Cousin Camp, 2023

I’m writing this at Club Med in Cancun, Mexico, where our extended family of 46 (including spouses) has gathered for our latest once-every-two-years “Cousin Camp.”

Here’s a photo of some of us climbing a nearby ruin:

We’ve been holding these family reunions for 30 years. Our first Cousin Camp was in Martha’s Vineyard. We (K’s and my siblings) were in our late 30s/ early 40s and our children were quite young. Today, it is our children that are in their late 30s/ early 40s and our grandchildren that are the young ones.

The original idea of having periodic family reunions was suggested to me by my brother-in-law. I liked it immediately because I had always rued the fact that I never knew my cousins. They all lived in Colorado, and traveling to Colorado was very much out of my parents’ budget (with 10 mouths to feed on an income of $14,000). So, my hope was that our kids and their cousins could grow up knowing one another, even if they lived in different locations.

The usual time slot for Cousin Camp is the second week of August. Since the first one on Martha’s Vineyard, it’s been held at a Club Med in Colorado, on a cruise ship to Alaska, in one of the Disney villages in Orlando, on a boat in Croatia, and at Rancho Santana in Nicaragua (twice). We’ve also been on two adventure trips – one in Canada and another in the Rocky Mountains.

The trips themselves have been interesting and enjoyable. But the best thing about these reunions is the fulfillment of the original idea. Our children have close and comfortable relationships with 15 or so cousins. They have the kind of relaxed and intimate friendships that come only when people are able to grow up together.

I have done all sorts of things in my life. And I’ve accomplished all sorts of personal goals. But there is nothing I’ve done that gives me more satisfaction than watching the casual affection these young people have for one another.

Thinking of Getting Your Book Published? Don’t Ask Me! 

At long last, you’ve finished that book you’ve been meaning to write for the last 15 years. Congratulations! You have accomplished something that only one in a hundred do. You have a right to be proud of yourself. And you are excited about the next step: finding a publisher for it.

It feels like once every month I get a request from a friend, acquaintance, or reader who, knowing I’m in the publishing business, presumes I can help him or her get a manuscript published.

As a courtesy and with a sprig of curiosity, I agree to review the manuscript. But even as I make this offer, I’m 99.9% certain I won’t be able to help. That’s because few people understand how traditional book publishing works. And because of that, they have completely unrealistic expectations. Also – and this is something I will say only if I think it will help – the manuscript is probably not good enough for publication.

After reviewing a manuscript last week, I replied with a more definitive than usual “no” – a longer-than-normal explanation of why, and a suggested remedy. I’m reprinting it here for anyone reading this who has a book and is looking for a publisher.

“You have put a fair amount of work into writing this. And I can see from your CV that you are very interested in and engaged with self-improvement strategies. So I don’t want to waste your time by encouraging you to try to get this published by a traditional publisher.

“To understand why, you need to understand how that industry works. Here are some useful facts…

“Publishers aren’t hungry to publish new writers. That’s because they know that 95% of books published by new writers in America will sell, at best, just a few hundred copies.

“Even with the new, less-expensive technology for typesetting and printing books, the investment in producing a new book is usually more than $5,000. If 95 out of 100 new books fail so miserably, that means that each of the five books that do make money must net at least $100,000.

“The first book that I wrote that was published traditionally (by John Wiley & Sons) sold somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 copies. That put it on the NYT bestseller list for a week or two. But it hardly made me a superstar with John Wiley.

“Authors that can sell at those levels are certainly appreciated by conventional publishers. But they are hardly cherished. The combined dollars they bring in every year may be enough to pay for the printing of the 95 books that fail. But they are not enough to pay for the salaries of their employees, among other costs, let alone provide profits for their shareholders.

“All that money is covered by the real bestselling authors. Writers like J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, and John Grisham, who have sold 500 million, 450 million, and 300 million books, respectively.

“Think about that. Five hundred million books sold at an average of $15 a book is $7.5 billion!

“What does this mean for an aspiring author like you?

“It means that, even if they like your book, there is a 95% chance that it will be a big, fat money loser. But it will cost the publishing company – even taking advantage of the new printing technology – between $5,000 and $10,000. Because they know this to be true, all the large publishers have dozens of recent college graduates working for them whose sole job is to give such manuscripts a quick scan and then send out a ‘sorry’ note.

“There are some exceptions. If, for example, the author is a celebrity. If the author is a well-known politician. If the author or the subject of the book is temporarily famous for committing mass murder. Or if the author is a social media ‘influencer’ with at least a million subscribers.

