M.D., editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, writing in the December 5, 1991 issue: “A decision about whether such mildly restrictive [gun control] measures are adequate or whether access to firearms should be more severely restricted is in many respects similar to the medical decisions physicians make every day about disparate choices. Such decisions depend on an objective assessment of the benefits and risks (and costs) of the relevant options and the weighting of these countervailing values. In medicine, this kind of analysis is often applied to decisions about using diagnostic tests, drugs, and other therapeutic approaches. Benefits are assessed in terms of the accuracy of tests and the efficacy of treatments, and risks in terms of morbidity and mortality. When one choice yields benefits that clearly outweigh the risks we embrace it, and when the reverse obtains we reject it. When the comparison of benefits and risks fails to yield an unambiguous choice, we develop either a formal or an informal benchmark, or threshold, based on the benefits and risks, that defines how a procedure or treatment should be used. We would use the procedure or treatment when our suspicion of a certain disease exceeds this threshold, and we would avoid it when it falls short of the threshold.”

To an old-fashioned classical liberal, a humanist, a libertarian, or even a populist, whose movements disposed of Technocracy as an approach worth taking seriously years ago, this discussion has already reached its conclusion. Doctors Satcher and Kassirer are condemned out of their own mouths as closet Technocrats. They want the money and power to determine what people do with their lives, and they claim the expertise to do a better job of telling people what’s good and bad for them than people could figure out without their studies, statistics, and charts.

It’s a pseudo-intellectual con game that Cambridge professor C.S. Lewis was wise to in 1958, when he wrote in his article, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State,” “Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects.”

Pay attention to the sleight of hand used by the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: firearms, smoking, job safety, and environmental hazards are all now to be lumped in with AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases as subjects which doctors claim they can cure … if only we give them enough money to study them … and the political power to impose their cures upon us. Medical doctors are now to be regarded as priests, social workers, inspectors, and police. Medical schools will replace anatomy and physiology with courses on theology, criminology, nuclear physics, and ballistics. Murderers won’t be punished but lobotomized. A rapist shot by a woman who refuses to be his victim will be just another shooting victim to the compassionate physician.

And to Jerome P. Kassirer, M.D., the decision of whether you want to defend yourself from the psycho breaking into your house, or dial 9-1-1 and pray that the police get to your bedroom before he does, isn’t one you are competent to access. No, Dr. Kassirer will decide for all of us. He will analyze your sickness then tell us what pill will make us better. And why should we object — did we object when we gave him the power to tell us what drugs we could take into our own bodies?

Ladies and gentlemen, do you see your folly yet?

There are men among us who regard you as lab rats and suckers. They intend to run experiments on you — and they expect you to pay for it to boot. They think they are gods because they can saw into a man’s chest without puking. They think you are too stupid to run your own life … and they know just the geniuses to take over.

Not me, Dr. Kassirer. You’re not my doctor — I wouldn’t trust a quack like you. Get your hands out of my pocket, Dr. Satcher. I don’t trust you with my money because I’ve seen the bogus science you’ve bought with it … studies which count up dead bodies to determine whether guns save lives … studies which can’t tell the difference between an accident, a murder, or a suicide … studies which make no distinction between an honor student and a 13-year-old serial killer.

Technocracy was discredited because whenever you give some men the power to make the rules for everyone else, you just get another group of tyrants.

The question is before Congress to take funding away from these tin gods who think they know how we should run our lives, and want to make white lab coats into royal robes.

As far as I’m concerned, it will be an advance to both science and humanity if we not only take away their next paycheck, but make them pay back the grant money they’ve already wasted on their pipe dreams.

Either that, or make them spend the rest of their lives in inner-city clinics, giving babies immunizations.

Originally published in 1996 on The World According to J. Neil Schulman

It won’t surprise me if you don’t think so. Bigotry, to most people, means intolerance of, or discrimination against, a person on the basis of race, color, creed, ethnic origin, gender, or what used to be called a handicap and now, using a euphemism for a euphemism, we call “challenged.”

The assumption that drives the social disapproval against bigotry is that the object of the bigotry not only has no choice about her or his condition, but that this condition is an ephemera to the person’s true worth. We obviously have no choice about our particular mix of chromosomes, so discrimination against one of us on the basis of race, color, creed, ethnic origin, gender, and physical or mental incapacities seems unfair.

Nowadays it’s not only socially acceptable, but socially encouraged, to be intolerant of people who engage in activities which are generally regarded as anti-social. Right-thinking people, often thinking themselves tolerant, would pour a glass of water on someone’s cigarette if he lit up in a restaurant, and would likely be applauded by other people who think themselves tolerant.

There is equally little tolerance for the man or woman who wears an animal’s fur as a coat but, practically speaking, there seems to be more tolerance for people who wear animal skins tanned into leather. Maybe the reason is that if you splash red paint on some “rich bitch’s” fur coat you might get sued, but if you splash red paint on a biker chick’s leather jacket, you’ll be talking to your lawyer from a hospital burn ward.

But if there is one class of people whom almost everyone seems to agree it’s okay to be nasty to, it’s the person who gets in your face and wants to give you a message. If the message is commercial, it’s coming from some sort of pitchman; if religious, from some sort of evangelist; if political, from some sort of rabble-rouser. What they all have in common is that they have no access to the monied means of communication — getting their words into books or magazines, or their message on TV, or their song on the radio. They can’t do what the big guys do which is bait a trap to get you to come to them — so they do all that’s left to them, which is to knock on doors, make phone calls, hand out leaflets on street corners, or write on bathroom walls.

In religion, do we have more tolerance for old, established religions with magnificent, centuries-old cathedrals and a millennia of pillaged statuary or the Jehovah’s Witness knocking on our doors?

In charity, are we more likely to give to some public-TV station which spends half its budget on fund-raising , or the plain-looking woman blocking your way into Wal-Mart who’s trying to raise money for a battered-woman’s shelter?

