'No Fat or Woffle'

A five star review of Twerps, Goons and Meatshields from Phil B.

I will start off with the “bad” things about this book. I am doing this because people usually put the bad things at the end of the review and leave the reader with a final impression that is negative.

Firstly, this book, other than the cover illustration contains no illustrations. It is true that a picture tells a thousand words and there are a few points in the book when a diagram would have clarified things enormously. In defence of the book, such illustrations would greatly add to the cost. They are not easy to produce and line drawings in particular are time consuming and hence expensive to have commissioned. Fortunately, Mr LaFond provides links to YouTube clips demonstrating the techniques and explanations contained in the book. A very sensible compromise. 

Secondly the book has been compiled from numerous articles that Mr LaFond has previously published on his blog and the writing contains some grammar and spelling mistakes. Occasionally some sentences need reading a few times to understand what the author is trying to say. If you are a Grammar Nazi, you will hate this book but to dismiss it on this basis is a mistake. It could have done with a review by an editor before publishing but again, that would add to the cost. The glitches are minor and do not detract from the overall good impression the book made on me. 

OK, now for the positive things about the book. This book is very modestly priced and is pure lean meat with no fat or woffle. It does not “explain” the history of stick fighting (hint – mankind has been bashing each other over the head with thigh bones, sticks and suchlike for a few million years). There are no oriental Dojos claiming to have invented the style and Mr LaFond does not attempt to waste time, effort and paper on claiming such history. He has devoted the book to telling you what to do and how to do it in clear and straightforward language. His expertise shows through with many references to avoiding injury and strains caused by moving incorrectly, poor defence or overextending the body to building up the stamina and strength needed by the student. Very, very few books will safeguard the reader with such advice. Clearly Mr LaFond has been there, got the T shirt and has developed a deep understanding of the subject matter and it shows throughout the book. For the safeguards and injury prevention alone, it is worth its modest cost. 

Mr LaFond also describes the injuries and accidents that he has suffered with a dark humour which again is refreshing in such a book. It adds to his credibility and demonstrates that he is not an “All talk and chalk” instructor who never makes a mistake. He is, in essence, saying “learn from my mistakes”. 

This is a “doing” book. You COULD read it like a novel but would not leave you with much understanding of the techniques or skills explained in the book. Read a chapter or part of a chapter, get on your feet and go through the exercises explained and described to learn how to stick fight. In this way, some of the techniques that seem confusing at first become self-explanatory and understandable. 

There is a glossary to explain what the various terms mean that he uses throughout the book and a training syllabus to take the reader from beginner to advanced which follows the development of the skills in the chapters of the books to assist the reader in a progression of skills, stamina and strength. This is useful so that the reader does not try to take on too much at once or attempt techniques that need to build on a foundation of basic techniques to cause the reader to become discouraged and/or injured. 

There are a series of discussions (questions and answers) taken from the comments on Mr LaFond's blog after the main body of the work and these are valuable because they expand on the main body of the book. The book simply and clearly lays out instructions to achieve proficiency in the techniques and the questions and answer discussions, if inserted into the relevant chapters, would tend to break the flow of the material. However, the questions are exactly what a student would ask in a formal class and provide an enjoyable and insightful supplement to understand the techniques and put them into context. 

His discussions of real duels and injuries make for interesting if somewhat grim reading. However, this is a combat activity and he does not pull punches or try to varnish the truth of what happens when hard stick meets flesh and bone. The hard practicality shines through and if this shocks you, take up chess as an intellectual activity. This is a martial art, not a sport. 

Mr LaFond's dry sense of humour shows through and there are a few laugh out loud moments which again shows that he takes the subject seriously but can laugh at himself. This is an extremely rare quality that is missing from the other deadly earnest martial arts books I have read. 

One very minor quibble I have is the title. Mr LaFond seems to have written the book for stick fighting competition. I would agree with his assessment that this would take you (if it was a formal martial art) to 1st Dan level (or first black belt) and he says, quite correctly that you still have a way to go before having the skills to compete at high level. I cannot disagree but if you read and practice what he has laid out in this manual and achieved a reasonable proficiency, you will likely be devastating on the street against any adversary that was not armed with a firearm. Which is why I bought it in the first place. 

So, for its modest price it packs a lot of real world practical experience into its covers. It is readable and with the YouTube videos to supplement the written material and illustrate the techniques in real time plus the discussions from the blog comments, it is one of the few books I can recommend unreservedly.

For more books like Twerps, Goons and Meatshields, see the bookstores below:

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 46

Your weekend links are a double today, because I have some excuse for not being around last weekend.