“When John Wiley agreed to publish my book, Automatic Wealth, I was writing and publishing a blog (Early to Rise) that had 900,000 subscribers. Today, with considerably fewer (but much higher quality) readers, any manuscript I sent them would be quickly ‘handled’ by one of their recent college grads.

“Which is to say, my advice is to forget about finding a conventional publisher for the moment. You should do what I did to get Automatic Wealth on the bestseller list: Build an audience.

“You can do that by starting a blog or a YouTube channel. Then work very hard on that. Work on improving the content – crafting ideas that are unique and uniquely marketable. Work on perfecting the delivery and the format to get your open-and-read rates to bestselling standards. And work on building your subscriber base until it reaches 10,000 and then 50,000, and eventually… who knows?

“If you hit a million subscribers, you will have a good chance of finding a conventional publisher to publish and promote your book. But don’t expect a huge signing bonus. As an unproven author (notwithstanding your big fan base), you’ll be lucky to get $20,000 plus a conventional royalty of 4% to 7% of sales.

“Or, at that point, you can publish the book yourself and sell it directly to your fans. If you do it that way, you will keep between 60% and 80% of the revenues (depending on whether the book is printed or digital).”

Speaking of selling the books you write, readers of this blog can order a copy of my book, Automatic Wealth, directly from us. List price is $24.95. But for you, the price is $15 (which includes free shipping).

To order your copy:

* Send a check for $15.

* Make the check payable to Cap & Bells Press, LLC. (No cash, please.)

* Include your name and mailing address and mail it to:

Cap & Bells Press

Attn: GKoo

290 SE 2nd Avenue

Delray Beach, FL 33444

Is President Biden Reading My Blog?

On Friday,  I wrote about Navy Joan, Hunter Biden’s child that, for four years, the Biden family has never officially acknowledged. On the contrary, Hunter has been suing the mother, attempting to legally prohibit his daughter from bearing the Biden family name. Apparently, that made its way back to the First Family. Just this weekend, Navy Joan’s grandfather first acknowledged her connection to the family.

Click here.

Catching Up on the Hunter Biden Story 

“I’m not really interested in the money accusations,” MM said to me. “What really bothers me is this story about him turning his back on one of his children.”

Not interested in the “money accusations”? Really?

If you get your news from the mainstream media, you would not have heard about Navy Joan, the four-year-old child that Hunter and the Biden family have been trying to ignore since August of 2018, when Hunter fathered her with an Arkansas woman named Lunden Roberts, who was working as an exotic dancer at the time.

The following year, Roberts sued Hunter for paternity and child support. He denied her claims, both in court and publicly. DNA testing confirmed Hunter as the father, but a motion was filed to keep the child’s identity private in order to “protect her” during the 2020 presidential election campaign.

The story was followed in the conservative media, but as far as the mainstream press was concerned, it didn’t exist. Nor did the child. The first time it was even mentioned by the NYT was on June 29, 2023, when the suit ended and the settlement made its way into the public record. And even then, you might have missed it, since it was reported in the Sunday edition of the paper, on the bottom of the first page.

That article, written by a Katie Rogers, presented Hunter and the Biden family as “victims of the politics of paternity in the public glare.” And she reported that there was no evidence that the White House was involved in negotiations with the child’s mother. (You can read the article here.)

Screech to a stop! What?

Joe and Jill Biden aren’t interested in the fact that their drug-addicted son knocked up a stripper and gave them their seventh grandchild? And they weren’t at all involved in that paternity suit that lasted four years?

When Biden announced that he had won the election in 2020, he had six grandchildren on stage with him. And in 2021 and 2022, the White House protocol supervisor, ever diligent about presenting the right image of the family, hung Christmas stockings for six grandchildren, not seven.

By that time, the cat was well out of the bag. “Remarkable that Joe Biden hangs a Christmas stocking for his dog, but won’t acknowledge his granddaughter,” tweeted Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, where Navy Joan lives with her mother.

The president and his wife refused to acknowledge the existence of one of their grandchildren? And the father of the child was suing the mother in an attempt to bar the child from having her father’s name?

How could any media outlet NOT want to run with this story the moment it broke and for as long as it lasted? I mean, this is a drama worthy of Shakespeare. No, Aeschylus!