Of the three message-pushers, the commercial pitchman is likely the most despised throughout history. The late semanticist, college president, and U.S. senator, S.I. Hayakawa, in the first edition of his book Language in Thought And Action, had a chapter on “The Marginal Businessman.” Hayakawa argued that much of the popular resentment against Jews was directed not at supposed deficiencies in the Jewish religion but on the ways Jews made a living. Since Jewish dietary laws forbid the eating of game, Jews were not hunters; since Jews were often forbidden to own land, they could not be landlords or farmers. Laws commonly forbade Jews from attending universities or practicing professions. So Jews became merchants and money-lenders, rag-pickers and trinket salesmen. Hayakawa documented history showing that every struggling businessman, of any ethnicity, is despised because of his in-your-face sales practices.

Half a century ago, the small businessman was still pictured in newspaper cartoons with a hooked nose. Since that’s no longer acceptable, we are instead given the ethnically sanitized image of the small businessman as Schemer on the PBS children’s show Shining Time Station, or the greasy fast-food inventor Falafel on Hercules and Xena. But the point is the same. Small businessmen are usually shown as despicable.

Who, among car salesmen, are the ones we despise the most? Is it the Mercedes-Benz dealer wearing an Italian tailored suit in a plush showroom or the guy in the loud sports jacket selling used-up wrecks off a recently vacant lot?

Are we more annoyed by chain stores situated in an upscale shopping mall or the mail-order outfits operating out of a warehouse somewhere in North Dakota that fill your mailbox with “junk mail”?

The fact is, we live in a noisy marketplace and we are all suffering from agoraphobia to one extent or another.

Agoraphobia is usually thought of as fear or dislike of open spaces, but historically and etymologically, the agora wasn’t an empty space but a bustling, jostling market with people shouting at you to sample their wares. Agoraphobia has now evolved into the fear and loathing of the unsolicited sales call.

What most people don’t seem to realize is that this fear and loathing serves the interests of those who want to control all means of mass communication. The old method of censorship used by ruling classes was to try to keep you from getting your message out by using violence against you if you said or wrote something that wasn’t approved. Since human ingenuity seems boundless, the messages got out anyway — and usually were even made sexier by being forbidden.

The ruling classes have learned their lesson from history. They don’t bother trying to suppress discontented messengers anymore. They just buy up all the means of slick communication — movie studios, TV networks, recording companies — and manufacture the messages they want you to hear. They don’t have to censor the opposition — they simply drown it out in a sea of glossy, sexy, manipulative entertainment products. And if everyone hates the pitchman, it’s because we are surrounded by them all day long.

The pitchman is on TV and radio — even on so-called “public” TV — hawking his wares. If we pay extra for commercial-free channels, she’s telling us about the next week of movies we can’t miss. He’s selling us oranges, bananas, and peanuts when our car stops at a light in Los Angeles, or trying to clean our windshield with a greasy rag if the stoplight is in lower Manhattan. He’s selling us the Los Angeles Times before the movie previews start in a Southland movie theater. He’s asking us for a handout when we get out of our car, and waiting to ask us for a donation before we enter the mall shop. She’s leaving messages on our phone answering machines. There’s no avenue of communication they won’t use.

Even the Internet.

The Internet is the most efficient means of distributing information the human race has ever invented. I describe it to people who don’t understand computers as the world’s greatest library with the world’s best card catalog. But information is precisely what those in power most wish to control. You can’t package lies to everyone consistently if there remains a single open channel for getting the truth out to lots of people fast.

A few conglomerates today own the TV and radio stations, cable networks, movie studios and movie theaters, recording companies and music stores, movie rental stores, newspapers and magazines, book publishers, telephone companies, cable companies. Now they’re moving into the Internet with World Wide Web sites.

In each of these media that these major corporations control, they can sit back and wait for you to come to them to receive their pitches. You want entertainment. They control entertainment. They don’t have to get in your face to pitch to you because they control the movies, TV shows, and music you want and will willingly approach them, listening to their sales pitches along the way.

And it’s the outsider — the real social critic, the radical, the small enterpriser, the religious dissenter — who has to get in your face and shout to get your attention away from the officially sanctioned sources of information. Let’s call the information monopolists the “Oracles.”

Here’s where I come into the story, personally.

I’m a writer. I’ve been a writer for a quarter century now. I’ve written novels, screenplays, poems, articles, short stories, essays, and speeches. I’ve won awards, had my picture in the newspaper, plugged my books on TV, had a script I’ve written produced for network TV.

I’m also in the publishing business. I can’t think of a job in the publishing business I haven’t had hands-on experience doing. I’ve read manuscripts for literary agencies and publishers, done rewriting, line-editing, and copy-editing, supervised cover jacket artwork and book design, picked out binding materials, proofread at all stages, called distributors to get orders and both shipped books out and received them back. I’ve managed to get a small press book into chain bookstores and gotten stiffed when a distributor went bankrupt, owing me for 400 hardcover books they’d already been paid for by the chain to which they’d sold it. I’ve picked up pallets of books at the printer in Vermont and driven them cross country, then loaded them into a storage locker in Los Angeles.

The essence of writing and publishing is the creation and distribution of information — which puts me in direct competition with the information Oracles. On those occasions when I have written something that didn’t offend the Oracles too badly, they’ve bought my work and disseminated it. But any time I want to get down and dirty and offer a viewpoint that doesn’t fit their vision, I’m on my own, and good luck to me trying to get your attention with the racket you’re already getting from the Oracles.

I ran into this problem when I tried to send an email letter to a few hundred people on the Internet, telling them about my world wide website which is offering downloads of books which the Oracles have decided not to publish. I chose to mail to a list of people who had openly published their names and email addresses on a website opposing Internet censorship. I sent each one a single message telling them how the book industry nowadays is channeled through one guy in New York who buys for the biggest bookstore chain — and no major publisher will publish a book of any consequence without checking with him first to see what his order might be. I suggested that when one guy sitting in an office can control what books a quarter billion people got a chance to buy, we might as well call it censorship.

And I ran headlong into the prejudice against the pitchman.