When the Taboo Man tells you that the tribe is the source of heroism, you must listen.

Don't mistake the knife for the knifer.  Read The Violence Project:

I think James is completely correct here, as well as "T-Jay."  Most everything that looks like a conspiracy, even if it really is a conspiracy, fits in the preservation and promulgation of the SYSTEM.

Attention readers! James wants to know what you think of the Portland heroes, leave a comment and check back!  More wild video footage, a sample of what police deal with, don't make their day any harder!  At 18:10 you can see the female knows what's coming.  She looks at her man and drops her head to her arm.

Fatherless boys share a resemblance, from Baltimore to Ireland.

Nero returns to the US via SF, doesn't stay long.

Hopping around like birds, I am crying.

Machete dueling is going mainstream?

I think these battles are mostly performances for the iPhones but there is potential for evolution into something more serious.

For your consideration, compare and contrast, Mormons and Mexicans.

James has a good voice for the Psalms.

The laws governing slavery in infant America crossed racial boundaries and were driven in part by enterprising black slaveholders.

Fight review: Ali vs Bowe, coaching notes for helping an underprepared fighter for an imminent match.  Banjo and James comment on blade training video.  Your hand strength says a lot about you.  James comments on a system marketed as prison training.

Nerds think living in a computer simulation is cooler than living in a divine creation.

The Shaman of Baltimorean Violence corresponds with good friend Jeremy Bentham.

View Jordan Peterson on with Joe Rogan, if you dare, but be sure to read James' take.

Advice on women - go after the lonely white ladies, and a word on how and when.

What do grizzlies and hoodrats have in common?  What about the country and the urban waste?

Not wolves, but pitbulls.

This "caravan" is a tremendous game of chicken, your blog mistress is betting Trump won't blink.

Murderbowl update - lots of unidentifiable bodies.

The collective vs. the individual... or is there a third way?

An interesting podcast rec and kind words from a listener.

Resist the neutered future - be masculine so your women can be feminine.

James is quite mild in his response here - reality has a misogynistic bias.

James helps you understand anthropologists and their works.

You can see James' books in the BOOKSTORE, but they are rapidly falling to the censor's hammer.  Now some -banking- troubles have held up his royalty payments.  

Many fine titles are available as pdf books through his main website.

Support James in his Plantation America work by becoming a Patron, or donate straight to the man through Paypal, because you love James and his work.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

‘A Landless Man’

A Writer’s View of the Trajectory of Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane by James LaFond

“But you, you jackal of hell…”
-Red Shadows

The aspects of Solomon Kane, his heroic characteristics, with heroism understood as including the narrative which works upon the hero, are laid out clearly in the first story, Skulls in the Stars, published in 1928.

Skulls in the StarsSold, 1928

Elements

• Brooding wayfarer.
• The landless wanderer affects a staunch purity, incongruent with the homeless life and his martial trade. From this position, in which failed men are indicted by society, he judges society.
• The brooding wayfarer is contacted, or encounters, or seeks to avenge or recover, a person of innocence, typically a boy or a young woman, and sometimes a backward and defenseless folk, putting him at odds with the malefactor. 
• A waiting, lurking evil is ever present. 

Dynamics

• The hero is a pure fanatic with zero internal conflict.
• The pursuit of evil is an all-consuming drive for the hero, who has no end goal, no great quest, only an everlasting commitment to fight evil.
• The hero experiences no satiation from killing evildoers, like a drug addict chasing his first high and doomed to be forever unwell.

The Right Hand of Doom
Unsold

The Right Hand of Doom, is based around Torkertown, in England, an attempt by Howard to establish geographic continuity with Skulls in the Stars, as he did with his two Faringtown horror yarns, the second of which failed to sell, as did The Right Hand of Doom, arguably a better tale than Skulls in the Stars.

Red Shadows
Sold, 1928

The novelette Red Shadows is arguably the best Kane tale. Kane is taken to France and then Africa and the author gained more sales per word than if he had written three Torkertown or Faringtown stories. With Red Shadows, Howard adapts to the market demands for exotic locales and the pulp editor’s preference for serialized novelettes and novellas over shorter, independent narratives.

In Red Shadows, a signature aspect of Kane as a Howard hero appears, in the form of N’Longa, the witch doctor, an extra-racial ally of the Aryan hero, which was a feature of the early Howard heroes, Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Cormac Mac Art and the savage Donald McDeesa in the novelette Lord of Samarkand. A reoccurring companion is not a feature of later Howard heroes.

Rattle of Bones

Sold, 1929

Rattle of Bones marks a successful attempt to bring Kane back to Europe, where Howard seems to have the sense evil can be more starkly presented in bold relief.

