It’s an odd thing, but for months now, I have felt very little desire to speak out on issues, or get into debates with sheeple.  Even, or maybe especially, about freedom.

For the past couple of years I’ve really been noticing how much most people only want to talk about themselves - especially on a very mundane level - and heaven forbid they return the favor and give you equal time!  The art of conversation is so far deceased that it has rotted into a putrid game of self-important, self-promoting control - harmless in a superficial sense, but deadly boring and wasteful of precious time.

But then too, I don’t care a rat’s patootie about the mundane aspects of most people’s daily existence, nor about revealing my own, when I would really prefer to discuss and debate thoughts and ideas and information about freedom, self-sufficiency, preparing for the trouble I see coming, etc.

So, in large part, I’ve gotten into a habit of assuming (usually with reason, I think) that no one cares to listen to anything I have to say.

Now, too, when I hear of abuses, I don’t get het up with anger or outrage anymore either, the way I used to.  (And it was that energy of fed-upness and violated justice that motivated a lot of my writing.)  I do often feel for the victims, if true innocent victims they are.  But the feeling I now experience toward the perpetrators is a cross between indifference and quiet resistance.

And I think it’s that quiet aspect that has me not talking or writing about my thoughts, concerns or plans.

It’s a struggle within, because one voice in my head says, “But these issues are vital and should get some exposure, and you can give them that!”  The other voice, though, counters, “Those who care at this point are already aware.  The rest aren’t interested in being preached at by you.  Let reality educate them, as it soon will.”

No coincidence, then, that last week, heavy into this mood, I decided to reread Atlas Shrugged.

P.S.:  Oh, and speaking of fiction, I was not one of the finalists in the Freedom in Fiction Prize.  No reasons or feedback were provided, so that’s all I can tell you.  Liberty Train will go on, but I don’t know how quickly.  Thanks to all of you who have provided warm support and commentary.  Your input has been valuable in every sense.

Brad of McBlog fame has penned a thoughtful little piece on living the “Frugalista Gulch” lifestyle - right where you are, in his case. Woohoo to you both, and welcome to the Outlaw crew!

When Wendy mentioned to me her “motivation #2″ for the frugal philosophy — resisting the state — the first thing that popped into my mind was “Galt’s Gulch.” Because what we are doing is very similar to what John Galt and his fellows did when they went “on strike” and withdrew to Galt’s Gulch. We are denying the State and its army of leeches, not the product of our minds as such, but rather our productivity.

And Brad’s conclusion is right on…there are going to be thousands of “Frugalista Gulches.” Perhaps there already are.

(Thanks to Dave Gross at The Picket Line for the link!)

Thanks, Lewlew, for tagging me on this one: “What motivated you to start looking into Anarchist/Libertarian thought?”

Hmmm.

When I was in second grade and we were learning about Hawaii, the teacher told the boys to cut paper surfboards out of big rolls of construction paper and to decorate them, while the girls were told to make paper hula skirts. I remember going ballistic about that. I didn’t want to have to put on some stupid skirt and dance around in front of people just because I was a girl.

So I insisted on making a surfboard instead. At least I wouldn’t have to feel like a simpering idiot. There were other similar instances through my childhood, all centering, in hindsight, around the issues of justice, individualism, and common sense. So, like Lewlew, I think the predilection existed in me already, but I don’t know why.

In high school I was lucky to have The Fountainhead assigned in English class, and the teacher was a rabid individualist who devoted a whole month to discussion of that book. But I didn’t have any leaning toward or interest in politics then. I was a budding philosopher, though - read a lot of Sartre and Camus, I recall.

It was during college that I got to thinking about the sweeping issues of freedom and liberty. I ventured to Washington, DC and fell in love with the brave words inscribed in the Jefferson Memorial…in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress…in the National Archives. I thought I’d found the real thing and it stirred my soul. I even decided to take some poli-sci courses, because I expected they’d go deeper into the wonders of liberty and the history of how it was intentionally protected. D’oh.

