September

-1. 1243, visit sister and niece,

-2. 1617,

-3. 1437, schedule weekdays out to New Year's Eve, Pittsburgh to Lancaster by car, Mister Grey to Erique

-4. Lancaster to Baltimore by car, Erique to Brickmouse, square away quarters, set up writing stations, refresh and back up two local computers, answer 118 emails, dinner with friends

-5. convert book files for publishing, meet with webmaster, schedule training,

-6. 1658, to Harford County by bus and car, dinner with son, cards with brother,

-7. 6 emails, paypall, edited and posted Nat Star #2, training and visiting with James Anderson and Incognegro,

-8. 1154, arrange publishing agreement with Casting Darts Publishing, 1285,

-9. 1177, post 3 periscope articles, 1026, 1670, finished off emails box,

-10. to Baltimore County by car, to Baltimore City by bus, weed back yard, back up files, proof NS #3, eye blew, 1054,

-11. 1301, yard work, resset patio blocks

-12. 1177, yard work, weeding, yard tennis with the Brickmouse, 1495, train operator, arrange fight brain meet

-13. 552, 1197, to Megan’s on the east side,

-14. 1 hour badmitton, read 175 pages in The Babylonian Woe, seizure lost a day, slept 14 hours

-15. brain fog, outlined 5 thru 14 of Conspiracy Against Mankind, relax

-16. 857, 781, 1359, weed Georgia’s yard, editorial call, 597

-17. 1620, scheduled posts, back to Brickmouse House, yard work, meet Big Ron

-18. 1317, worked on publishing with Jeth, visited with webmaster, lost in dominoes to Guila Girl

-19. weeded, 1800, watch fights,1787

-20. wash clothes, 1185, back up files, pack, To East Side, 1224, insane nightmares busting road blocks with Mesc Frank, knife fighting in Pittsburgh against skin heads.

-21. 1434, 1111, Meet Damien,

-22. To Harford County, visited grandchildren, who agreed to publish outstanding history proofs,

-23. 1348, clean ground floor, 1097

-24. bad brain fog, spent 2 hours writing 1 brief email

-25. proofed last item, 498, frame 3 nonfiction articles, dinner with The Operator, listen to Arrian,

-26. 1316, clean kitchen, 1536, met with head coach at Towson Karate,

-27. bad back spasm, cant stand or walk, working on floor exercises, 1226, pack and go to Lancaster, PA with Mister Grey, kitchen stag discussion over beer with Nero the Pict

-28. 891, cleaned apartment, to Erique’s, entertained Princess Ruby, pushed Ruby in the swing for 90 minute, which helped my back, weeded around the gazebo, who painted my nails and skull,

-29. shopped with Ruby and Erique, tore vines off of two trees, sank 12 small trees and found a coal bed, probably the remnants of an old coal shed, back to Mister Grey’s, made corned beef chili

-30. 1471, record 5 videos

Articles/Chapters = 34,

Books = 0

October

-1. 1471, cleaned, cooked, sparred, 5 videos, to Eriques

-2. to Baltimore, 1244, emails,

-3. emails, coached from 5 to 11 pm

-4. 1453, visit by bus Cousin Michael, walk to meet Charles, begin John Harrower’s diary

-5. publishing emails, comments, 1795, cut grass weed 4 hours, 1269,

-6. 1818, 1008, spar with Charles, to Megan’s on East Side, 1032, shopping for groceries with Megan, 1374, can now haul weight

-7. 2008, 1554, 2745, 2569, editorial call, 2443, legs and abs, walk to store, tight back, nerves in legs flaming cut squats short

-8. woke with locked up back, 90 minutes mobility exercise, wrote too much yesterday, 1816, 2467, vacuumed house, 2684, completed annotating Diary of John Harrower, must return to fiction tomorrow.

-9. could not walk, barely made home form Megan's, listened to Arrian, 2 emails, sick, stretched 6 times for 7 hours therapy, weird baccanal at Esoteric Cafe,

-10. tight, steep temp drop on old bag of bones, 11 emails, 454, 743, coached from 5 to midnight

-11. very tight, extreme eye seizure, nausea, listen to Arrian’s Alexander Book 1 23rd time, expand The Son of God Alexander project, chapter 1 to be 12 sections, to Harford County clean Mom’s windows,

-12. bad eye and locked up back, 1277, clean windows, train with Incognegro, cards and rum

-13. wake up drunk, clean shed, patio, clean rest of windows, to Lancaster with Nero the Pict, work on yard, train with Erique

-14. fast day, weed, move rose bushes, plant arbor vidas, to Denver, PA with Mister Grey, record videos, beer, 1 shot rum, make chili

-15. chili and coffee for breakfast, 1666, make videos, train, to Erique’s

-16. to Baltimore with Erique, lunch with Man in the Hat, dinner with Doc Dread and Brickmouse, got incredible drunk on Taquila and blacked out, need to get a handle on this lest I erase a book in my head before its written

-17. begin Babylonian Woe notes, 1435, star concluding Banjo Timejack, rake yard, spar with Charles, coach boxing, dinner with The Operator

-18. begin I Miss Them So, 1290 Son Of God,1330, to eastside,

-19. badmitton 100 minutes continuous, 1708, finished reading Pill City,

-20. 1528, shopped at markets, 1343

-21. visit Doc, interview Michael, 1621, 1095, 1,072, repaired porch lattice, stored tools and parts from plumbing job, dinner with three happy hens, crab soup, eggplant, shrimp, meatballs

-22. 902, 1948, shop for Megan, 1537,

-23. 449, 1662, entomb rats under porch with beer bottles and bleach/ammonia gas, 1169, dinner with Charles, to Brickmouse House

-24. 16 emails, 4 emails, 1347, skyped with Jeth Randolph, rake lawn

-25. 1376, was clothes, 1488, rake, begin level spring house bed, patch up eroded side slope, proof morning writing, cut grass shower, to karate school with gear, meet Sean and crew

-26. trained from 11 to 4:30, concussion, black eye, 9 bruises, 1 cut after 1 hour boxing, two hours stick, 1 hour blade, 2 over 1 against James Anderson in LPR machete duel, 0 and 5 against James with bastard sword wasters, dinner with the crew at Raven Inn, to PA with Erique, bad headache, eye seizing bad, legs held up, hips did give when I got rocked

-27. feel like I was hit by a car, cleaned house, closed down pool, water transplanted shrubs, news that Kelly passed, to Mescaline Franklin’s, 2 video beer reviews

-28. 1189,

-29. comments, emails, to Erique’s, yard work

-30. to Baltimore, 7 emails, 227, wash clothes, to pharmacy, 449, meet Big Ron, try to learn majon

-31. 1634, 1274, pharmacy, boxing, knife training

Articles/Chapters = 44

2nd month in a row with no book completions. Unacceptable

November

-1. to cousin Mike’s by bus, 1495, to Harford County by car, clean house, 1163,

-2. clean kitchen, set up for party, play cards for lunch, 1444, serve the eaters,

-3. birthday for relative

-4. back to Baltimore, not feeling well, video and text archives with Guillo Girl, 1238, 932,

-5. 894, walk to pharmacy was closed, hit snake, 1545, 947, dinner with operator, drinks until 2:30 on election night

-6. read Eye of the Chickenhawk, 1023, dinner with Chuck, 1582,

-7. 1447, posted February nonfiction, pharmacy, coach boxing 55 minute sparring round with Leo, dinner at the esoteric cafe,

-8. 1169, pharmacy, to east side,

-9. 1161, bull roast

-10. 1188, over to the Brickmouse House for a Myth 20 podcast,

-11. 1367, 1164, wash clothes, to east side,

-12. 1261, read Works and Days, 1588, back to Brickmouse House, 1779, meet Big Ron and Charles at bar,

-13. 1278, 490, arranged text and completed Banjo: Timejack 28,800 words, emails, update site essentials, rake lawn, 1614, 2264, arrange Nat Star text

-14. arrange Moses Roper text, read Nat Star, 1181, Skype Jeth Randolph, work out plot and roster for Vunak of Antares coach boxing, train The Operator until midnight,

-15. 1246, back up files, check site, meet Mister Grey and to PA, three videos

-16. edit yesterday’s chapter, emails, to Erique’s plantation, framed Vunak of Antares, cleaned house, baby sat, yard work, movie

-17. 1671, removed 4 stump with Erique, sparred, dinner with Erique and Yakubiton, 1608, 1597, 3,376, finished annotating Moses Roper, videos with Mister Grey, drank until 3:30 am

-18. exercises, read Theogony, emails

-19. 1355, 31 flights of stairs, fast, to Erique’s,

-20. to Baltimore, breakfast with Ezz, 904, lunch with Mom, dinner with Doc

-21. 1160, Miss Ezz brought dinner, 1035, Jeth skype, last boxing session with Towson Karate, coffee and whiskey with Jason, all canceled for illness

