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Principles of Anarchism Sep 10, 2013

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“Principles of Anarchism” applies classical logic and deductive reasoning to the subject of human interactions and rights. Beginning with the axiom that all human beings are equal, the author goes on to draw a number of conclusions from this postulate in the manner of a Euclidean proof. These include the contention that there is no such thing as human rights, the assertion that anarchism is essentially intellectual rather than activist, and the suggestion that historical developments such as cities and industries are harmful to the human race rather than helpful. More centrally, though, the pamphlet argues very simply that any form of authority or government is logically incompatible with the existence of humanity. And it is the implications of this theory, rejection of which requires rejection of the equality axiom as well, which make the argument offered both novel and timely.

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In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate Oct 2, 2014

by Tim Parise

( 2 )

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The Iranian Supreme Court has sentenced two teenagers to death. Their crime? Being involved in a three-year long homosexual relationship. Every gay rights organization in the Western Hemisphere has cried foul - and left it at that. Protest, they claim, is an adequate response to violence. But Major Matthew Martin, an instructor at the Marine Corps University, disagrees with their lack of action, and he’s feeling bored at the moment, having been relieved of his duties after giving a controversial speech at a local high school. The Major pulls together a few other disenchanted Marines and activists for a little side venture of his own: staging a private invasion of Iran and stopping the execution by rescuing the prisoners. His connections with military contractors in Afghanistan appear to make the project feasible at first, but word leaks out, and the Iranians relocate the teens while mobilizing their army to bar his escape route. Four gay Marines face off against fifty thousand troops for the possession of two boys who have become more than just ordinary convicts.

On the opposite side of the Persian Gulf, the government of Bahrain has been stepping up its efforts to suppress pro-democracy activists, left over from the Arab Spring, who are becoming increasingly strident in their demands for reform. When Asim, a computer science student, is nearly arrested for sedition, he runs for his life and ends up in the company of an underground organization of hackers aiming to bring the state down by more oblique means. The underground is headed up by an unlikely leader, an imam who asserts that there can be no such thing as an Islamic state. Reasoning from the Quran, he argues that all existing states are nothing more than idols, a position that places his group at immediate and lethal odds with the Bahraini government.

Back in Washington, Republican congressman Mark Randall is meeting with one of his Democratic colleagues, freshman representative Michael Elliott. Apparently Randall isn’t far enough back in the closet to have kept Elliott’s husband, a magazine editor, from discovering his recent affair with a party operative. Elliott agrees not to publish the information just yet - as long as Randall casts the final vote necessary to make the Equal Marriage Act law.

And while Randall searches for a way out of his predicament, and the Bahraini government is rocked by one disclosure after another, Major Martin disappears into the heart of Iran, leaving nothing behind except a trail of argument and debate over the merits of his actions.

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The Bettor Feb 14, 2014

by Tim Parise

( 1 )

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Berlin, 1939. An American tourist walks into the bar of the Adlon Hotel and offers, while under the influence, to bet that Germany and Russia will make common cause against Poland in the near future. The locals don’t buy such an outlandish prediction and eagerly accept his wager. Later that evening, the news comes over the radio that Germany and the USSR have just signed a nonaggression pact.

Six years later, Professor Harry Gordon is still gambling, winning a quarter of a million dollars on a long shot at Belmont Park in New York and making steady profits on the stock market as well. He also seems to have acquired more dangerous hobbies, too. When a prominent scientist goes missing in Mexico during a riot, he is eating at a restaurant down the street. When important documents disappear from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he is busy sending off packed envelopes to foreign embassies. When the CIA brings counterrevolution to Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, he happens to be watching from a nearby hill.

As it turns out, the Professor is not content merely to observe events as historians usually do. He wants to play a role in manipulating them. Aided and abetted by an American draft dodger, an Australian pilot, and a former Soviet spy, the Professor works by devious routes to hammer into the public imagination the idea that there is a worse threat to the American way of life than mere Communism. And then, in the background, he quietly goes about increasing that threat by every means in his power.