The Castle of the Devil
Unfinished

The Castle of the Devil has more power lines drawn in the initial scene than any other Kane tale and has the potential to be the best, but is abandoned.

Death's Black Riders
Unfinished

Death’s Black Riders began superbly and horrifically in a style like Lovecraft and Irving Washington being admonished for not inserting a heroic character in their dark forest tales. This is dropped immediately. As Death’s Black Riders and the Castle of the Devil are both set in Germany’s Black Forest, it seems likely that Howard, keeping abreast of his sales and pulp publishing trends, realized that he had to get Kane back to Africa to get major sales.

The Moon of Skulls 

Sold, 1930

The Moon of Skulls was one of the best white man’s burden tales written, particularly of those set in Africa. Approaching short novel length, this was a major sale for Howard.

The One Black Stain 
Unsold

The One Black Stain was a verse about Kane serving with the anti-hero Francis Drake, reflecting well on Howard’s historic reading, that he saw through the British propaganda to perceive the greatest of the Elizabethan sea dogs for what he was, the most conniving backstabber and power player.

The Blue Flame of Vengeance 
Unsold

The Blue Flame of Vengeance was a pirate yarn set in England with Kane serving up justice. The action was great, but it seems that Howard could not sell a pirate yarn to save his life, unless it was a Conan story. The period pirate genre seemed blocked to him.

The Hills of the Dead 
Sold, 1930

The Hills of the Dead is a fantastic horror tale in which Howard finally manages to wed the supernatural horror he wished to set in Europe in the African setting where his sales were more likely. His previous African tales had no supernatural elements.

Hawk of Basti 

Unfinished

Hawk of Basti was a tale of Kane meeting a pirate in Africa from his sailing days along the lines of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King.

The Return of Sir Richard Grenville 

Unsold

The Return of Sir Richard Grenville is a verse about Kane being helped by his piratical hero, who was screwed out of the chance for historical heroism by Drake, set in Africa. Since his verse and his ventures into seafaring fiction seem to have been frowned upon by the editors perhaps he hoped the African element would save this sale.

The Footfalls Within 
Sold, 1931

The Footfalls Within was a brilliant mix of horror, oriental adventure, Kane’s latent religiosity and the African setting.

Wings in the Night 

Sold, 1932

Wings in the Night once again combines supernatural horror, the African setting and uses the white man’s burden to affect a burning vengeance, making it possibly the most Kane, Kane story.

The Children of Assur 
Unfinished

The Children of Assur was an attempt at a novella of Edgar Rice Burroughs type, who set Tarzan stories in various lost European race kingdoms in African valleys. Howard uses the Assyrians [untapped by Burroughs] and manages to combine his sympathetic tribal African elements and then drops the story, perhaps for another character.

Solomon Kane’s Homecoming
Unsold

Solomon Kane’s Homecoming is a recapitulation of a stridently unexamined life in verse, in which Kane finally looks at himself and turns away. This was Kane’s epitaph and seems to mark a clear abandonment of the character as a narrative force in Howard’s mind.

Considering Howard’s highly tuned sense for the literary sale, for he sold scores of stories in a competitive market, I have decided that unfinished Kane tales represented Howard’s assessment that he was not going to be able to sell it. In this light, Kane, the character sold 7 of 16 tales along the following arc:

1928 (2)
1929
1930 (2)
1931
1932

One of those 1928 stories was a substantial novelette and there was another unsold, so one can sense a blooming passion for the character in 1928, followed by a struggle to contextualize him in 1929, a triumph of horrific adventure in 1930, a struggle to fuse heroic Anglo-Saxon elements in 1931-32, not realized until he placed Kane firmly under the white man’s burden arrayed against superstition and Islam, those forces having preyed most heavily upon a race of people he obviously regarded with deep sympathy.

These impulses, combating superstition and the Asiatic mind, would fall to Howard’s two most dynamic characters, in that the characters had far more charisma than Kane or his other brooding heroes, Mak Morn, Mac Art and Kull, but equaled Kane’s fanaticism, these Characters were Conan—who shouldered both burdens—and El Borak, who was Howard’s modern oriental adventures hero.

Related to Howard’s treatment of Solomon Kane and the editor’s disdain for European settings, Howard ultimately resurrected the dour puritan [who was indeed a repentant pirate], as Kirby Buchner, a home grown American hero of the Piney woods who is the protagonist in Black Canaan and Pigeons from Hell, some of Howard’s later works, set in contemporary America.