-22. snow and rain, feel 80 years old, proof an ode, mail to Jeth, 1646, to Eastside

-23. 1545, strength exercises, format 10 part review of Bernays for Conspiracy against Mankind, 699, read Book of Job

-24. 1449, 1178, completed Nat Star: Timejacker! At 20,237 words, 1036, Wake Christopher in print

-25. to Rosedale to interview Mike, Harford County, train Operator in Baltimore county

-26. up at 6:55 AM disoriented, brain fog, emails, website updates, finish packing, lunch with Man in the Hat, train with Brett bruised sternum, drinks with Big Ron, Charles, Brickmouse, Jason, in bed by 6:00 AM

-27. up at 8:30, bad hangover, eesh!, exercise, physical therapy final check by Brickmouse, post office, deliver present to little Emma, to Harford County, played cards

-28. up at 5:50 AM, clean house, sort gear for short stay, set up desk, proton emails, Thanksgiving with family in Harford County, conversed with X wife until 5:00 AM over Barbados rum

-29. skyped with Jeth Randolph over Vunak of Antares

-30. 1387, surprise dinner with Nero the Pict and Cutie Homesteader, 434

Articles/Chapters = 41

Books = 2

Novels = 2

December

-1. 1777, emails, updated site, visit with family, to Lancaster with Uber Joe, visited with the princess and the queen and watched a movie with Erique

-2. 1332 VU #1, to Pittsburgh by train,

-3. breakfast with reader, edit VU#1, strength training, record videos

-4. record videos

-5. 1414 VU #2, skype with Jeth, to Chicago by train

-6. #3 train to LA, read Hesiod’s Theogony, Stan is my seat mate, crossed the Miss at Port Madison, Iowa, sleep, fast

-7. woke in Dodge City at 5 AM, edited VU#2, 1283 VU#3.1, outline VU#3.2, typing difficult on rails, read Hesiod,

-8. wake in LA, switch trains, nodding on the train, in San Jose coaching Eddy,

-9. listened to Hesiod, 459 of amplification to VU#3.1, 1576 VU#3.2, listened to Hesiod

-10. woke with bad eye, VU#3.3 1600, explore San Jose on foot, VU#5 1067, used book store, read North American Indians by George Gatlin, listened to Hesiod thrice, read Hesiod,

-11. bad eye attack, 895, listened to Mankind in Amnesia

-12. listen to Hesiod, edited yesterday’s article, 1150, 1435, outline Pale Riders, listen to Spengler, Hesiod, 1151, 1275, listen to Gibbon

-13. listen to Gibbon, 28, 29, 30, 1743, listen to Hesiod, 1083, buy Greek Lyrics by Latimore and The Fall of Troy by Quintus Smyneus, 1052, listened to Gibbon 31and 32

-14. Listen to The Shield of Herakles, 1962, Listen to Mankind in Amnesia, Listen to In the Beginning, 1389, two tall beers and to bed

-15. listned to Gibbon, 2240,

Winter begins for the Crackpot, 12 books in 12 months is enough.

Articles/ Chapter = 21

Books: 0

Expenses

Train: 75, to Pittsburgh,

Bus: 4, 4, 5, 5, 4, 5, 5, 2, 5, 2, 2, 4

Hotel: 200, 200, 200, 700

Food: 57, 20, 14, 16, 38, 18, 10, 20, 20, 50, 24, 10, 30, 50, 20, 29, 20, 40, 12, 23, 5, 10, [December food and drink taken care of by Mister Gray, Rick and the Operator]

Medical: 32,

By Friday 22nd I was shaken with migratory nerves. I do not travel well, have never had wanderlust, never thought to leave the evil place that hatched this twisted mind, until it drove me out in June 2018, the very day that The Brickmouse and Guilo Girl invited me to stay with them on any return to Baltimore. But there I was in the cozy Brickmouse House where I have been so welcome. I was already homesick for it and was having bad brain fog trying to pack bags. I was losing things, washing clothes and forgetting where they were.

Monday Night the 24th into the early midnight hours of Tuesday, I trained The Operator, sparring in a street light lit basement alley. He paid me with a bag of big mac burgers and fries. Back at the Brickmouse House, with an introductory letter in hand to one of his colleagues, I cut up the fries, tossed out the buns, put meat around the fries, covered all with left over cheese, and nuked it for 2 minutes—a feast.

The blackout curtains admitted just enough light to warn me awake. My last week in a longtime location, I am unable to sleep past dawn. I answered emails, checked the back end of the site, and packed, unable to write.

At 11:00 AM, The Man in the Hat picked me up to meet his son, Brett, at the Valley View Inn, an old roadhouse bar and eatery in Baltimore County. When I was his age I walked past this six mornings a week headed home from the night shift at the supermarket that has changed hands a few times since. The young fellow looks great, showed us the pic of his gorgeous girl in Southern Maryland and paid for our meal and beer. He then said, “James, you look so much better then when I took you to Doc last year. Can you spar?”

“Sure, the Brickmouse has extra gear you can use.”

“Oh, I have my sticks and gear in the truck.”

“What kind of psycho drives around for four years with gear in his truck?”

The Man in the Hat answered, as the stud grinned, “The one that just fattened you up for the kill! James, here, you better have one more beer to kill the pain.”

As he went to get me a fourth beer, Brett smiled, “Dad’s an animal. He still plays hockey. I remember when his teeth got knocked out and he skated over to us and handed them to me and went back to play.”

Brett took me to buy the Christmas booze for my son’s Thanksgiving dinner, the well rum, well tequila and cheap whiskey. Home to the Brickmouse abode we went. As we gloved up in the yard he said, “James, the Brickmouse will be home soon—he can spar too, I’ll take it easy.”

“Bro, he won’t go anywhere near you with a stick.”

An hour of moderate stick sparring in the yard, was bisected by the Brickmouse walking by in route to some after work errand, chuckling as I was stiff armed into the turf like some secondary punk trying to slow James Brown. We moved to the patio and gloved up for boxing for a ten minute round. I noted Big Ron was now sitting on the picnic table drinking a Budweiser. At a certain point I ate ten straight punches and decided it was time to stop assaulting Brett’s glove with my face. I do think my mouth piece and saber mask should file a class action lawsuit against me for willful neglect.

Big Ron grinned, “You were doing pretty good while your foot was on the outside of his—but he figured it out.”

Brett then gave me a $20, “Here James, for the training.”

“Bro, you bought lunch and drove me around.”

“James, you trained me for free for ten years when I was a kid with no money.”

$20 bucks for the honor of making him work me over, two bruised hands, two bruised forearms, a bruised sternum, a bruised bicep and other warmly retained sensations five days later that tell me I am still alive.

That’s a deal.

We repaired inside for drinks and were joined by Charles, his bride, Guilo Girl and the returning Brickmouse. Brett does not drink. He did eat canned corned beef with me, as the others drank espresso. I am so lucky to be blessed with such fine young friends.

At 9:30 it was time for Brett, the last pirate on board the goodbye ship, to head home. I had dispensed all of the area training contact phone numbers in my phone in hopes that these fellows will train together in my absence. That would make this feel worthwhile in the cracked rear view mirror.

Jason’s place is on the way. The manager of the Esoteric Cafe has lost a lady and is stuck between books, overthinking his next two writing projects. Brett dropped me off three miles north out in Baltimore County, wished me well, and pulled off.

I had only drunk 10 Miller Lite beers over 9.5 hours. With me was 2 shots of over proofed rum, 3 beers, and 6 shots of Bird Dog salted whiskey. Jason does not drink such garbage. As befits a man with four languages under his hat band, he drinks wine. He had just finished fabricating and welding door pins for an antique sports car he is working on out back. He drove us in his beater to the liquor store and bought two bottles of dark wine. On the way home there was what appeared to be a fatal three-car collision at Joppa and Perring.

Finally back in his eccentric mansion, an old dentist office house, with the entire first floor strewn with books, stalked by his attention-hungry, hypoallergenic, teacup creature demanding a seat at the table, Jason heated up slices of spinach pie. We sat, spoke, drank, discussed writing, drank, spoke of the wrong turns in or life, then came upon the subject of writing once again. Jason read passages from his most recent book, and I had to honestly inform him that his prose is better than mine. He does understand how languages are built. The beer, rum and whiskey were gone, the rum grinning up at me with a wry twist of grin. Jason was halfway through the second bottle of wine He looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was 3 AM.

“James, thank you so much for this inspirational conversation, for this book [Can]. I think I have drunk too much and am fading, night creature that I am. How can you still be up and lucid?”

“I worked night crew for 38 years. It’s almost quitting time.”

“Please, finish the wine and take a couch.”

I downed the half bottle of wine—against Rick’s rules—and said, “The Brickmouse will be up and about in one hour. I’d like to see him off to work. The rum bottle can be used to discipline my errant chattel.”