During sophomore year, I also read Atlas Shrugged in three wild, wonderful days, gasping and then grinning at the unexpected but perfectly logical plot twists and turns. I read The Passion of Ayn Rand and learned of the utter totalitarianism that woman had fought and escaped - learned a history that had eluded me until then. This, and my disgust with the poli-sci and other courses in school, gave me to understand that the learning I wanted would not be found in expensive classrooms. Philosophy in college, for instance, was sheer senseless misery - Kant and Hegel, Hume and Marx - forced regurgitation of which did nothing to illumine my life.

After graduation, I floundered. Now I see that I was disillusioned with the world around me versus the world I knew within myself…still am. But one day, wandering through stacks at the library, I happened on a section of DIY books - two in particular, about building one’s own house (one from stone, one from logs). It was like the skies opened and rays of light broke through. “I could do this! And be very happy living this way!” That was the beginning of my journey down the path of gulching, although I wouldn’t call it by any name until many years later. But what a sense of freedom and competence reading those books (and many more) gave me about life, a real life in freedom! It was about this time that I found Claire Wolfe’s early books too - they were a great help to more understanding, and a big challenge to action too.

However, I didn’t have the means then even to follow that simple dream. I’m still striving, in fact. Almost got to that point while I was married, but divorce took away what I’d managed to build. When I was starting over, I figured it would be good to join the LP and meet some likeminded people. But - well, suffice it to say that what I saw in the LP sent me into the anarchist camp. Bigtime.

Only I knew nothing about anarchism - I’d vaguely classified it in my mind with Satan worship and black magic, dark and destructive and dangerous. All I knew was what I’d told myself for years: that I never wanted to be a boss nor to have one. Bingo…things came together as I looked into the subject.

I remain on the cusp now, an anarchist at heart but not always in deed, knowing mostly that the system is rigged against freedom, yet holding out hope for one last change. Not just through Ron Paul, but through the phenomenon of so many individuals coming to understand and passionately to embrace his message. I have no interest in further political action, personally. But I do see that these Paul supporters are at the point I was at a few years ago, and many are beginning to see the man behind the curtain, so all is not lost, yet…even though the election is a longshot.

I’ve been wondering lately whether we’re seeing today the equivalent of maybe 1770 or so, when the Boston Massacre was just beginning to galvanize people of conscience and intelligence. I think of old Sam Adams, for instance, who rabble-roused for years before he got the Sons of Liberty riled up enough to garner serious attention from the powers that were. No, I don’t want to see a war in this country or in any other. What I’m driving at is the mindset, the dawning awareness of insufferable tyranny.

Perhaps, with that awareness growing, a peaceful yet passionate revolution could indeed be in the future. I like to think so, anyway.

Uber Cool Nerd Queen, thank you very much! LOL.



I was so surprised by these results that I just had to post ‘em. Me, uber cool? AND a nerd? Geek, maybe, but nerd??? Nerd is a title of honor, my friends! Nerd is a pride thing!

I’m such a non-techie that it’s embarrassing. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a slide rule in the flesh (or is that in the wood?)  And except for TNG, DS9, and the less bloody episodes of Firefly, I am NOT a sci-fi fan.

But you never know, I guess… :D  So here’s one more nerd queen joining the sisterhood!

Take the Nerd Test yourself here!

In many ways this new year looks to be a scarifying time.  I won’t even bother to enumerate the litany of troubles - if you’re a reader here, you’re plenty well aware.  Yet I do have hope as the baby new year sets in.

Say what you will about the validity of participating in the political process - you must speak from where you are.  What gives me hope and joy is to see so many thousands of people speaking and acting from where they are - awakening to freedom, both lost and recoverable - and taking principled, richly creative, motivated, joyful individual action to bring it about.

People, so many people come alive as never before, using their resources and talents on behalf of a good and humble man called Ron Paul, simply because they have seen him expounding the ideas at which they themselves have begun to arrive.  Simply because being in Washington for twenty years did not “change him.”  Simply because he stands for something - something they perhaps had forgotten how much they loved.

