Home | Monkey, Defined | Inside the Book | For Readers | Contact Us


Starving the Monkeys, An Entrepreneurial Horror
An Individualist's Guide to Fighting Modern Progressives
 


by Tom Baugh
Paperback fiction, 390 pages
ISBN:978-0-615-30155-6
Price: $19.95 US

Sneak a peek inside the book or check out our Frequently Asked Questions page.
Unbelievable.

Have you read that book? Glenn Beck's "Common Sense" is one of the best-selling instant-phenomenon books of the past month.

Yet, a third of it is just a reprint of Thomas Paine's original work. Stuff you probably read in high school, back when school meant something.

Most of the rest, all hundred or so pages of what is left, is just stuff cut-and-pasted from his TV show. Most of which you have heard before, and pretty much know anyway. I guess that's the "common sense" part.

Now, I don't blame Glenn Beck. I know the guy's heart is in the right place. He, like many of us, is struggling to find "the answer", but it is so hard to see what that might be in our modern world. A world filled to the brim with stupidity that threatens to enslave you.

Yet our system is supposed to protect you from stupidity like this. You elect people to represent you, but when they get to Washington they lose their minds and start acting just like the last guy. It seems as if your vote doesn't count anymore.

It seems this way because your vote doesn't count anymore. And there is a simple reason why.

Because YOU don't count anymore. At least not to the people who make the decisions that affect every aspect of your life.

And they are not who you think they are. There are no conspiracies, and no smoke-filled rooms where fat-cats pull the strings.

Nope.

The reality is FAR worse than that. Because if there was a mysterious "they" out there getting together in little cabals, we could do something about that.

But while we spend our time and our energy throwing tea-parties and thinking that all we have to do is to simply get the message out loudly enough, we are missing the essential nugget. A nugget that no pundit is willing to address.

This book would never pass the filtering process that exists at a normal publisher. Why?

Because it is too realistic. Because it shows exactly where the problems in our modern world lie. And what to do about it.

And no, those solutions don't involve violence, or "grab your gun", or any other kind of "let's go git 'em, boys!" kind of foolishness.

Doing that would only get you killed. And the responsible parties would rejoice at your sacrifice. Because that is exactly what they want you to do.

Don't give them the satisfaction.

There is a much, MUCH, better way. My way.

I've been fortunate to have had a lot of different experiences in my life. I grew up in southern Mississippi from poor circumstances, yet I believed in our system and our ideals that work and thought and truth would prevail. I graduated near the top of my class from the Naval Academy in 1988, and from there accepted a commission in the Marine Corps. I am a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. I took a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech. I earned patents at McDonnell Douglas in fractal designs and networked voice communications. I have run my own businesses for over a decade now, and have thousands of customers and consulting clients worldwide. Universities use my materials in both their labs and classrooms, and I homeschool my kids.

This blend of experiences means that in, every day terms, you might think I have a hard time holding down a real job. This is probably true.

But it is also true that this breadth of experience has allowed me to see things from a lot of different perspectives at once. I have seen our problems brewing for years, but only recently have I come to understand where the real problem lies.

And who is responsible, and why.

So who is this THEY anyway? I'll get back to that in a moment. I'll give you a hint though. They fling psychological poo at you all day long.

All day, every day, you look around and wonder why no one seems to see things the way you do. For a long time, you felt like no one understood that things are falling apart.

Or worse, that no one seemed to have any idea about what to do to fix it.

Then along comes some guy, seemingly out of the blue, who has the right kind of fuzzy "feel-good" kind of thing going on, and seems to talk common sense. So, everyone rushes that way hoping to find an answer.

But that guy, whoever he is, always falls flat.

Or in the case of a Ross Perot, he just decides "to hell with it."

Or in the case of a Ron Paul, he gets studiously ignored by everyone whose job it is to report. And abandoned by everyone who mouths the right words and should, by their own ethic and affiliation, be standing behind that guy 100%. But they don't.

Or in the case of a Glenn Beck, he starts this great movement and says things like "We surround them".

Only to find out that, oops, they actually DO surround us. His project has less than a million subscribers, for a guy who has WAY more than that in listeners.

Now, I know that there are a LOT of people who like his ideas, but might be afraid to sign up for his site. I understand that entirely. But still, even if you compare his audience, and add in Limbaugh and just about anyone you like, and ignore the fact that most of these people overlap, you find out that, as a percentage of the electorate, yep, THEY surround US.