Listen to James, Lynn and Nick Mason discussing Solomon Kane here:

Kane Posting

(c) 2018 James LaFond

I Couldn’t Name The Jew

A Letter from a Appalachian Jail by John Paul Barber

Spending time in prison is the closest you’ll ever come to going on a world tour without leaving the country. You get to meet people from every corner of the globe. For a young man who’d lived in the hills of North Carolina his whole life, this was quite an experience. Until I went to prison at 19 years old, I really never knew anyone who wasn’t either an Anglo-Celtic redneck or a descendant of African slaves.

The first Jew I ever met was in the Mecklenburg County jail in Charlotte, NC. He was an actual Israeli. He was about 6 feet tall with dark wavy hair and probably weighed around 205 lbs. He’d been in jail for awhile already, awaiting trial for trafficking ecstasy. You could tell he was in very good shape, always doing push ups and pull ups. He told me his name but I couldn’t pronounce it so I just started calling him ‘Mossad.’ Mossad took a liking to me after I gave him that nickname. He was impressed that some hick like me even knew what the Mossad was. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d only heard of them about a month prior to meeting him because someone had left a Tom Clancy book in the last cell block I was in.

In this same cell block I was in with Mossad there was an old man from Texas named Charles Eagle in there with us. In the real world, he was a truck driver who also hauled marijuana for one of the Mexican drug cartels. Charles claimed he was part Injun but I don’t know if that’s true or not. All I know was he was one ugly troll of a man. He was about 5’4” tall and probably weighed around 220 lbs. He had very dry, frizzy gray hair that hung down to his shoulders. Charles looked a lot like Billy Crystal’s character in The Princess Bride.

I was a newcomer to that cell block so I’m not sure if something had happened between Charles Eagle and Mossad before I got there but they absolutely hated each other. This was a little odd because there were so few of us non-blacks in Charlotte, we all pretty much stuck together and got along fairly well. From what I saw, it was mostly Mossad who was the instigator in these conflicts. He was always belittling Charles, cursing him, and calling him names. Admittedly, Charles was a bit of a dullard and wasn’t a very likable guy, but in my opinion he didn’t deserve the kind of abuse Mossad dished out at him every day.

One day we were playing spades. Charles was my partner and a guy named Shaky from Gastonia was Mossad’s partner. Charles and me ended up losing because of a dumb mistake Charles made. I fussed at him a little but I got over it pretty quickly. But Mossad just kept raking Charles over the coals and ridiculing him for losing to such a wise card sharp as himself. If I recall correctly he called Charles a “stupid, old, broken bastard”.

Apparently this really got under Charles’ skin more than I realized. Looking back, I suppose it was the combination of losing to Mossad, the things Mossad said to him that day, and all the built up anger Charles had inside him. After every meal, certain inmates volunteered to be on the clean up crew while the rest of us went back to our individual cells. Charles decided to volunteer that day. The jailer on duty unlocked the utility closet so the clean up crew could get all the supplies they needed to clean the common areas. Charles claimed bathroom duty that day so he picked up what I call a deck brush to scrub the floors with. But he didn’t go straight to the bathroom.

Mossad should’ve been in his cell already but he was standing in front of the jailer’s desk talking to Shaky. Charles walked up behind him with that deck brush, hoisted it over his head like he was chopping wood and proceeded to wale away at the back of Mossad’s skull at least four or five times. The first blow was enough. It knocked Mossad out cold but Charles hated him so much he gave him a few extra to grow on after he was face down on the floor. And he kept screaming at him “Who’s broken now?!!!” after every strike of the deck brush.

The head of that brush was wooden and the corners were fairly sharp so it cut Mossad open in several places. I’ve honestly never seen that much blood in my life and I hope I never do again. The jailer on duty hit the panic button and the goon squad came in to haul Charles away to solitary confinement. The medics took Mossad off on a stretcher and rushed him to Carolinas Medical Center.

A few months later I got in a fight with this negro named Shorty and got sent to The Hole myself. I was reunited with old Charles Eagle once again. It was good to see him and catch up on what he’d been up to the last few months. He’d been sentenced to solitary for the rest of his time there. He also caught me up with Mossad’s status. He was still at CMC in a coma, most likely with permanent brain damage.

After I completed my 90 days in The Hole I went back to a regular cell block. Within a couple months I got in another fight and went back to The Hole again. Of course, Charles was still there. His status and Mossad’s status hadn’t changed but Charles had been informed that they were considering filing attempted murder charges on him. This time around I was serving 120 days in The Hole. One morning after I woke up, I hollered through the crack in my door at Charles but I didn’t get an answer. The jailer told me they'd released Charles from custody before dawn. He’d went home with time served.