Because my message was “unsolicited” and “commercial,” I got back dozens of email replies accusing me of mailing “spam” — which is a term of art on the Internet for sending out multiple messages to unrelated public news groups or private email accounts. Most “spammers” use the Internet to pitch scams, phone sex, and CD-ROM’s offering dirty pictures. They’ll send messages to unrelated news groups, hundreds at a time. They’ll send from anonymous email accounts so Internet service providers can’t cut them off. They’ll buy lists of email addresses drawn from people who have posted messages in public news groups.

I didn’t do any of that. I mailed to a list of people who had freely self-published their email addresses in support of a cause — and I was sending them a message on a related cause. I sent them one message — and I told them that I wasn’t going to send them any more.

They didn’t believe me. It appears this was what every “spammer” said as part of the pitch. I was cursed out, insulted, threatened with legal action, and sent a huge message designed to cripple my email for about an hour. Even the most mannered and eloquent of those people who had received my email were offended by its being an unsolicited invasion of their privacy, and they acted with the zeal of white blood cells attacking a foreign DNA strand attempting to fend off my unwanted intrusion. They were guardians of the public good, defending their polity.

In other words, they were people after my own heart.

Just a few years ago, the Internet was the preserve of a few academics and government employees, free from any commercial enterprises — and those people want it kept that way. They probably feel about me how Pocahontas’s dad, Chief Powhatan, felt when he saw the Susan Constant sailing into harbor filled with English boat-people.

But the objection to “spam” on the Internet is, at its essence, the same prejudice that ruling classes throughout history have used to maintain their power. If they can get the people to despise the pitchman, the evangelist, and the rabble-rouser, they can continue to enjoy a monopoly of their subjects’ attention spans so that our money and energy will be spent how they want it spent.

The World Wide Web is, largely, a level playing field, where the small enterpriser, the evangelist, and the rabble-rouser can enjoy messaging opportunities equal to that of the corporate Oracles. It is, perhaps, the first time in history that communication has been so free and democratic.

But the Oracles still can command attention on the World Wide Web using vast gobs of money, using Internet directories such as Infoseek and Yahoo! to display advertising banners. “Directory” is the correct name for these services — for they direct millions of people to a few select websites every day — and the Oracles maintain their grip on your attention thereby.

The small fry like me — with an alternative website — is, like the door-to-door salesman, the telephone pitchman, and the panhandler — forced into the undignified and despised job of attempting to grab your attention by any means left to us that does not require thousands or millions of dollars in advertising. And I tried sending out email about my website to some people I thought would be interested because I can’t afford to sit back and let people find me the way the Oracles can.

I will not soon try that again because the Oracles have conditioned their subjects to reject the pitchman, the evangelist, and the rabble-rouser, and I don’t appreciate getting insulted, threatened, and outright damaged by the guardians of public morals.

Which, it would appear, leaves the Oracles with their monopoly on mass communication intact and unthreatened.

Ladies and Gentlemen: the people who eat caviar have a good reason to make you hate spam. Spam threatens their monopoly on communications. If you buy from the lady who’s selling cheap oranges on the street, what do you need the overpriced produce in the high-rent supermarket for? If I can use a $12.95 a month email account to send a message to thousands of potential customers, how can they make you buy their overpriced junk with million-dollar Superbowl commercials?

It’s only by fostering your hatred of the pitchman who’s in your face with an alternative product that the Oracles can maintain their lock on your pocketbook, your vote … and your soul.

If you despise spam — the pitchman, the evangelist, the rabble-rouser — you are allowing the people who are already rich and powerful to make sure that they brook no competition from new ideas and alternative enterprises.

If a pitchman, evangelist, or rabble-rouser has to shout for your attention, it’s a clear signal to you that what they have to say is not something the Oracles want you to hear.

If the Oracles wanted you to hear it, they wouldn’t have to get in your face. They own the media. They don’t have to shout. They already have you where they want you and they don’t want to lose you.

At some point, people who are seriously concerned about freedom of speech are just going to have to figure out whether they’re willing to put up with the inconvenience of having some nasty, ugly, cheap low-life’s like me get in your face on occasion in order to preserve your freedom of choice.

The specific reason that this case is being heard before the Supreme Court is a legal contrivance — an attempt by those who believe in the individual right to keep and bear arms to establish that right in the federal courts, where it can be enforced.

Specifically, in this case, a ban on handgun ownership in a private home is being challenged on grounds previously established in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court recognized the Second Amendment as enshrining in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights an individual right to keep and bear arms.

But the Bill of Rights was originally intended to restrict and limit only powers granted by the Constitution to the Federal Government. It wasn’t until after the Civil War and the passage of the 14th amendment that rights enshrined in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights were thought to be able to be enforced by federal courts on state and local governments.

And therein lies the primary question: do you want the Government of the United States — federal marshals, FBI agents, the EPA, IRS, even the ATF — coming to your defense when your rights are violated by state and local officials?

It’s not a question that remotely crossed the minds of the Founding Fathers when they carefully crafted the balance of powers between the United States and the states themselves, because they did not contemplate what we have today: a federal government that has taken upon itself vast powers never granted to it by the Constitution that survived a rebellion from the States and the people.

The Founding Fathers — Jefferson and Madison in particular — would have been shocked by nothing so much in subsequent American history as the federal government winning the war against states seceding from the Union.

So when Alan Gura — the attorney for the plaintiff seeking relief in a federal court from the oppression of the City of Chicago — argues to the Supreme Court that the “privileges and immunities” clause of the 14th amendment should be used by federal courts to forbid the City of Chicago from violating Otis McDonald’s Second Amendment-protected right to keep a handgun at home, Mr. Gura is using the arguments of liberal civil-rights lawyers and liberal activist judges to further weaken state and local governments and further empower the federal government.

The conservatives on the court — who want to give no more power to the federal government — are caught on the horns of a dilemma. They believe in the Second Amendment. They believe the right protected by the Second Amendment is no less deserving of protection than other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights which previous courts have already held can be enforced by federal courts against state and local officials.