The stagger down Harford Road, for a few miles, took me up and down three good hills. I had miles, over an hour, utterly alone except for blinking lights, buzzing light poles, a rat scampering crookedly across the street. I did not feel too drunk—indeed was able to get the key in the door on the FIRST try. When I entered, my young friend was making breakfast. We sat and he regaled me about some world military news—a high speed missile I think.

At last, dawn was tinting the sky as he locked himself out.

I nodded pleasantly in the decommissioned gamer chair they save for my back.

“James, James,” spoke rose-fingered Dawn, some fresh goddess voice prodding me awake.

I looked right and saw Guilo Girl, “James, time to go to bed.”

Embarrassed that I only lasted 23 hours, I slunk off to bed for my last turn there, to wake three hours later, realizing that I stumbled home along the same road that stretches endlessly in my rebooted nightmares of being late for work from missing the bus, afraid I’d get soaked in the rain.

Comment by Erin

I have been looking for a copy of Pizza Wars for over 15 years. Can I buy a PDF copy from you?

Erin, I do not own a single copy of anything I have written.

I cannot even buy copies of my stuff if I were strong enough to ruck it and wanted to grouse at those uncaught typos.

I have given some raw pizza wars stuff to a few fighters and Lynn Lockhart when i became homeless in July 2018.

If I had a copy i would not know how to publish it. I have 75 unpublished books that I am too stupid to put in print as my encroaching retardation closes in like a myopic disorder.

Mister Gray and Lynn, as far as i know, are the people holding copies of this old game, which I lost $1,500 on in 1988-89.

2,500 copies of Pizza Wars and Pizza Wars Imperium where bundled and sold to The Armory in Baltimore, a game supply house, and to Zocchi Enterprises in Gulfport LA or MISS I forget which crawdad state. Lou Zocchi was a total character and award winning game designer for his Battle of Britain game. He convinced me to design Pizza Wars Apocalypse, which he was willing to publish. In 2018 I gave away the art and text of this game that never got published, due to me getting discouraged and devoting myself to slinging freight in supermarkets. There was a lot of super cool art work. i thought I gave it to Lynn or Mister Gray of Inthesegoingsdown. But both say they did not get them, so those 14 cool sketches and the game rules are lost forever in the scattered dumpster of a dysbegotten life.

Sorry, at this point someone will maybe pirate it.

In any case, I hope you get a copy. It was a fun game, an accidental design.

thanks for the interest, Erin.

As I finish writing Banjo: Timejack, I have traversed the very places in which the story is set, places I have frequented due to work, to include coaching, and for habitation. I have noted some changes.

Homeless Crackers

Baltimore has long been too dangerous for homeless people of any race to live outside of dense camps: Morrel Park, where they had to battle the hoodrat packs by night, and on the porch of the post office under I-83 at City Center. The homeless generally had to live in wooded areas in the county. The dynamic here was that when hood rats attacked and failed they called the cops and the cops prevailed. People do not realize that the Knockout Game was not just a way of KOing unsuspecting white hipsters, but of getting low down crackers arrested for fighting back. Now, one sees lone crackers camping in the shelter of city eves, bothering no one. Our traditional enemies no longer bother calling the PIGz in, as the defund the police ended that.

A month ago, Big Ron saw a scrawny cracker beating the piss out of some black man a Hamilton and Harford, in front of the bar where I was refused service for failure to tan last year. In the past, before 2008, blacks would have piled on and kept coming until they won, whites doing nothing. Since 2008, the cops would have been called to arrest the cracker for failure to recognize his Kang. Since 2022 cops have left us scum to our own devices, ghosts versus shadows.

Bus Passengers

These were 95%+ shadow my entire life. Now, crackers, low down folk to be sure, with crappy jobs, and sometimes none, are taking the buses again. There are dot heads, Squatamalens, some sissy light skinned kangs, black women with good medical jobs and Africans. There are a couple white bus drivers! They were extinct as the buffalo once was and have been brought back with the expansion of the bus service, which has been routed to serve the newly constructed condos now packed with African refugees. The Africans are well dressed, have smart phones, are polite, travel in pairs and don’t know how buses work. The female Afro-American bus drivers are constantly yelling at the Africans. Where once about a third of black bus drivers would decline to stop if there were not a black with me at the stop, now they must stop according to the semi-automated routing system. The men are mostly cool and half of them wave me on, declining my cash payment, indicating my white beard with a nod. Yesterday an Africa was holding onto the stop bell cord like it was a handle and the queanly driver was screaming at him.

The day before yesterday a young black fellow dropped his smart phone under my seat and I returned it. He said, “Thank you, sir,” very polite, unusual from a man of his demographic before 2020. Most of the people taking the buses are headed to work, and do not know the way well and ask for directions from this old crumb.

The Rap Battle

Behind me, on the back deck of the bus, a couple weeks ago a fellow voiced about 20 was rapping into his phone, recording. A fellow with a voice of about 30 began speaking with him. They were both rappers with social media followings “on all platforms.” They then engaged in a rap battle, the younger man being much better to the point that the veteran of rap battles submitted and declared him a “prodigy.” When they got off, I noted the young fellow was a pale-ass cracker with red hair and beard, like an Irish silverware thief. The older fellow, crest fallen, actually looked like a 1990s gangster in his black attire, but minus the menace.

How far some have fallen

Last Thursday Night

After boxing with Leo, a 12-year-old karate student, for 50 minutes straight, I toweled off and crossed the street to the The Raven Inn. At the jukebox was a woman about my age, a pretty woman with a good figure, who, back in the day would have never given me the time, being the best of her crop. She said, “Hello,” as I walked past and said nothing, so surprised I was.

At the bar, Sean served me a draft, so I could hydrate before drinking alcohol. I drank that and noted that there were more women then men here, including the looker with her two sisters, obviously of the same brood. She looked at me and asked them for their support in placing a slave collar upon my bearded neck. I drank and she asked across the bar if I and the sloppy drunk next to me liked her music selection. It was country, so I gave her a thumbs up. She smiled. I would have, should have, stayed to get to know her and write for her a sorrowful country song. But Jason was waiting for me to help clean up his cafe and speak about writing in return for him driving me home—my host the Brickmouse and The Operator both insisting that I not walk back into the city from this worse county hood at night. The drunk was telling her he did not like country music and wished she would play some metal, as I cashed out with my pint of whiskey and left, to Sean’s, “Be safe, Brother.”

This was the scene of our two Fight Brain dinners. On Friday night they have kareoke, mostly attended by women and their children!

I walked out back, up the alley, where a funeral cross has been placed where the stray cat used to live in the house made by bar patrons, West on Joppa, and north on Orchard. I passed the American Boxing Academy, which was packed, finding a supply of sparring partners for my local guys. Jason and I stayed up until 2:00, four hours past closing, discussing books and writing. He had been so exited to sit down and crack a book that he had forgotten to lock the front door. In walked a 6’ 6” 320 pound Gro, demanding food, water, shelter, not threatening yet. Jason spoke with him in the doorway, trying to convince him that the cafe was not open. I walked up behind him with my hand on the hilt of the sheath Kabar claw knife Big Ron gave me. The big fella looked at me over Jason’s head, raised his brows, his eyes swimming in worry beneath, turned on his heels, and shambled off into the night.

Yesterday

As I waited for the bus from Essex down into Colgate, a pair of shady crackers slouched on by. These guys are about 21. The big man stands 6’ 2” and 220 pounds, a smug face under blond hair, wearing faded jeans and a wife beater in the warm November sun, smoking a cig. His partner, has dark hair, a narrow face and beaked nose, and stands about 4’ 10” in jeans and sneakers.

They walked past us south, than back north, then east, with the attitude of patrol. Oh, yes, big boy was holding an aluminum T-ball bat with leather wrapped handle, and his runt partner, a gulf club, a putting iron. Not a pig was in sight to permit the feral foes that drove my entire extended family out of our home town between 1968 and 2022, to turn day into night.

“The false has no limits.”

-Seneca, On Philosophy The Guide to Life

…

“You are the man, and I must say pretty tech savvy, better than my parents and my wife. You got cash app, venmo or anything like that? Or is there a place to straight donate on your website? I hate to say it but I've only been a reader in prison. When I'm not in I can't even finish a magazine.

“Either way, since getting out life has been great. Spending lots of money trying to get pregnant again, but life is good. Always look forward to your perspective. I feel like when your on a podcast people start to "step up" a bit. Kinda like a new shot caller entered the prison yard. Even though it's done online over a podcast you can hear something inaudible in the other hosts perk up a bit when they are on with you.

“I always love stealing historical anecdotes at parties. Talking about white slaves, dropping some of your book titles like I read them. I love being white and being proud. Not in an annoying way, but in a reasonable manner. History is so much more interesting when you talk about it. So much more intrigue when it isn't retold like a marvel movie with a definite good and bad guy.

I think I'm also contrarian, memorized just enough historical facts to bring up some interesting facts.

-Myth of the 20th Century Listener Email, 11/18/24

…

“In my view philosophy is the least gay type of writing. It is the study of the human will.”

