Books

The Neocon Con

September 16, 2011
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The Neocon Con

David Gordon has a review of Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, on Mises Daily: C. Bradley Thompson … argues that neoconservatism stands in fundamental opposition to individual rights and a free economy. Although neoconservatives have indeed challenged certain aspects of the welfare state, they have no quarrel with it in principle. . . . . why do the neoconservatives criticize the welfare state at all? Aside from the technical deficiencies of particular programs, what concerns them is the way that some welfare programs encourage unvirtuous behavior. Welfare that rewards giving birth out of wedlock, e.g., arouses their protests. This sort of criticism reveals a key fact about the neoconservatives. They have a very definite sense of the proper conduct that the state, or as they are likely to term it, the regime, ought to promote. Not for them is the libertarian view that each person, so long as he does not initiate force against others, is free to lead his life as he wishes. To the contrary, the leaders of the state have as one of their prime duties the development of the citizens’ characters. Accordingly, freedom of speech most decidedly does

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“Pattern of Wounds:” Bertrand Scores Again

September 14, 2011
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“Pattern of Wounds:” Bertrand Scores Again

One of the keys to a long career in law enforcement is learning how to tell police psychologists what they need to hear without sounding deceptive. The only alternative is good mental health, which to me has always seemed too unrealistic a goal. That’s Houston Police Detective Roland March, hero of J. Mark Bertrand’s crime novel Pattern of Wounds, a sequel to Back On Murder. I liked the first book very much, and I think I liked this one even more. Bertrand is doing almost exactly the thing I’ve tried to do (with far less success) in my own fantasy novels—to portray the real world through eyes of faith, giving both believers and unbelievers a fair chance to make their cases. Roland March is a Houston cop, at once admired and disliked in his department because of his erratic career history. Successful enough as a crime solver to have been the subject of two true crime novels, he went through a slump period (following the death of his daughter in a car accident with a drunk driver) during which he seemed to be on the way out. In this book he tells us something we didn’t know before about that

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John Locke’s “The Love You Crave:” Not Much Good, Except As a Lesson to Publishers

September 10, 2011
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I’m not going to post the cover of John Locke’s The Love You Crave, because it’s kind of racy for our standards in these parts. And I’m not even going to link to the e-book, because you can find it if you want to. I do not in any way endorse Locke’s Donovan Creed novels, of which The Love You Crave is the first I’ve read (and, I’m relatively certain, the last). But there are things to be said about the series as a phenomenon, and not just “Tsk, tsk.” The Donovan Creed novels are a series of “humorous” thrillers about a government agent and assassin. He’s a little like James Bond on cocaine. The books (judging from this one) are full of violence and sex, and attempts at humor which (according to reviews) work for some people, though I’m not one of them. The book suffers from a severe lack of likeable characters. The hero (not himself very likeable) tries at one point to figure out one of his friends whom he can trust with his life. He realizes that most of his friends have tried to kill him at least once. If I were giving advice to a

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Dead Hand of Government Monopoly Impedes Indie Publishers

September 9, 2011
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Dead Hand of Government Monopoly Impedes Indie Publishers

The so-called “Internet Reformation” is a hopeful alternative to business as usual, for both the purveyors of political facts and even traditional fiction publishers: Over the last few years, the publishing world has begun to change drastically. As with the music industry in recent times, people no longer need large firms to get published. With the rise of the e-book and print-on-demand services, a writer can now circumvent the traditional system and release their work directly to the public themselves. — Reagen Dandridge Desilets A more “democratic” intellectual development is hard to imagine. Nevertheless, the federal government wasn’t content to permit the “reformation” without hindrance: One of the first things an author needs in order to self-publish is an International Standard Book Number, better known as an ISBN. It’s not required in some cases with ebooks but to maximize your sales and get listed in large name distributors and retailers, an author really does need one. In order to get one, the author has to go to the only company allowed to sell them in the United States: Bowker. I suppose the idea is that it is easier to have one company managing the numbers, but a closer look reveals

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The Donzerly Light: A Good, Rewarding Supernatural Thriller

September 8, 2011
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The Donzerly Light: A Good, Rewarding Supernatural Thriller