Ouch.

But you knew this already. You know it because you see it every day. You see it at work. Especially at work, where sometimes you feel like your value is measured more in whether or not you get upset at anyone rather than the quality of your actual work.

You see it while out shopping. You see it in every form of media. You see it when you try to strike up a meaningful conversation with just about anyone. You see it in your church. You see it in the election results, most of all.

And you even see it on your favorite conservative shows. Or hear it on their radio programs. There is something a little bit wrong with all of that stuff, even from those people whom you SHOULD be able to count on.

Why?

Because YOU don't really count to those guys either.

Because their business is volume. And they know that, ultimately, there aren't enough of you, the real you, to matter. All they care about is whether or not they can keep the numbers up.

Just like any politician.

All they have to do is package a little bit of what you want to hear in with a bunch of other pap and you'll tune in day after day and visit their sponsors.

Because they KNOW that you are looking for something. And if you found it, you wouldn't need them anymore, would you?

Well, you found it. Right here. This book.

And those pundits are going to be upset.

Because after you read it, you will see why their message is broken, and twisted to get you to believe a certain thing. Which makes them part of the problem too.

Now, I don't care about volume that much. Would I like to sell ten million copies? Sure! Who wouldn't? But that's not going to happen with a book like this.

No, I would rather reach a few key people instead. The few people that actually make the country work. And that can make it stop working.

And they are not the leaders of industry, either, like Ayn thought they were. In all likelihood, the people I'm talking about are sitting in cubicles or in their garages or basements right now reading this. These people are probably you.

And you have more power, much more power, than you probably realize. You just have to understand the issues in the right way to understand this power. And how to use it.

The problems that face us are complex, too complex to lend themselves to sound-bite solutions.

But curiously, the solution is very, very simple. If you had the right frame of mind, I could explain it to you in less than a minute.

But you have been so programmed to think a certain way, and to doubt your own judgement. So I had to write about four hundred pages to make it make sense.

If you have read to this point, it is because your frustration with the way things are has just about hit the boiling point. And yet, some of you won't buy this book unless someone tells you it is OK. This is part of the cultural programming we have all experienced.

If you wait for a Beck or a Limbaugh or a Hannity or whoever to tell you it is OK to buy this book and read it, you will be waiting a LONG time, because they are flicking the numbers around on the abacus and know that this book will enrage a lot of their listeners. Worse, it will make some of their listeners start thinking in a different direction.

OK, then, I'll do it. I'll tell you its OK.

It's OK to buy this book and read it. You can get it from amazon right now.

When you get my book, read it from cover to cover. Don't try to skip ahead and get to the "good stuff". It's ALL good stuff, but you won't recognize some of it as such until you are almost finished with the book. If you read some of it out of context, you might get exactly the oppposite of the message I am trying to convey.

As you read it, I try to get you to put it down, because some of the material will make some of you want to throw it against the wall in disgust. Because some of those ideas tickle a little part inside of some of you, a little part that will do anything to protect its hold on you. The monkeys have installed a little control program in your mind to make sure that you keep feeding them.

Ayn Rand tickled this little part, too, in her book "Atlas Shrugged". It is for this reason that people who try to read "Atlas Shrugged" either finish it and love it, or else can't finish it and just "don't get it".

This effect is SO STRONG that you can use it as a screening tool to see if someone you are talking to has any sense or not. Now, it isn't 100% effective, as someone who started that book may have had some family trauma or something intervene that kept them from finishing it. But you can still get a pretty good idea just by asking simple questions like "what did you think of John Galt's speech?" or "what did you think about Galt's Gulch?"

The other day Glenn Beck asked something along the lines of "Where are all the Orren Boyles" or something like that. From the context of his discussion, an "Atlas Shrugged" reader would know that he had no idea what he was saying. He just kind of pulled some stuff out of the Cliff Notes version, I suppose, and thought it would sound cool. But, in all fairness, at least he admits that he never finished the book. Hmmmm.

In my book, "Starving the Monkeys", I've turned this screening dial ALL the way up. I want some people to put it down before they finish it. Just like I don't want them to read this page through to where you are reading right now.

Because those people are part of the problem. A big part of it.

And I don't want them to see the solution that I present to you in "Starving the Monkeys".
Get it
from amazon:

 
© 2009 Starve Monkey Press, Inc. All rights reserved.