I later learned the reason Charles got released so suddenly, was because he’d decided to testify against some of the cartel guys he used to haul for. I have no idea what ever happened to him and as far as I know, Mossad ended up serving a life sentence.

(c) 2018 John Paul Barber

A Fighting Foot

A Hazard of Coach-Sparring

When one coach-spars with a non-fighter who is schooled in a martial art, he is inconstant danger of suffering an ego-based injury, while his partner is operating in total safety, safe from all physical injury that is, but highly conditioned by the stilted, scripted version of his art to psychological injury. Just before the injury suffered below [two sprained toes] I said:

“We are sparring, not fighting. This is not a competition. We are working, not scoring. I will move at one fifth speed. Your goal is to defend at the same speed I am moving and to attack and counter at a slower speed. Tap and brush with the stick. This is learning. If you move at full speed I will get hurt. I am rendering myself helpless in a cooperative sense so that you may get onto the learning curve and grow.”

Sure enough, as soon as this bigger, younger, more fit, more skilled man discovered that even though I was moving less than half as fast as him I was outscoring him, he went into ego survival mode, misread my heel step, thought I was shifting back and then darted in like the Green Lantern, sprained my big toe and my first toe ligaments and snapped my first toe before he even knew where our relative positions were. As this happened, which, with street shoes would have resulted in zero injury to me, I struck the finishing blow to his head.

This is common. Earlier this year I received a concussion from a fighter I was tapping because his ego got engaged and he lost his cool in the drill. My brother in law, as he looked on in horror while my sister photographed these toes said, “Why didn’t you drop him?”

Dropping him would have lost a student for my host, would have degraded me by paying back an accident with intent and would have knocked the fighter forever off the learning curve as the session ended badly. He apologized and we continued. All martial artists have been conditioned by our sissy society to see sparring as fighting when fighters see sparring as work. This is due to the semantic game played by karate promoters who seek to avoid paying athletic commission fees by calling their competitions "sparring." People from MMA gyms also have this karate mentality of sparring as combat rather than work, which is why their boxing is so retarded.

Such occurrences are proof that technique training in combat without continuous contact practice [continuity of contact being much more important than level of impact contact] is not only useless but dangerous to the user. In practice I was injured due to the need to go barefoot in the mat, while in a survival situation such an attacker would scuff by boot and die. When this does happen, honestly informing the novice partner can be sobering for him and help in stay on the learning curve. The value of continuity of contact over level of intensity in training is proved by the general superiority of grapplers over strikers in MMA.

What happened was he ran the ball of his foot into my toes, snapping the first toe and spraining the tendons and ligaments. The bleed on the top of the foot is from the burst capsule and ligaments in the toe joint and that below from the torn tendons.

In our world of falsely supported, skill-based ego, which is known to be false in the mind of every deluded student when the fists and sticks and blades come his way, the body of the coach and the mind of the martial artist are both at risk, leaving the coach with the burden of leading by painful example.

Note the wear on the right foot compared to the left foot. The right foot serves as a pivot point in stick fighting and a driver in boxing. I use medicated ointment to minimized the splitting of the calloused skin, which open into bleeding cracks if left untreated.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

Sound of the Mountains

Notes on Foraging in the Uinta Mountains

On various hikes I sought to make myself useful to my kind hosts and gathered first Oregon grapes, then elderberries and all along rose hips, the last, I believe the best source of vitamin C available.

I have harvested these between mid-July and mid-September.

This has been a drought year, with poor supplies of alpine berries, elderberries and Oregon grape, unless on irrigated ground.

I have found wild rose bushes from 6,500 to 9,500 feet, with their presence sharply declining after 9,000 feet.

They tend to keep company with young aspen, that white-barked tree which grows in groves like a mushroom, spreading clones underground. Aspen do well in burns. Thus roses are often found growing in ash-blackened soil.

Where the aspen return to pioneer tree life, roses will tend to cluster around rocks and boulders, at the base of rock slides and in dry washes and along stream traces trickling down to the creeks. In dryer areas they will be mostly on the down slope side of a road, where rare water has sunk into the soil.

At high elevation the bushes are small, about knee- to waist-high and each will have between six and twelve hips.

Where the forest has returned to scrub levels, with aspen as thick as your leg, below 8,500 feet the bushed may be chest-high in spots.

In irrigated places below 7,000 feet the rose bushes grow in towering thickets, 10-12 feet high, with juicier, but smaller hips.

In my favorite canyon, I have noticed that whenever the creek below is close enough to be heard, that the wild roses are most abundant, leaving me to wonder if they benefit from airborne moisture, because the creek is sometimes 100 feet below, and the bushes merely thigh high.