The U.S. will not suddenly become a perfect (or perfectly moral) place should Dr. Paul be elected.  But over time, it will likely be better than what we know now.  Someone is going to be elected (or possibly remain in the office of) president.  That someone is going to have an impact on most every human life in this country - and many others around the globe.  Whether or not you think voting is an acceptable act, would you complain at the demise of the terroristic IRS?  Could you honestly denigrate the ending of American involvement in hostilities around the world, and the beginnings of a foreign policy of peace and freedom?

And if he’s not elected, I kinda doubt that his many riled-up supporters will go quietly or promptly into the night.  Perhaps the “movement” will morph into a non-political or semi-political form.  Perhaps that would even be something the non-voting anarchists could get behind.  (I mean this kindly.  After the 2004 election, I too had planned never to vote again.)

The greatest thing about the Ron Paul R3VOLution might simply be the wonderful sense that, as freedom seekers, we’re a lot less alone and alienated than we thought.  Maybe human brotherhood - of an individually, freely chosen sort, of course - isn’t such a drippy concept after all.

Hey, it’s 2008.  Anything’s possible.

Ran Prieur has written yet another of those posts that get me fired up to go all Outlaw.  I’m copying it here in full for posterity, because posts from his blog “drop off the edge” after about 10 days:

December 1. There’s a lot of buzz about the Homegrown Terrorist Radicalization Whatever Act. According to the script, we’re supposed to respond, “Unthinkable! Outrage! Constitution! Fight through usual channels! Oh no, usual channels not working! American reality different from American ideal! Protest! Ow, stop hitting me!”

If we respond this way, we are going along with the abuse ritual. To an abuser, there is nothing sexier than when the victim expresses shock and outrage and fights back in a way that’s totally ineffective. The next sexiest thing is to grovel in submission, and next after that is total numb defeat. These strategies not only don’t work — they actually feed a demon that inhabits the collective consciousness and many individuals, and they encourage more abuse.

So what can we do about it? As Thaddeus Golas said, “A great deal, if our heads are clear.” The common mistakes of abuse victims and political dissidents correspond exactly to the first four of the five stages of grief. It’s time to stop fucking around and get to the fifth stage.

America has passed from Republic to Empire, and will not go back. We are living in an authoritarian state in rapid decline. The federal government will pass more and more repressive laws, because that is what declining empires do. By all means, we should pay attention to hostile moves by government and business, the same way you would pay attention to rising floodwaters. You don’t get angry at the water. You don’t say “the Constitution forbids water getting this high.” It is not a good idea to march through the water holding signs demanding that it recede. But you might be able to channel the water to where it will do less harm, or pile up sandbags to protect critical areas, or at least evacuate to higher ground.

Moving from metaphor to reality, we can fight big domination systems with little systems that are still democratic. Your vote for president is now worth less than your vote on Reddit, but you could make a huge difference by starting a group to run a candidate for city council, or to connect responsible squatters with vacant houses, or to fix and give away old bikes, or to turn an abandoned parking lot into a garden.

Another thing we have to understand is that the law is a distraction. The highest and lowest classes already know this in their bones: the only thing that matters is what you can get away with. The police will invade your house, kill your dog, and steal your computer if you run a perfectly legal website that scrutinizes the police too closely. But you can flagrantly violate the law by occupying an empty house, raising chickens in your back yard, and providing unlicenced medical care, as long as you maintain good relations with everyone who knows you’re doing it.  (emphasis added)

I know he’s more or less right.  And it just gets me, you know?  Because I have the hugest love and admiration for Ron Paul and what he’s taking on.  Yes, I’ve been supporting him with my plastic FRNs - and I want to see him win.  Just to observe the look on the faces of George Stephanopoulos and Ann Coulter and all those who say “he can never win.”  (How come no one ever makes the so-called expert explain just why he can’t win, when it’s still a month to the first frackin’ primary?)

Dangitall.  I’m stuck in hope.  I love this particular underdog.  I can’t help it.  He’s a dear.  And he’s mostly right.

But my dark side whacks me upside the head with a 2×4 and yells, “So is Ran Prieur right!  Not even a President Paul  can save us now!  You know it - you gotta save your own ass.”