-Nick Mason from an 11/8/24 unrecorded skype conversation, in response to this old crumb’s admission that I avoided reading modern philosophy because I thought it was gay.

…

I sit here and write while enfeebled by a beautiful thing, the first November snowfall in Baltimore City I have seen. It is coming from the west, the interior, from the quarter which I am soon bound by train. I tempted and then resist the modern view that that which harms is ugly and try and remind the muddy mind to embrace the ancient way.

The eye, the back, the hip, the leg, the many overuse injuries are lighting up the old crumb and challenging my presentation of the “Theban Debacle.” The 335 B.C. kindred genocide of a people, was like a Canadian warlord took Chicago then let his allies from Detroit, Millwaukie, Joliet, Gary and Indianapolis decide what to do with that great and arrogant city.

I recall, the left wing podcasters and conservative historian Victor Davis Hansen have spent much effort in 2024 writing and speaking upon ancient genocides, putting their own spin on the ancient crime. For instance, the homosexual podcasters declared that Roman lack of female political authority was a crime only barely exceeded by the extermination of the city of Carthage. Right and left is in agreement that any ancient conqueror who permits a city to be wiped out has committed an unforgivable and even irrational act. Yet modern America has turned a hundred cities to rubble, even melted a few, and is always “the good guy.”

My primary ancient source on the Theban Debacle, which was an obvious externally induced form of social suicide, Arrian [who all of these modern sources distrust for his admiration of Alexander] did write that even in the case of a people such as the Thebans, who had a 200 year long record of such war crimes, and might have been said to have been punished according to “the Wrath of God,” that the human actors getting their hands dirty in such business are still guilty of a shameful and disgraceful act against their “kindred blood.”

Modern minds shun the idea of bloodlines which were central to the ancient experience and is the subject of The Son of God, my book on Arrian’s view of Alexander. Therefore, the modern mind has been deconstructed to misunderstand every past act. The cabal that engineered this were genius actors of diabolic insight, which I posit acted over multiple generations, even centuries, and probably across ages.

Alexander and his slain father before him were in a battle to the death over the autonomy of their people and the preservation of their bloodline. At the time that Alexander permitted his allies to pass terminal sentence on the Thebans, a dozen vassals and allies of his father had risen in revolt after his father was murdered. Alexander and his entire family would die in this two decade long war, his line extinguished, their loyalists murdered. Alexander explicitly wanted Thebes as an ally to contribute an excellent battalion of soldiers to the small army he was to lead against the vast Persian Empire.

The Persians knew that a united Greece would spell their utter doom—and it did, even a barely united Greece, with the Spartans and Thebans siding with Persia against their own cousins.

It is obvious to any rational observer, that Persia must bribe Greek states to rise against their national Hegemon. A careful look at the simultaneous rising of so many hopelessly over-matched powers lead by exiles returned from Persian courts, BEFORE their oppressor left, shows a practical hand. The Persians funded the suicides of various folk, most tragically the Thebans, in the hopes that Alexander would be slain—for as a hero king he led from the front—but more likely, that he would be delayed, which he was. At Thebes, the military math tells us that an entire nation died, so that the governors of Greek Persia might have another week to assemble their army to oppose the young Hero King.

To the modern historian, there can only be the judgment that Alexander was the “bad guy” and the Thebans [whose shadowy leaders evaporate from the stage as soon as the walls of the city they coaxed into revolt are breached] are the “good guys,” fools perhaps, patriots maybe, but good guys.

Today many people believe that members of other races hate them and wish to wipe them out because those others are “bad.” This reminds me of the Theban response to the news that Alexander was at “the gates” to their homeland, a man so endowed with excellence in leadership that he was regarded, even at age 18, as unbeatable. This is not something we can believe today, as one man may not lead. Yet the career of Alexander bears out that he was special, that he took nothing, gave away everything, restored local government, as well as restoring the looted tombs and temples, and was ALWAYS lenient to a foe who agreed to be friends and kept their word.

When he was poised to come against Thebes, the Thebans who wished to make peace with him were reviled by their fellows and shunned or attacked for not believing the media reports [yes, they had media] that Alexander had been slain. The hysterical belief was that Alexander had been slain by one of the many plots hatched against him.

When finally, he came before Thebes and offered peace, the same hysteria mongers convinced most Thebans that Alexander was a liar and would slay them all, so that they might as well die in the cause of liberty. Thebes attacked, as Alexander offered peace. He then won easily and handed the fate of Thebes to the numerous small towns they had oppressed. These towns did not just decide to sell the Thebans into slavery, but to restore two towns that Thebes had wiped out. Alexander then offered peace to the many other cities that had revolted at the same time and was as good as his word. He insisted of Athens only that they exile a single man—who went back to his Persian paymaster.

This is the same man who protected the wives and children of his conquered enemy Darius, and punished the traitor to Darius who killed that king. That well read historians must play good guy bad guy to cue our perennial hysteria, even when evidence shows that both Alexander and the Thebans, cast as “bad guy” and “good guys” were both struggling pieces in a terrible chess game they would both fail to survive: the taken pawn and the checked king. We, in this world beyond the pale of conspiracy, are not permitted to see the hand of the explicit enemy [Persia] let alone the machinations of the masterful and unnamed player for which kings and pawns are the most vulnerable playing piece and real power is wielded by the queen [palace staff], rook [fortress commanders], knights [army commanders] and bishops [conspirators].

The game of chess is reduced to mere math, its lesson about rule from the shadows and the impotency of kings caught in the web of conspiracy, lost under the black hat/white hat narrative imposed on us from birth. The key to playing the game of Satanic Earth, [1] for whoever the unnamed players who have ruled us from the shadows for ages are, is the establishment of their puppets in the popular mind, as either good or bad, with that vast gray reality spanning the world between those two fantastic towers of ivory and opal, rendered invisible to the mass mind. It might be useful to refer to the Public Mind as a creature that sees only black, white and shades of red, with other colors as well as gray invisible to the emotional iris implanted in that forever infant consciousness.

…

-1. I agree with the author of The Book of Job and the Gospels of Mathew and Luke, as well as the venerable Increase Mather, that Satan rules on earth as God rules in heaven, and that Milton and Dante painted portraits of earth set in pagan myth to evade censure by our terrible underlords.

42 chapters of this, the oldest book written to appear in the Bible, is placed before Psalms, which are largely prayers for social affliction. Social collapse due to various natural disasters: astronomical, earthquake, drought, flood, blizzard, famine, disease and warfare are addressed. The sections break down roughly into 4 sections:

-1. God and Satan afflict Job, is the briefest section.

-2. The Three Wise Men Debate Job in his Distress, the most extensive section.

-3. The Young Man Exhorts Job, the second most extensive section.

-4. God Answers Job and the Wise Men, Blessing Job, which is slightly longer than the tail of Job’s affliction. God's power shown in creatures is a delightful sketch of the monstrous.

I happened to read this book in light of Hesiod, which I have read four times this past month, and The Babylonian Woe, the book on ancient financial conspiracy by David Astle. There are many aspects of Job that bear on the perennial suffering of the bound working class, of the various cults of experts that control the values of society expressed in Edward Bernays’ Propaganda: The Public Mind in The Making, which I am currently rereading while reading Job. In fact, the plight of job and the young man who exhorts him, is well reflected in the puppet aspect of the Public Man by Tiziana Matarazzo in the 2024 Martino Fine Books edition.

I offer a brief representative list of quotes from Job that seem to bear upon the individual and mass cognition under conditions of social affliction. The one phrase that appears most often outside of normal verbal convention of cadence and affirmation is the concept of Deep Shadow, of the under girding of reality known only to God. The arrogant wise men, faithful Job and God all use this phrase in relation to exclusive understanding or the impossibility of understanding. The dialogues remind me much of the bipolar bickering over pervasive social issues from 2016 thru 2024, a time of great psychological social affliction, characterized by previously unknown levels of mass hysteria and delusion.

2: 1-2: Satan is among “the sons of the [true] God [who] entered into their station before Jehovah, and Satan also proceeded to enter right among them to take his station before Jehovah.”

Satan is shone to be a disliked but tolerated administrator of God’s will on earth and is also permitted to debate with God before the other unnamed minor gods. The general denial of this relationship by modern Christians seems largely to be related to a notion of unified singular creation imposed by atheists in humanistic debate. I see the resulting ignorance of all parties on this question to be instrumental in the modern secular and religious belief that there can be no conspiracy against humanity, among us, or above us.

1:17: The Chaldeans, who later are placed over the Hebrews exiled in Babylon, and who seemed to operate a financial empire from 1850 B.C. to A.D. 1240 when the Mongols waste the city, are depicted as rapacious actors.

7:2: “Like a slave he pants for the shadow,” perhaps meaning the shade from labor, is couched in the contexts of lunar confusion of the reordering of months.