But they do not want to unleash a swarm of federal bureaucrats on state and local governments as an unintended consequence of attempting to protect individual rights.

Likewise, the liberals on the court would like nothing better than to expand the power of federal courts to intervene in state and local matters — and what better excuse than protecting rights enshrined in the Constiitution? — but they get sick to their stomach when they contemplate that the right to own and carry guns will be among those protected rights.

It puts every Justice outside of their usual comfort zones.

It gets even more complicated because the authors of the Bill of Rights got even more radical than the idea of the people being well-armed to protect the possibility of future revolutions. In the Ninth and Tenth Amendments they said that just because they missed writing down a specific right didn’t mean the right disappeared. They created a category of “unenumerated rights” — rights held by the people at the time the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in 1792 — and if you take the Constitution at all seriously, what this means is that every bit of personal freedom that was legal for an individual in 1792 is still legal today — and any legislation to the contrary is null and void.

Taking the idea of unenumerated rights seriously was so threatening to Justice Scalia that when Alan Gura brought it up — in passing — Scalia asked Gura if he was trying to get himself a job as a law professor. After all — let’s get serious. It’s only in an ivory tower that one could possibly take seriously the thought that the Supreme Court is supposed to launch a Second American Revolution by actually enforcing the people’s individual rights against a Leviathan Engine that regards them as fuel!

The problem with Justice Scalia’s panic is that Alan Gura isn’t the problem.

The American people are Justice Scalia’s problem.

Even after over a century of public-schooling and major media working to legitimize a powerful, paternalistic welfare/warfare State, there are still millions of Americans who read the Constitution — which is a fairly short document written in plain English — and regard it as a contract in which certain rights and powers are their own, not any employee receiving a paycheck paid for with their taxes.

It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court says. They know what the contract says is theirs, and they’re going to get ornery, uncooperative, and possibly even go ballistic when that contract is violated and their lives are disempowered and impoverished thereby.

That, Justice Scalia, is revolution. Madison writing in the Federalist Papers knew that no matter how many weapons systems are in service to protecting the establishment powers, nothing can prevent the people from eventually reaching a point where merely by refusing to cooperate the system collapses in on itself.

It’s not just guns that would come out in the streets when that happens. It would be SUV’s, iPhones, IED’s, and — in general — the indignation and ingenuity of millions of people who have their garages, attics, and basements filled with so much lethal junk that even I — a science-fiction writer — can’t imagine the havoc they could create if the Middle Class American ever really got pissed off.

The Supreme Court of the United States is the mediator between a nation of potential revolutionary maniacs and an establishment that exists — no shit, really — only by their sufferance.

I am not the one making this threat, Justice Scalia. I’m just a reporter. Don’t shoot the messenger.

But pay attention. However you decide the balance of power between the federal government and states and localities, it had better have as its object the maximum preservation and protection of what the American people see as their natural and obvious Constitutional rights.

An earlier Supreme Court made a mistake about this once in a case called Dred Scott v. Sandford. Somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 Americans died because of that mistake.

I suggest you err, next time — just for the sake of public safety — on the side of liberty.

A compilation of my commentary on war, over the years. Am I anti-War or Pro-War? I think the clear and honest answer is, “yes.” But I am, and have always been, unequivocally opposed to conscription at any time, for any purpose. I wrote my novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, to make the strongest pro-natural-rights and anti-utilitarian argument I could muster.

Regardless of how evil a dictator Saddam Hussein is, and what weapons he is accumulating, the arguments why the United States needs to make a preemptive strike against Iraq strike me as both hollow and wearily familiar. Time and again through history — whether it’s the Israelite nation or the Roman Empire in ancient times, or the colonial British, Nazis, or Soviets in our own century — some heads of state claim the moral stature to impose their will on a morally inferior enemy — and the military advantage to do it. Now President Clinton — who as a college student decried the American military presence in Vietnam as imperialistic — asserts that because of its unique status as a superpower, the United States has a moral obligation to “send a message” to a foreign power that does not pose any immediate threat to our national security, by preemptively bombing its cities until it complies with our disarmament demands.

There is no other word for that sort of policy than imperialism. Naked imperialism. Evil imperialism. It is imperialism of precisely the sort that has buckled the knees of every superpower throughout history that has attempted it, destroying its people’s domestic liberties along the way and replacing personal freedom with an intrusive state that spies on its people, raids their homes, businesses and churches based on nothing more than suspicion and rumor, and attempts to leave them disarmed and helpless against its official predations.

Chivalry, Courtesy, Provocation, Women’s Suffrage, and the Vile United Nations, J. Neil Schulman, November 8, 1999

These requests to support United Nations projects is symptomatic of this. The noble purpose is paraded; the principles that need to be violated, and the villains who must be supported to accomplish these noble goals, are hidden.

The United Nations is not yet a world state, but there’s no doubt that the establishment forces today would be happy to make it one, so long as it remains under their control. The appeal of the United Nations to the Third World is envy; the appeal of the United Nations to the First and Second Worlds is power. It appeals to those forces of imperialism and international robbery in the developed nations; it appeals to tinpot dictators in the undeveloped nations. Both unite in agreement that a Blue Beret is an emblem of virtue; and those who oppose it are at best atavists and at worst partisans of what Gore Vidal called the Hitler of the Month.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself …”, J. Neil Schulman, September 19, 2001

Only a week after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, all the commercial American airline companies are within weeks of declaring bankruptcy themselves. They have cut back on scheduled flights by 20 percent already, and have begun layoffs of airline employees that may top 100,000 jobs eliminated within days.

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D, Missouri) has called for Americans to save the airlines by boarding planes again. He is, in essence, suggesting that Americans suck it up and forget their fears of terrorist attacks in order to save the American airline industry.

But it is not the fear of the American people that is destroying the American airline companies. We have learned about the heroic passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, disarmed by longstanding Federal Aviation Administration policy but having heard what other hijacked airliners were being used for, making an unarmed attack on the only person who knew how to fly the plane — the pilot-hijacker who had already murdered the United flight crew — in order to prevent the passenger jetliner they were on from being crashed into buildings and murdering thousands of their countrymen.

