The Starfire Codes by Demi Pietchell

The Starfire Codes by Demi Pietchell

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MRT’s Haircut's avatar
MRT’s Haircut
Nov 30

Hahaha. This scroll is like eating a bowl of corn flakes with a slice of bananas in the bowl and just when you think the bananas are all gone, you find one last one in your spoon!

Thanks for the shoutout and as always happy to contribute to the shenanigans.

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Jim Davidson's avatar
Jim Davidson
Nov 30

Oh. Someone said "my friends would tell you to move to Somalia." =sighs heavily in French=

Ok! I moved to Somalia. I will now be "that guy" because, after all, who else here amongst us can say that they moved to Somalia and lived to tell about it? Not that Swiss guy in his twenties who moved to Hargeisa about 2006 and was murdered because he *talked* about marrying a Somali woman and having a family and living in Somalia for the rest of their lives. Not that Italian nun that I met in 2000 and 2001 who was murdered about the same time as the Swiss guy because although she was an ardent communist and worked in the hospital in Borama treating patients who were dying of antibiotic resistant tuberculosis she was *kind* to them so that might have led someone to be thoughtful about Christianity, and even though she never once opened a Bible the entire time she was in country, they murdered here as too great a risk that she might prosletyse someone away from Islam. You think Americans are xenophobic? Oh, you poorly travelled child.

Well, it will be necessary one day to write about all the things. But let's begin at the beginning. My space sweepstakes project was destroyed in 1991. I was blacklisted from working in the space industry. Later I was told that some crazy libertarians in Las Vegas were going to build a new country on the ocean on artificial platforms and they needed someone who understood USEnet to promote the project. I put a small mattress in the back of the 1987 Honda civic station wagon and headed there promptly. The guy running that thing raised a quarter million dollars (roughly $1.7 million in today's spending power) and then stole all of it to cover his margin calls on the stock market because he was right and the market was wrong. Also he had no stop loss orders. =sighs in Austrian economics=

Meanwhile, I had gone back to Houston area to write my first book, _The Atlantis Papers_ which explained the very comprehensive constitution and very short list of laws of the new country. Then I found out that there would be no convention at Caesar's Palace, the model the architect sent of the floating platforms city I would not see until 1998, and much sadness enveloped. So many sadness envelopes, so little sadness letter delivery. =sighs in Lysander Spooner=

But! Courtney Smith, the world's most effective trader of stocks, bonds, forex, and everything else, was running a billion dollar assets under management fund, and working with guys like Wes McCain who was running a six billion dollar AUM fund that same year, read my book. (jfyi $6 billion in 1994 dollars is roughly $41.4 billion in today dollars.)

He liked my book. So he calls me up. Yes, I put my landline phone in the book with my bio at the back. Yes, we did have pagers in those sophisticated times. I'll tell ya about it some day and the numerical codes we used based on the tables in the Chemical Rubber Handbook. But that was long ago, in what has become another country, and besides Christopher Marlowe is dead.

So Courtney invited me to speak at his event in New York in the 11th month of 1995. The founding conference of the New Country Foundation. We had a newsletter, as is tradition. We discussed the ways in which countries are formed. (Check out Monaco if you want to know how it is done right.) I met Mike Oliver, the guy who founded the Republic of Minerva, another ocean based endeavour, 1970-71 which was conquered (!) by the kingdom of Tonga. He had been consulted on the constitution for Oceania, the country to be built out of the aforementioned Atlantis Project and described in detail by me in _The Atlantis Papers_ so of course the aforementioned grifter put Mike on the cover as co-author of the selfsame constitution, which was news to Mike at the conference after party at Courtney's upper east side penthouse condo. =sighs in rural American=

Well, Courtney had a friend who couldn't attend, named Michael van Notten. They had met through the International Society for Individual Liberty and the Mont Pelerin society, places where people were still talking about free countries. Michael (or Michiel as his name sometimes appears) was a Dutch diplomat. Or, anyway, carried a diplomatic passport, which is kinda cool. I mean, if you have to show a document when the apparatchikisti say "papers please" you might as well throw down with the top of the line, right? He was working in Somalia, and had been since his days in Mogadishu in 1991. Oh, the stories I have.

Well, we met in Wes McCain's big conference room. Fund management with a very nice conference table, lemme tell ya. We spread out the big maps. We talked about where to site a new free port which would become a new Hong Kong. It was still 1995, the horrors at Tiananmen had been seen but not properly understood, and people still thought of Hong Kong as some sort of exemplar of a free market country.

Later I worked directly for Michael on several projects, including a company we incorporated in Mauritius through his Swiss friend Christian Michel. So, it was essential that we go see in person. We boarded an Air France flight in Paris, stopped in Yemen for reasons that are not completely clear to me, refuelled, flew to Djibouti. It was the 12th month of 2000. Then we took a very strange puddle jumper from Djibouti city to Borama flown by a very strange Russian pilot with those distorted pupils suggesting that he had been mainlining meth for a week or more. Met with the abaan who was our host, Haj Ali. The word abaan means patron or guardian as well as host, and in Somali culture is the person who acts "in loco parentis" so you are their responsibility, and by extension, the responsibility of their subclan and clan. It's a culture, it is not your culture, and it would involve several books to explain. Might throw same said books at people who tell me to move to Somalia next time, in the fullness of time.

Well, staying at his home was a temporary expedient, which lasted two nights. More interesting stories. Then we went to a dormitory for Coopi Italiano which is where people hiding out overseas from the Italian anti-mafia police go to rest up for future shenanigans. I kid you not. Which is how I came to meet the elderly Italian nun who was an ardent communist, was surprised that I had the palle to bring my mom's Bible in country, and who interviewed us at an office in town that was entirely bereft of any indication that a Catholic charity worker used it. Strange days.

We worked on the road from our proposed port near Bull'ado. I visited the coast and dived at the site with scuba gear I had brought with me. We later travelled to Djibouti again to discuss a fishing port using their flash freezers and shipping langoustines to European destinations on Air France. We worked on the port layout, the freshwater creek being a major discovery to us, not on any maps but known to the Chevron workers who had been in country before the fall of government in 1991. We did a lot of things. Previously we had flown a mutual friend into Kismayo to work on some projects there. I got to see the Guban, which is Somali for "burnt land" and is literally burnt - like it was flattened and blackened by an ancient nuclear explosion or something. Desertification gone to extremes. Perfect for the sort of dry lake bed space port we were planning.

Well, time went on, the cia pushed the Dahir Riyale about us a tiny bit, and we were asked to depart. In our one meeting with Dahir he told me that if I ever returned to Somalia I would be shot, to which I replied, "Why not shoot me now?" He was sort of taken aback, actually moved his head back in surprise, and said, "The time for shooting is not now!"

He then instructed his men to take us to the police station and the aeroport. I said that I wouldn't go to the police station. We were standing in the parking lot when our translator Ahmed Madar conveyed these words. I asked why they needed to take us to the police station if we were going to be going to the aeroport and leaving the country. Was it to beat us up and break our bones? Someone went inside to talk to vice president Dahir and word came back that we should be taken to the aeroport and put on the next flight out. You take the small victories where you find them.

A few months later I came back and worked some more on the fishing fleet project. Behold, I was not executed. Then it was useful for me to go back to Texas late in the 8th month of 2001 and I watched a friend's cable television coverage of the buildings in New York free falling into their own footprints. Strange behaviour for steel frame buildings.

Anyway, the short version is: Somalia isn't any fun for free marketeers. It has too many governments.

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