Millions of Dollars of Questionable Income

Back to the subject that didn’t bother MM – Hunter Biden’s questionable financial transactions during the time his father was vice president under Obama…

Here are the facts: In 2017 and 2018, Hunter failed to report more than $1.5 million in income that he and his various shell companies received from unnamed foreign sources. Somehow, he discovered that the IRS was coming after him, and coughed up the money to pay the taxes.

Still, he was guilty of at least two felony tax crimes that would have landed any ordinary person in jail, not to mention the huge fines. But somehow, in negotiating a settlement, the charges against Hunter were dropped to misdemeanors. For which, instead of going to jail, he was going to have to take some sort of tax ethics course.

That was crazy enough. But there was another term in the settlement that caught the judge’s eye. It was an agreement by the government that, after finishing his “course,” he would have immunity from all further charges related to tax frauds that might pop up in the future. (Can you imagine?!!)

When the judge saw that, she asked the IRS if there were any other ongoing investigations of that type. The answer was yes. “How can I agree to this settlement when there are other charges, about which I know nothing, that are still in process,” she said. (I’m paraphrasing.)

So, the judge denied the settlement and Hunter pleaded not guilty to the charges and the saga continues, with Hunter still being liable for tax and other crimes he might have committed then, or since then.

And there are plenty more. For example:

* In one deal, a representative of Hunter’s company received more than $3 million from November 2015 to May 2017 and wired approximately $1 million in installments to Hunter, his business associate James Gillian, and Hallie Biden, the widow of the president’s oldest son, Beau Biden, who died in May 2015.

* The investigation into Hunter expanded to include potential violations of foreign lobbying and money laundering rules as he reportedly “cashed in” on his father’s name to close lucrative business deals. In 2014, for example, he served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, where he was paid about $50,000 a month. And between 2013 and 2018, Hunter and his firm took in about $11 million in payments from China and Ukraine.

* IRS special agent Joseph Ziegler told the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday that Hunter’s overseas influence-peddling operations have enriched the First Family and their business associates to the tune of more than $17 million. The funds were raked in through various multimillion-dollar payments made by foreign nationals to Biden-family-linked corporations between 2014 to 2019. Click here.

And even that cannot possibly be the end of it. As I said in the April 18 issue, Hunter Biden, this kid who was kicked out of the military because of bad behavior and spent years addicted to drugs and whoring around, this kid that had no previous education in any of the businesses he was getting paid to consult with, has somehow acquired a net worth of $160 million.

It’s impossible to end up with a net worth of more than $100 million unless you have earned at least $300 million. So, are we supposed to believe that he earned that money legally? What could he possibly have offered Russia, or China, or the Ukraine, except his father’s influence?

This is not going to go away. There is just too much documentation of Hunter’s malfeasance in the hands of the Republican-dominated House. It’s going to come out. What’s more, there is mounting evidence that Biden was involved in Hunter’s activities, including recordings when he talks about “10% to the big guy,” and a recording of him threatening an official to pay up, saying that his father was sitting right next to him.

That’s why I’m standing by my prediction in that same April 18 issue that, for one official reason or another, Joe Biden will not be running for president next year.

Are Big Cities Dying?

I’ve been writing a lot about the demise of America’s big cities: Chicago, LA, New York, San Francisco, Houston, etc. Crime is up. Property values are down. COVID lockdowns taught corporations and their employees that they don’t really need to be downtown to make things happen.

It feels to me that we are five to 10 years away from the end of multimillion-person urban centers. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by 2030, the US would have only two cities (LA and NYC) with populations above a million. NYC would be down from 8.6 million to… hmmm… 3.6 million. And LA would drop from 4 million to about 2.5 million. (LA will retain more on a percentage basis because it is already a sprawling suburb.)

In the last three years, we’ve seen big, scary changes. On top of the list are the hysteria-fueled, power-grabbing government lockdowns, which unintentionally revolutionized the way businesses and employees think about work. Nobody wants to commute 30 or 40 minutes to work in a nondescript cubby in a nondescript city tower anymore. The future is two- or three-day in-office workweeks. And that is probably optimistic.

BLM riots, which destroyed blocks and blocks of formerly healthy retail businesses, including hundreds of Black- and Brown-owned businesses, are gone and don’t seem to be coming back. And there are stretches of formerly upscale retail streets that are eerily half boarded up.

The rise in violent crime in the big cities isn’t of much interest to anyone because it is mostly drug-related and Black-on-Black crime. What’s scaring businesses away is the huge increase in all forms of theft effectively allowed by city mayors and their DAs that believe there are too many people of color in jails.