Nowadays there is an agreement between the terrorists who capture jetliners to use them as weapons of mass destruction, and those who are calling for sealing airline pilots into their cockpits no matter what happens in the passenger compartment. That agreement between the terrorists and the counter-terrorists is that the passengers, the reason for the existence of the jetliner itself, are as expendable as dumping jet fuel. The metal is now more important than the flesh.

It is not only at airports where “fear itself” is going to paralyze us. We already fear, and will fear more, taking our loved ones to concerts, sporting events, high-rise buildings, theme parks, government buildings, and many other places that are tempting targets for terrorist reprisals, once the armed forces of the United States engage the enemy overseas. We fear that public gatherings could turn deadly from terrorists with bombs or strategically placed machine guns. We fear that the enemy is already among us with horrific weapons of mass destruction including biological agents, chemical weapons, or even nuclear bombs.

President Bush was correct when he told us we must get back to work.

Congressman Gephardt is right when he tells us to suck it up.

But it is not the fear of the American people that is the threat to our economic and community life. It is the fear of our policy makers, including Congressman Gephardt, that is the main problem.

We all remember the grade-school teacher who, hit by a spitball while writing on the blackboard, punished the whole class because she didn’t know whom the perpetrator was. Our leaders are acting like that teacher.

Because there are a few — very few — terrorists among us, and our government’s investigators doesn’t know who they all are, our policy makers are punishing all of us. They are treating all of us like terrorists. Our leaders are terrified of the American people and in their fear it is they who are paralyzing our national life and our economy.

It’s time we told them they have to trust us again.

If anyone needs to suck it up, it’s them.

UnHoly Lands, J. Neil Schulman, October 16, 2002

The Middle East is not the only place on earth where, if one went to the trouble, one couldn’t make a good case for the restoration of ancestral homelands and fomenting a long-term civil war over real-estate. Considering how poorly the Cherokee people have fared in the last 16 decades, they might be able to convince a sympathetic world that they have as good a case for a restored homeland as the Jews of Europe had following Hitler’s holocaust.

As much as I think Andrew Jackson’s nearest contemporary of ours might well be Slobodan Milosevic, I think anyone who initiated a “White Rose” movement to restore a Cherokee homeland in Georgia would be a maniac. If the Cherokee actually wanted a new homeland, I’d suggest they start with someplace nobody is currently living, and start developing. I’ve flown over the United States. There’s still plenty of unoccupied land.

But here’s my point.

Anyone who fought a war over Holy Land in the state of Georgia would be a maniac.

Anyone who decided that it was worth blowing up school buses, cafes, and supermarkets over conflicting deeds of title to real estate in Georgia would be maniacs.

When I look at Israel, I see a civil war between maniacs.

Collateral Damage and the Libertarian Non-Aggression Principle, J. Neil Schulman, October 29, 2002

Perhaps it is better to define libertarianism not by the non-aggression principle but by the principle that any chosen action contains the possibility of third-party damages, and the moral actor accepts personal responsibility for them. This is not so much letting the end justify the means as recognizing that no human action, even choosing inaction, is without risk of a catastrophic outcome.

This is, I admit, not a pristine libertarian position. That’s because, in the world I see, this libertarian can’t find one.

Reply on Wally Conger’s Out of Step blog, J. Neil Schulman, May 2007

I support fighting Jihadi cadre who wish to impose Sharia law on the rest of the world by any means necessary, including violence and acts of terror.

I support armed and informed civilized people defending themselves and private property from invaders, criminals, and terrorists of any race, creed, color, faith, gender-preference, ideology, or national origin.

I oppose suspension of habeas corpus, imprisonment without trial, disarming people who travel on common carriers of their personal self-defense weapons, searches without probable cause or warrants, confiscation of private property except after conviction in a jury trial, or the issuing of warrants except on presentation of specific facts leading to probable cause to a magistrate.

Of course, in the event we ever have an agorist alternative, my standards will go up considerably. These statements are made in the context of our current Hobson’s Choice — anomie or organized crime.

As far as the War on Terror (so-called) — its been botched.

The point to the invasion of Afghanistan was to capture Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda cells and punish the Taliban for hiding him. The Taliban was punished and any campaign against al Qaeda involves clandestine services, not “boots on ground.” I have no idea what policy or national defense interest is served by a continuing presence of American troops in Afghanistan.

As for Iraq. There was yellowcake in Baghdad — under IAEA seal. Saddam Hussein did use poison gas against both Iran and the Kurds — some of it provided to him by the U.S. He did want nukes because his enemy Iran wanted nukes.

And, the disinformation that Hussein had an active program (as Iran really did) to centrifuge yellowcake into fissionable materials he could use to make A-bombs originated with — tah-dah! — Saddam Hussein, who was passing this disinformation on to any intelligence source who’d listen because that’s what he wanted Iran to think. This bluff cost him his dictatorship and his neck.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was, in retrospect, unnecessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from obtaining nukes he could pass on to third parties for deployment against his enemies — including us. But it hasn’t been established to my satisfaction that George W. Bush knew that when he ordered the invasion.

What has been established to my satisfaction is that once Saddam Hussein’s statue fell and he was in hiding, and his rape-room sons had been killed, and the inspection for WMD’s — which was the casus belli of the invasion — had been completed, then the mission was indeed accomplished, and the U.S. troops should have been pulled out. Purple fingers, while preferable to either Saddam’s more secular dictatorship or Sharia law, was not part of the sales pitch.

Bring the troops home from both Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s Way Past Miller Time for the War in Iraq, J. Neil Schulman, May 20, 2007

Mr. Bush, you’re the President who Won the War on Terror. Please brings our troops home from Iraq and declare a domestic State of Emergency that suspends the numerous federal, state, and local impediments to domestic oil and coal production and refinement.

We don’t have to stop the Iraqi Insurgency for our own security, or for Israel’s. We can accomplish that merely by doing what Americans do best: minding our own business.

Mr. Bush: Make Oil, Not War.

