Obit Magazine on Jack Kemp: “Kemp wasn’t one of a kind: The quirky and individualistic Barry Goldwater, for whom he volunteered in 1964, was his ideological forerunner. Ronald Reagan, in whose Sacramento office Kemp once worked when Reagan was California’s governor, shared his famous passion for supply-side economics: a stratagem for eternal American prosperity that involved a radical cut in taxes and – somehow or other – a government both flush with cash and raring to spend it. But Kemp was unusual in one special way: He never sacrificed any of his personal beliefs, however sound or loony, for either expediency or personal advancement.”

The article also says Kemp advocated returning to the gold standard. I wonder if that appeals to more people today with our current president’s attack on our economic stability.

What if government officials wrote novels as their primary work? If they followed the pattern they use when taxing the people and allocating that money to projects, how would they go about writing 300,000+ word fiction? They would copy-n-paste; they would plagiarize.

Our elected officials do not produce anything, not like we do. We earn money through our labor in the market. We the people produce raw materials, manufactured goods, and services in competition with each other in order to win each other’s dollars. We make our living by taking risks, developing our skills, and inviting each other to trust the quality of our work. Government officials don’t, generally speaking. Yes, the government does provide some essentials services, like a national military and the creation and enforcement of essential laws. But today’s politicians ask us to turn to them for more and more, and many of us seem to think it’s a right, noble, and virtuous for them to take what is produced from those we don’t like in order to give to us or at least those we do like.

Isn’t that the same as a writer taking from other novels to make up his own? Isn’t it close to a hack copying another work, changing the names, and altering the ending by copying the last chapter from third novel, then claiming it all as his own? That’s what government subsidies do. That what many government programs are. They take what our neighbors have produced (by force of law through taxes) and give it other neighbors and themselves. I suppose many artists support this because they believe they are entitled to their neighbor’s money. They are jealous of millionaire athletes and want the government to make them millionaires too. Perhaps if they would think of taxation as plagiarism, they would resist calling for more of it.

Ryan Sayre Patrico at First Things Blog channels a Bobbie Johnson column at The Guardian, about the secret technology Google is using to digitalize all the books in the world.

Tonight, for no particular reason, I’m thinking of things that struck me as wonders of technology, long, long ago in the Age of Analog.

It was my aunt, I think, who gave our family an old black and white TV. I don’t think it was one she was discarding; I have the idea it was a TV somebody had given her, and she didn’t want it. So we were suddenly a family with two TVs, big stuff in the early ’60s. It had a blonde cabinet and was about the size of a Frigidaire. I think it was a Muntz. Dad put it in the hall, upstairs. The only problem was that our antenna was attached to our “real” TV (also black and white), down in the living room.

The solution was provided by my uncle (who sometimes reads this blog). He brought Dad a marvelous new device—an antenna signal splitter. With this piece of electrical wizardry, you could have two TVs attached to the same antenna! Who’d have believed such a thing was possible? Continue reading The future of the past →

So, Lars, did Olaf Tryggvason, who features in The Year of the Warrior, make overtures to Sigrid the Haughty, Queen of Sweden?

For those of you who are Facebook members, there is now a group devoted to my novels, called Lars Walker’s Viking Thing, here.

They’re talking about how conservatives are engaging or should get involved in Hollywood over on the Acton Institute’s PowerBlog. Bruce E. Walker makes a good case for conservative ideas in film, describing the meaning behind Million Dollar Baby. Conservative Christian filmmakers have to be willing to show who can be redeemed, even how bad life is without God’s salvation.

The modern world presents us with challenges of flesh and conscience that mature Christian artists and audiences alike must address in order to serve as responsible witnesses of Christ’s mercy. To pretend reprehensible behavior doesn’t exist and, furthermore, dwell on our hatred of the sins rather than our love and the belief in the potential redemption of the sinner will marginalize further the cinematic depiction of Christian principles.

First of all, my exacting sense of justice requires me to say a word of praise for my congressman, Keith Ellison. I’ve written harsh things about him here (and surely will again), but in actually trying to do something about the crimes of an African government (and an Islamic African government at that) he’s showing more principle than the average Democrat. More than the average Republican, for that matter.



Saturday was garage clean-up day for the Viking Age Club & Society of the Sons of Norway. Times are lean even for the wolves of the sea, and so we’ve decided to move one of our boats out of paid storage and into the garage of one of our founding members (for slightly less pay). But that required a communal effort to help clean his garage out and install shelves for the Viking stuff he was already storing there. Nature cooperated by not sending the predicted rain, but we still managed to get a lot less work done than we’d planned. We were, however, immensely successful in talking to each other and eating a lot of pizza.

Everyone admired my new book cover.



I had a personal victory in the area of self-control. (May I note, in passing, that I really hate maturity?) Museum Replicas, Ltd., of Atlanta, the budget-conscious reenactor’s best friend, has a clearance sale going on, and one of the items advertised is this Norwegian Viking sword, which I could have had for $160 (plus shipping and handling. Oh yes, I’d have wanted it sharpened too. That’s extra). It’s a great deal, I said to myself. You can’t miss an opportunity like that!

Well, yes. Yes I can. I have more practical uses for the money, and I know it. And, as I replied to myself, Soon I’ll be rich from book royalties, and then I’ll be able to afford an Albion sword.