BradSpangler.com

Why haven’t you read Alongside Night yet? You should, particularly NOW if you haven’t already. This novel predicted the current crisis three decades ago.

Ripped from Today’s Headlines!
The Prophetic Novel of the
Final American Revolution!

The American dollar is in freefall. Prices are soaring. Foreclosures and unemployment are up, and even defense contracts are going overseas. Foreigners are buying up everything in America at firesale prices while gloating over the fall of a once great nation. Homeless people and gangs own the streets. Smugglers use the latest technology to operate bold enterprises that the government is powerless to stop, even with totalitarian spying on private communications. Anyone declared a terrorist by the administration is being sent to a secret federal prison where constitutional rights don’t exist.

And caught in the middle of it all are the brilliant 17-year-old son of a missing Nobel-prizewinning economist, his best friend from prep school whose uncle was once a guerrilla fighter, and the beautiful but mysterious 17-year-old girl he meets in a secret underground … a girl who carries a pistol with a silencer.

The setting could be next week. But this novel was written three decades ago by a 23-year-old college drop-out who crafted his particular brand of prophecy from combining the techniques of science fiction with projections based on an obscure economic theory.

Building on the prophetic novels of Orwell, Rand, and Heinlein, J. Neil Schulman created in Alongside Night the first of a new generation of libertarian novels, telling the story of the last two weeks of the world’s greatest superpower through the perceptive eyes of a young man caught up in the maelstrom of the final American revolution.

Alongside Night scored lavish praise for a first novel when it appeared in 1979, winning accolades from luminaries such as the English novelist many consider the greatest of his generation, and from the first American to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. Ten years later the Libertarian Futurist Society voted the book into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for novels embodying the spirit of liberty, alongside Orwell’s 1984, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The last time the novel saw print was in 1987. Now, Pulpless.Com is making J. Neil Schulman’s classic novel of the last and first days of America available once again, and perhaps, this time, its prophetic clarion call will be heard … if there’s still time.

Order it from Pulpless.com: Alongside Night

BTW, Schulman recently suggested in email that members of Congress who voted against the Paulson bailout should caucus together as a new party.

In the video clip below, Texas Congressman Burgess claims on the floor of the House that martial law was declared last night. Request confirmation.

Is a third party vote wasted?

No, but I wish it were.

Just like a major party vote, a third party vote will serve as a rationale to keep you under the illusionary impression that freedom or justice are somehow obtained by changing the policies or leadership of the gang of thugs called “government” — rather than through subverting, defying, ignoring or circumventing the same. This fundamental misunderstanding of the problem is reinforced by an electoral spectacle that distracts all for the purpose of changing nothing. The proper mindset for a slave who would prefer to be free is not to compare potential masters in a vain attempt to perhaps get to serve the master most comfortable to serve.

Your third party vote is not wasted. It serves to enslave your mind just as well as a major party vote does.

Ron Paul wants people to contact their Congressional rep about the Paulson bailout and related ripoff attempts. So does George Phillies.

I think that’s a waste of time. Even so, I’m not completely opposed to contacting politicians. Below is a draft petition that I welcome your feedback on.

This is a DRAFT, so take the opportunity to offer proposed edits and LATER I’ll put it up on a site like ipetitions.com.

To President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin of the Russian Federation,

Thank you for the opportunity to address you in this petition.

The Russian News and Information Agency (RIA Novosti) recently published an opinion article written by British historian and political analyst John Laughland. Laughland suggested that the Russian government consider making the rouble convertible into gold. The article can be found here:

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080924/117072937.html

We ask that you please consider Laughland’s proposal.

All factions of the political leadership of the United States government appear determined to wreck the value of the U.S. dollar. We are not optimistic that U.S. political leaders will adopt a wise monetary policy. Not only is this bad for the people of the United States, but because the U.S. dollar is so widely used it is bad for the people of the world.

We believe the Russian government has an opportunity to provide stability for the world economy during this time of crisis created by the U.S. government. We believe potential Russian adoption of a gold standard supports such efforts.

We ask this also on behalf of our own selves and all Americans who truly wish to prosper. You will recall, gentlemen, that the U.S. dollar once served as a stable currency for the informal economy in the Soviet Union. You may recall that this so-called “black market” did perhaps more to make life bearable for the ordinary Russian than the official economy did. We ask that the Russian government now return the favor by adopting a gold standard, creating a currency that can undisputably be trusted within the U.S. informal economy that must grow as the emerging U.S. police state grows in power.

Sincerely,
The undersigned

Well, not quite.

Sign it: Petition for Investigation of Police Misconduct at the RNC

Also, there’s a Free the RNC 8 group on Facebook.

Although Lew Rockwell mentioned this a few days ago, I want draw attention to it as well.

The UK’s Libertarian Alliance is sponsoring an essay contest of particular interest for left libertarians.

By the 10th October 2008, contestants are invited to submit essays to Dr Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance.

Essay Title: “Can a Libertarian Society be Described as ‘Tesco minus the State’?”
Essay Length: 3,000 words excluding notes and bibliography

Explanatory Note

Many socialists and conservatives regard libertarians as cheerleaders for big business. Our belief in free enterprise is understood as support for the bigger, and therefore the more successful, corporations - General Motors, Microsoft, HSBC, Tesco, and so forth - and for an international financial system centred on the City of London.

Some libertarians are happy to be so regarded. They dislike the way in which big government provides opportunities for big business to acquire privileges that shelter it from competition. Even so, they believe that a world without government, or a world with much less government, would be broadly similar in its patterns of enterprise to the world that we now have. It would be much improved, but not fundamentally dissimilar.

Other libertarians disagree. They regard big business as fundamentally a creation of big government. Incorporation laws free entrepreneurs from personal risk and personal responsibility, and allow the growth of large business organisations that are bureaucratically managed. These organisations then cartellise their markets and externalise many of their costs. The result is systematic distortion of market behaviour from the forms it would take without government intervention. These libertarians often go further in their analysis by denying the legitimacy of intellectual property rights and ownership rights in land beyond what any individual can directly use.

Where do you stand in this debate? Are you broadly comfortable with a global capitalism that is raising billions of people from starvation towards affluence. Or are you a radical with a vision of a society that has never yet been tried and is as alien and even frightening to most people as anything promised by the Marxists.

You tell us.

In case anyone’s not clear on this, Tesco could roughly be considered the British answer to Wal-Mart.

First prize is one thousand British pounds.

The typical Republican has the morals of a thief, even after they’ve been the victim of a crime themself.

I am not praising Democrats.

Reading over the essay “Anarchist-Mutualism” from former Tuckerite J. Wm Lloyd (who had deserted to statism by the time he wrote the piece), two things struck me very early in it…

1) Confirmation, once again, that Tucker’s doctrine and Proudhon’s were regarded then as one and the same:

“In 1884, or thereabout, I became a disciple of the school of Proudhon and Tucker.”

2) There’s something about hyphens…

“Tho never very orthodox, I passed for a pretty straight Individualist-Anarchist for some 20 years.”

I may be reading to much into it, but it’s not clear that the author was referring to an “Individualist-Anarchist” as a subset of the larger category “Anarchists” or if he was, instead, indicating he regarded the two (”Individualist” and “Anarchist”) as synonyms.

Sheer speculation, but I shall reserve this alternative interpretation to tentatively apply to other writings in the future as test cases.