I got this book free for my Kindle (it still is free, at least as of this writing), and I have to say it’s one of the better free books I’ve downloaded. Ryne Douglas Pearson is known as an author of techno-thrillers, but, as he explains in an Author’s Note, before he started in that genre he wrote The Donzerly Light, a Dean Koontzian supernatural thriller, which didn’t sell. He remained fond of it though, and the advent of e-publishing made it possible for him to offer it to the public. The time is the late 1990s. Jay Grady wakes, tied up and blindfolded, in a dark closet, with a cast on a broken leg. Rough hands lift him up and carry him to an interrogation room, where he is questioned by a man who does not seem to be a policeman. Jay was captured after being seen shooting a man to death. He does not deny the act. Once, we learn, he was a Wall Street celebrity, a young man with a gift for picking winning stocks, a mover on the way up. Then he suffered what looked like a psychotic break, and disappeared. For years he survived as

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Did Thomas Jefferson Really Have Children by a Slave?

September 3, 2011
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Did Thomas Jefferson Really Have Children by a Slave?

Everybody “knows” he did, right? In a book due out Thursday, eminent scholars say it’s unlikely that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children, disputing a decade’s worth of conventional wisdom that the author of the Declaration of Independence sired offspring with one of his slaves. The debate has ensnared historians for years, and many thought the issue was settled when DNA testing in the late 1990s confirmed that a Jefferson male fathered Hemings’ youngest son, Eston. But, with one lone dissenter, the panel of 13 scholars doubted the claim and said the evidence points instead to Jefferson’s brother Randolph as the father. The scholars also disputed accounts that said Hemings’ children received special treatment from Jefferson, which some saw as evidence of a special bond between the third president and Hemings. There seems to be reason to doubt Jefferson’s patrimony: Claims that the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson started in Paris are unlikely because she was living with his daughters at their boarding school across the city at the time. The “Jefferson family” DNA used in the 1998 test came from descendants of his uncle, which the scholars said means any one of two dozen Jefferson men living in Virginia

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Let’s Hear It for “The Internet Reformation” — E-Books Challenge Political Orthodoxy

September 1, 2011
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Let’s Hear It for “The Internet Reformation” — E-Books Challenge Political Orthodoxy

Behold the demise of the political “gatekeepers”: “Good” writers generally craft stories that many, many people like. That word “craft” entails a lifetime of hard work, trial and error, self-education, and, yes, native talent. Not everybody can do it. In fact, not very many people at all can do it relatively well or successfully. And therein lies the issue over which the dying world of book-object-story is currently dashing itself to pieces. The commercial structure undergirding our previous method of story delivery – the mass-marketing of book-objects that present individual stories — acted as a gatekeeper that prevented all but those regarded by hard-eyed editors using a definition of quality that included notions of profit — Will this story sell enough books to make a profit in our current commercial structure? — from reaching a significant number of readers. That structure is dead — and the gatekeeper function it performed is equally dead. — Bill Quick For authors accustomed to enjoying market share for their books because of their politics (a.k.a. the “prestige writers”), reality is catching up: . . . one class of writers who currently benefit under the current system will suffer, and another class which has suffered

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The New New Deal Isn’t As Disastrous As the Old New Deal — It’s Worse!

August 27, 2011
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The New New Deal Isn’t As Disastrous As the Old New Deal — It’s Worse!

The specter of John Maynard (“If you’re stuck in a hole, just keep digging”) Keynes must be a regular sight in the Oval Office, offering posthumous advice in seances, which the current administration follows religiously, thereby postponing — or even canceling — an economic recovery. The first New Dealer also tried the “command and control” approach, back when it was billions and billions (pace Carl Sagan) instead of trillions and trillions: The Great Depression dominated the 1930s, in large part because President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs failed to create jobs. In May 1939, shortly after learning that unemployment stood at 20.7%, Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the Treasury, exploded: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Morgenthau concluded, “I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!” Why did Roosevelt’s New Deal fail so miserably? The larger problem is that federal spending can’t create jobs. It merely transfers wealth from taxpayers to central planners. But worse than that, most of FDR’s New Deal was driven by politics.

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Cultural Marxism — Is It Here to Stay?

August 26, 2011
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Cultural Marxism — Is It Here to Stay?