Dragon*Con Report: The Panels,the Pageantry, the Parties, StarTrek.com, September 30, 2007

In the Q&A afterwards Schulman commented on his thematic intentions.

“I’m a libertarian, so I’m suspicious of government and the way they do things, even at times when one has to be on the side of the government,” Schulman said. He remarked that while he understood the reasons for the war in Iraq, “I don’t think it has accomplished what Mr. Bush thought it was going to accomplish. We still have a big problem with terrorism and I don’t see that the government knows how to solve it. What I was trying to do with this film as much as anything was to say, look at Flight 93. On 9/11 the only people who managed to stop an al-Qaida attack were the passengers on Flight 93; the government just totally fell flat on all levels in preventing this. And so I’m going back to the original idea of the framers of our system of government of relying on the people themselves … If I have any overall message, it’s that the American people have to look to themselves for their own security — they can’t count on the government to do it.”

J. Neil Schulman to John Amendall, Facebook, April 10, 2009 (no longer linked by Facebook)

John Amendall:
You wrote in Jan 2006: “Since 9/11, I have been a supporter of the War on Terror — including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.”

What made you change your mind?

J. Neil Schulman:
John, it would be dishonest of me to claim that my disillusionment with the conduct of these two wars was either moral or ideological, since in terms of my pure libertarian principles I’d already made my lesser-of-evils “deal with the devil.” My October 2002 article “Collateral Damage and the Libertarian Non-Aggression Principle” on Rational Review is probably as close as I will ever be able to explain how someone who lived in the Jesuit-like monastery that the AnarchoVillage was for ten years of my life could support two wars.

As I posted today to the MLL Yahoo Group, and my Facebook wall — but in less detail — I had lost faith that I was ever going to live to see Agorism enter the mainstream and compete with Marxism, Social Democracy, and various levels of constitutional conservatism. It just didn’t seem to be an option on the menu so I was left with the hard choices that always face those who find that their principles have no traction in the world — just how to try for crumbs when even slices of cake, never mind the whole cake, are beyond one’s reach.

I considered the point of the invasion of Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda brains responsible for the 9/11 attacks who was still coordinating their independent cells, and as a secondary goal to put the Taliban out of power, since they were evil tyrants and it didn’t take much of a casus belli beyond retaliation for 9/11 for me to want to seem them disestablished. But then Afghanistan — as it had been for the Soviets — became another Vietnam-like quagmire — and any point of continuing to maintain a military operation there eluded me.

With Iraq I believed the WMD threat was real, and as I’ve stated elsewhere I believe the disinformation that led to this threat appearing credible came from Saddam Hussein’s attempt to bluff Iran, which as we know is well along the way to having its own A-bombs. Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator and, again, it did not take much of a casus belli to want to see Iraqis — especially the Kurds, whom he had massacred — liberated from him. I’d previously opposed the first President Bush’s Gulf War and President Clinton’s bombing of Iraq so this was a radical change for me. But my enthusiasm for continued American military presence in Iraq faded quickly after Saddam’s statue fell, and when I saw the “Mission Accomplished” sign on the USS Abraham Lincoln I was ready for the troops — and yes, the bombers also — to come home and leave the future of Mesopotamia for its own people to sort out.

John Amendall:
In the same essay you write about “sneak-attacked the chief financial and military defense headquarters of my country” as if you are entirely satisfied by the finance industry. Have you kinda noticed that they suck? And the military kinda sucks too.

J. Neil Schulman:
I am as thorough-going an individualist as you will ever find. I don’t just see a “financial industry” or a “military-industrial complex.” Three thousand individuals died on 9/11, and I would consider most of them non-combatants — and even those working at the Pentagon would exist on a spectrum of moral responsibility depending on their specific jobs. I don’t think the receptionist in Hitler’s office bore the same moral responsibility as the generals sitting at the table who ordered people being put on cattle cars to concentration camps, and even among concentration camp Capos and guards there would be a moral spectrum of bad to worse to worst.

You’ll note that in Alongside Night I have characters who are ex-military and even ex-CIA. I consider that people are not only redeemable but we have to judge them according to how well they act within the Tao when being members of organizations and processes that do overall evil. I abhor the collectivism that infects even anarchist individualists when it comes to blanket condemnations of those who work at jobs we wish did not exist. The clerk who is in charge of veterans benefits is not even on the same moral plane of calculus as a Lt. William Calley.

John Amendall:
You are quoted saying “Schulman said that a ‘war on terror’ is both necessary and moral, partially because, whatever the past wrongs in US interventionist foreign policy, he sees no present alternative that would protect innocent civilians.”

Has your view on the war on terror changed? If so, why have you changed your view?

J. Neil Schulman:
I still hate the collectivist evil represented by Muslim jihadis, particularly when they make no distinctions between Jews and Likud, or Americans and the Ku Klux Klan. I never had much faith that the Bush administration would do well in conducting the “War on Terror” and they were far worse than I had hoped for — making airline travel a nightmare when most of the security procedures are actually counter-productive; ignoring Constitutional protections that did not advance the actual process of fighting the enemy; and engaging in Wilsonian nation-building that was in direct contradiction to historical conservative principles. But I must note that George W. Bush could have sent American Muslims to relocation camps and engaged in virulent racism against Arabs, and he did not. Let’s give the devil the credit that’s due.

John Amendall:
You write here: “From a libertarian standpoint, any murderous dictator or party of dictators is ripe for overthrow at any moment. By committing acts of mass murder, torture, and tyranny, they have long forfeited any rights they might have.”

Is that universal? Would it apply to any tyrant, or just an Arab one?

J. Neil Schulman:
Universal. But I do make distinctions between term-limited office holders whose power can be limited or recalled short of assassination or revolution, and totalitarian dictators who can be separated from power only by massive force.

John Amendall:
In this thread you write, “I support fighting Jihadi cadre who wish to impose Sharia law on the rest of the world by any means necessary, including violence and acts of terror.”

Do you deny having an ongoing desire to fight Jihadis “by any means necessary” including government action?