On top of that, you have big inventories and higher interest rates that have a greatly negative impact on commercial real estate. In New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, and Madrid, luxury office towers are only half-filled. And some landlords are walking away from their debt rather than pouring good money after bad. In San Francisco, for example, the owners of the largest shopping mall have abandoned it.

Even as stock markets rally and interest rates ebb, the problem for commercial real estate in cities is getting worse every week. The center will not hold.

Click here and here and here.

Did You Ever Notice…

The Myrtle Beach crew (high school friends who spend a week in Myrtle Beach every October golfing – sort of) killed some retirement time recently by composing this list of Action Movie Clichés:

* Whenever the main character suddenly needs a change of clothes, they find a clothesline or break into a house. Somehow, the clothes they have randomly stolen fit perfectly, and are usually rather stylish.

* The main character drives to a courthouse, a police station, or a busy downtown nightclub. Lo and behold, they get a parking spot right in front. Not only is there an open parking spot, they don’t have to parallel park. They just pull right in.

* In an action movie, a handgun holds 40 bullets, an automatic weapon never runs out of ammo, unless a final fistfight is in the script.

* Speaking of fighting, throughout the movie the hero beats up three, four, sometimes six guys at a time. But in the end, when he is fighting the villain, who is usually a small guy, the fight lasts for ten minutes.

* When a woman is on the run and must change her identity quickly, she goes into a drugstore and buys hair dye and a pair of scissors. Next, she goes into a gas station bathroom, cuts and dyes her hair. She comes out looking like a hair model for Vidal Sassoon.

* They never pay for anything! They don’t pay for drinks at a bar. They don’t pay for dinner at a restaurant. And they never pay for a cab.

* Whenever there is a bum in a movie, the bum has beautiful teeth.

* When the detectives on the law-and-order shows interview a person of interest or a witness, the character never stops unloading boxes or answering the phone or supervising other employees. The cops have to follow them around while they’re doing their job.

* In the beginning of the film, the hero is almost always reluctantly coming out of retirement.

* If the car he pops into to make his emergency escape is not brand-new, the engine fails to start until the very last second.

* In the bedroom scenes, he and his companion always yank the bedsheets around their hips as they step off the bed and walk into the bathroom.

* The bad guy almost always has to die twice. The first bullet or stab, however deadly it seems, isn’t enough to finish him.

* The beautiful woman, whoever she is, eventually has to run for her life. And she always does so perfectly in heels.

* When the hero has to fight many opponents at the same time, they never seem to think of charging him at the same time. They stand around like karate students waiting for him to dispose of one attacker before they rush in to be disposed of.

* The injuries are unrealistic. The hero gets shot in the arm. You think he is going to bleed to death without immediate medical attention. But he fights on and triumphs.

* Ever notice that, in a car chase, as chaser and chased careen around corners and jump stairs and drive on sidewalks, no pedestrians are ever injured, let alone killed.

* Similarly, when the hero is chased to the train station, he miraculously jumps through the closing door while his pursuers scream bloody hell.

Can you think of more? Send ‘em in!

Today… 

It’s been several weeks since I served up a new conspiracy theory, or even given you a juicy update. So today, I’m giving you one of each – one on why the FTC is getting involved with AI, and another follow-up on the coming digital dollar. Also today: two reviews on Charles Bukowski’s Factotum, the book and then the movie.

A Look Back:

The Power of Wit

On Tuesday, I shared an excerpt from an essay I wrote in 2008 about the state of America – an essay that is still disturbingly relevant. Today, I’m switching gears with a piece that I was happy to read again, because it is about a way of moving through life with less stress and more success. It’s not something I was ever very good at. And I can’t say that I’ve gotten better in the last 13 years. But it’s nonetheless good advice.

As W. Somerset Maugham once said, “I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.”

Written for Early to Rise, April 12, 2010 

My friend B is a very affable guy. He always seems happy to see you. He asks about your family, work, and friends. He is happy to talk about his life, too, if you ask him. And when he does, it is always positive and amusing.

This combination of congeniality and wit is used to make quick connections with customers, employees, and colleagues. The unsaid theme of his humor is that the business you are doing with him is not all that serious. Let’s make a deal, he seems to be saying, but let’s make it fun.

If you tell B that you think the price of a particular item is high, he won’t argue the point. He’ll make a joke of it. “For someone with your money,” he might say, “it is chicken feed!” If you ask him if he can deliver it on Friday, he’ll say, “Friday of what month?”

In doing business with B, you can never forget that fighting or fretting about most things simply doesn’t make sense. There are more important things to worry about.