If it does, you can blame … J. R. R. Tolkien? . . . one of the things that I talk about is what I like to call “West Coast White nationalism” because West Coast White nationalism, a lot of the people that I know on the West Coast who think in terms of a racially defined new order of society, you take one look at them and you think that they’re hippies or you think that they’re liberals. Their lifestyles and their attitudes embrace a lot of things like Eastern spirituality, and drinking fruit juice, and wearing sandals, and granola, and vegetarianism, and organic food and organic farming, all these sort of things that you think are kind of hippie things. If you look at the roots of a lot of the West Coast hippie culture and also the hippie culture in Europe for that matter, a lot of it goes back to Tolkien. What doesn’t come from the New Left, let’s say the Frankfurt School and things like that, a lot of it comes from Tolkien which is pretty much directly connected with European Traditionalism. — Greg Johnson According to this view, ’60s hippies took Tolkien’s “message of

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Book Review: ‘The Days of Laméch’ (A Reposting)

August 20, 2011
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Book Review: ‘The Days of Laméch’ (A Reposting)

The Days of Laméch — By Jon Saboe — Outskirts Press — 2011 — Novel — Trade paperback: 503 pages — ISBN: 978-1-4327-4643-8. In the aftermath of the Family Wars, the Semyaz arrive from unknown lands with a message of peace and hope. Their advanced technology and wisdom helps to rebuild the fallen cities, and their teachings that all people are Children of the Light promises to ensure that such horrific wars are a thing of the past. But there are those who don’t trust their motives—or their stated promise to improve the human race. Are the Semyaz altruistic benefactors, or do they represent the ultimate enslavement—or even eradication—of humanity as we know it? The youthful and reckless Laméch is ripped from his comfortable city life and thrust into a centuries-old resistance where he discovers the true nature of the Semyaz and their multi-generational designs on humanity. Numerous clandestine operations bring him face to face with their secret research facilities, his long-absent grandfather—and a beautiful dark-haired prisoner who teaches him the true meaning of love and sacrifice. Laméch learns a new kind of warfare that entails trusting the plan established by his grandfather—even though it seems destined to grant the

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Is Western Culture Going Insane?

August 20, 2011
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Is Western Culture Going Insane?

David Solway thinks that the West is exhibiting “he symptoms of an imperium in its dotage”: The greatest civilization the world has ever known has lost confidence in itself, infected by a plague of self-doubt and self-recrimination. Having lost its bearings, it is no longer willing or able to think clearly, to make difficult choices, to defend its patrimony and resist demographic subversion, to accept the need for sacrifice, to value the radiant catalogue of its triumphs and achievements in art, science, technology, medicine, and statecraft, and, with its declining birthrate, even to reproduce itself. This is total madness. Solway fingers the usual suspects: The gradual but unrelenting insinuation of socialist and neo-Marxist doctrine into the liberal West, after it has been reliably shown to falter or collapse wherever it has been implemented, is still another index of severe mental disconnect and maladjustment to reality. Command economies are proven to be inefficient, and the welfare state, predicated on the punitive taxation of a shrinking and increasingly insolvent productive base to subsidize ever-inflating entitlement programs, has been properly described as a gigantic Ponzi scheme. Redistributionist and womb-to-tomb security states, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, will eventually run out of other people’s

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“Hitler’s Bible”

August 20, 2011
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“Hitler’s Bible”

On the CMI website, Russell Grigg tries to set the record straight: Elimination of the Jews in Nazi Germany was not confined to the Holocaust. It also took the form of rewriting the New Testament to ‘dejudaize’ it, i.e., to remove references to Judaism and to recast Jesus as an Aryan, generating what has been called the ‘Nazi Bible’. This has been the subject of some sensational and substantially erroneous claims, including that the project was Hitler’s brainchild. In 1930s Germany, the ‘German Christians’ (Deutsche Christen) movement arose. These were theologically liberal Protestant churches and theologians who were enthusiastically pro-Nazi, calling Hitler the ‘Führer Jesus’ and ‘God’s agent in our day’. Politically ambitious and anti-Semitic, they wanted a faith without anything Jewish in the Bible, and without converted Jews in the Church. Their ultimate membership of 600,000 constituted about 30 percent of German Protestants. In opposition to this, the so-called ‘Confessing Church’ (Bekennende Kirche) movement arose, ultimately attracting some 20 percent of Protestant pastors. It included notable opponents of Hitler such as Karl Barth, Martin Niemöller, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, some of its members were inclined to take other liberties with the plain meaning of the biblical text, and some

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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