13:4-5: “...you men are smearers of falsehood; all of you are physicians of no value,” claims Job of the wise men who have come to judge him in his affliction, easily assigning the cult of experts who rule us to this day the greatest biblical antiquity.

13:27: “You also keep my feet put in the stocks,” declares Job, against the modern Christian and secular experts who declare stridently that no slavery existed in the ancient world, despite the prevalence of bondage equipment.

15:5: “For your error trains your mouth,” gaslights a wise man taking the afflicted to task for failing God and deserving his misery. This is behavior that has been rife since 2020 in our time, serving to blind and therefore bind both arguing factions.

15:7: “were you the very first man to be born, or before the hills were you brought fourth with labor pains,” is a clear statement that must make ancient astronaut theorists thrill with joy.

16:11: ‘God hands me over to young boys, and into the hands of wicked ones he throws me headlong,” is a statement to earthly life as a test of the soul, as a crucible.

17:10: “as I do not find anyone wise among you,” calls out to tormentors as ignorant dupes of an unseen hand, that being Satan whom God charged with working evil upon Job.

18:10: “A cord for him is hidden on the earth, and a catching device for him on his pathway,” presents the ancient mind as aware that the world is ruled by conspiracy.

19:15: “… my slave girls themselves reckon me as an outsider,” is a measure of the fallen man of power’s woe, a harvest elsewhere in Job compared to the harvest of ripe wheat, and of great value to international money systems, which are referenced in Job. Slave girls are again noted in offense to our modern view of the ancient world.

19: 23-24 “Oh that now my words were written down!

“O that in a book they were even inscribed!

“With an iron stylus and with lead, forever in the rock O that they are hewn!’” suggests this, the most ancient book of the Bible, placed curiously near the end of the Old Testament, as having been written at some point after the introduction of Iron, yet still in the Bronze Age, making the recording of that entire sacred document younger than international banking by thousands of years, and younger than the Chaldean Inception in Babylon by very little, as Iron might be reckoned as in special use by about 1750 B.C.

Job has many lessons to learn for the modern seeker into the past, most having been skipped in this light treatment. An extensive use of Job as a reference to faith in times of earth changes is present in my omnibus science fiction trilogy, Who Writes the Songs of Night, in Volume 3: Night Song of the Nords or Eye of the Dictor.

Thank you for considering this inquiry.

-JL, East Baltimore, 11/24/2024

Chapter 8

Tyrant And Trapezitae

The expansion of mining, coinage, checking, banking and slavery into more tradition settings, would, from 750 B.C. to 250 B.C., from Homeric culture to Hellenistic civilization, change the very name of the slave from a word based on the house, to one based on the coin, with people, over the course of 500 years being reduced to a unit of exchange. The tyrants rose as an early indication of this trend. These were men of the traditional nobility who used alien financial baking, mercenaries & slaves to overthrow their own class, who had refused the “landless traders and manufacturers” membership in the ruling class.

In addition, the landed elites abused the peasants [small free holders] who “were oppressed by the rich and encouraged to get into debt and then were reduced to slavery and exile; slaves began to compete with free labour. Ambitious individuals capitalized on this discontent to overthrow the constituted government and establish themselves as tyrants in all the Greek cities with the notable exception of Sparta.” The later state used monetary abolition, dual kingship, and a council of elders, along with a myopic warrior ethic and xenophobia to avoid tyranny. [0]

Deep parallels between Planter England in the 1500s and 1600s, which permitted international agents of banking and shipping houses to enslave its poor—indeed employed these agents of misery to remove the hungry, homeless and needy—are drawn from pages 112 through 126 to focus almost exclusively on banking politics in Modern England, through 1920. This will be treated in the Plantation America omnibus In This New Isrаel: Volume 1: The Sowers.

To return to 600s B.C. Greece:

“If the land itself they did not own and control, it mattered not; for there were those voices that told them that land too was but a trade and a tool in the new order. As their factories and slaves were the capital investment that produced those textiles (as at Megara[1]), or pottery (as at Corinth), that every ship leaving the harbour carried to the ends of the earth, so the land of the great lord was but the capital investment that grew the food that he the manufacturer purchased for himself and his slaves or the raw materials needed for his particular trade; and he himself, in the money creator’s kingdom on earth, was as assessable in coin as was potter, weaver or armourer.’

The economy of the traditional home based manufacture of goods, by children, wives [2] and household slaves, was now taken to a house that was no home, where people slept before the tools and on or under the tables of their trade. This economy was directly replicated in early Modern Europe and America, with work houses at once prisons and factories. Ominously, the name of Megara—and there may be no foundational link—where textiles were manufactured, meant “Chambers.”

These chambers of purely muscle driven industry were staffed by the poor, “needless to say, soon returned to being poor again… The word “poor” having existed, of course, long before the crafty banker, standing in the shade beside the ways of life, arranged it that poverty and riches was in that number of (privately issued) units of exchange in which a man could be assessed according to success or failure in the conflict of life as he the banker had established it.”

The status of freeman or slave was, as in later ages that sowed America, established by the merchant class. The King of England in the 1700s would be unable to help Jemmy Annelsey from the clutches of his defrauders who sold him, in the return of what had been taken, and later advised a humbled gardener, Isrаel Potter, on avoiding the clutches of man hunters and soul driver, by hiding in London, for the KING could not protect his gardener from bounty hunters, jailers or creditors. The ancient petty king and tyrant as well, was in no position to disobey his financier.

This reader is reminded of Glaukus, Gray-fish of Karystos. He was a peasant’s son, scion of a free farmer. He would use the same hammer fist that he had once employed to straighten a plow blade, to win victory in boxing at Olympia. As an older man, he become a parasite, a side by side banquet friend with, of one Hiero, a Tyrant in Sicily. Glaukus was appointed as governor of a small city by this Tyrant. When revolution came to, Gela, I think was the name of this town, Glaukus was slain in an uprising. Just as tyrants and their “creatures” were elevated through the backing of financiers, the fomenting of uprisings, and the employ of paid professional soldiers, so were they disposed of.

When I advise fighters I train with to avoid political entanglements and work for money alone, I am thinking of being the paymaster’s man, not the man, of the paymaster’s puppet, a puppet, as they all are, which will eventually tatter on that duplicitous stage, to be cast into the rag heap of discarded social avatars.

…

Intermission of Inquiry

Having adopted Astle’s view of lateral, anti-social, capitalist coordination as an ancient economic factor, I am compelled to set aside this fine, heavy, cloth book until my return to this writing retreat in May, 2025. I will now focus on the ancient writings of Hesiod, Arrian and Tacitus, as well as an academic review of the latest physical and linquistic evidence concerning the ancient Scythians, before returning to Astle’s starkly shadowed view of antiquity.

-JL, Baltimore City, 11/6/24

…

Notes

-0. It is of interest to this reader that warrior ethics and fear or suspicion of alien immigration are among our strongest taboos in our postcultural monetary matrix.

-1. Megara and Corinth occupied the Isthmus, being trading cities on the east and west ends of the narrow strip of land that linked Redfaceisland with the rest of Greece.

-3. See Agamemnon’s statements as to the fate of captive women in the Iliad and, in the Odyssey, Penelope, a minor queen, weaving upon her loom.

Chapter 7

Phrygia, Finance, And Front Man

The Assyrian conquests, culminating in the looting of Egypt from 671 thru 661 B.C., despite seeming a revolt by an ethnonationalist empire, come back from near extinction, soon to gain that full honor, fed the very banking networks that it sought to stamp out. For instance the loot from the temple of Amon at Karnak, would have been in 1974 dollars, worth $186,648,000. A description of the sacred metals in their old temple context is given by Diodorus in 57 B.C., writing of times ancient to him:

“So that there was no city under the sun so adorned with so many stately monuments of of gold, silver, and ivory, and multitudes of colossi and obelisks, each cut out of an entire stone…”

Electrum is listed as an alloy of 75% gold, 22% silver and 3% copper.

Phrygia, in northwestern Asia Minor had been an earlier, possible Hittite source of iron and steel. It remained after the vanishing of the Hittites as a “peasant kingdom” with a strong iron craft artisan class. As late as the battle of Cannae in the late 200s B.C. one Roman writes to another, “Who was not wounded there with Phrygian steel?”

Lydia was a minting center near Phrygia, where the grifter agent of Babylon Sadyattes, latter dispossessed and executed by Croesus, who in his turn is disposed of by Cyrus, managed a regional mint. This mint, close to quality weapon manufacture, would be the target of various barbarian invasions, from the Cimmerians circa 750 B.C. to the Gauls circa 260 B.C. With chariot production transferred to Egypt and steel a thing of far western Asia Minor, empire divorced from national presumptions were required to dominate, and also encouraged by the financial class. The scramble for lost knowledge and the touring of learned men such as Solon and Anacharsis of this period, reflects a mature international class of scholars. There is little indication if this is related to finance and may simply be a parallel trend.

