Starvin Larry

The future is held hostage by little minds and small ideas.

A gaggle of intellectual Lilliputians gaze upon their handiwork—productive people on their backs, bound by government strings of taxes, debt, phony money, out of control spending, entitlements for the unproductive, regulation, war, etc.—and proclaim Gulliver permanently disabled, he’ll never walk again. Invariably their palliatives never involve cutting strings, only more government.

It’s claimed that true innovation is dead, except for innovation directed by bureaucrats and funded by governments. Or there’s going to be so much innovation—automation and artificial intelligence—that there’ll be no work left for humans to do. Then government will have to confiscate the increased wealth flowing from those innovations and dole it out to the unemployed legions. Or soon it will take more energy to produce fossils fuels than the energy derived, so government must push us towards its chosen alternative energies. You get the idea: humanity…

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

Recently, I had my head torn off by a book: Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, about the 1970s underground. It’s the most important book I’ve read in a year. So I did a series of running tweetstorms about it, and Clark asked me if he could collect them for posterity. I’ve edited them slightly for editorial coherence.

Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn’t be. The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about.

One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and…