J. Neil Schulman:
I don’t deny having had that desire. I am far less sanguine about the benefits of doing so than I was closer to 9/11.

John Amendall:
In saying “bring the troops home” you don’t say anything about air forces. Since an air force plane can be based in the US and fly to Afghanistan and back, they are brought home and yet still bomb.

J. Neil Schulman:
I am opposed to the U.S. engaging in continued military occupations or operations anywhere in the Middle East, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and what’s generically called “the Holy land.” Is that clear enough?

Now Obama’s Got His Own Phony War, J. Neil Schulman, December 2, 2009

The Taliban didn’t launch the 9/11 attacks — and President Bush punished them eight years ago for hiding Osama bin Laden. The Taliban are not still hiding Osama bin Laden, so what the fuck?

President Obama also admitted that what remaining al Qaeda there still are in Afghanistan camp out close to the border of Pakistan, and cross over into Pakistani territory our troops aren’t allowed to follow them into whenever they’re pursued.

So adding 100, or 1000, or 100,000 more American troops to this bug hunt won’t bring us any closer to capturing or killing Obama bin Laden and his merry men because they still have a safe haven: Pakistan.

Barack Obama is not willing to enforce the Bush Doctrine — he who shields a terrorist will be treated like a terrorist — on Pakistan, any more than President Bush was willing to enforce the Bush Doctrine on Pakistan. The reason is that — unlike Iran, which is just a nuclear wannabe — Pakistan actually has nukes.

Private emails to Brad Linaweaver, J. Neil Schulman, December 26, 2009

I support the American Revolution.

I think some Native American tribes got ripped off of land they should still own.

I oppose Lincoln’s refusal to accept secession of Southern States.

I’ve never studied the Spanish-American War but from what little I know I think it unnecessary.

I don’t support the U.S. occupying the Philippines prior to the Japanese invasion. Frankly, I don’t understand how the U.S. legitimately gets any territory in Pacific Islands.

I oppose U.S. entry into World War I.

I oppose U.S. provocations against Japan, but after Pearl Harbor — and Germany’s Declaration of War against the U.S. — I can’t fault entering WW2.

I favored the Cold War but I’ve never really been convinced that Korea and Vietnam were the right theaters to fight it.

I might have thought a full invasion of Cuba the moment Castro declared his alliance with the USSR was a good idea.

I have no problem with financing and arming anti-Communists in Central and South America.

I demonstrated against the first Gulf War.

I favored the invasion of Afghanistan to punish the Taliban and al Qaeda and capture or kill Osama bin Laden. I oppose installing a puppet regime and continuing presence there. All U.S. troops out of Afghanistan now.

I favored the invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein and his sons from power, but I would have withdrawn as soon as they were captured or killed and the WMD inspections were completed. I oppose any nation-building in the region. All U.S. troops out of Iraq now.

I oppose a preemptive U.S. strike against Iran. I have no problem if Israel feels like doing it without U.S. help.

I favor returning the United States to its pre-1911 Constitutional form of government. I support the 14th amendment extending the Bill of Rights to state and local governments.

Published September 19, 2001 — a week after the 9/11 attacks — in The Sierra Times

It struck me that President George W. Bush has told us that America is now in a war against Terrorism. What is terrorism if not the goal of producing a paralyzing fear?

And nowhere has fear been more effective in creating paralysis than in the American airline industry.

On the day of the attack, when terrorists seized and caused the destruction of four American passenger jetliners and successfully used three of them as weapons of mass destruction, the FAA grounded all American aviation. Airports were shut down. Flights into the United States were sent back or diverted to Canada. Foreign airlines were told not to attempt to land in the United States.

It was several days before there was another commercial flight. By that time, one financially troubled American airline company, Midway, had already declared bankruptcy. Americans who couldn’t travel in their own cars were using any other means of transportation possible to avoid flying: trains, buses, rental cars, limousines, taxicabs.

And no wonder! New airport security regulations have made even a flight without a terrorist a nightmare. At Los Angeles International Airport it is now forbidden for private automobiles to pick up or drop off passengers at a terminal. The Skycaps are now jobless since all baggage must go through additional inspections. The electronic ticketing that had become so popular and had simplified boarding procedures is now as cumbersome as the old paper ticketing.

The average wait at a ticket counter before one may even proceed to one’s flight is averaging between two and three hours for domestic flights and up to six hours for international flights. Then one must proceed through security checkpoints where the possibility of a full body cavity search is possible if one is found to be carrying a forgotten nail file or a plastic letter opener. Carry-on baggage is being eliminated from many flights, requiring that upon arrival one must go through the incredible hassles of retrieving one’s bags from the carousels, with even more time delays and all the well-known problems of lost, stolen, and damaged bags worse than ever.

Virtually no one contemplating these facts is choosing to travel for pleasure, and many businesses are instituting new policies reducing or eliminating the necessity of their employees flying on company business. Some corporations have even instituted a policy that exempts any employee who chooses from flying on company business, period.

Only a week after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, all the commercial American airline companies are within weeks of declaring bankruptcy themselves. They have cut back on scheduled flights by 20 percent already, and have begun layoffs of airline employees that may top 100,000 jobs eliminated within days.

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D, Missouri) has called for Americans to save the airlines by boarding planes again. He is, in essence, suggesting that Americans suck it up and forget their fears of terrorist attacks in order to save the American airline industry.

But it is not the fear of the American people that is destroying the American airline companies. We have learned about the heroic passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, disarmed by longstanding Federal Aviation Administration policy but having heard what other hijacked airliners were being used for, making an unarmed attack on the only person who knew how to fly the plane — the pilot-hijacker who had already murdered the United flight crew — in order to prevent the passenger jetliner they were on from being crashed into buildings and murdering thousands of their countrymen.

Nowadays there is an agreement between the terrorists who capture jetliners to use them as weapons of mass destruction, and those who are calling for sealing airline pilots into their cockpits no matter what happens in the passenger compartment. That agreement between the terrorists and the counter-terrorists is that the passengers, the reason for the existence of the jetliner itself, are as expendable as dumping jet fuel. The metal is now more important than the flesh.