So I guess the best I can do is to support two underdogs with my plastic FRNs - Ron Paul, and myself.  Hedging, I think they call it on Wall Street.

First, it was reported the other day that Hushmail, the web-based encrypted email provider, has caved to Canadian federal authorities and turned over twelve discs’ worth of email messages to and from alleged steroid dealers:

However, installing Java and loading and running the Java applet can be annoying. So in 2006, Hushmail began offering a service more akin to traditional web mail. Users connect to the service via a SSL (https://) connection and Hushmail runs the Encryption Engine on their side. Users then tell the server-side engine what the right passphrase is and all the messages in the account can then be read as they would in any other web-based email account.

The rub of that option is that Hushmail has — even if only for a brief moment — a copy of your passphrase. As they disclose in the technical comparison of the two options, this means that an attacker with access to Hushmail’s servers can get at the passphrase and thus all of the messages.

In the case of the alleged steroid dealer, the feds seemed to compel Hushmail to exploit this hole, store the suspects’ secret passphrase or decryption key, decrypt their messages and hand them over.

I’m removing Hushmail from the links list on this blog, partly because it seems that their marketing copy did not make this distinction between the two formats sufficiently clear to privacy seekers.

And second, just this morning, I received news via GATA.org that the Liberty Dollar office was raided yesterday by feds here at home:

I sincerely regret to inform you that about 8 this morning [Wednesday the 14th, apparently] a dozen FBI and Secret Service agents raided the Liberty Dollar office in Evansville, Indiana.

For approximately six hours they took all the gold, all the silver, all the platinum, and almost two tons of Ron Paul Dollars that were just delivered last Friday. They also took all the files and computers and froze our bank accounts.

We have no money. We have no products. We have no records to even know what was ordered or what you are owed. We have nothing but the will to push forward and overcome this massive assault on our liberty and our right to have real money as defined by the U.S. Constitution. [See my own post on that last point here.]

We should not be defrauded by the fake government money.

But to make matters worse, all the gold and silver that backs up the paper certificates and digital currency held in the vault at Sunshine Mint has also been confiscated. Even the dies for minting the gold and silver Libertys have been taken.

All this has happened even though Edmond C. Moy, the director of the U.S. Mint, acknowledged in a letter to a U.S. senator that the paper certificates did not violate Section 486 and were not illegal.

But the FBI and Secret Service took all the paper currency too…

From a letter signed by Bernard von NotHaus of Liberty Dollar, quoted by Chris Powell of GATA.org. Chris adds:

This move seems extraordinarily bold considering that Liberty Dollar’s right to operate already was being litigated in federal court.

Who knows how many individuals have lost small fortunes in this outrage, in addition to the Liberty Dollar crew. This jackbooters’ move wouldn’t have anything to do with Ron Paul’s face on those Liberty Dollars, now, do ya suppose?

Come to think of it, this kind of police-state sh*t is playing into the RP2008 campaign’s hands beautifully. And I’ll bet they soon find ways to milk it.

Hi, folks. Just checking in to say that I’m still standing, and I’m thankful for you loyal readers.

I’m hard at work these next few weeks getting my entry ready for the Freedom in Fiction Prize contest, sponsored by the Mackinac Center. The deadline is January 1, 2008 for submission of two full chapters plus an overall outline of your novel. Finalists will be notified by March 31 and will then have one year to complete their manuscripts. Liberty Train will be in the running!

Any of you care to join the challenge too? Good freedom fiction is something desperately needed - and given the groundswell of support for Ron Paul lately, it’s probably also something with good market potential!

I’ll be around here when I can, but it probably won’t be much until after the first of the year. I’d post excerpts from the book for you, if I weren’t concerned about the “previously unpublished” rule in the contest guidelines. Maybe later…

Blessings and happiness - and freedom - to you all!

[UPDATE  1/1/2008: I will not be providing excerpts here from the novel, even though Justin Marshall gave the go-ahead from the contest's perspective.  A seasoned fiction instructor advised me that if a novel writer seeks a contract with a big-name publishing house, then even excerpts from the novel on a blog are a no-no.  Sorry, y'all.]

