Some Updates, Stray Thoughts On The State of the World And How We Might Make It Better, and A Novel Extract
I have handwritten most of my novel and I am currently talking to would be agents. If any of my readers have any connections with the publishing industry I would be much obliged. Or even if any of you would like to read the novel as it comes along, I’d like that too.
On my process I shoot for the Stephen King standard of 6 pages a day and I think I should have a strong draft of the novel by Thanksgiving. Some days I hit 15 pages or so, so it’s going very well. I often go for a walk and narrate it to myself. I find the trance-like world I’m entering to be appealing.
One of the attacks on me has long been that I’m a fantasist so why not write fantasies? Will I be less likely to be sued by foreign-backed billionaires if I hide the truth in a novel?
I recently saw The Long Walk which was based on the King novel he wrote when he was a freshman at the University of Maine. It was not incidentally the first novel that he would have published. That distinction would fall to Carrie, which I have often wondered prefigured the school shooter. Did you know that King’s wife rescued the novel from the rubbish pile? Or so the legend goes…
King is now 77 years old. I find it very interesting that a novel King wrote when he was a teenager or a twenty-something becoming a major film and being treated well, by the co-creator of the Hunter Games no less, is very interesting. How timeless it is that we consume the youth for spectacle…
And of course the choice of casting the son of Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, was rather inspired. I found this quite poignant: "When your trauma is on display for the world, there’s no actually hiding it... I might as well talk about it or I might as well put it into something. Because if I keep hiding it and running from it, that’s not fair to anyone else who has gone through that... hopefully someone else watches it and goes, He sees me, he understands me and that’s, in my opinion, the only reason to do any sort of art."
I don’t want to spoil it for you but I found it a pretty interesting vehicle about male friendship, sacrifice, and fatherlessness.
It felt a bit Boomerish but I suppose that’s how the Steven King stuff works. Does anyone really believe in books anymore?
****
A friend of mine and I were going for a walk the other day. He and I like to go to the National Portrait Gallery. Though he is a Microsoft engineer he suffers from autism and it’s been said that I, too, may have a touch of the ‘tism but candidly I don’t really see it.
His son is autistic, too, and naturally he and I turned to discussing the Tyler Robinson killing of Charlie Kirk.
If Robinson is autistic is the state justified in taking his life? Brains are not really capable of making informed decisions before the age of 25. How shall we think of an autistic mind aged 22? Does it have to be terminated?
Charlie Kirk was my friend and I don’t think it’s appropriate to execute his gay autistic killer.
If it comes to that I will advocate against Robinson’s killing by the state.
The way I would use the death penalty is to try to get Robinson to turn on his larger network — assuming he even has one.
My friend and I discussed how many of the shooters seem to have a certain look. Is physiognomy real? And if it is real can you use facial recognition to identify would be shooters before they. commit violence? And if you can use facial recognition to identify would be shooters can you use facial recognition to restrict their access to the internet?
Certain brains can’t really access the Internet in the same way that others can. Should they be banned from the Internet altogether? Or should they be given a filtered version of the Internet?
Has there been an effort to seriously study these mass shooters genetically?
You could imagine a world in which people are identified through their genetics. Why don’t we genetically sequence all prisoners?
I’ll have more thoughts on this matter when we get closer to October 7th but I do find it odd that 23 and Me’s hack predated the attack in/on Gaza.
Oracle ultimately stepped up to take over 23 & Me’s data just as it has with Tik Tok.
Jeffrey Epstein’s Little St James is to Ehud Barak as Larry Ellison’s Lanai is to Benjamin Netanyahu. Each Jewish American oligarch is assigned an Israeli prime minister. Now the more interesting question is who handles who. Is this is what is really meant by Israel as an aircraft carrier for America? Is this the binational security state?
Viewed one way, Ellison’s takeover of Tik Tok is marvelous indeed as it could discipline Tik Tok’s excesses. Much has been made of Ellison’s supposed Judaism but I think his Italian side is the one to watch.
I have grave doubts as to whether or not A.I. is real or if it’s merely an excuse for higher energy prices which seem as if they are going to free fall during a global recession.
I suspect we are going to see a lot more efforts to hack personally protected data and then run it through A.I. I think this has been happening already to those of us who are skeptics of the Israeli war machine.
I have a hope — perhaps vain — that the efforts to buy Bari Weiss’s newsletter by Larry Ellison’s son, Michael, is a kind of op. I so hope I am right.
Some ideas I have been having lately:
The pardon machine? It seems to me that one of the best ways to make America calm down is to begin a serious effort at pardons.
A serious effort means at pardons means a systematic effort.
I think you might even consider a conditional pardon where every federal prisoner is required to write his or her testimony. We’d then take that and run it through an A.I. program.
What would an algorithm look like that would help Donald Trump make the right decision rather than the bought decision?
Doesn’t it seem to you as if the pardon process is likely to bribes being paid?
Could you imagine a website where that money is collected on behalf of the federal government to help build that pardon machine?
Of course the horrifying example is the GoFundMe driven pardon system.
And now for a novel I’ve been working on… Killing Me Through Time And Space
It’s become possible to solve crimes from way back. All you need is DNA. But what happens if the perpetrator is long dead? And if his family has benefited from the crimes he did? Imagine a cult leader who instructs his soldiers to hunt people through time and space to get your payback. They believed my great-great-great-great-great grandfather had done them wrong and maybe he had. I don’t know. I wasn’t there and neither were they.
But the cult wasn’t interested in what I had to say about their theology. They contorted quantum physics to argue that because time itself was an illusion a crime that had taken place some two hundred years ago might as well have taken place yesterday. Convert or die, they said, or pay up.
The man who showed up at my house with aa shotgun seemed apologetic, as if he was just as embarrassed as I was that he had been caught by my cleaning lady in the veranda.
“I’m not here to kill you, Señora,” he said politely. “Is the man of the house home?” I witnessed the whole exchange from my back office in the carriage house. I fumbled the combination for my gun safe and unlocked the hunting rifle my father had given me years ago.
In part because I doubted it worked and because he seemed so well dressed, I trained my rifle on him and slowly crept up behind him. “I think that’s enough for today,” I said, “Drop it.”
He knew I had him on range and didn’t bother firing the gun. He put it down and looked at me, mostly defeated.
It had been a few years since his cult officially ended and the U.S. government had seized its funds. These remnants were darting around.
We began the interrogation. He didn’t know why he had been. In fact the bishop didn’t know either. All he knew is that there was aa machine that printed out orders and those orders had to be followed if his family wanted to be fed. Sure, you could pay to get out of following the machine but this guy with the shotgun now at my feet hadn’t paid so he here he was.
I can't remember the first time the cult tried to kill me. Middle school, maybe, but the efforts had increased in recent years. I longed for the days when they just worshiped each other rather than the machine whose power source they kept going at all costs. No one ever told me how I got on their list for deletion but they didn’t believe I had a reason to continue breathing, let alone prospering. I had gone way out into the sticks and they found me all the same.
The more man started to worship machines, the more machine-like man became.
The books seems interesting. I’ll be an early buyer.