The looting of temple gold and silver, along with the increasing abundance of iron and growing obsolescence of bronze, Astle indicates, served the wicked ends of inflation. For gangs of slaves could strip bronze and iron from the dead on battlefields and their masters could then use this to adulterate coinage and extract bullion to an area with a shortage of money, perhaps a new region for financial development where the ruling class had long used pure silver and gold as jewelry/money and would not accept alloys.

Pheidon, King of Argos in 680, arch enemy state of anti-money Sparta who reigned in the age of Lucurgus, the money abolisher of Sparta, established a 400 to 1 silver/ iron alloy coin as his national standard to match international metrics. At about this time, the Egyptian kopish sword is adopted as the Argive side arm, eventually to evolve into the Nepalese kukri. Naturalized “Greeks” who had immigrated from eastern financial centers to work in manufacture and finance were beginning to establish true international interests in internal city state politics. This person was typified by the trapezitae who sat on a small stool in the agora, the center of each Greek polis, save Sparta, which had as its focus the sacred grove and the military barracks. The “progressive” activities of sell out kings and tyrants like Pheidon is summarized by Astle as a growth of deposit banking, something we are familiar with in modern America.

He sights two banking house, which each lasted at least 100 years, having done work under the Assyrian King Nabopolassar, father of Nebuchadrezzar and the Persia Darius Hystaspes. These houses are evidenced by clay checks and deeds found in an earthenware jar by Arabs. The houses were Egibi Sons and Murassu.

Astle is in his own groove here with the moral vision of ancient finance, convincing me he must have hated that awful movie its A Wonderful Life.

“...the systematic spreading of money madness amongst the landed aristocracy of Greece, thus separting them from their peoples… For their peoples and their labours had now become but cyphers; desirable wealth assessed as according to the figures in the banker’s book.”

But the banker is doomed as well by his own grift.

“They are but pudgy and sly little men as much overwhelmed by the monster they have raised, as are the foolish nations that permitted them to do so.”

Western financial methods were not invented in the 12th Century A.D. but were there a mere colonial adaptation of an ancient near eastern practice. The many poor laws and criminalization of poverty in the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods in Western Europe had a deep antiquity and ere not the innovations we suppose. Just as William Moraley, Petter Williamson, Golieb Mitterberger, John Harrower, Davvy Crockett and William Garrison would discover, it was the same in antiquity, save for the language:

“Behind the Aramaic speaking banker came the slave trader, and it was not long before the poor people found that the king’s law was no longer for them…”

Citizenship would always be easy to obtain for those with money. When the banker no longer needed the king, or the cabal of oligarchs, revolution would be funded and a more malleable rabble would be given a voice, bought by the same agents that supplied the weapons:

“...stirred active resentment against their former leaders… and who, of course, had no more understanding than themselves of that force by which they were both being manipulated…”

One wonders, was this the point of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?

[Half of the work or more in this chapter is from my reading of the primary sources, and constitute ancient corroboration of Astle’s case, particularly on Alexander and Solon and the Persians.]

Chapter 6

Babylon, Banking, And Bullion

The first big bad guys of standard history, the Assyrians in their 900s B.C. conquests, seem, on Astle’s consideration, not so much oppressors of small states, but as rebels against international banking, using small states as branch offices. The front men for the banking operations were primarily Arameans, an Arуan people whose written language was the source of both Greek and Hebrew writing. Aramaian and Greek would be the two languages the New Testament was first recorded in, which in this context brings to mind Jesus driving the money changers from the temple, not so much as correcting a blasphemy as we assume, but affronting an ancient financial faith. The banking network extended from India to eastern Anatolia. Use of the term Phoenician applied to the Aramean refugees from the Assyrian ethno-national revolt, is something like describing the Norman British ruling class as Anglo-Saxon, which they are manifestly not.

The coinage reforms in Athens under Solon [1] in the 590s B.C. were a form of regional standardization by international weight via local mintage establishing community authority, related to large scale bullion movement, due in part to local mining and in part to removal of treasure from Assyria banking centers. After reactionary local politics rocked the banking establishment, Solon seems to have been a front man for the bankers who, in order to continue basing their operations in Greece, had to stop enslaving its people through debt, labor and fraud, and needed to import slaves into Greece to work the mines. Some free Greeks did join the gangs of mining slaves for a time.

The basis of Greek coinage would now be the drachma, “circulated at par with the shekel” of Babylon due to weight reforms. This extended the common market into the Greek sphere and would bring with it reform in Athens, severe reform in Sparta, [2] and war from the east.

Solon, the philosopher Archon [mayor] of Athens reformed the “the old noxious contracts” that were “a mere snare for the liberty of a poor free man and his children.” This was called “shaking-off-of-burdens,” which established them as an enemy of the Babylonian system and its Persian puppet kings, who then extended their military occupation into Europe in 512 B.C., above Greece, in Thrace, where rich mines were in operation.

That 512 invasion of Europe by Darius, the invasions of Greece by he and his successor Xerxes in 490 and 480 B.C., viewed in our murky mirror, begin to take on some of the proxy aspects of an American Petro-Dollar war racket. The improvement of the Laureion silver mines controlled by Athens, very close to where the Persians landed in 490 at Marathon [3], positioned Athens as a regional rival to the Persians. That class of international brokers who handled the affairs of the King of Kings who must tax some 30 captive nations, seem to have also helped improve Athenian mining and minting. Athens now had a dictatorship under Solon that discouraged slavery of its people, and granted citizenship to rural folk from other nations willing to relocate to work as artisans in Athens.

These brokers are only hinted at in Herodotus’ account of the great war between Persia and Athens. An Asiatic Greek, Herodotus had as much access to the Persian camp as to the Greek, largely through interviews with the train of Greek exiles that worked as advisors to the Great King. Spies, secret police, torturers and executioners are referred to vaguely as “those whose task it was,” to do such terribly necessary things as punish a river god by flogging it, slay the sons of the subject King of Lydia and loot his entire treasury along with all movable resources such as beasts, hay, slaves and food.

Astle has an inkling, and I expect he is correct, that being expelled from Sparta for promoting degenerate consumption and debt slavery, these faceless, nameless brokers would work with the Athenian rivals of reactionary Sparta, promoting conflict with the King of Kings, who was also dependent upon their system of exchange, their shipping and their consequent control of the slave trade.

“Out of war could only come good to them and theirs. Whether the Great King remained great, or Athens took his place…” The term “hand over fist” for making loads of low investment money seems perfect for this war monger activity. They would provide financial services, to include turning captive slaves into money, the measure of their gain determined only by the ruin of war—the more terrible and destructive, the higher their profit. It is clear form my study of the Greco-Persian Wars that Xerxes gathered the better part of the military of 30 nations, even dismounting the Scythian horse archers, and marching them to the edge of the world to be marooned. The grain of Egypt was heaped in great depots by thousands of ships. The lands, people and treasures of Anatolian and European vassal kings were pillaged on the way to Greece. The great army was marooned and the Great King returned with his Persian troops, to be King Supreme. For he had sent the flower of the warriors of 30 nations to die by war, hunger and thirst on the door step of an upstart power with a seat at the money table. Napoleon used the same strategy in his invasion of Russia, with most of his manpower not French.

The Macedonian invasion of Persia 150 years later by Alexander had been planned for so long as a known, and long frustrated, necessity. For mines dotted Northern Greece and they must be got or kept. After Alexander gained the agreement of all of Greece save Sparta, who had come back into the power of the bankers, hopeless revolts popped up in mining areas to the north which Alexander had crushed when he was a prince of 16. As well, Thebes, which Alexander and his Father had crushed 2 years earlier, rose up in hysteria, having been convinced by returned exiles that he was going to kill them anyhow, so they might as well die defiantly. Those folk who were not killed by their vengeful neighbors were sold into the same international system by the hand of the man that system secretly opposed, for he could not do without money to pay his troops. I have skipped ahead here, as Astle does not take us to Alexander and will declare the death of freedom before the rise of that money power’s greatest foe. [4] These extinguished Thebans were, ironically or not, the scions of the Arameans under Cadmus who had fled the wrath of the Assyrians.

The Laws of Lycurgus rejecting money in Sparta pressured the refugee bankers, a multi-ethnic network of socio-economic parasites, to cooperate with Athens rather than follow the normal course of undermining the social structure and extracting slaves, silver and gold from the host society.

…

Notes

-0. seisachtheia

-1. Solon would advise Croesus of Lydia, who did nationalize his banking, and was then crushed by Cyrus, seemingly on their account.

-2. see part 12

-3. Fennel field

-4. this will be covered under Arrian

Chapter 5

Blood, Sorrow, And Silver

By about 1,000 B.C., improved iron tools had increased the silver supply to the point where silver coins, rings and bars served as the value itself, rather than as a representation of goods held in a temple promised for payment over some debt.