Like you, probably, I’ve been amazed and humbled, in the past week or so, by the story of the Buddhist monks in Myanmar (Burma) quietly and peacefully resisting their totalitarian regime.

LewRockwell.com this morning features an article by Henry Porter, entitled “The faith of the oppressed can topple the worst tyrants,” inspired by the horrifying police-state revenge visited upon these monks who are acting according to conscience. Porter’s thesis is that organized religion often stands as a beacon, and churches as a rallying place, showing their people the way to freedom in dark times of oppression. He uses in particular the Nicholaikirche example from Leipzig, East Germany in 1989 that led eventually to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.

Being a contrarian of sorts, I’d like to tweak his thesis a little. In fact, I’d like to suggest that it isn’t religion that provides the fuel of leadership in such cases. Rather, it’s the powerful example, often demonstrated by religious “leaders,” of examining and then acting upon one’s conscience. It’s morality in living, principled action.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal for “righteousness like an everlasting stream” wasn’t directed merely to Christians. The Huguenot pastor Andre’ Trocme’, in France during the Vichy years (whose story is told in Philip Hallie’s book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed), acted out of his personal sense of rightness - informed, certainly, by his religious beliefs - to hide Jewish children from Nazi agents.

Morality, decency, ethical behavior are not and never have been the monopoly of organized religion - but rather of principled, decent, good-hearted and clear-minded individuals acting as their own conclusions lead them to do. (Religion knows this, and has been known to fight the fact tooth and nail.) Gandhi, for example, was not a clergyman - rather, he began his career as a lawyer and elected official. His individual study into Hindu and other philosophy colored his choice of stance and action.

And look at Rep. Dr. Ron Paul. What a shining exponent of principled, moral action - and resistance to the tactics of tyrants. What a lovely and hope-giving response this man of obvious good conscience - and good cheer - is engendering among Americans of all stripes (except those in the mainstream media), who (perhaps only now) are realizing how fed up they have become with encroaching statism.

Men and women of good conscience - of clear awareness - of free, generous spirit - exist in all walks of life. Let us - please, oh please - seek them out and honor them when and where we find them. Let us encourage and support them, as we encourage our own glowing ember of love for integrity to burst into the flames of action. Let us aspire and strive to emulate them - because the admiration we feel for them as ethical individuals is the voice of our own good conscience reminding us of who we are as well.

A substantial number of visitors have visited this blog in recent days from keyword searches seeking information on ClaireWolfe.com, and Claire’s associated blog Wolfesblog, which went offline suddenly a few days ago.

Apparently, Claire’s web hosting account was due to expire, and she chose not to renew it. Unfortunately for us readers and fans, we didn’t see this change coming. If you caught her blog between September 17 and about September 26 when her site went down, you know that she had already chosen to cease writing it. But I didn’t realize that the whole site was going bye-bye, at least not so soon.

If you’re one of the good folks wondering where to find Claire’s past work online, however, there is a solution - well, actually several solutions…

Bill St. Clair has created a mirror site for ClaireWolfe.com as it was on September 26, 2007. Thank you, Bill, for doing this in such a thoughtful and timely fashion. (Bill’s also got an excellent roster of freedom sites mirrored at his BillStClair.com url, and his blog End the War on Freedom is a good daily freedom news and commentary clearinghouse.)

Bill has also had a mirror of Claire’s early website, Wolfe’s Lodge, for quite some time now.

Debra Ricketts’s site TheClaireFiles.com still exists, too, last updated in July 2007.

And Claire’s archive of Hardyville stories and other articles can be found at the wonderful Backwoods Home Magazine.

Finally, Paladin Press, who agreed to act as Claire’s book publisher after the sad demise of Loompanics, continues to offer several of Claire’s books in their online catalog, although her name doesn’t appear in their author list. Amazon.com has some as well. And Out of the Gray Zone by Claire with Aaron Zelman is apparently still available as well.