It is not only at airports where “fear itself” is going to paralyze us. We already fear, and will fear more, taking our loved ones to concerts, sporting events, high-rise buildings, theme parks, government buildings, and many other places that are tempting targets for terrorist reprisals, once the armed forces of the United States engage the enemy overseas. We fear that public gatherings could turn deadly from terrorists with bombs or strategically placed machine guns. We fear that the enemy is already among us with horrific weapons of mass destruction including biological agents, chemical weapons, or even nuclear bombs.

President Bush was correct when he told us we must get back to work.

Congressman Gephardt is right when he tells us to suck it up.

But it is not the fear of the American people that is the threat to our economic and community life. It is the fear of our policy makers, including Congressman Gephardt, that is the main problem.

We all remember the grade-school teacher who, hit by a spitball while writing on the blackboard, punished the whole class because she didn’t know whom the perpetrator was. Our leaders are acting like that teacher.

Because there are a few — very few — terrorists among us, and our government’s investigators doesn’t know who they all are, our policy makers are punishing all of us. They are treating all of us like terrorists. Our leaders are terrified of the American people and in their fear it is they who are paralyzing our national life and our economy.

It’s time we told them they have to trust us again.

If anyone needs to suck it up, it’s them.

For years I have spoken about the necessity of restoring the Second Amendment to its intended purpose of regarding the armed citizen as an asset, rather than a liability, in the struggle against crime and terrorism. During peacetime my words have largely succeeded in rousing only the choir. I am hoping that now we are at war against an enemy within us, my words will have impact among those of my countrymen who have thought them unwise.

Americans with guns can prevent many, but of course not all, of the scenarios by which terrorists can damage us further. It can prevent the terrorist taking over of subway cars, trains, and buses. It can provide an effective means of stopping the machine gunning of crowds before mass casualties occur. It can prevent a truck stop, or a tanker truck carrying flammable liquids or hazardous materials, from being turned into an enemy asset. It might prevent the takeover of tollbooths at a bridge or a tunnel.

And yes, as I have said repeatedly this past week, letting airline passengers with badges, and licenses to carry concealed firearms, on board with their guns, checked only for the proper ammunition that will not cause critical damage to airliner control surfaces, can make sure that the next time passengers need to take on hijackers, they might be able to avoid having to crash the plane in order to save those still on the ground. They might be able to land safely themselves and get medical help for the casualties.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

President Bush, his cabinet, our governors and mayors, our legislators and city councils, and the ladies and gentlemen who serve in our civil services: we are your countrymen. If you can’t stop being afraid of us, if you can’t trust us with a gun when our enemies can take over a critical asset with a box cutter, then how can you ever expect us to stop being afraid and return our country to normality?

Note, March 8, 2010:

I wrote this a week after 9/11, before there was even a Department of Homeland Security.

Obviously airline security is even more invasive and no more effective.

Obviously the airlines are still in trouble.

Obviously nobody listened to me.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon “a complicated intelligence scenario and act” used by the U.S. as an excuse for the war on terror, Iran’s state TV has reported. “September 11 was a big lie and a pretext for the war on terror and a prelude to invading Afghanistan.” So here are twenty questions I wish President Ahmadinejad to answer.

1. Who is the mastermind for the 9/11 attacks?

2. What clandestine intelligence agency or agencies of the United States sanctioned the 9/11 attacks?

3. Name all known persons who were aware of the planned 9/11 attacks prior to 9/11.

4. Given that the plan involved the destruction and long-term contamination of the chief financial district not only of the United States but of most financial elites, why were the financial power elites willing to kill thousands of their own functionaries and poison their own turf?

5. Since no oil or other commodity of value was secured as a consequence of the wars launched in response to the 9/11 attacks, what goal was so important and pressing that the financial power elites behind the 9/11 attacks were willing to risk the political and economic destabilization of the United States?

6. Since the 1993 attempt to bring down the World Trade Center did not involve hijacking commercial jetliners but explosive demolition, would not another explosive demolition have been even more plausible as a casus belli for whatever war the “insider” 9/11 perpetrators had in mind?

7. The overall costs and damages of the 9/11 attacks add up to trillions of dollars. In simple terms of investment and profit, what financial payoff could justify this multi-trillion-dollar investment?

8. Since the 9/11 attacks were contrary to the national interests of the United States, what specific foreign or multinational cabal was behind the 9/11 attacks, and why are Muslims (specifically Arabs and Sunni, often enough Iran’s own enemies) automatically clear of being suspects?

9. Former FBI agent William O’Neill — who had left the FBI when his warnings of Osama bin Laden’s plans to attack the United States were ignored — was security chief of the World Trade Center at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and died on 9/11 at the World Trade Center. How could any 9/11 conspirators get by O’Neill’s suspicious and watchful eye in planting explosives in the World Trade Center?

10. Vice President Dick Cheney is often linked to the 9/11 attacks. How did the Vice President of the United States get into a chain of command for such an operation when the only Constitutional power given to the Vice President of the United States is to break a tie vote as President of the Senate?

11. What was in the cargo holds of Flights 11 and 175?

12. How many personnel were involved in the 9/11 attacks and how were they recruited and positioned for the attacks?

13. When was the plan for the 9/11 attacks first formulated, and where?

14. Who, specifically, on the 9/11 Commission is a conspirator-before-the-fact of the 9/11 attacks?

15. Who, specifically, on the 9/11 Commission is a conspirator-after-the-fact of the 9/11 attacks?

16. Who in the Bush administration was a conspirator before or after the fact of the 9/11 attacks?

17. Who in the Obama administration is a conspirator after-the-fact of the 9/11 attacks?

18. What technical experts being consulted regarding the 9/11 attacks are conspirators before or after the fact of the 9/11 attacks?

19. Who in the major media are conspirators before or after the fact of the 9/11 attacks?

20. How specifically has the State of Israel directly or indirectly benefited from the 9/11 attacks?