But he doesn’t shy away from difficult discussions. He seeks them out. He seems to know that he has the power to straighten out problems quickly using his finely tuned sense of humor.

He does what George Bernard Shaw said he always tried to do: “Take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then say it with the upmost levity.”

This is very powerful, when you think about. Usually, when confronted with a difficult or awkward situation, we feel the prudent thing is to say nothing. But saying nothing conveys nothing. The fraud is not unmasked. The foolishness is not sanctioned. The reprobate is not reproached.

To some, humor is synonymous with joking or punning. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Humor – true humor – requires intelligence and draws from an appreciation for the absurdity of life.

Humor is funny. Joking is, at best, amusing. And punning? Spare me.

A joke is a remark or anecdote that is memorized and retold for the amusement of others. To be a jokester, you need only have enough memory to recount something you heard.

A pun is a very obvious play on words. It requires no wit. In fact, it suggests the lack of it. A punster’s only attribute is a remarkable lack of embarrassment. A punster is willing to verbalize inanities that others have the sense to keep to themselves.

By contrast, a witty person shows himself to be smart and positive, but also someone who understands the pathos of life. As Mark Twain said, “the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow.”

Humorless people inevitably become upset when they encounter obstacles or setbacks. They are like wagons without springs, as Henry Ward Beecher said, “jolted by every pebble in the road.”

But if you have wit in your head and lightness in your heart you can say the correct thing to anyone at any time and get away with it. With humor, you can deal with disappointments and surprises with equanimity and even optimism.

A Look Back:

The Problems Facing America in 2008

To give my immune system an extra challenge last week, I caught a cold. So, between the energy needed to defeat that and the energy needed to repair all the damaged tissue around the knee, I’ve been sleeping most of the time I normally work. Thus, this issue, and possibly the next, will be a look back at some things I wrote about years ago.

I’m starting with this little piece, in which I worried about some of the major problems facing America back then. Reading it now, I’m 80% discouraged, but 20% hopeful.

Discouraged because every problem I cited (including being involved in an expensive proxy war) has gotten worse. Hopeful because America is still alive and kicking and may be able to make it through the madness once again.

Let me know what you think…

From Early to Rise, October 31, 2008 

Several of my golfing buddies are worried that the American Empire is crumbling.

Every day, we wake up to news that signals its demise. Soaring debt, collapsing financial institutions, looming climate change, hurricanes that wipe out entire cities, decaying public infrastructure, healthcare that is the worst among the developed nations, an unnecessary war that is costing us billions – and a government that has been telling us that if we just keep buying consumer goods with our credit cards, all will be fine.

And what are we doing about it? Our economists are arguing about economic theory. Political candidates are shouting slogans at one another. Our representatives in Washington are bailing out big businesses by asking us to pay for their greed.

For more than two decades, Americans have been getting poorer, not richer. Since World War II, America has been involved in unnecessary wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of our young people, cost us trillions of dollars, and have benefited only the war industry that was, before World War II, non-existent.

We are told we can’t afford to provide basic healthcare to our poor, and yet we spend hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out big banks and insurance companies that went bust because they gave in to greed. And they were helped along the way by the federal government urging us to spend, spend, spend!

The problem is not with most of the American people, who are as hardworking, industrious, and bighearted as ever. The problem is that big government has made a devious plot with big business. And the two, working closely together, are duping Americans into continuing to spend money they don’t have for causes that were invented purely and simply to take advantage of our big hearts.

We are probably already too far down the slippery slope of an economic landslide to prevent a depression. We have only one hope for survival. As we live through these next five to 10 years, working harder and getting poorer and paying more taxes to pay past government bills, we must remember to trust neither our government nor our largest corporations.

The salvation will not come from the government. Or from the huge industries that are lining up with the government right now. Their goal is to make Americans dependent on them for everything, from earning a living, to healthcare and safety, to planning meals, and taking vacations, and even to what they read in their magazines and newspapers and watch on TV or the internet.

And they will work in lockstep with the public education industry and the government-military complex to make sure that most Americans and their children are happy about becoming wards of the State.

I don’t know if there could be a political solution to this. Politicians want to get elected. And getting elected is much easier if you promise to give the electorate everything they want and everything they think they need, from the government or huge companies aligned with the government, for free.

If there is any salvation it will be in the diligence and productivity of individual Americans who will, despite the worst sorts of external conditions, continue to work hard and smart to protect and care for their families and themselves.