In Chapter 5 Astle describes how the banking interests who truly stood to gain over the fall of Troy, worked through Agamemnon—who was doomed to be killed in a more dark way than Achilles after the peace—employed the promise of plunder, along with the return of the lovely Brisais, “to bring Achilles back into the fight.” casual readers of the Iliad might only recall the drama around Troy. But the thing that was so dramatic about it, was the fact that Achilles had already sacked some twenty cities!

Just as the folk who make the real money off of a gold rush are those who exchange it for money, make blue jeans and overalls, and rent equipment, as well as charging high prices for food, or simply robbing miners, those who ultimately profit from the sack of a city are the slave traders and money changers. [0] No one who dug gold in 1848 California left a fortune still in tact to this day. But Levi Strauss, I still wear his jeans 116 years later.

“...the destructive forces that were gnawing at the Tree of Life,” are identified by Astle as the machinery of money, the reality of a tool usurping its own purpose in the realm of the medium of exchange.

In 2500 B.C. Sargon of Akkad seems to have invaded Anatolia on behalf of Mesopotamian creditors. In 550 thru 546 B.C. Cyrus is suggested as a mere agent of Babylonian banking interests. This is indicated by his attack on Croesus of Lydia for the international crime of nationalizing the treasury in his nation, for which he was punished at the hands of the proxy conqueror. 14 years later, Cyrus was admitted by internal ruse into Babylon as a liberator by the real powers that resided there, at the expense of their political puppets. Solidifying influence for banking interests was one thing left to the king.

“As the most valuable bi-product of their being and existence, kings and conquerors were also needed towards the maintenance of the steady inflow of slaves, sufficient to take care of the fearful death rate in the mines, and no doubt, to permit the opening of new mines due to the rapid expansion of the mining industry on account of the growth of the use of hardened iron tools and improved methods of exploration… not only was an increasing and continuous flow of slaves needed for the mines, but also for the industry to which the products of the mines gave rise… monetary circulation withering, and even disappearing from wear and tear, exportation and hoarding, with the economic collapse that such condition could bring about: one was through mining using slave labour, as mining with free labor was rarely profitable, and the other was through sack and plunder. For the first method, Conquerors were needed, for free men did not willingly become mine slaves; for the second method conquerors were needed again, for to cause a people to reveal and surrender their hidden hoards…”

Sacks of cities and profits in talents of gold, silver and iron are listed form 843 thru 717 B.C. this is a period in which all calendars were changed from 300 to 360 days, and from 10 to 12 months. [1]

Extensive organization of army “camp followers” into gangs of looters employed to scavenge for iron and bronze is introduced as a concept. Additionally, it is pointed out that war captives enslaved in the Near East were exported as slave labour to Phoenician mines in Cornwall England, where the all-valuable tin needed to combine with copper to make bronze was extracted. At such a great distance, unable to use martial law to enslave locals, slaves from distant lands would be imported. This, in part, may account for the dark haired British races described by Tacitus in Agricola, the residue of runaways and rebels fleeing to native cultures from the slave colonies.

In 586 B.C., the last protector of Isrаel, Pharaoh Necho was defeated and Sargon of Assyria sacked “Samaria” and carried off 27,280 men and their families into captivity. By 536 B.C., Persian forces under Cyrus were let into Babylon by night and “proud Belshazzar, king in Babylon, was slain that night.” The descendents of Hebrews referred to by Sargon as “Samaritans,” where then enabled to return to their homelands by proclamaition of Cyrus, indicating that he had been aided by them in entering Babylon, and by inference, that these folk were in some measure agents of the Chaldean bankers who had been based in Babylon for at least 1300 years. It was the habit of bankers to use literate slaves and slave artisans to make and count their money.

“The Hebrew, being aggressive and intelligent, may have risen to especially privileged position in the Babylonian money industry… The law no. 7 of Hammurabai had long since become a dead letter… bullion which was the foundation of the money system, had become a highly specialized and closed trade now able to operate quite apart form the temples; even if in many cases the temples still continued to permit themselves, and that which they stood for, to be used as a front, and so offered sanctity to those most sinister and destructive operations of the money, bullion, and slave brokers; in themselves and their attitudes towards mankind, the antithesis of God, the Anti-God…”

“The unfortunate masses of the Ancient Orient, who had so trusted their rulers, had no idea or understanding of the new reality, and that the ruler they saw, far from being the Son of God on Earth, was in reality a puppet manipulated by the conspiratorial force exerted by the controllers of the precious metal bullion particularly, that lurked in the Aramaic speaking middle class mentioned by Professor Oppenheim. [2] ...The policies of these controllers from their standpoint of internationalists, where necessarily directed towards the stimulation of war against the well-being of mankind… the gathering of a new crop of slaves to replace those stocks of silver and gold, so necessary to the foundation of their money power...”

“Frequently wars were above all the prime essential, firstly towards destroying the natural system of rule… the nobility have always been the first to disappear in major warfare. As leaders of their men in battle, their young men are the first to die. During the recent first Great War, it may safely be said that the best part of the young men of the natural aristocracy of Europe has perished in 1917.”

It has long been my contention, that WWI was begun a year after the foundation of the Federal Reserve for the explicit purpose of eliminating the millions of men with the highest agency from Europe and America. Industry was automating. Fewer hands would be needed. WWII was an agreed upon mass extermination of the remaining warrior class. [3] Henceforth, with more mouths desired to fuel consumption, automated and increasingly self aware social and production and education systems would rise to facilitate a world with steadily decreasing agency.

…

Notes

-0. See Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast.

-1. I do not know what correlation there is. But it would be an oversight to omit the insertion of October and November between September [9 moon] and December [10 moon]. For nations and tribes do not easily surrender their notions of time.

-2. Letters from Mesopotamia, Chicago, 1967.

-3. The U.S., with more total air and naval power than all other nations combined, has, since emerging victorious in 1945, failed to impose its will in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Venezuela, Peru, Columbia, Mexico, El Salvador, Iraq and Afghanistan. This is an indication that the quality of U.S. fighting men has declined. The organisms tat employ these men have always been poorly manned by captive decision makers from the 1860s through today, employing a managerial rather than a leader model. Successful field generals fought the system and would be discarded after hostilities. By Vietnam, effective combat officers have increasingly been overlooked for promotion for management types. This is the continued policy of agency reduction among the warrior class, which never benefits a nation but always benefits international finance by lengthening wars, making military operations more technology/manufacture dependent, and preventing inspiring characters from rising into the political sphere.

Chapter 4

The Left Hand Of Dawn

“...cheques were in use in Babylon from the earliest times. Such use of cheques has also been verified as having existed in Ur during the 3rd and 4th Milleniums B.C. by Sir Charles L. Wolley…”

“...a credit system developed in Greece as in other parts of the ancient world long before the adoption of coinage.”

“...the original loan had been but an entry in the ledger by the agent, probably, in the final analysis costing little more than the labor of slave scribes.”

The Theban origin legend of Cadmus [in Ovid] points to a Near Eastern patrimony in the late Bronze Age. Of interest is that Thebes will play the pivotal role of keeping Asiatic interest before its own community, indeed its survival, from 479 B.C. through to 335 B.C., helping Persian interests against Athens, Sparta, the region of Boetia and the Macedonians, until it is extinguished for this habit of siding with international interests against those of its neighbors and own people.

“Further evidence of the activities of the Babylonians is indicated by the discovery of their seals in the Cyclades.” These are a small chain of islands off of Greece.

The smallness of garrisons at Megiddo, Gezer, Jerusalem, wealthy Byblos, and Syrian Brigawaza, indicate limited metal weapons for arming troops circa 1200 B.C., and also no armed population, but slaves.

The isle of Thasos was colonized in earliest times by Phoenicians, credited to a mythical brother of Cadmus, Thassus, involving the search for Europa. A Thasian Herakles is noted by Herodotus in a statue antedating Herakles son of Amphytryon. That makes three, possibly four Herakles founding various cities with financial [temple] ties to the Near East as well as introducing rules for sacred agons. [see the Gods of Boxing] I take these threads to indicate imperial Late Bronze Age colonization of the primitive Greeks by the financial centers of the Near East. The siege of Troy, in this light, might have been simply a proxy war to wipe out Troy using the Greeks in the waning cycle. The Armarna Tablets indicate a system of religious finance, in the form of missives between heads of state, such as:

“To Niphururia king in Egypt, Thus saith Burraburias, King of Karadunias, thy brother. I am well. With thee, thy house, thy wives, thy sons, thy land, thy chief men, thy horses, thy chariots, may it be very well… Now since my work on the House of God is great, and vigorously have I undertaken its accomplishment, send much gold.” [1]

Study of Bronze Age politics, tend to indicate in the above way, a lateral brotherhood of class loyalty, of joint financial, religious and military interest between kings, with the exclusion of their race, their religious followers, their citizens and slaves from any concern. Gold and the singular God, the Patriarch of Heaven, are in a sense, one.