By 1968, France, Israel and Iran are forming a nuclear triumvirate that dominates the Mediterranean world. The United States is refocusing its foreign policy on a revival of the Monroe Doctrine. Southern Asia and China are balancing on the verge of the worst famine in centuries. Africa is in flames from Alexandria to Cape Town. The Soviet Union is depending on American resources in order to survive, and vice versa. In these circumstances, the Professor’s efforts to carve out an improved future for humanity appear to have failed. Any effect they may have had on history will be lost in the spreading patterns of conflict that are busy plunging nation after nation into internal strife. Or will it?

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Arms and the American: A Syllabus of Errors Aug 26, 2018

by Tim Parise

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Arms and the American examines the contradictions inherent in common attitudes towards firearms in the United States, and explores the superstitious feelings that most Americans have towards guns regardless of whether they favor gun rights or gun control. Drawing on more than four hundred sources, these eleven essays consider topics ranging from the origins and abandonment of the militia system to the biochemical motivations that drive violence in society. They review the self-interest of the armed forces in relation to widespread military support for gun control, and the geographic distribution of gun violence in the U.S., along with the work of the National Rifle Association to support gun control and drive up firearms prices in opposition to its stated mission. They also document how the handgun replaced the rifle as the primary weapon of American civilians, the efforts of The New York Times to further gun confiscation, and the decay of due process through the administrative expansion of background checks for firearms purchasers. Special attention is paid to the American paramilitary or police forces, and the financial and human cost the public incurs by maintaining units staffed with officers who are six times as dangerous to the public safety as convicted felons. Above all, Arms and the American outlines the authoritarian inclinations of gun advocates and opponents alike, and examines the contrast between their views and the ideals of the early American republic.

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The English Taste: Cuisine and Class in the Works of E. Phillips Oppenheim May 18, 2020

by Tim Parise

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Between 1887 and 1943, the bestselling English author E. Phillips Oppenheim published more than 160 novels that today are almost entirely forgotten. The English Taste explores how Oppenheim used literary portrayals of food in general and haute cuisine in particular to reinforce the social themes of his works, including his support for class stratification and his opposition to democracy and women's rights. It looks at the restaurants and nightclubs he favored, inquires into the brands of champagne he preferred, and investigates how much it cost to eat like Oppenheim did, as well as examining the value of Oppenheim's works as social propaganda and the symbiotic relationship that Oppenheim perceived to exist between fine food and intelligence.

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Totum Hominem Aug 14, 2013

by Tim Parise

( 1 )

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Past, present, and a possible future blur together in this story about Erin, an obscure copyist whose home lies within the vaguely-defined boundaries of a great valley. The last surviving descendant of a line of rulers called primi who once held sway over the valley, he finds himself at the center of a regional power struggle between the mountaineers of the western hills and the priests of the House of Alexander. The priests desire to maintain the status quo in the valley: namely, a rigidly hierarchical society totally dependent upon them for its intellectual and physical survival. The mountaineers have a bigger goal in mind: removing the House entirely and replacing it with - nothing. The absence of any sort of central authority, they claim, will restore humanity to the people of the valley and facilitate the building of ships and the exploration of the distant seas, ventures which the priests have carefully suppressed. When the priests see a potential threat to their power in Erin and move to eliminate him, the mountaineers respond by kidnapping him to save his life. As a refugee in the mountains, he is forced to adjust to existence in a community held together by the loosest possible ties of self-interest while coping with the realization of what the priests have done to him and every other one of their subjects. At the same time, he must decide for himself whether he is fully human or not, and if so, what his rights and obligations are as a man and a member of no group other than the human race.