I have gathered about a bushel wet weight over the two month period. My hosts and I made jelly and syrup with elderberry and Oregon grape out of 5 quarts of the juiciest hips. The hips seem to be best for rendering when picked in wet areas and after the first frost. About 10 pounds dry weight remain in my host’s library, hung in a net sack. They were originally dried by laying in a baking pan in the sun and wind for a week.

Gathering requires a lot of bending over at the waist, so I limited picking to one hour in three of hiking time. Overall, the best thing about this activity are the scenic views had from cliff face tops and the bases of massive rock slides. I have gotten to the point where, when looking at a mountain, I can’t forget the sounds of the aspen rustling and the creeks falling that usually attend the habitat of the wild rose, drooping like a vernal bud on its thorny stalk.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

Kane Posting - Crackpot Podcast 47

Welcome to a special episode of the Crackpot Podcast!  Nick Mason joins us from The Myth of the 20th Century and The New American Sun to discuss the works of Robert E. Howard, focusing on Solomon Kane.  Solomon Kane is a single-minded Puritan, an avenger of wrongs the world over.  If you are new to the works of Robert E. Howard, don't be shy.  We don't give much away in our discussions and most of his works are short and worthy of many re-readings.  Many published works can be found at the Howard section of Gutenberg Australia and some additional links appear in the time stamps below.

The Crackpot Podcast features the writer James LaFond, well known to share significant physiognomic traits with Robert E. Howard, and Lynn Lockhart, reportedly a human female.

Audio:



YouTube:

0:00:30  Welcome to Nick Mason of The Myth of the 20th Century and The New American Sun
0:02:10  Learning ancient and modern history through Howard's fiction
0:06:10  How to find some of Howard's obscure works, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, Ballantine
0:10:10  Contrast with Conan
0:13:45  Nick's favorite Kane story, The Moon of Skulls
0:21:36  Kane as an undead
0:23:29  Civilization for Kane vs Conan
0:27:15  European vs African settings for Kane
0:32:53  Does Kane need a sidekick? Stories set in Europe
0:36:18  James thoughts about Howard
0:42:45  Howard's westerns
0:44:19  What might Howard's favorite western movie have been?
0:45:50  Howard wrote himself and his friends into some stories, how that might prefigure his suicide
0:51:54  How selling affects a writer, kinship between writers, Blood and Thunder
0:59:06  Richard Grenville
1:03:53  What did Howard see in America?
1:06:20  Kane movie, casting Kane
1:14:00  A reading from Solomon Kane's Homecoming, Kane as a spectre
1:17:41  Peckinpah
1:19:19  Well of Heroes

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 45

Your humble blog mistress presents the weekend links:

This is a shocking incident!  When your humble editor was a young coed, she had a bedreadlocked, 40 year old Rastafarian classmate, and he informed her with a wink that back when he was vending naturally derived pharmaceuticals, he would frequently exchange "a dimebag for a lovemaking."  Being entirely uninterested in such an exchange, she did not inquire as to the effects of inflation in the intervening years, but $1,200 worth of coke strikes her as excessive.

Banjo gives good advice here.  I heartily approve of men doing such seemingly useless things as hobbies.

Nero the Pict continues his SEA travelogue.

The unknowability of one's reaction under stress is a coping strategy.

When the brawl is more interesting than the fight, you know you have entered pro-wrestling territory.

A train is a great place to meet a train savant.

The War on Drugs, like so many other wars, is a boon to government at every level.

James describes the magic of life in the mountains.

To me this reads like emails from the subcontinent combined with phone calls from qts as a marketing strategy.

The censorship extends to statistics displayed on obscure history websites.

The Crackpot runs the numbers on the black middle class.

jameslafond.com was down for a little while Thursday morning, but James' webmaster was ON IT!

How to evaluate a boxing gym, a coach, and the importance of cleanliness for your BJJ practice.

We need to bring back Cowboys and Indians as a genre.

For your viewing and listening:
-Slavery and piracy in the South Seas
-Lefty podcast (they sound like f****ts) covers serial killer Carl Panzram
-Not just gun rights, but gun culture, is incredibly important to the history and future of America, and we inherited neither from England.  Cling to them!
-A rather scathing movie review, The Magnificent Seven.

Visualizing the slave migrations of North America.

You can see James' books in the BOOKSTORE, but they are rapidly falling to the censor's hammer.  Now some -banking- troubles have held up his royalty payments.  

Many fine titles are available as pdf books through his main website.

