That picture [of Sean after our May fight] is brutal, I can see why you don't feel the need to carry a gun. Do you think you can use that in one of your books, or for a cover?

The picture of Sean’s torso and legs is titled Old Testament, since it was the price he paid for Christian victory over this old heathen, and will be the cover of The Combat Space, scheduled for an early January release.

Your piece "Running Up the Flag" seems like a simple declaration of sides, as during a war. I don't know of any formal movement, and I read a lot of weird things on the internet. This is something else I have meant to ask you but can't remember if I have, if you could comment on the use of flags in wartime. Not too long ago, Trump stopped by here in San Jose, and the locals were waving Mexican flags and attacking Trump supporters. To me this is tantamount to a declaration of war. The police were ordered to stand by, and you bet they did.

Since that article, which was written post 4th of July, more flags have been going up, mostly by older palefaces who are living next to houses being put up for sale by younger palefaces. This reminds me of the use of a flag as a rallying point during a battlefield crisis.

The history of flags is a huge field. They began as standards, usually a painted hide or stitch-worked cloth emblem, stretched between two rods lashed to a pole. The standard developed away from hide and cloth and toward pole-mounted statuary, such as the Roman Eagle, sometimes with streamers and banners beneath to catch the wind. In this way the flag, banner or streamer served another function, all of which will be detailed below. Flags and banners came into wider use at sea and on horseback, where the wind would take them dramatically, giving the illusion of life, and eventually displaced standards as warfare became more mobile. Japan's feudal warriors often wore flags mounted on their back!

Both standards and flags, as well as coats of arms painted on shields, are symbolic expressions of warrior loyalty and collective identity and pride. We moderns understand symbology but poorly, though it is used to control us and influence our behavior. I am not patriotic in the least, but was conditioned from childhood to hold the American flag in awe, and despite my rejection of our society, my heart beats stronger when I see it catch the wind. Likewise, some folks are conditioned to have a deep fear of other flags, like the Stars and Bars. The boxing supply company I buy headgear from will emblazon a fighter's national flag on any piece of headgear. George Foreman described his waving of the small American flags held in each hand after his Olympic victory as the high point of his life.

Uses of standards are:

1. Symbolizes unit identity, helping the warrior focus on his moral obligation

2. Identifies units and leaders from a distance, enabling command and control

3. Serves as a rallying point for beleaguered defenders

4. Gives a leader the option of symbolically committing the identity of the unit to a focal goal, such as when Julius Caesar had a signifier throw his standard among an enemy formation to inspire the men of that unit to a crazed advanced.

5. As trophies, the standards of defeated foes serve to enhance the status of the victor and preserve the warrior identity of the defeated, forming a cross-tribal bond and further enhancing victor status. This is a type of reciprocal recognition of enemy spirit, which means nothing in our modern minds, but was meaningful to warriors. A modern spits on a flag or burns it, where a primitive saves it and tells his children how brave and fierce the men were that carried it. The Zulus and various Indian tribes did this, with the Zulu's boasting of the British they slaughtered that they fought like lions. This is ancient fetish behavior, akin to eating enemy livers, taking scalps and wearing teeth and fingers and such. ROK marines in Vietnam were said to wear Vietnamese ears, for instance. As trophies, standards served as a type of historical record and funeral marker for the enemy.

Flags serve all the functions of standards and additionally:

1. Are more portable

2. May be raised higher and seen from further

3. May be made larger than standards

4. Are not easily destroyed—can be shot by cannonballs and still fly

5. Are important archery, marksmanship and artillery adjuncts, as they indicate wind direction and speed

6. May be used as signaling devices, and served in this capacity at sea until superseded by electric signal lights and radios, and are still used to signal naval aviators at takeoff and landing.

For standards see the movie The Eagle, starring my stunt-double Tatum Channing.

For flags see Heaven and Earth a Japanese movie about the war between Takeda Shingen and the lord of Enchigo, The emperors’ champion.

Your piece Against The Goddess reminded me of a PBS documentary about the Boeing 777. Below is the link to part one. It is several hours, but long story short, it is Paleface men doing what they do best, quietly and diligently designing and building an amazingly complex piece of technology. How did they do it without the help of Diversity, OUR GREATEST STRENGTH? How did they do it with almost no vaginas, or visibly homosexual people on the job? Impossible to answer, we will never know.

How do you reconcile your rejection of civilization with your desire to see humanity explore space? I have thought about this question myself, and I think there must be a way to maintain technological advancement while avoiding turning into a mammalian termite colony. I don't know how, but I do hope it is possible. I have been lucky enough to travel to Europe and view some truly transcendent art, and I even feel that way seeing the Blue Angels perform. I don't care if they were started as a gimmick to sell war bonds, F/A-18s and the men who fly them are among the best things on earth. I put your writing in the category of things technology has given me, that I would have no access to otherwise. Technology appears inherently masculine to me, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Lynn, I am so glad you sent this link. What an amazing record of achievement—and we are still—according to our leaders—unable to match the efforts of the engineers and astronauts of the 1960s! I challenge anyone to view this documentary and then say it is impossible for humans to return to the moon.

All of our surviving civilizations took the easy route to quick prosperity for the leadership by focusing on emasculation of the man in order to scale up servitude and enslave the majority of the species—generally about 95-98%. There were times when we did not advance in technology because of this. For instance the Greeks and Romans had working models of industrial machines but kept them as cult props and toys as their slaves were too numerous to make retooling the economy palatable. When the mercantile economy was developed, old style mass slavery was used to feed new style industry done on an ancient servile model. After thousands of years of near universal enslavement, and with transmission of knowledge held in fewer minds with every passing year, it became not only possible, but easy, to indoctrinate herds of slaves so vast as to have been unimaginable in the ancient world into believing that they are in fact, free! That is where we stand—nearing the end of that complaisance trajectory.

Will we plummet into mewing oblivion, as primetime network TV programing seems to indicate?

Or has this millennia-long spiral into domestication triggered a violent reaction in enough minds, with time enough to reverse or divert the domesticating course?

Technology is the first expression of masculinity we find in the archaeological record of Early Man. Just as faith and spirituality are politically hijacked by religion for secular goals, and racial and cultural identity are hijacked by politicians in pursuit of extra-tribal goals, the ultimate masculine expression of technology has enabled proxy aggression to become so efficient that ever smaller numbers of men are required to purvey tyranny and farm apes. This technology is on the verge of displacing warriors completely by micro war machines. If Civilized Man had not become a vast, wailing, collective woman men and women would be in space now, struggling, dying, surviving and overcoming. But since Man has stopped looking upward and inward, and sees only the physical comforts and terrors of his gross, proximate sphere, the energy and genius that would have been expended colonizing the solar system, will be spent squabbling over non-renewable resources, fiat currency and expanding the debt owed the evil by the stupid.

Man's masculine expression of technology did not have to castrate him, but it has. The question is, can we build another moral ball-sack while living beneath the Soul-effacing God of Things? As you have pointed out, this technology may provide a chance, and all any real man needs is a chance. That is the hope of resurgent masculinity, that the colossal enemy will grow torpid and fail to act before risk has been eliminated, while somewhere a man or men will take a perilous risk with no promise of success.