The Conscience of Abe’s Turn freedom of speech, defense, and life

A reviewer of The Conscience of Abe’s Turn called it “a fairly overblown story that my mind could not completely wrap around… I can’t understand why a group of professionals who are supposed to be so brilliant are holding protests and playing hippy saboteurs rather than just contacting the Feds and getting their problems solved.” Here’s the real-life analogue, and the real-life reason: because the Feds create problems, not solve them. Just ask Yolanda Madden’s father, interviewed in this new civil-rights video from KopBusters.  read more »

I might as well let the cat out of the bag. I’m preparing a report, entitled “The Most Critical Overlooked Issue in American Government: Our Eroding Civil Rights.” I don’t know when I’ll be ready to release the report, but Ravenskya’s (not her real name, I think) new review of The Conscience of Abe’s Turn has further confirmed my intuition that this is a key issue of which many Americans are ignorant.  read more »

Anthony Gregory has an interesting article on LewRockwell.com that goes well with The Conscience of Abe’s Turn (both the site and the novel). He points out that—contrary to popular mythology—conservatives are not more libertarian than liberals, because the conservative agencies of the military and the police are the instruments of power that enables statism.

To dedicate Abe’s Turn, I chose the famous quote by Lord Acton: “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” In other words, even a good man, when allowed to use the police power as he sees fit, is likely to act out the evil within him.

For this reason, liberals of strong civil-rights values are even more likely to be libertarian than their economic-conservative counterparts. That’s why libertarians should enthusiastically and unapologetically reach out to liberals, as much as to conservatives. Or as Anthony Gregory puts it:

[A] left-liberal who is radically anti-war and anti-police state will often be receptive to libertarian ideas, since he already distrusts the establishment and recognizes that statism can cause very real and significant harm to human beings. The best, and somewhat rare, combination is in a liberal who is much more antiwar and anti-police state than anti-capitalism. This is somewhat rare because, unfortunately, many leftists are more radically anti-authority the more anti-market they are, whereas the ones who are more moderate in their condemnations of free enterprise are often also more tolerant toward empire and the establishment.

When talking to the Left, the best approach, regardless, is to stick to principle. Often leftists are used to deconstructing the hypocrisy of the Right, which claims to be for smaller government but defends Big Brother and gigantic military bureaucracies. By maintaining radicalism and principle, a libertarian can distance himself from such right-wing hypocrisy and prove that his positions come from serious, principled thought and a genuine sympathy for the human victims of state aggression.

(Click to read the entire article.)

I’ve been looking for a way to work this into a blog post, and now Mike Tenant has given me an opportunity to do so.

On LewRockwell.com, Mike talks about obeying men rather than God. As a Christian—and as you know, Clydene and Ted are also Christians—I see a form of idolatry taking root in America, even in our churches.  read more »

The first comments are in on the first book of The Conscience of Abe’s Turn, and largely positive. “Can’t put it down.” “Want to find out how things turn out.” And so forth.

Of course, these were all from friends and family, whom I expect to be as honest as they can without hurting my feelings. But at least they are reading it, which says something about how engaging it is. Expecting other comments soon from those not related to me.

-TimK

Today, I shipped out 4 copies of The Conscience of Abe’s Turn. And I’m thankful that shipments have started small, because that gives me time to work the last few kinks out of the ordering and fulfillment process. Meanwhile, my wife is sitting across the room from me enjoying her copy of the book.

Today, I got a piece of direct mail from Perry Marshall (whom you may recognize from my acknowledgments in the book’s preface) regarding Bill Bailey, inmate #60733-066, who is speaking at Perry’s upcoming seminar.

Who is Bill Bailey? He spent time in federal prison for computerized snooping that’s way less offensive than what Clydene is engaged in. Now, Clyde is a computer geek. She read about the BBS raids of the 1990’s. She read all about Randall Schwartz, and knew enough about the technology to take sides. She knows way more about the computer crime laws than (I’m sure) the politicians who voted for them. If you ever doubted that she would be terrified of being caught, just read Bill Bailey’s story.

(While Bill ended up in a relatively good prison, what terrifies Clyde is the fact of prison at all. Baedes would take great joy in that. The thing is, there’s no guarantee that Clyde would end up in as “good” a situation as Bill Bailey had.)

In a post on his blog the past June he wrote about a Heritage Foundation seminar that was entitled “Go Directly to (Federal) Prison: The Criminalization of Almost Everything”:  read more »

I have a big box of books to get rid of, so I have a great introductory offer for The Conscience of Abe’s Turn at the official J. Timothy King Web Shop.

(Compare Amazon’s offer and BarnesAndNoble.com.)

Expect the book to show up on Amazon soon, but stay tuned here for special offers.

UPDATE: Barnes & Noble have already slurped Abe’s Turn into their database, probably from Bowker. They have no availability or details yet, but they should get that info over the next weeks as it percolates through various industry databases.

-TimK

The first proof copy of The Conscience of Abe’s Turn (the Advanced Copy version):

One word: Yippee!

-TimK

Just an update. I finally sent the ARC bookblock and cover artwork to the printer and am awaiting the first copy. It’s 348 pages (divisible by 4—the number of pages in a book is always divisible by 4). And I’m expecting it to arrive sometime next week.

The ARCs are 6x9 trade paperback, but the final copies will be 5½ x 8½, a little smaller and a little easier to hold.

-TimK