Support James in his Plantation America work by becoming a Patron, or donate straight to the man through Paypal, because you love James and his work.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

The Universal Housing Right

The Premise behind the Science Fiction Concept of Reverent Chandler, Malediction Song & Nightsong of the Nords (coming soon).

The world of Reverent Chandler is a science-fantasy setting, in that it is based on real climate science, not state-media propaganda, real current events and a heroic vision of life, which, in terms of science fiction, is the literature of modernity, fantastical.

The suppositions underpinning the storyline are only obliquely treated in the text, and are, in order that they occur to form the setting:

1.  2030: The social disintegration of postmodern western civilization accelerates.

2.  2060: The African population explosion and the imposition of one world government [excluding China, North Korea and Japan] results in The Universal Housing Right Initiative, mandating the integration of homeless Africans and Middle Eastern refugees into American households. Implementation of this law will be placed in the hands of Christian and Jewish charities, with population removal, reduction and integration handled by military contractors coordinating with church agents.

3.  2090: As Protestant Christianity naturally devolves into secular humanism or spawns radical denominations, and Catholicism naturally evolves into a statist apparatus, the prediction is that the large scale Islamization of Europe and the U.S.A. will generate a crusading order among Deep State fanatics, who will cloth themselves in militant Catholicism in an ultimate attempt to remove the caliphate from Vatican City and restore the papacy.

4.  2100: With the earth clearly entering another major glaciation, Indigenous Americans of the northern and formerly temperate zones will seek local cultural autonomy, expressed as an amalgamation of metaphysical traditions native to those regions and to those regions of northern Europe ancestral to the remnant Caucasian population, in other words a mixing of Nordic and Amerindian worldview.

The resulting setting, hundreds of years after the collapse of one world government and supporting technological infrastructure, is a wholehearted return to the medieval mindset, a northern hemisphere, temperate zone population of less than 10 million, and an increasingly bitter struggle between militant Catholic multiculturalism and a resurgent Caucasian heathenism.

A pure science fiction approach would have sought the most probable result of these 4 factors. The science-fantasy approach is to embrace a less probable, extremist setting which may facilitate lifeways that at once resemble a return to our ancestral conditions, and conditions critically affected by the lingering aspects of our technological society.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

Ire & Ice - Crackpot Podcast 046

Welcome to episode 46 of the Crackpot Podcast!  James and Lynn have a wide ranging discussion on fiction, the Roman military, John McCain and the New Mexico compound.

The Crackpot Podcast features rampant speculation by James LaFond, an outstanding fiction writer, and Lynn Lockhart, whose mind has been addled by the interaction.

Audio:



YouTube:

0:00:50  Yusef of the Dusk, font choices
0:05:30  THE BOOKSTORE
0:07:26  Ire and Ice, Jericho Bone, Drink Deep of Night
0:14:03  Humans deserve it, James with the Mountain Men, Mountain Boomers
0:19:23  SLC has mudsharks
0:25:03  James' sympathy for urban drones, writing them into fiction
0:26:40  Roman military service compared to US Army
0:30:06  Taleb and Amazon suppression
0:31:45  K for Kindergarten, Taleb continued
0:36:59  McCain funeral
0:51:47  The future of statesmanship
0:55:04  Future of paleface men in the Dem party
0:57:07  American cuisine
0:57:55  Misogyny
0:59:45  The future of South Africa
1:02:29  Strip club economics
1:05:08  New Mexico compound

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

‘A Hand’

Roses Laughed in Her Pretty Hair by Robert E. Howard

James LaFond's impressions, reading from page 87 of A Word from the Outer Dark

This single verse consists of 10 lines in five rhyming couplets and struck this reader right off as a laugh at the expense of civilized conventions, such as in the soft sarcasm implicit in lines one and two:

A little hand was prettily raised,
Nor ever enough might it be praised.

Howard then goes on to toy with the civility necessitated between men and women of his age and well enough predicts that it would disintegrate under the pressure of the collapsing bones of our civilization and devolve into men going their own way and pursuing their own competitive past times. There was no need for the poet to predict video games, for the men of his time had their own secretive competitions: they played cards; and the poet insinuates that he is not rude enough to tell the young beauty that though her hand is fair, it pales before the winning hand he was dealt on another night.

The rescue of the masculine soul from the pettiness of petite civilization through competitive past times was something more obvious in Howard's day, when men boxed, than it is to today when they are confined in a sedentary social box.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 44

James reviews the incredible story of a Southern warrior.

Luther tells us about making himself at home in lockup.

Modern Agonistics lives on, these fellows are fighting with hatchets and knives!

The story of James', Bran's and others' youths is one of groping for a substitute for the family, community, and rituals absent from American mass society.