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Hyperdrive Apr 4, 2013

by Tim Parise

( 7 )

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Europe, 2300 AD (more or less). A Marquesan scholar spontaneously begins developing the ability to act as the long-sought hyperdrive, a device--or in this case, a person--capable of reprogramming the space-time continuum and transporting people and objects across the galaxy at will. His abduction by agents of the city-state of Toulouse, who desire to put his abilities to work for them, prompts his boyfriend and childhood best friend to embark on a rescue mission: to Mars. The formerly barren planet has become the garden spot of the solar system, but the societies that flourish there are dramatically different from those that remain on Earth. And even as the would-be rescuers find themselves navigating the fierce local politics of the Martian outposts, they begin to realize that the hyperdrive is already at work.

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Children of Plutus: or, Some Observations upon the Present Administration Aug 10, 2018

by Tim Parise

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Reviving and updating the eighteenth-century tradition of political verse satire, Children of Plutus serves up the ironies, contradictions, and theatrics of President Donald Trump and his administration within the genre's usual framing narrative of classical mythology. Plutus, god of wealth, temporarily hibernating on the former planet dedicated to his father, Pluto, is awakened by a very expensive NASA spacecraft, and interprets it as an offering made by the American people. In a gesture of tongue-in-cheek recognition of their reverence for wealth, he grants them a plutocrat for their chief executive, and dispatches a few of his mortal minions to support this novus homo. One by one, the poem reviews the abilities of these children of Plutus in detail, along with their condensed foibles, desires, and fears--mostly fears. The cast of characters includes not only Mr. Trump and his family, but also Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Mike Pence, as well as brief appearances by Paul Ryan, John McCain, Dana Rohrabacher, John Lewis, and Jared Polis.

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The Parallel Congress Nov 6, 2016

by Tim Parise

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On Election Day 2020, voter turnout in the United States is at an all-time low, along with public confidence in the government as a whole. Philanthropist Alexander Soren decides to capitalize on this growing swell of popular dissatisfaction by launching a radical new project: a Parallel Congress. Composed of ordinary men and women selected at random from the entire population of the country, it is a statistically perfect representation of all the various backgrounds and opinions that make up American society. Unlike its elected counterpart, it is a young, vigorous institution. Millionaires and lawyers are almost absent from its ranks. Its members are untainted by allegations of voter fraud or connections to special interests. They are representatives of the populace, responsible only to their fellow citizens.

Political parties and advocacy groups, even those that previously clamored for greater citizen involvement in government, hurry to denounce the Parallel Congress, seeing it as a threat to their control of the political process. They question its commitment to democracy, and whether you can have democracy at all without elections. Retired statesmen reject its offers to serve as the first Parallel President. Scorned by the elite, but supported by the force of popular opinion, the Parallel Congress turns to legislation. It balances the budget, restructures the tax system, and launches a new national energy policy in a matter of weeks. Every decision it makes is a mathematical expression of the views held by the greatest number of Americans. More importantly, its success begins to raise the question of what gives a government legitimacy: tradition, succession, and heritage? Or popularity?

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A Case of Impiety Aug 17, 2016

by Tim Parise

( 1 )

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If you could put Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Marcus Aurelius in the same room, what would the outcome be?

In the year 180, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius gave a dinner at his winter headquarters in the town of Sirmium, in modern-day Serbia. Present were his son and future successor Commodus, several of his close friends and senior officials--and a farmer who had traveled all the way from southern Italy to attend.

This farmer had acquired the rare ability to speak across time and space, and his patron, the consul Bruttius Praesens, had thought it prudent to bring this unusual prescience to the attention of his friend and emperor. By means of the man’s telepathic abilities, Aurelius finds himself in conversation with an American astronaut of the twenty-first century--a man who once walked on the moon.

Born politicians, the Romans soon turn the conversation from science and history to the state of the world. They discover that the astronaut’s country is engaged at the moment in its version of a consular election. Good! Who are the candidates? they ask. What are the parties? What are the policy proposals at stake? The Roman telepath obligingly lays before them a summary of the American campaigns, issue by issue. Aurelius the philosopher, the most insightful of all Rome’s rulers, listens and weighs the politics of the United States in the balance of Stoicism. Occasionally he is mildly approving; more often he is scathing, and his criticisms, with the weight of eighteen unborn centuries behind them, fall on Clinton and Trump alike with unsparing force.

