Free-Man's Perspective

I’ve made no secret of my admiration of Thomas Jefferson, and today I’d like to show you at least part of why. And so I’ll give you a collection of my favorite Jefferson passages. There was considerably more to the man than just his writings, but this will give you enough to appreciate. And please remember that he came up with these thoughts between 200 and 250 years ago. Continue reading “The Wisdom of Thomas Jefferson”

This series of seven podcasts include the text (but not the notes) of my book, Post-Primate Society: A New Look At The Human Story. I think it’s a very important book, but I also think it will take some time to be accepted. And so I posted it to Kindle and am posting it here as quickly as I could. A proper audio book will follow, and I hope a paper book will follow, but all in good time.

The material in this book is simply a lot to ingest. I’m convinced I have described it well, and it certainly makes attractive arguments, but I also expect it to be difficult to retain: It’s simply too foreign.

And so, please go through it as well as you can, and allow the concepts to remain in the back of your mind.

Thanks.

 

Many small farmers, however, attached themselves to people controlling good land or remained where they had been living. Historian Regine Pernoud described the process this way: Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L8, P6”

I recently had some discussions with a friend on the Deep State in America. And since this topic has been making the rounds, I think a primer may be helpful. I spent time, some years ago, among these people: commuting on their roads and trains, sleeping in their leafy suburbs, and strolling the very fine streets of the capitol. I think I can make a fair enough job of this. Continue reading “A Deep State Primer”

We’ve had more trouble with Amazon.com, and so we’ll take another step away from them. They seem to be handling our Kindle orders as usual, but have de-listed our paper titles. This has wildly distorted the prices of our books on their site. A copy of The Breaking Dawn, for example, was listed this morning for $59. We were previously selling new ones for less than $20.

All of this after 16 years of problem-free business.

But all of this it hardly matters, since the number of books Amazon sells for us has dwindled to all but zero. How and why that happened, we don’t know.

So, if you’d like hard copies of our books, you can download a form and order by mail… the old school way. It’s slower, but you’ll still get the books.

We’ll build a system for selling e-books and audio books soon, and cease relying upon Amazon for that as well. 

This series of seven podcasts include the text (but not the notes) of my book, Post-Primate Society: A New Look At The Human Story. I think it’s a very important book, but I also think it will take some time to be accepted. And so I posted it to Kindle and am posting it here as quickly as I could. A proper audio book will follow, and I hope a paper book will follow, but all in good time.

The material in this book is simply a lot to ingest. I’m convinced I have described it well, and it certainly makes attractive arguments, but I also expect it to be difficult to retain: It’s simply too foreign.

And so, please go through it as well as you can, and allow the concepts to remain in the back of your mind.

Thanks.

 

One oddity of this time (and it appears to have been a necessary oddity) was gift-giving. The rich and powerful of the time gave lavish gifts to one another, and often very dramatically. This seems to have been a carry-over from Roman patronage, and, according to historian Peter Brown, it became “treasured as the cement of their social world.” Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L8, P5”

While it’s possible to use “conspiracy theory” in a neutral way, I’m struggling to recall an instance. In actual use, to call someone a conspiracy theorist is to slap them. It’s purpose is to shut them up, to stop others from considering what they said, and to shame them as badly as possible. Anyone who’s been its target knows this.

Calling “conspiracy theory” adds precisely no factual input to a discussion; it’s simply an attempt to end a conversation; an attempt to intimidate and paralyze. Continue reading ““Conspiracy Theory” Is Thuggery”

I got an email from my old friend Dick not too long ago, who is maybe the smartest guy I ever met, and I’ve known a lot of smart guys. He was coming through town and we decided to meet at our old hangout, Jay’s Bar.

Dick was from California, but he came through Chicago every now and then back in the 90s, and he often joined our cypherpunk hangout in the back room at Jay’s. Continue reading “You’re Already Rich”

Adaptations, Better And Worse

There has never been an absence of not-particularly-moral men seeking power, and such people didn’t just vanish once Christianity became the new European legitimacy. Nor did Rome falling apart stop them from grasping at whatever power they could. Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L8, P4”