James' take on HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts), with very good comments from Jeremy.

Illegal aliens are cheaper for employers than slaves were, because this time around, the rest of us are picking up the slack for medical care, food, housing and education. Injured aliens do not disappear into the desert mist, they enter your local ER. Their children suck up and degrade public school resources. They bring criminality, though not as much per capita as the last round of cheap laborers commit. Lynn's answer: cheap labor destroys society, it has happened many times, it's happening right now.

Grocery store politics are about the same as office politics.

Look, everyone likes indoor plumbing, plentiful food, and so on, but the trajectory of "civilization" is not good.

James is back in Harm City mode, giving the update on Murderbowl 2018 and predicting the future of mid-Atlantic urban violence.

We are learning there is more to slavery and human trafficking than Africans in shackles.

Baseball is a great case study of how corporatism and scale destroy fine institutions before our very eyes, with most people failing to notice anything amiss.

Toker doesn't see color when applying an aluminum baseball bat.

T. Spoone Slickens (I think) is here to speak out for Bill Cosby.

A movie review by James and one by Nick Mason, Hold the Dark.

Nobody tell my mother that Alex Jones is Bill Hicks, please, I am begging you.

Your upscale neighborhoods are not safe.

If you people would buy more books, James could eat more animal protein!

America needs 1,000 Pinochets, 1,000 Lee Kwan Yews, instead we have Catherine Pugh. Truly, Baltimore's level of gang control and police corruption is outstanding, as witnesses are committing suicide left and right, never making it to trial, and gun battles are fought on camera, in broad daylight.

The Khan's appearance on the Crackpot Podcast has given rise to another question.

You can see James' books in the BOOKSTORE, but they are rapidly falling to the censor's hammer.  Now some -banking- troubles have held up his royalty payments.  

Many fine titles are available as pdf books through his main website.

Support James in his Plantation America work by becoming a Patron, or donate straight to the man through Paypal, because you love James and his work.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Serpent’s Tooth

A Cautionary Tale by Riley

Knew this guy, still do I guess, if he still lives. More and more pass these days and you don’t even hear. He was in on the North Sea back in 1970s - 1990s, minded the checkbook and wound up with a good reputation, a destroyed marriage and a Son. I worked with him now and then, never as much as I would have liked to, for he was a pleasant man to work with. A very nice, smart, Lutheran, tall guy from Wisconsin, who loved rock and roll and guitars.

He had one of those places down in Florida, all stucco-Spanish, up under big-leaved trees. An example of every pest known to man lurked in the ditches and tall grass. Maybe five acres, just off the main road. Just enough to be too much for a man who spent 250 or more days a year offshore to manage. He’d broken up with the Wife and she’d moved on, except she really never did. She got so that he was moved to go to court to get possession of his boy for his own good, but boys get a lot of their traits from their Mothers. He just didn’t have the time for a Son.

He had a locked room in his house, stuffed with tasty guitars: Jimmy Page guitars, Elvis guitars, bare-bones Fender Telecasters, the varnish long ago worn through to the wood out in some honkey-Tonk back in some woods north of Mobile, inlaid Gibsons and all the rest. It was the sort of collection a man cranking out a half million a year could amass, and it was what he thought of when he thought of home. He never clicked with his boy, not enough anyway.

Careful how you breed there, randy man. He had current girlfriends living there, and in some cases hired illegal kid watchers, all doing the Mom job on this young lad, while Mom was out greasing up the bitch-pad on some thug’s Harley. He also had the County coming around, the diversity lard but hard-ass chump-hire who hated him from the moment he spoke. He spoke well, you see. Made her feel dumb. Pissed her off. She made him her hobby. The situation was bad alright, but she saw it as such for all the wrong reasons. More inspections, and more demands, as this woman worked overtime to ensure his scene would fail. A half million a year will buy a lot of toys, but peace from the high sheriff and police costs a lot more.

His house became a party house for his Son and his friends, and the Mother would check in, accompanied by some road warrior opportunist, just to see her cub was safe. Really nice guitars started showing up in local pawn shops. The drug crap. He spent his month off running guitars down, all through Florida, Alabama and Georgia. He got perhaps half back. His Son was locked down on some felony. Diving contractors were thinking he was too hung up on safety issues.

The emails bounce back and the 'phone don’t hook up. I picture him sitting in the mouth of a cave, clutching his head with both paws, looking out over the desert moaning “what is it that you want from me?” Or maybe he’s with someone, happy for now and coping. One never knows, and for now wondering will do. I’m sorely worn out from mourning lost brothers.

Riley
September 29, ‘18