September, 2016

The Day After Never – Retribution is now live on Amazon! In the fourth installment in the series, Lucas must travel into the mouth of hell to keep a promise to the woman he’s fallen for, while the world collapses around him.

This is the final book in the original story arc. Depending on how it’s received, I may do another trilogy that takes Lucas into yet more disastrous predicaments, where he has to risk everything to defeat an enemy that’s determined to rule the emerging world.

But for now, this is the end of the series, and I hope everyone who’s enjoyed the first three has a hell of a time with Retribution. There are worse ways to pass a few hours of one’s time. If you think it sucks, try tequila. Tequila fixes everything.

Or so I hear.

Continue reading

In a post on Hugh Howey’s FB page, in answer to a suggestion we list the top three things we would want the U.S. government to do if we ran the country, I offered the following as my necessary changes that would result in a complete turnaround to the U.S.’ sinking prospects and fortunes.

Let’s preface this with the observation that the country is currently borrowing about a trillion more per year than it takes in, and has done so to the tune of $20 trillion – a sum so vast it can never be paid back unless the value of the currency drops to nothing from printing it. The U.S. has gone, since it abandoned the gold standard, from the largest creditor in history, to the largest debtor, in a matter of a couple of generations.

With that fact in place, here are my suggestions, two of which involve how to climb out of the debt hole and fund necessary infrastructure repairs and investments in the nation’s future, and one in how to ensure that future isn’t populated by mouth-breathing morons.

I’ll start with where the money would come from to fund things, and finish with how to ensure lasting prosperity versus moving deck chairs around on the Titanic:

1) Close all military bases in foreign countries, end all wars of aggression, slash the military budget by 90% so it’s more in line with what every other nation on the planet spends for defense (as opposed to waging war), and limit our military to defending the geographical U.S., not acting as the aggressive, warmongering police force for the rest of the world. That would simultaneously free up a massive amount of money, and reduce terrorism by at least that 90%, as most won’t give up their lives to attack a state that isn’t murdering its demographic.

2) Free college to all citizens if they can pass an aptitude test. Why? Because it’s an investment in our future, and an educated citizenry is one that can make more informed decisions and build a better future.

3) End the Federal Reserve. Why? A privately owned bank that creates money from thin air and charges the nation to use it via usury is the single largest drain of prosperity ever conceived, and ensures that wealth isn’t evenly divided, but rather, becomes unevenly concentrated in a few hands – hands that do nothing but create money from thin air while everyone else must labor to get it. Also, the inflation effect of unsound money ensures that the masses lose buying power of their savings and so are always behind, and that those who labor for pay are constantly losing, as the scrip they’re paid in loses value. It’s servitude, and the basis of most of the nation’s inequality and problems. Solve that, and you don’t need to rejigger the tax system, which is simply trying to use confiscation to right a social ill whose basis lies in the form of currency used, and the lack of prosperity it inherently creates. Unsound money always favors those who issue it at the expense of the rest, and enables society’s parasites to corrupt every institution with the currency they print from thin air.

Do those three things, and the prosperity of the nation would skyrocket within less than a generation.

To my last point, most don’t realize how currency is now created in the U.S., or that it’s in violation of the Constitution. The Constitution establishes only two forms of lawful money: silver and gold coin. The framers were more than conversant with fiat, paper currency issued by private banks – they’d seen it drain the prosperity from England, and when imposed on the colonies  by the King’s insistence they use Bank of England notes instead of colonial scrip, drain the prosperity from the land of plenty. They wanted none of it, for good reason.

In 1913, the Federal Reserve act was passed, which created both the Fed, and the IRS. Why the latter? Because if you’re going to create money from thin air, you need a mechanism to suck it back out of the market so you don’t create runaway price inflation from all the new money chasing the same goods and services, and the IRS was that mechanism. Of course, an unapportioned tax on labor was unconstitutional, which it was then and is now, but the IRS got around that when it lost in court prior to WW2, by establishing a voluntary 4% tax during WW2, and the citizenry became so used to this voluntary tax, most kept on sending in their 1040 and check even after the war ended. That monster morphed since into an authoritarian bully that demands you pay a tax you aren’t liable for, at gunpoint, and refuses to furnish any proof there’s a law requiring you to pay it – there isn’t – preferring to point to court decisions that back it in legalese that’s impossible to decipher for the average person, as opposed to a law.

That tangent aside, most don’t understand how U.S. currency is created, so I’ll explain it in abridged form. For every dollar on deposit in a bank, the bank is allowed to create $9 from thin air when it makes loans. You get a mortgage, for which you’re going to pay the bank 2-3 times what you borrowed over the 30 year term, and it did nothing to get that currency but tap a few keys. That’s it. Poof, new currency, which it collects the interest on for 30 years and did zero to earn, and for which it will confiscate your house if you fail to make the payments. If that seems like it’s fraud that stacks everything in favor of the currency creators, you’re correct, but the Congress sold you down the river, and made fraud the national monetary system in 1913, when it delegated the right to issue the nation’s currency to the Fed (which the Constitution doesn’t allow, incidentally – nowhere in it does it grant the Congress the ability to delegate its duties, and currency creation is the job of the Treasury), giving this privately owned cartel of private banks control over the nation’s currency. The nation’s prosperity was a foregone conclusion from there.

So end that scam, and suddenly you have a tremendous amount of wealth retained in the country instead of paid to a privately owned collection agency (the IRS, owned by the IMF) for the Fed.

As to terminating the perpetual war machine that is the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned about in his final presidential address, that’s a simple one. Stop fighting wars for oil, heroin, and to destabilize nations that don’t want to go along with your empire building, dismantle the war department, and focus on defending yourself against direct attacks. That’s it. Defending the country, not waging endless wars using “defending our interests” or “freeing the people” or “bringing democracy” as the excuse to allow war profiteers from looting the treasury year after year. None of the wars fought since I was born are to defend anything but the privilege of elite corporate interests, and the children of the poor die to do it. It’s unjust, wasteful, and extremely expensive, and we need to stop this insanity before it kills us all.

With the additional prosperity those two steps would create, you could fund free education, effectively end poverty within a generation due to the massive boom that would ensue, and enrich everyone except the very small clique at the top that currently amasses all the wealth while creating nothing of value.

Or continue as we are, and watch the wealth continue to concentrate at the very top, leaving the nation, and the world, living on a planet it no longer owns, slaving just to make ends meet, working for masters for whom you are nothing more than ants, pawns in a game you don’t even understand, whose lives matter not in the slightest.

Continue reading