Inspired by the dialogues of Plato, A Case of Impiety interweaves up-to-the-minute politics with classical philosophy to present a radical and uncomfortable new perspective on the American political process.

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The Senator Dies at Dawn May 30, 2016

by Tim Parise

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When a United States Senator is shot during his morning run in Rock Creek Park, Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department immediately begins to focus their investigation on an old political rival from his home state. MPD Detective Lewis, who has been placed in charge of the case, accepts the assistance of Special Agent Colfax of the FBI with great reluctance, as he resents federal intrusion into what appears to be a simple and rather careless murder. Meanwhile, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle react to their colleague’s death by introducing a new set of gun control laws.

Then two more members die within minutes of one another, but with each killing remaining a distinct event. One is poisoned while dining with a friend; the other is stabbed while walking through a crowd to his car. Acting on a suggestion from their medical examiner, Lewis and Colfax develop a theory that the same person was not only responsible for but actually committed all three homicides. And when the Commandant of the Marine Corps turns up in Saint Patrick’s Church without his head, it confirms their suspicions: the murders are the work of an atypical single serial killer with a very particular taste in victims.

The attempts of the MPD and the FBI to form a unified task force to oversee the investigation are thwarted by the efforts of the Secretary of Homeland Security, who does not believe in the serial killer theory. Seeking to expand his own role in the case, he advocates for treating the murders as an act of terrorism committed by a group and uses the Secret Service to disrupt the proceedings of the joint force, resulting in the government’s resources being divided between two separate investigations. In spite of his obstruction, the director of the FBI and the Solicitor General manage to secure the assistance of the National Security Agency, which turns its computing power to running down a suspect who fits every facet of the behavioral profile developed by the detectives. If successful, it will identify the killer based on his psychology alone, a task that is vitally important considering the absence of forensic evidence in every one of the murders.

But while the computers are thinking about it, the killer removes another member of Congress. And another. And another...

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Ships of the Desert Nov 30, 2015

by Tim Parise

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Sir Charles Grosley is a wildly successful billionaire banker. There is no apparent reason why he should suddenly decide to invest his fortune in mining ventures in the war-torn Central African Republic. Maybe he did help the Seleka rebels sweep to power a few years after the former government almost eradicated them, and maybe they are inclined to cut him a deal on his concessions as a result, but that’s not a sufficient reason by itself. It certainly doesn’t explain why he’s flying all over the neighboring state of Chad, holding meetings with the local sultans and disturbing the tribal balances of power. Nor does it account for his large purchases of tunneling equipment through a retired Chinese general, or for the sudden influx of foreign aid workers into a certain region of the CAR, or for the private regiment of Sikh veterans that he’s raised to protect his holdings. And Captain Mbala, acting head of counterintelligence for the Central African Armed Forces, would very much like to know what his true motivation is.

Mark Andover collects airplanes. He’ll buy them if he has to, although he prefers to smuggle them out of forgotten corners of the world and then pay off inspectors to look the other way. His museum at Homestead AFB is filled with his illicit, one-of-a-kind rescue projects. So when a couple of Tuareg tribesmen turn up with evidence of a WWII Lancaster bomber that made a forced landing in the Chadian desert and was hidden beneath the sand until recently, he buys it from them on the spot. His plan to salvage the plane is an audacious one, but as his crew digs the bomber out of the Sahara, he begins to realize he may be engaged in a race against time that he can’t win: a race with Sir Charles Grosley.

Meanwhile, in a laboratory beneath the desert, a group of engineers is at work on a spaceship that will break the technological stagnation that has endured since the last Apollo mission and finally deliver on the optimistic promises of the 1950s. The Space Age will be reborn and humanity will reach out to colonize the planets in a single stride. But to make the ship fly, two governments must first be destroyed.

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