In Greece, mines were founded and exploited by Near Eastern colonizers in the Late Bronze Age, during its collapse, and in the ensuing Iron Age. [see Ovid in the 4 ages, from gold to Iron.] In the 400s B.C., one Polycrates [City-taker] bought off the Spartans from holding the valuable mining center of Samos by coating lead coins with gold. In the times of Theophrastus, [2] circa 240 B.C., he describes the method of mining on Samos:

“Those who work in the mines cannot stand upright, but are obliged to lie down either on their sides or their backs: for the vein they extract runs lengthwise and is only two feet deep, though considerably more in breadth and is enclosed on every side with hard rock.”

The Balkans, from Corfu, the place where revolution began in 430, igniting the Peloponnesian War, to the Black Sea, had been mined for gold and silver extensively in the Bronze Age. These areas would remain central to Near Eastern and increasingly Roman interest until late Antiquity, forming the core of the Roman Christian Empire until 1204, and thence to the Ottomon Turks.

“In many parts of Greece or European Turkey, where ancient mines were worked, a superstition is said to prevent the peasantry from visiting them. Malte-Brun especially mentions this of the old Roman mines near Traunick, and we ourselves have noticed the same superstition in the vicinity of the Roman gold mines in the Carpathian foothills… probably due to the traditions of that cruel and relentless slavery to which their forefathers were subjected… Valdivia, writing to Emperor Charles V, declared that every castellano of gold from Peru cost a measure of human blood and tears… a human life for one ounce would probably be well within the mark.”

So wrote Alexander del Mar: History of Precious Metals,

pp. 47-50, 1886

The Bronze Age Collapse from about 1300 down through 1177 B.C., to include mythic relations by Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Apollonius, Ovid and Virgil, indicate that some banking power, based in temples that acted as branches of deposit for counting houses, probably based in Babylon, which seems to have weathered every storm until the tide of Islam, was active arming, perhaps hiring “Sea Peoples” to complete the wreckage of the host civilizations. These Sea Peoples are attested as sometimes mercenaries for the very empires they would demolish, sailing from as far away as Denmark!

When the Dark Ages came down it was as if a curtain was drawn concealing the fact that the bankers of Babylon “now with the plunder of a half dozen civilizations in its strong rooms,” was in an excellent position to broker deals for weapons, silver, gold and slaves, the latter yielding more of the former, with small polities. Much of this could be done through colonial missions, setting up temples on islands adjacent to ore bearing mainlands, and where this failed to extract the ores, to incite nomads from the hinterlands to pillage. This latter method permits the metal brokers, dealing in silver, gold, bronze, iron and steel to supply both sides and despoil the loser in the end. The colonists are indicated as “Canaanites” or Syrian “lowlanders,” coastal people named by the Greeks as Phoenician, for the purple robes that were used to dress clergy and royalty, [3] and from whom the phonetic alphabet was brought to Greece as an improvement in Linear A and Linear B record keeping.

Using the cedar forests of Lebanon as resource, Cyprus as a safe port, there was “a Semitic element side by side with the Indo-Europeans [Aryans],” attested by the ancient sources, Semites and Arуan explorers fully integrated, as also seen in Punic/Nordic inscriptions in the North Atlantic as early as 1700 B.C. As in later ages, timber sourcing would move, as old forests were despoiled, from Europe to America, so did Near Eastern timber give way to European timber in the Bronze Age and Iron Age; ever westward, clear cutting the forests. [4]

In the early Iron Age, circa 933 B.C., Aramean “Phoenicians,” were driven from Syria by Assyrians. These refugees colonized and dominated Greece until the laws of Lycurgus in Sparta and political reform in Athens in the 600s corrected the degeneration of local politics. The center of financial gravity was, at this time, shifted back to Babylon, with the fall of Assyria and the rise of the Medes and Persians, and had been expanded to Carthage in North Africa. The Greco-Persian wars will loom in a more left-handed light as we progress in this inquiry.

Astle points to the “experimental social systems” of Greece as in the main machinations financed by “money changers scheming in their shaded courtyards in Babylon,” and in the minority, traditional backlashes against international banking. At the core of this was private production of money, fraudulently claiming to be state issued money, stamped with the head of the very king that money was put into circulation to enslave or unseat. The people would be sold into slavery to plunder the forests for kilns to smelt the ore that they dug from the mines, continuing the process of habitat and ethnic annihilation upon which banking is based. The cycle of rural flight from monopolized and despoiled countrysides to work in urban manufacturing, and also to be shipped as slaves to new resource extraction locations described in the ancient world is exactly that documented in Early Modern England during the Enclosure Period. [5]

“Such industry could only be organized on the basis of money wages in the case of freemen, and therefor only with labour, slave or free, trained to the concept of money, and the making of money, as the be-all and end-all of life.”

“...a great part of the power and learning gravitated from those fast dying worlds of the most Ancient Orient.”

So did the spirit of Prometheus, depicted enchained in the 450s by Aechylus, spread the technologies of the ancient east to the young west.

…

Notes

-1. One skips from family, to land, to warlords, to horses and to chariots, with the people itself not even ranking as a natural resource!

-2. Student of Aristotle.

-3. Judges, those robed figures at athletic venues, were in fact priests acting in a sacral capacity. As money has spread over the ages, the robes of priests have ascended to white and descended to black as a way of denying concord with kings as sacred duties are exchanged for civic, imbuing civics with the vestments of faith and interpretation of ideology. There is no more sinister, visible functionary than the robed judge.

-4. A letter from my patron, Baruch, of Isrаel in 2018 indicated an attempt to undo this age old desert making process, involving more kiln and quarry burning than ship making. From 1688 through 1820, almost every tree in Pennsylvania, a land once covered in 95% forest, was clear cut for iron forge and mining. This writer has visited two old iron works.

-5. 1520s thru 1820s, roughly, peaking in the 1600s and 1700s.

A Blue Print for Inducing Pattern Recognition Deficiency

A Symbolic Study of the Martino Fine Books, 2024

Edition

This cover, is, in my estimation, a genius work of symboloy. The edition is very high quality, with the only typos involving transpositions of “of” and “or” in three places.

Propaganda is lettered at the top in heavy block letters:

PRO letters are rising from left to right,

PAG then sing and rise, with the P as low as in the first syllable and the risen G bisected by a crimson cord being held by a fist above

ANDA is then leveled.

The lettering presented in this way suggests a rising awareness, then a fallen awareness, rising to a new consciousness bisected by an element of control, with the final four letters level indicating that the feeding of information resulted in the consumption of alternative information according to an obscure guideline, resulting in a controlled consciousness.

Below this powerful, and symbolically heavenly, lettering, is the subtitle, in lighter, level lettering:

The Public Mind

In The Making

The underlining of the artwork is accomplished with the moderately block-like author’s name, with the letters set in a beta wave, E high, D low, W high, A low, etc.

The centerpiece, framed ominously to the left, is a small crimson man, with no distinct face, in a crimson suit, hands in pockets. The figure wears a white shirt underneath, representing the remaining uncontrolled aspects of his mind, his right shirt sleeve slightly exposed above his pocketed hand and his white shirt collar visible between the V lapels of his suit jacket.

Ominously, the white shirt collar is bound with a tight black tie, representing what it is, the throttle hold that material economics hold upon this modern man.

The man faces over his crimson left shoulder to the right of the field.

Unseen, at his feet is a crimson cord descending below the field.

His view is held by the precise crimson hand which has its three lesser fingers raised to him, and its thumb and index finger carefully controlling a crimson cord attaching to his knee.

Above this visible hand is an obscure crimson hand which is holding the cord attached to the subjects lower back tightly, in a fist, of which only the thumb and forefinger are visible.

At the top of the field, holding the chord that bisects the G is a godlike hand clenched in a powerful fist grasping the crimson cord that attaches to the subject’s back.

More ominous, although the subject is able to see a kindly precision hand, and glance up to two more bully fists, and even look down to see a crimson cord whose holder is not visible in his field, are three cords behind him: one attached to his right shoulder, one to his right hip, and one to his right ankle.

Altogether there are 7 crimson cords of control, colored the same as his civic uniform. These equal the seven faces of the hero from antiquity [1] and are present in the Statue of Liberty, which is a male priest of Apollo wearing a crown of 7 rays of enlightenment. Those who wield these seven influence upon him, are mostly unknowable.

Most ominously at all is that the cords and the controlling hands lead away out of view into into a black cover back, with no dust cover, no information.

The overall impression of this cover art and lettering is that the cords disappearing off field behind the subject, that is the idealized Public Man, represent aspects of social branding, induction, abduction, conduction leading to pure creation of artificial perception, so as the public man, to the extent that he can see and think, is able only to be mislead by his anonymous shepherd.

Cover designer Tiziana Matarazzo has depicted Bernay’s vapid yet sinister study and promotion of mass mind manipulation in a concise and stark field of control depicting a man as a puppet on a lonely stage controlled by the actions of numerous forces, seen and unseen.

…

Notes

-1. Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell