Month: November 2012

Thanksgiving properly understood involves a divinity, though I’m the first to admit it doesn’t require a Christian divinity.  You can be thankful to fate, or Gaia or destiny or whatever it is you believe in.

By definition – in general – we’re not thankful for those things we worked really hard for and can control.  “I’m thankful I got up this morning and cleaning the kitchen” would be a bit silly.  “I’m thankful I have a kitchen to clean” given these days of unemployment and sudden economic ruin makes sense.

In my case, of course, I believe in G-d, though I have some trouble believing He really micro-manages my life.  (On the other hand once or twice He has intervened with causality-breaking force, so I also don’t say that too loudly.  I don’t have a dog in the fight.  If He wants to micromanage my life, it’s entirely His business and it’s not like I can do much about it except b*tch now and then.)

At any rate, there are things I have and things about my life which I know aren’t dependent solely on my efforts – something of which I’m reminded daily when I see better people and more worthy who fail to secure these “blessings” I have.

So, since it’s the day for it – I’m glad I found my husband to marry, and I found him early enough that we grew together.  I have serious trouble imagining another man who’d both put up with me and have the strength to say “No.  Enough” when I go a bridge too far.  (And when I get to walk all over people, they’re no fun anymore.)

I’m thankful I have the boys.  Yes, I worked d*mn hard for Robert, but there was no guarantee of success, and Marshall was a delightful surprise.  I’m glad they’re the sort of boys they are, and though I like to take credit, and to some extent influenced things like the fact they’re literate, I didn’t influence the sly senses of humor, the way they fall into improve skits at the drop of a hat, or the fact that they’re sheer fun to have around.  (And honorable and kind young men with it.)  If you told me I could go back in time and become a major bestseller at 25 and be a multimillionaire now, but I’d have to give up having the boys, I’d tell you to shove it.

I’m thankful for the cats.  Yes, yes, they’re fuzzy pains in the behind.  Yes, yes, all but Miranda are rescues.  Yes, Euclid costs us a bunch of money a month for his allergy shots, without which he’d chew through his belly skin.  But sometimes just sitting down with a completely trusting, purring bundle in your lap is the best part of the day.

I’m thankful for Baen.  Without it, I wouldn’t have a traditional publisher anymore.  I’m thankful both for the gentle prodding (Yes, yes, Noah’s Boy IS getting done, and I’ll answer some of the blog tour stuff today) and for the flexibility they’re willing to give the weird chick who doesn’t work well under contract.

I’m thankful for the tech to go indie.  At this point – and btw, as an off-side remark, and part of the reason I’m sorry Marc Whipple took offense at my calling him annoying (I sort of assumed half of you plume yourselves on that.  It’s not a bad thing.  He just picked a REALLY bad time for it) since he’s the one who made me change the pricing: since I changed the short story pricing to 2.99, I’ve been selling not just more in money (understandable, that, since, well… it’s more expensive) but more copies per story and if this goes on I’m on track – (IF IT GOES ON.  I only have a month so far) to make about a novel’s worth from my backlist short stories.  Well, the mystery novels, which made about five and a half K

Now, there are a lot of things I’d like to be thankful for next year – like, managing to sell the house and move somewhere more manageable.  Like, figuring out what went on in this election and how to plead the cause of liberty better – even if it makes me, like John Adams “Obnoxious and widely disliked” (If you haven’t watched 1776 the musical, you should.)  Like figuring out how to avoid the government hydra that’s getting its nose into my life more and more.  Like… escaping a hit from abroad and riots on the streets.  Like having the money to go visit my aging parents and to pay my kids’ tuition without their incurring any debt.

But I keep reminding myself – at least in terms of the political situation – that it’s always darkest before dawn and that our love of story has vitiated how we see our own situation.  In every great battle throughout history, in every long war, the winning side didn’t know it would win.  Half the time, in the revolutionary war, the idea of winning is highly unlikely.

I’m told there’s great glory in bringing off an unlikely victory.  If so, then we can look forward to great glory if we pull this off, considering what statism (fascism/socialism/communism) has done to every country and people where it got a foothold.

I take comfort in the fact that in the long run, the trend of history is towards greater individual freedom.  Yes, there’s no guarantee.  But the trend seems to be with us.

Of course, I never wanted glory.  I wanted to live quietly, raise happy kids, write fluffy escapist books, and die full of honor and surrounded by my descendants.  And I thought I’d paid off my share of interesting living in my teens.

You can’t always get what you want, and you should be thankful for what you get, and make the most of it.

So, Happy Thanksgiving.  Enjoy your turkey.  And come back refreshed and full of ideas.

I was going to write about WWI and why it had a unique fracturing impact on western culture, and also why it in a way made the US the “scapegoat of nations” – in its ancient blood-ritual meaning.

Unfortunately – and for those of you who are waiting for guest blog posts and answers to questions, this is the reason you haven’t got them yet – I’m recovering from the flu.  I got the flu about a day after getting the flu vaccine, and I’ve now heard of this happening to enough people, that it seems to be hitting about half of those who are vaccinated.  I got it on the 9^th, and it floored me for about eight days.  It was a milder case than what seems to attack people who get it naturally, but it’s proving very hard to get over.  I’m THEORETICALLY well and have been since my birthday, except the slightest effort knocks the stuffing out of me.  For instance, going out and through a museum made the next day a drag where I just felt like sleeping.  Apparently that effect is still operating, because yesterday I went grocery shopping for Thanksgiving after a day of working on Noah’s boy.  Today I woke up very late and I feel like the walking dead.

So a demanding post on historical causes of today’s uncomfortable world situation is simply not going to happen.

Instead, in the spirit of following up on yesterday’s post, I thought I should “forwarn” those of you with kids in public schools of the work you should be doing at home.

Let me start by saying – this was part of our discussion at the dinner table yesterday – that I never talked politics to the kids.  I answered their questions when they asked, and Robert seemed to follow from a childhood obsession with Roman culture into reading about law and economics.  Probably his greatest influence in politics, he says, was a history teacher who was a retired navy commander, and who – he says – actually made sense of World War I and II and made Robert curious about how things worked.  Marshall just started reading my reference books right from the shelf.

I didn’t even use to talk about politics in the house (and didn’t have many friends with whom I could talk about it, either) because my husband used to think I was “mean” about it.  (Remember, largely apolitical, even if he has voted conservative since Reagan’s second run.)

But there are things I did do.

Part of this came from going through school in Portugal under socialism (I loved the way the trollish visitors pointed out that the socialists only won like two elections.  Very cute, but Portuguese governments are always coalition governments, not winner takes all.  Also, until last year when it was revised, the constitution written after the revolution said Portugal was a republic on the way to socialism.)  I knew that my books had contained gross distortions, and that imbued in the teaching philosophy there were other “messages” which I’d had to work hard to circumvent.

Because of this I’m not a very trusting person, and I started looking through kids’ materials from Kindergarten on.

Now, I’m not going to say the first thing that bothered me was intentional.  Someone in the comments said “A sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”  To think that this particular program was intentional, I’d have to assume the entire education establishment was filled with a malicious and fiendish intelligence.  Since I’ve seen no signs of it, I’m going with sufficiently advanced stupidity.

The VERY first thing I spotted was not what they were teaching, but how they were teaching.

Let me start by saying that Robert and Marshall loved contests as kids.  They won so many coloring contests of one sort or another that they had coupons for fast food kids’ meals enough to keep them till they ran out of the age for kids’ meals.

HOWEVER when Robert (being older) came home and told me he could win a prize for reading x amount of the “right” books, I offered to give him the prize, never mind the contest.

The books were mostly picture books, and he could have read them in an afternoon.  BUT it was the principle of the thing.  Call me picky (and I did tell him what was wrong with the contest) but reading is something you get to do as a reward, not something you’re rewarded for doing it.  Being rewarded for doing it files it away in kids’ heads as something unpleasant done for reward, not something you do for fun.

Around this house, a book is what you got bought if you’d otherwise been a perfect gentleman while mom dragged you through most of downtown and lunch with her friends.  It was a REWARD.  It still is.

The second thing that kicked up was Robert being convinced glass was a finite resource.  (Oh, I suppose it is in the fullness of time, when the Earth runs out of sand… but we won’t be here by then.)  There might be reasons to recycle.  I’m divided on it, believing that the recycling processes are more harmful to the environment (in the case of paper, at least) and use up more resources.  It also makes the final product more expensive.  OTOH I haven’t studied glass PARTICULARLY.  However, I realized my son was being brought up with this idea of a shutting down future, where everything needed would be scarce — with the idea that the future would necessarily be worse than the past, that progress and civilization were bad excesses that must be paid for.

I dragged him into the house, we researched the manufacture of glass and then he went off on his own to study other recycling processes and now he has very stringent opinions on some of it.

There were other things, just as small but ultimately insidious – like their being taught that their “culture” depended on who their ancestors were.  That one got the full mom foaming-at-the-mouth lecture.  “Culture is not genetic, it’s learned.  Your culture is geek-sf-US.”

Other than that, I made sure they had books – books written before the current era and current books, stacked around the house.  Stories set in Ancient Rome were more or less catnip to my kids.  I’m sure yours have their own triggers.  I never pushed these.  I just left them lying around and would sometimes ask one of them to read to me while I cooked or cleaned.

It’s not that I wouldn’t let them read politically correct books – they read those too, and like most of us can even enjoy a book around the edges when the core is rotten – it’s that I let/encouraged them to read everything, and I made sure they had a broad variety.  Weirdly Marshall, particularly, started being able to detect when a book was fudging to push a politically correct view when he was barely reading fiction – because he’d read the other stuff and he has a relentlessly logical mind.

MOST importantly is teaching your kids to read and read fluently.  I will not go into Whole Word Reading, which has now changed names, but yes, is still around.  It’s a stupid idea (like total immersion in foreign languages – sort of a great idea if you are in fact totally immersed [and have a ton of grammar on the side] but as practiced in classrooms a recipe for never learning the language while putting forth enough effort to learn three languages) that refuses to die.  I’ll just say if your kid can’t sound out words, teach him to, and make sure he can read words he’s never seen before.  We are not a language of ideograms.

The reason I say that this is the most important thing is because I’ve noted – when I taught, when helping kids who are in college, when I accidentally catch a glimpse of papers written by my kids’ friends, when I see what these kids post on blogs – that most college kids today are … well.. subliterate.

It’s not just the errors of vocabulary (if word has the same general shape as the other word, it will be used instead) or grammar – it’s the inability to carry a coherent sentence from beginning to end, or to logically follow a thought.

I think one is related to the other.  If you’re so busy READING and painfully writing out stuff, there’s no mind space left for logic and grammar.  And this makes you easily manipulated by anyone who shows you a few youtube videos and repeats a few slogans.

In this, I want to make a recommendation – don’t assume your kids were taught grammar.  Or, if they were, don’t assume the grammar they were taught is correct.  Buy them Strunk and White.  It’s a thin book and for both my kids it acted as a revelation “Oh, so that’s why!”  I just wish there were exercise books that go with the book.

I have, and made both kids use (at six.  I’m a hard*ss.  Deal) a 1940s book that’s called something like (it’s in storage now) The Oxford book of English Composition for Foreign Learners.  It taught how to write an essay and develop an argument.  I bought it by accident as a kid, in a used book store, and it saved my own life in college, so I made sure the kids learned it too.

I’m sure there are equivalents in the US currently – perhaps a little old.  If kids can’t put their own thoughts in writing and take them out and unpack them, they’re not going to think deeply about anything.  I know that most people don’t think deeply about anything, but is that what you want for your kids?

Anyway – sorry for not very coherent post (I feel like I need a nap) but I hope you got the gist.  Keep an eye on what the schools are teaching your kids, not just openly but by implication.  Stuff like “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it has to be done Wednesday” is great to know, but “it doesn’t have to be correct, it has to be done in pink as the teacher said,” is something different because it’s teaching mindless obedience.  They’ll still have to do it to get the grade, but make sure they know it’s stupid and it’s trying to teach them mindless obedience.

Mind you, I know I’m excessively picky, and I know that what you do with your kids is your own business.  I’m not telling you how to raise your kids — only that you might want to keep an eye on how the school is influencing them.  A lot of junk has crept in alongside the important stuff, (and more is likely too since a new Federal curriculum has been issued from on high for next year)  and they’re YOUR kids.  Shouldn’t you be the one in charge of their education?

Different post — on filing serial numbers off fanfic — over at Mad Genius club.  Midnight Story Parts.

Americans are funny people.  Yeah, okay, I’m including myself.  I think I fit in that just by virtue of my mother saying when I was about fourteen “I’m very worried about her.  She takes ideas too seriously.”

America too takes ideas too seriously.  Part of it is that we are a nation of ideas.  We exist on no other foundation than the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  There are no ties of blood between the lot of us – well, some, but no more than between most humans – and there certainly are no ties to the land, even if some of us have some percentage of blood that goes back very far on this continent.  (And some just have high cheekbones.)

But we do have the Constitution and the Declaration of independence, so we’re all kin through those ideas.  To an extent that makes us unique.  To another extent that makes us uniquely vulnerable.

Sometime before the election, my friend Stephen Green pointed out that the French have had – in the last 250 years – a divine-right monarchy, an empire, a republic, an occupied republic, and now a republic again.  They’ve been socialist, more socialist, another color of–  Okay, never mind.  But through it all they have remained French.  Their national integrity and identity is not shaken and is not moved.  Because being French is being linked to other Frenchmen by greater ties of blood than to anyone else around.  Being French is being tied to the land area of France.  If you ask “what is France” people will point to the region on the map.  (And before all the would-be amateur historians come in and point out what we call France is a collection of what used to be rather independent tribal identities and that some of it still persists – yes, yes, I KNOW.  I studied all this when I studied French literature.  But those tribal identities still had come communality and were still tied to the land that became part of France.)  The real threat for this type of nation is immigration (which France has faced with the Portuguese and now from Arab countries.  All things considered Portuguese was less of a threat.  After all most of them were from the Northern regions, which were freed from the Moors by French crusaders – and given how most French crusaders behaved — they were at the most somewhat distant cousins.  Not that the French see it that way.)

Yes, I do realize that if you ask anyone what is America, they’ll point to the map.  But that’s neither strictly true nor… Okay, that’s confusing the kettle with the tea.  America possesses a land mass (which has changed over time, usually to expand) but it is not a land mass.  The people who inhabit this land are not Americans because they happened to be born here – yes, I know,  but yet the law can be an ass – they are Americans because they were born to the equality under the law, the right of speech, assembly and representation granted to Americans.  Change the system and America stops being America.  An American monarchy means in effect the end of the grand experiment.  It means that government by the people for the people has perished from this world.

A communist America would be no better, because communism, for all its loud clamoring of being a system for and by the people, is in fact an oligarchy of clerics – government by “intellectuals” imposing an idea that ignores human nature.  Even where it’s brought in by free and open election (I have a vague idea this happened somewhere, but d*mned if I can remember where.  It is sometimes brought in by rigged election, but that’s a talk for another day) it can only persist by rigged election and force, because people aren’t that stupid and know starvation when they experience it.

Also, communism does not grant equality under the law.  It grants (in theory, okay?  I know that always, some animals are more equal than others) equality of results.  (This was the same promise of the French revolution, and ultimately the reason the streets ran with blood.  The way communism stops the perpetual killing is by having bureaucrats the arbiters of what is “equal” and not letting the common man have a say.  This ultimately means that the bureaucrats have to be compensated by their extraordinary effort and… yeah.  Some animals are more equal than others.)

So a communist America would also not be America.  Oh, we’d still have the same land mass, and the same population, but the ideas that created this country would be dead except in the hearts of a few of us.

This is why Americans get so upset at things like the top-down imposition of government health care mandates.  The leftists who whine “But France has a pony, why can’t I have a pony?”  besides looking at the fact we’ve been protecting France’s *ss for more than fifty years, allowing it to spend its money on candy and ponies, should take a good look at our founding documents.  It’s impossible to apply “universal health care for free” without a) enslaving doctors, who will be conscripted to work at a fee they do not choose, at someone else’s command.  That violates their liberty, not to mention their pursuit of happiness.  b) violating people’s conscience and religious rights as we’re seeing with Catholic institutions being forced to pay for procedures they consider a sin (and do not – DO NOT – tell me single payer solves that.  My taxes would still go to pay for things I consider sins.) c) making the individual subject to the state and to the utility the state ascribes to the individual.  I.e. the state can decide keeping you alive costs too much money given your marginal utility.  Which violates your rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

So, in effect, a law that might just be a bad idea – and OMG, it is! – in other countries, in the United States violates the very essence of what it means to be an American.  Which is why we get so upset.

This is also why other countries tend to get all confused about “American patriotism.”  You see, they’ve been taught – I KNOW, I grew up there – that any form of nationalism is suspect and it leads to wars.  In a way they’re right, sort of.  The Nationalism one experiences in Europe is a form of tribalism writ large, and it CAN lead to wars, usually when the country is afflicted with a highly dysfunctional government that can’t provide for its people, and therefore decides to steal from the next country.  It is easy to excite national hatreds when a nationality is tribal.

American patriotism is of a different order.  It is awareness that we are a thing quite new, a nation of ideas, a strange animal upon the Earth.  We’re patriotic because we believe in our founding document.  We’re not particularly interested in making sure everyone else believes in our founding document, because how hard would it be to process half of the world population through the INS?  People would become grandmothers in line.

We do intervene abroad, yes.  I knew you’d bring that up.

You see, the US while a different bird, still lives in the flock of nations.  (And if you pronounce that without an l and put a cluster before it, you have the right idea.) One way Americans born and raised tend to fail at getting international politics is that they don’t realize how unique America is.

I remember the poor dumb duckling going to Iraq to serve as a human shield for Saddam’s targets telling an equally credulous reporter that of course we shouldn’t be attacking Iraq, because a country that couldn’t provide clean water for its people could have no weapons.  (Syria.  The weapons of mass destruction went to Syria.  So all the leftists trying to do good work by telling us poor gobsmacked idiots that there were no WMDs will be deleted unread.  Contrary to leftist myth we didn’t drop on the benighted country like a thief in the night.  We went to the UN and we gave them THREE MONTHS to move weapons elsewhere.  That was a piece of idiocy.  If we were going in at all we should have dropped in like Sudden Death.  Y’all would whine, but you whined anyway.)

It never occurred to this pampered child of Western Civilization that nations might have weapons as a higher priority than the health and well being of its citizens.

In that sense, Americans often fail to “get” what other nations are doing.  They don’t get the “machismo” of nations based on tribal pride, who will go to war not in the interests of peace or freedom but in THEIR OWN INTERESTS and sometimes just to prove their d*cks are bigger than the next countries’.  Americans don’t do that, and Americans tend not to understand that other nations THINK we do that (which is obvious from any British reporting on American soldiers in the two World Wars.)  And the rest of the world tends to be utterly baffled by when and how we choose to intervene.

Frankly, I’m a little baffled, too, at times, because one wing of our country – the “pacifist” left – seems to think it’s okay to go to war provided we don’t get anything by it, or even provided it hurts us and our stand in the world.  This is because…

This is because we are a country divided against ourselves.

I’d like to say it started with agit prop by the USSR, and to an extent that’s true.  At least the systematic indoctrination and the slanting of media and entertainment to promote the idea that the US is uniquely bad and therefore should be punished DID start with agit prop by the USSR who realized the only way to take us was with a fifth column, from within.

But the truth is that this agit-prop worked because it linked in to a… ah… flagellant tendency in the American character.  Like ancient Israel – and I think because we too are a nation of belief – we tend to always have some number of people ready to blame anything that’s less than perfect on us not “cleaving perfectly” to our ideals.  There’s some number of lamenting Janes (particularly the males) always ready to beat their chests and start with the mea culpas.

These are the brilliant people who decided that, because the US institutionalized mentally ill people, and the USSR imprisoned political dissidents in mental hospitals, people in mental hospitals in the US MUST be “political dissidents” against the “capitalist system” which was what was making them act oddly.  These are the brilliant people who equate the Japanese internment during WWII (under, of course, Strong Man FDR, but never mind) with Hitler’s death camps.

The problem is that the agit prop of the USSR filtered into our education system and inflamed these flagellants, who then took over all our education, our media and our entertainment.

I’m not saying the US never did anything wrong.  Duh.  We are a nation composed of humans, not angels descended from above.  (The beauty of our system is that it works, more or less, with real people, not requiring angels.  Communism on the other hand…) We’ve made mistakes, sometimes grievous ones.

It is all right for our young people to be taught that.  That’s how you learn.  What is not all right – not acceptable in fact – is for them not to be taught that other nations have also committed errors and often outright crimes.  What is not all right is for them not to learn that under other forms of government (pretty much ALL of them) things are far, far worse.

What is not all right, is for them not to learn that if they disagree with our form of government, and if they want socialism, they have most of the Earth to go to, where those forms of government are IN FACT practiced.   It is not all right not to teach our children about the ideas in our founding documents, and not to tell them that if they want to live by those ideas, then they have the right to fight to keep them alive in this land, with these people.

Because if we lose them here, they’re gone everywhere.  And though there might still be some humans called “Americans” – the real America, the one that separated from England in order to live under the Constitution, will be gone.  Forever.  Or at least, until a lot of people are willing to give up their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honors to bring them back.

What is not right is not to tell our children that people who despise our Constitution and who want to grant people equality of results under the law should not be elected to positions of power.  It’s not that we think they’re bad people.  It’s because, regardless of where they were born, they are, essentially foreigners.

By hating the ideas that created America, they hate America and they hate all of us who want to live by those ideas.  By hating the ideas that created America and wanting to substitute their own, they want – in essence – to destroy that on which America is built.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.  And a house with a head of the family who despises it is not long for this world.

Teach your children well and dig in deep.  This is our last redoubt and it always was.  If we lose this we lose all.

We are a people of ideas and we must fight for those ideas.

 

It can be argued that the natural form of government for humanity is the strong man.  This makes perfect sense, of course, since from what we know of our simian cousins bands are usually led by a large male.  (Though sometimes an older cranky female will do.  Be warned.  I’m cranky and I’m not getting any younger.)

Tribal government is usually exactly just that – the strongest man, or his son if strong enough to maintain the prestige, gets to rule the roost and impregnate all the women or a significant number of them.  In exchange he keeps his tribe safe, steals the other trib–  I mean, recovers the stolen property the other tribe took from his people, and generally makes life ordered and relatively safe.

Like most other forms of government, strong man government can even work reasonably well, given a small enough group and a smart enough strong man.

Scaling up, it can still work reasonably well as monarchy (which is hereditary strong man government) given the right kingdom, the right historical situation and a truly brilliant “strong man” who has been raised with the idea of noblesse oblige.  (Weirdly, through the entire history of monarchy in the world, I can count on the fingers of one hand the “good monarchs” of that stamp.  And half of them didn’t end well.)

Even in democracies, and republics, we keep getting strong men who take power, usually after a period of horrible chaos and terrible economic conditions and who often improve, or at least bring order to their people.  Salazar in Portugal was one of those.  I’ve expressed before that I don’t like his style of management (as a libertarian I dislike most strong men because they’re arbitrary and dictatorial) but from what I got from my grandparents (neither of whom were particularly fond of him, if one listened carefully to what they said) he took a bankrupt nation with rampant banditry, disorder, and famine, and shepherded it into semi-modernity.

He was of course a dictator.  Most strong men are.  Also, his policies were very similar to FDR’s who was in many ways as close as the US will ever get to a “Strong Man.”  I think that FDR’s policies prolongued the depression, and I think Salazar’s policies kept Portugal an agricultural and poor country much longer than it should have.  (Though how much of the current “prosperity” is the result of massive infusions of international money, I leave as an exercise for the class.)

The problem is that as bad as government by strong men is – and most of it is, and it always is in the long run because no one is strong enough or smart enough to manage even a city well in the modern age, much less a whole country, the twentieth century brought us the revival of a much, much worse idea. The theocratic leader, a sort of Messianic Pharaoh.

Part of it was that most people cannot face the notion of “government by the people” – not really – except in the US.  And the very idea of government by strong men had been damaged for us.  It happened with World War One and World War Two.  The men leading the various countries then were “the pride of their race” and the “brightest of their people” and it was strongly believed that of course they knew what was best for everyone.  Progress depended on their vision.

After the killing fields of World War I, the idea that these mature, responsible men knew what they were doing was severely damaged worldwide.  And after the ovens of World War Two the whole idea of racial supremacy and eugenics was a horror we refused to look in the face.  (Though eugenics still permeates much of “progressive”’ thought, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

And so – this is obvious if you read a lot of stuff set and written between the wars – the young decided they needed a new idea with which to steer the course to the bright future where if they had a say we would study war no more.

The problem is that not only had most of them lost their religious faith, but they had lost something deeper and more elementary: the faith that their civilization was better than the rest, a faith that arguably carried Indo-Europeans to vast expansion and to becoming the predominant world-culture prior to this.  (Interestingly, there never seemed to be an Indo-European RACE, just a culture that absorbed all others.)

Suddenly, all assumptions had to be examined, and everything we took for granted must be wrong.  The older men with knowledge and power who had led the culture, the fathers and grandfathers one trusted implicitly were to be doubted, to be impugned.

But men – and women too, for those who don’t understand the anglo saxon rule of using men to refer to both – don’t live by bread alone, they live by ideas.  And the idea can’t just be “the opposite of everything they say.”  For millennia – forever? — the idea was that the oldest, the wisest, the most successful would of course lead.  The nervous shock of WWI (and yes, there are reasons why it punched harder than other wars, but this is a blog post, not a monograph) upended that idea.  And yet, a society – a civilization – can only run so far without a central, unified assumption underlying what its members choose to value and how they plan for the future.

The Nazis and the various like movements around the world (it was very common, all of it, including eugenics.  You’d be surprised how many otherwise intelligent people fell for it) was one of the attempts to come up with a grand-unified-structuring-theory for Western civilization.  It combined the “Strong man” and “best of his race” with the whole idea that the youth would somehow evolve and be better and propel each “people” to glory.  (Listen, you can argue all you want to, but I was forced to memorize more cr*p about Siegfried in my German culture classes than I ever want to have nightmares about again.)

Well, that led to WWII and therefore caused yet more recoil.  Fortunately (!) a similar ideology was waiting in the wings.  Just like Fascism was National Socialism, this one was socialism, too – it satisfied the need to deny power to those “old men” who had been successful under the normal rules of life and business.  BUT unlike National Socialism, this one was International Socialism.  It didn’t separate humans into races and try to perfect the race (well, later it did, but for purposes of manipulation.)  Instead, it came with its own mythos about how private property had deformed the human soul, its own (bizarre, unproven, counter-logical) idea of a past in which all men had shared everything, and its own idea of paradise.

It is perhaps counterintuitive to those who haven’t studied the theology (it is, trust me) of these beliefs in depth, but the apogee of communism is supposed to come when every man becomes a natural communist, a perfectly evolved man who will have neither greed nor individual desires, and then the state will wither away since it’s no longer needed.  And of course, this will happen worldwide and we’ll study war no more.

This dream is of course nuts.  What Heinlein said about one man’s religion being another man’s belly laugh applies.  Only, while religions at least rely on some supernatural event to make this happen (and therefore can’t be disproven, because unless you can prove that the Messiah has come, or that the second coming has occurred, or that…  You can’t prove it won’t work) all communism has is the process of first forming a brutal state that is supposed to crush all trace of individuality and human will out of its subjects and (implied) keep those who would pass on such traits from leaving descendants.  And, unlike religion, where you can’t prove that when you die you don’t go to heaven or that when the great transformational event happens humans won’t be miraculously transformed, with communism we know the result of their attempts.  They run about seventy years of increasingly worse conditions, and then the whole thing comes crashing down, because it turns out selecting people to rule based on parroting back your lines is a worse manner of picking rulers than to select the great grandson of three pairs of first cousins.  At least most European rulers knew which end of the queen the crown went on, even after six or ten generations of inbreeding, while communism creates rulers who LITERALLY can’t see the reality before their eyes.

Communists have learned something from history, though.  They’ve intuited that “strong men” regimes happen when everything collapses.  Throughout history they’ve taken advantage of this to institute their regimes.  It’s just that for some odd reason (bad luck!) they can never hold on to their gains and things just get worse and eventually they’re toppled.  (And, it seems, unless great care is taken, at least some of them will revert to strong-man-government, aka Putin.  Which is better than communism, but not by much.)

But look they don’t see that.  They KNOW how the forces of history are supposed to work.  They’ve read Marx and Engels, and this time it will be different.  The theories are logical and make perfect sense.  They make much more sense than messy reality.  And therefore they’ll continue applying the theory even when reality refuses to respond in the right way.

Which brings us to the difference between the strong man and the communist Messiah (which is what they keep looking for and why Mao, Kim Il Jung, Castro, all acquired weird patinas of theocratic leadership) is that the strong man is not – generally – blinded by ideology and is therefore able to see what is before his eyes, and how to make life better (or at least not worse) for his people.  Meanwhile, the true believer Messiah insists on ramming the train full speed ahead, because the bridge simply can’t be out.  It doesn’t matter what his eyes show him.  His eyes are biased by capitalist lies. Why, his college professors, the best minds of his time, the authorities of his received wisdom which has become a religion, all tell them there WILL be a “bridge to the future” there.  So, if he just rams the train forward fast enough, the bridge will materialize.

So, in country after country, after a real or forced collapse, communists have grabbed the reins of power – often by masquerading as “strong men” – and led the country into the abyss.  At best, it devolves into a sort of strong man rule, but one so tainted by theology and personality cult that even the most functional of them is horrible for the common people.  (This might be worsened by communism’s view of individuals as widgets, interchangeable with other individuals of the same general characteristics.  It instills a lack of respect for normal people, and in fact an inability to see them as individuals.)

It has fallen in country after country, but “next time will be different” because a hundred million dead is not enough.

It remains to be seen whether the US is different enough – we are different, you know?  Not only a country of colonists, but the only country where most people are voluntary colonists and where we made a decision to accept each other’s religion and race.  There are many other blended countries in the history of the world, but they were created by waves of conquest (yes, we conquered our own aboriginal population.  So, we’re human, deal.  BUT that’s not how we accrued most of our population) – to resist the virus of the communist religion like we resisted (no?  We did put term limits in after FDR, an admission that something had gone horribly wrong.  And we started trying to walk back from the abyss) the strong man government of the 20^th century.

Is there enough sheer cursedness left for us to resist the idea of the great communitarian world society?

You know, if the virus had reached its peak in the seventies, I’m not sure.  We were full of hopey-dopey ideas, then, aided by a lot of drugs.

Now?  Oh, sure, they’ve had our schools.  They have our entertainment.  They have our media.  But we’re still Americans.  We have the sheer cursedness of not trusting the slick bastards.  And there’s no longer any country in the world even pretending communism works.  The liberals’ worship of China is sad and pathetic when you consider the Chinese have gutted all the communitarian crap out of their system to survive.

Can they get a little headway?  Sure.  But their crawl through the institutions means most of their leaders have already reached third generation stupid and would need a hint or two before they could tip the pee out of a boot with the instructions written on the sole.

Their inability to deal with individuals as individuals works against them, too, because the one thing that Americans are is individual.

Also, their idea of technology is the same as when the march through the institutions started: they think in terms of mass technology, mass transmissions, a unified voice and vision.

The current tech is much closer to bringing us total chaos (and you can hear their sweet, sweet screams of rage and pain as it hits entertainment, media and education) in which the individual and individual creativity and ingenuity rule supreme.

The new world emerging is MADE for Americans – the people who left everything behind to join with and invent a new way of life.

Will we win?

I don’t have a crystal ball, and the future is always uncertain, but my bet is that we’re too big, too weird, too individual for them to even hold for long.  They can by the tip of their nails hold us for a little while, but they can’t swallow us, they can’t destroy us, they can’t reduce us.  Not as they’ve done to other countries.

No.  I think in the end our very American brand of chaos wins.  They’ve made a mistake.  They got ambitious.

THIS is the land where the misbegotten dream of international socialism dies.  We are individuals.  We will not be reduced.

Yes, they’ll bring on the chaos.  Yes, it’s going to get rough.  But Americans thrive in chaos and it will wake up those among us who’ve fallen into communitarian dreams.  This is not a land that lends itself to a secular messiah.

This is the nut they crack their teeth on.  It’s good they came here.  We’re the only ones who can discredit this murderous religion forever.  And we will.  Because we’re Americans.  Because a hundred million dead is enough.  And because we have them surrounded.

Be not afraid.

Honestly, I thought I was taller than that…

I’m consoling myself today with the idea that by 50 Kit Marlowe had been dead for twenty one years and Shakespeare only had eight more years to live.  Then again, considering what those two accomplished, perhaps this is not a consolation.

On yet the third hand, I have yet to see convincing evidence either of them had cats, and you know how much trouble and work those cats take…

Anyway, I’m offsky (Pratchett reference) to spend the time with da Hoyt Boys (husband included.)

But because I lurv you guys and want you amused while I’m having fun, here are freebies, today only, (though I’ll be taking them free again in rotation, in the fullness of time, for another 4 days each… eventually.)

Yellow Tide Foam

An Answer From The North

Super Lamb Banana

Ganymede

and, of course, Sacrifice is still free.

Let’s suppose you were born with an inheritance, something that accrues to you by virtue of being born and being human.

It’s something you can spend, but not directly, like a lot of cash.  But you can trade for it.  Let’s say it is a beautiful, rare, exquisitely cut diamond.  You can wear it, but it’s not quite suited for display.  It’s just something you’ve always had, more precious than anything else you have except life.  And if you keep it, lifelong, your kids will be given equal ones when they’re born, and then your grandkids too.

How would you go about safeguarding such a jewel?

Would you keep it always under your control, where you are the only one who has a say on whether it’s kept or taken away?  Or would you trust politicians – politicians who btw are telling you they can keep your jewel for you by taking other people’s jewel away and trading it to keep yours safe – to safeguard that jewel by putting yourself, your life and everything you own in their power?

I’m very afraid for a number of people the answer is the second.  And that the answer is the second for even one person scares me beyond reason.

I was watching Bill Whittles’s excellent video Cannibals, which details our fiscal and cultural troubles.  I wanted to leave a comment (ended up not doing it because youtube drives me nuts on registering to do so) so I looked at the comments.

Comment after comment, with names like “proudfree American” said things like “I voted for Obama because I don’t want to have to bear a rapist’s child.  My body is mine and no one else can make decisions about it.”

(A friend pointed out these are pathetic comments both in search of approval of like minded people, and sticking one in the eye of what they imagine to be the opposition. Let that stand for a moment.  I’ll come back to it in the end.)

Abortion is, of course, one of those complex things.  It is not a natural right.  It can’t be a natural right because a human woman in a state of nature who tries to abort will more often than not end up offing herself along with the child.  You could say infanticide is a natural right, as it has been practiced by most civilizations throughout the ages, less so in Judeo Christian lands, but impossible to stamp out just like murder is impossible to stamp out.  Of course it violates another person’s natural right to life, but in the case of infants that is always iffy as “natural” as they require someone else to defend them.  So, it is a very complex thing, not from a moral but from a NATURAL point of view.

Let’s leave aside for a moment that no one in this election – not even Todd Akin – ever said a woman BY LAW should bear a rapist’s child.  What Akin (who is an idiot for the way he expressed himself and for walking into the matter at all) and the other guy said was based on their own moral judgment, involving “if it happened to someone I love.”  Let’s leave aside, also, that my answer would be rather similar to theirs, and it’s more germane, since I CAN get pregnant.  (In theory.  Well, it happened once naturally.)  “If I got pregnant by rape, it’s impossible to know what I would do, but it would be hard to get over the fact that the child DIDN’T commit the rape, and that what causes a man to become a rapist is not necessarily genetic otherwise every man and woman born would be a rapist, because we’re all descended from rapists several times over.  Though I can’t say for sure what my state of mind would be, there’s a good chance I’d decide the moral thing is to keep the child.  Because I like children, because it would still be mine, and because it’s not the child’s fault.”

That is not important.  It’s also not important that while Mitt Romney made noises about abortion, the MOST he could do – and he wouldn’t, any more than he would abolish the department of education.  That’s not how DC works – is sent the matter back to the states.  And he NEVER said anything about outlawing abortion in cases of rape or incest.

Let’s instead assume that it is right and just, always, for a woman to abort a rapist’s child.  This right to “not carry a rapist’s child in MY body” is not only NOT a natural right – it is one that depends on an advanced enough technology, a functioning economy, and no one being able to regulate what kind of medicine is practiced upon you.

There is an English proverb “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”  Same thing.  Updated “you buy your CDs, you buy whatever music you want.”  However, if the government is giving you free music, then you will listen to whatever they want you to listen to.  And it can change.

So, let’s suppose that for these young women the most important thing in the world, truly is that if they should get pregnant  from rape – unless you extend rape to “changed my mind afterwards” a small enough chance – they should be allowed to abort the child.

Very well.

To secure this non-natural (because it requires functioning high tech) right they voted for the man who promised them this AND contraceptives for free.  I.e. they voted for someone who said they’d pay for what these women consider a need, so that the women can “control their own bodies.”  Further, to secure this, this man – this party – is trying to make people against whose conscience it is to pay for such things… pay for them.  That is, they are willfully violating what is a natural right of other people: the right to not pay/endorse things that violates their conscience.

And these women think giving these group of people the right to pay for/decide what is done to them gives the women control of their own bodies.

It never occurs to them apparently that those who give them contraceptives/free abortions today can also deny them tomorrow.  Or that the fiscal mess Bill Whittle is talking about in the video means a diminishing level of wealth and therefore of tech.

What I mean is even if the government isn’t lying to you – and frankly, after Benghazi how can ANYONE believe these people won’t lie to you and with a straight face – their policies are almost guaranteed to make doctors flee the country in droves, or go into retirement.  They are also guaranteed to add a layer of bureaucracy that will delay everything.

The end result might be that you did in fact get raped – I understand in countries where law breaks completely down this is a risk women run from eight to eighty – and you got pregnant.  (Or you had a night of sex with your boyfriend and didn’t take precautions, so you’re being “punished with a baby.”) You have a right to your free abortion.  Great.

Only the nearest hospital is chock a block with more urgent cases and the nurse practitioner who could have done it is full up for six months.  In six months it will be a high-risk abortion, and gee, we just don’t have the equipment.  Maybe if you go to Mexico?  I hear they can do these same day, for ten thousand dollars.

Think this is unlikely?  This is almost guaranteed.

Other nightmare scenarios include the government running out of contraceptives.  (No?  When something is free, people get it.  And when it’s free there’s no incentive for companies to research better stuff OR to make it cheaper or more abundant.)  I once heard an – hilarious, because it wasn’t me, and because these people had escaped – interesting story by a group of Russians, at the end of the USSR, discussing how this group of ten men shared a condom which they washed after sex and which, btw, the one of them who worked in a rubber plant patched more than once.  If you think that can’t happen here, you have missed the fiscal mess we’re in to which we’re adding an unimaginable amount of debt for an “entitlement” that can’t be secured without enslaving doctors and other health professionals to serve at the pleasure of the government.

So, suppose you run out of contraceptives and your ONLY contraception is abortion.  But the birth rate is going through the floor and our lords and masters become aware they won’t have enough of a next generation to bear the massive burden of debt.  Think they won’t forbid abortion?  Or they decide you’re from a non-favored group and they don’t want you reproducing at all, so they mandate that you be sterilized and your existing children killed.  Think it won’t happen?  It’s happening in China.  Google “dying rooms” China and children, and I hope you have a strong stomach.

You think it won’t happen here?

Why do you think that?  Show your work.  Is your body any more sacred than other people’s convictions?  Why?  Why should a government that has the power of life and death over you, a government that can literally decide that you’re too expensive to keep alive and send you home with palliative care (no?  It happens practically everywhere the state runs medicine.  Maybe everywhere.  Reporting on these things is iffy) NOT make you bear a child because it suits the state’s needs?

You were born with this special, priceless jewel: Liberty.

You can keep it – that includes covering the costs of it, both monetary and in informed citizenry – and get to decide what to do with it, and in which circumstances to apply it.  OR you can entrust it to people who lie and whose very nature is predicated on having power over you.

Whether the liberty is freedom of religion, of assembly, the right to bear arms – no matter what those rights are, entrusting them to the government is a bad idea.  All the more so when those “rights” require a complex, functioning civilization to be effective.  (For instance, I would not vote for a government that promised me free weapons, because I know how bureaucracies work and in the end I’d have the right to a chipped bit of flint.)

No, you do not have a right to your own body.  No one does.  You can’t say “I won’t bear this child” any more than you can say “I won’t die from this cancer.”  Both of them involve a complex civilization and other people’s skill and knowledge to avoid.  And neither can be granted to you by a tyrannical government who HAS to control other people’s work, intelligence and freedom of thought to grant you this.

You do have a right to your own mind, and that so many people have chosen to give up their natural right to inform themselves and make informed decisions makes me seethe.

My friend was right, on the people who commented on that video being special snow flakes in search of social approval.  Of course why they think that idiotic statement makes them sound “correct” is why we must speak out.  For too long we’ve let the idiots own the air and the soundbites, because we didn’t want to rock the boat.  And what we’ve created is sort of a state religion, in which young people repeat platitudes that don’t make sense, in the sure certainty of social approval.

It’s time to start taking back their minds.  And then maybe they’ll understand how to keep control of their bodies.  And maybe they’ll understand the meaning of liberty.

You can’t enslave a free man.
Only person can do that to a man is himself.
No, sir—you can’t enslave a free man.
The most you can do is kill him.  Free Men by Robert A. Heinlein

 

I’ve said before that the only way I think we beat the civilization-killing mess we’re in is technology.  For one, tech in the last twenty years is the sort of tech that empowers the individual, from news to entertainment — the fields I know.
A commenter asked about nanotech — a field I don’t know — and M. Simon promised to write something about it. He did.

My only issue with it, is that I don’t recall saying that a financial crash can stop it — I think the financial crash that will stop all the new tech is so massive it will stop civilization too.  I’m hoping we don’t have that.  I’m very much hoping we don’t have that.  Sometimes I think it’s what the enemies of the future want, though.  They understand medieval.  It’s the future that scares them.

One other minor quibble is asking how much of this will come to a stop when (?) Lockheed Martin gets whacked by the fiscal cliff (that one seems fairly sure.)

This is what M. Simon has to say:

One thing holding back the use of nanotubes is that they are relatively expensive to make. Not a significant problem for computer chips, but if you want wires five times more conductive than copper, you are going to need kilograms and megatons of the material. Researchers at Rice University believe they have an answer to that problem. A Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University (just North of Chicago) believes he has a better answer. He has started a company, Nanointegris, to explore the possibilities. Right now, they are focusing on carbon nanotube inks. They have also branched out into graphene. That has great potential for replacing the conductive indium tin oxide coating on touch screens. Indium is kind of rare, so this development has great possibilities. And they have actual products for sale.

Well Sarah (and commenter), I hope that has answered your question about the near future of nanotechnology. I think we are in a short pause between Kondratieff Waves. In my opinion, the time between waves is getting shorter, so we will not have too long to wait before the next wave takes off. My estimation is that we will see macro economic results in five to ten years. An eternity if the present economic cycle is causing you a lot of suffering but in historical terms a fraction of an eye blink.

Go read the whole thing.

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

The Weight Of The Crown

They’d no more hit the ground, running, than Nell realized she couldn’t run on home.  Even if she wanted to.  She had no idea where “home” was, or for that matter which home she should go to: Earth, which she still thought of as home, or Avalon, where, supposedly, she’d first come from?

The place where they landed – running – seemed to be made of black shiny stuff, like really polished glass, and they were running along a corridor made of the stuff.  It was hard not to slip, even in running shoes, and she worried that the less well designed footware of Avalon wouldn’t be up to it at all.

The air that pumped into her lungs felt so cold it singed them.  It was like walking in a snowstorm back in Colorado, the air icy and dry, and feeling like it burned its way down your nasal passages and made your chest hurt.

Nell tried to think – hard to do while running and hurting.  She remembered again that most things in fairyland were illusory and could be changed by the mind.  She tried to think of running elsewhere – on a meadowland path towards an open portal to Earth, for instance – but nothing happened.  She tried again, throwing her magic at it, and still nothing happened.

If she couldn’t dent this “reality” imposing itself on her and her friends, then she must be in the type of trap like the net.  And that meant… that meant they needed extraordinary magic to get out of it.  She wasn’t even sure that their running was taking them anywhere, or whether they were just running in place on a slippery, never-ending black-glass trap.

“I’m tired,” a voice said behind her, and she recognized Caroline’s voice.

“You shouldn’t be,” the voice of the young man with her.  “You shouldn’t be.  We gave you the magic potion that–.”

“I’m tired,” she said again.  “And I’m thirsty.”

And now Michael’s voice came, sounding exactly like Seraphim’s only younger, at that age when male voices haven’t fully acquired the depth of adulthood, “Lady, Miss, I don’t think my sister can go much further.”

Nell stopped and turned.  Behind her, she heard her companions stop.  She turned around to face them.  There was Caroline, and a young man holding her hand, and she looked like she was going to faint, while he looked full of concern.

Michael, on the other hand, just looked pale, and was panting a little as if from the long run.

For a moment, something in the young man to whom Caroline clung called Nell’s attention.  He looked like someone…  The resemblance formed in her mind, fixed in disbelief, and, finally horror.  Antoine.  He looked like Antoine.  But he … He couldn’t be…. And yet why not?  Had not Antoine come from Avalon?  Or from some other world that had connection to Avalon.

“Madam,” the young man said, and his voice too echoed the memory of Antoine in her mind.  “Milady, you see, my people gave Miss Ainsling a potion that should have prevented her feeling hunger, thirst or tiredness.  If she’s feeling that, wherever we are, then something is leeching the magic and virtue of the potion she took.  And nothing should be able to.  I think, lady, that this is a trap.”

“Your people?” Nell said, more perturbed than she wanted to admit by the young man’s resemblance to Antoine, even as she scanned the walls of the tunnel.  She could now see it was not a tunnel but a box.  There was more black glass at either end.  Had it always been there, or had they appeared when the little group had stopped growing?  And if it had always been there, how had they been kept running in place?

“My…  My name…  The Lord—” Something that sounded like an elf name.  “Whom you know as Gabriel Penn called you princess… are you?”

“I am told I am the princess of Avalon,” Nell said, miserably.  She didn’t want to be.  More than ever, now, she didn’t want to be.  Back on Earth, as a young woman, fantasy adventures had seemed so romantic and exciting, but now all she wanted was to go back to Earth, go back to her job as a code monkey, and live a life of complete and ordinary lack of adventure.

His eyes widened.  “My people,” he said.  “Have long been in search of you and… and of the real king of fairyland.  We’ve worked long and hard to bring it about.  My brother—”  he stopped for a moment, his voice gone watery, and Nell thought he had stopped to get his emotion under control before dissolving in tears.  “My brother died in that quest.  The prophecy said he would.  I will too probably.  The prophecy said if my father wanted to rescue both worlds he could do so, but it would cost him all his descendants.  No more would those of his blood run in the woodland glades of fairyland.”  The young man set his chin, all jutting angles, beneath a face still endowed with childhood softness and dark eyes swimming in tears.  “He still did it.  He still did what was right.”

And now the hair at the back of Nell’s head was trying to rise, and there was a feeling of dread, but she had to know, “Your brother’s name was… Antoine?”

The young man blinked at her.  “No, but he used that name when he went among men and didn’t want to be known for what he was.  His name was Anargyros.”

“But… he used Antoine?”  There was a distinct buzz in Nell’s ears.  Were the walls moving closer?  “When he went among… men?  What…”

“My sister, lady, do you have water?  Your highness?” Michael asked.

She got her backpack down and without thinking passed a bottle of water and crackers to Caroline, then one to Michael.  She continued staring at the Greek looking young man.  “Who are you?  What are you?  What was your brother?”

“My name is Akakios,” he said.  “And I’m a prince of centaurs, only heir to my father, now my brother is gone.”

She looked down at his very human, bare feet, on the floor, “Centaurs?”

“We can change shapes.”  He sounded tired.  “All centaurs are male.  All our mothers are human.  We don’t become centaurs till we’re five or six.  And we can change back, though it takes some effort.  Lady, the walls are closing in on us.”

“Yes, I think so too,” Nell thought, as in her mind the idea that Antoine had come to find her on Earth in service of some fairyland prophecy, that he’d, in fact, sacrificed his life to bring her back to Avalon put a whole other perspective on their involvement.  He might have lied to her, and he might have had things in mind he wouldn’t share, but he’d done what he’d done in service of an ideal and not because he wanted to seduce her.  And he might have even loved her for all she knew.

“It’s a magical box,” Michael said.  “We must get out of it.”

“Yes,” Akakios said.

“It will take your power, you know,” Michael said.  “Because it can’t be fully controlled, since your father didn’t swear fealty.”

“And hers,” Akakios said.  He looked at Nell.  “Yours, your highness.  You must use the power of your ancestors.  Your connection of Avalon.  You must be the one who forms the connection.  The… the true king told you to run along home.”

She didn’t have time to instruct them to do anything.  Their hands linked, and on one side Caroline’s cold hand, on the other Michael’s sweaty one to hold of hers.

In the middle, Nell fell all their powers given to her – trustingly given.  Michael’s power, and Caroline’s brilliant and dazzling power, and Akakios’ all odd shapes and yet reminiscent of Antoine’s.

“Now, lady, now.”

And Nell who’d been brought up to think that kings and queens and princesses were quaint things of the past, now tried to reach for what should be in her blood.  For kings and queens and princess’s long dead.

She felt as though a great weight rest on her.  People thought that power over people was… power.  That you could tell people what to do and they would.  True, a lot of politicians thought so too, but those weren’t the good politicians.

Public power wasn’t glamour and glitz, ball gowns and being worshipped.  Real kings, she felt, and yeah, princesses too, served.  They shouldered the burden because someone had to, and they used it to make sure the unthinkable didn’t happen to those who trusted in them.

She felt the imaginary crown like a band around her head, but she knew what she had to do.  Gathering all their magic, she thought about the palace in Avalon.  It was by rights her home.  They couldn’t keep it out.

The glass box shattered with a sound like a note of music so high it hurt the ears.  They were falling, hands still linked, from somewhere near the ceiling of a large room.  A large room with a tree growing in the middle of it, two dragons, and a confusion of people.

The splinters of the cage, falling ahead of them, managed to hit the floor where they stuck, vibrating, without actually hitting anyone.

And Nell fell in the middle of them, and just beside Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater.

Right now and for the next five days, the Short story Sacrifice will be free on Amazon.

(There will also be goodies on Sunday, because it’s my birthday and I give away if I want to.)

Also Baen has my short story Angel In Flight (with Jarl aged about 19) free on its home page (page down.)  It is a Christmas story and profoundly transgressive, though it has an historical basis, in the sense that Christians have done this in the past and still do in certain areas of the world.

I’ve been thinking about this blog a lot.  I never wanted it to be a political blog. This is my personal blog, where I post whatever is crossing my mind at the moment.

I started it at my then agent’s instigation (has it really been that long ago?  And how the world has changed) because of course my books were getting close to zero distribution and I could fix this with a “platform.”  (This is one of the illusions the publishing world chases.  It works, kind of.  If say, like VDH what you write are non fiction historical books and your blog talks about parallels between ancient history and today, it works wonderfully.  It can also work if what you write is always set in a particular time period and you write about that time period exhaustively.  There is probably a low-probability world in which the Shakespeare series did well and I continued to write in that time period and my personal blog has gone completely after my personal obsession with all things Tudor… and that might help the books.  This of course presupposes I didn’t kill myself through having to write “literary” stuff, which I can do but depresses me unutterably if it’s the ONLY thing I do.)

Anyway, so my agent wanted me to have a platform, which in my mind was this little wooden soapbox onto which I could climb and start shouting at the crowds of indifferent passersby.  The other thing she pushed on me was Facebook which mostly serves to raise my blood pressure, unless I confine myself to cute cat pictures and aphorisms.  OTOH it provides a way for people who don’t have my email to contact me and that has been a boon.  But I’m at a loss for how it builds the er… platform.

The blog was actually not THIS blog, but the live journal one, and this was back when I was stealthing it: trying to pretend to be a rather standard liberal (and being shocked by how far to the left the other authors were, even from standard liberal) with the idea once I got big I could decloak.

What that meant was that I couldn’t post about anything I cared about.  Besides being an intensely political animal in the sense that I don’t trust the critters in power more than an inch out of my sight, and therefore follow politics obsessively, I’m, of course, an amateur historian, an observer of culture, and an American.  Since I couldn’t decloak all of these were verboten topics.

Heck, I couldn’t even post about what was going on with the kids, because this included my interface with the public schools, the daily deprogramming sessions “No, the US isn’t an aggressive bully.  Here what you need to look up”, the truly bizarre stuff that was built in to assignments like the assumption that race equals culture (and that one broke through and caused a month-long blog war).  I couldn’t even blog about my housewifely quirks (I don’t have many of them.  I don’t have time for many of them) like the really cool steam iron and the occasional attacks of crochet.  The times I tried I got slammed for being insufficiently liberated or something.

So the blog got updated once a month if that, and frankly I think only three people read it.

But the agent kept pushing about the platform, and finally I started this blog and made it a point of blogging everyday.

It is impossible to blog every day without dipping my toes into politics, or at least culture.  I tried to not have partisan politics here – and it’s amazing how many people who think they’re far left of center agree with my root statements, provided I don’t mention politics by name, which leads me to believe they think this is a soccer match and not a battle of ideas.

Still, I started getting some following, and the blog community that has grown here is very enjoyable.

But last week I had to decloak politically.  I had to do it because I think part of the reason we’re losing is that we’re keeping quiet and allowing the other side to define us.  (BTW I find it interesting one of the blogs that linked back to that post said it was of course superfluous for me to decloak since I won the Prometheus.  Apparently, they’re unaware that the Prometheus judges the book, not the writer, and has been won by any number of leftists.  Again, perhaps the base assumption is that all libertarians are left?  Or right?  I fail to get it.)

I am for the record a small l libertarian, who would like government out of people’s economic and social life.  Saving people’s souls is the business of religions.  Saving people from utter disaster is the job of charity.  When government gets confused with either of those it ends in tears.  Churches become branches of the government, and the government forces compulsive and bizarre charity (did you know there are provisions in Ocare impinging on “your lifestyle” including how you eat?  No?  Perhaps you should.  Considering the pyramid those idiots forced on us as one size fits all, I’d say we’re headed for choppy waters.)

Anyway, having decloaked politically, I found there was a series of politically pertinent posts I could/should make, because the times are perilous.  Having done it, too, I don’t intend to keep as strict a hold on my tongue from now on.  To be absolutely honest, we’re living in a target rich environment and speaking out about the things that drive me most insane might just keep me from having an embolism.

But my life is not politics.  My life is fiction writing with a good bit of reading, while trying to keep my husband’s life as smooth as possible, herding four cats and trying to get two young men a decent start in life in this very hard time for it.

A lot of what I customarily blog about here is writing – how to create universes, what bothers me about universes others create and trends in writing, etc.  I think from now on I’ll keep the highly technical how-to stuff for Mad Genius Club (and tell you when I post that there.)  Frankly, I think most of my regulars have endured those with a quirked eyebrow.

But I blog about other stuff too, as it relates to writing: the way writing shapes culture, and the way it’s been shaping culture without most people even being aware for the last thirty years; the way writing is changing, with indie displacing traditionals – the we’re escaping between their fingers like sand thing – and the way the elites seem ever more out of touch with the everyday person out here on the streets.

Thinking about that made me realize where this blog belongs and where it should head.  As I said in the post about how they can slow down the defeat, but unless they completely dismantle civilization hey can’t win (and I think this is part of their infatuation with the most obscurantist of religions, the fact that this religion has stopped progress very effectively in any place they took over.)

What is happening at the top level of everything from education to culture to politics to entertainment is a stunning, almost jaw-dropping disconnect to what is actually going on in these fields, at every other level and among common people.

It’s as if the future is being born but the people who fought hard to acquire power over the present time are trying to cross their legs and prevent it coming out.

It doesn’t work, and it makes things way more painful.  And there is room there for someone who has a tendency to seriously overthink things to highlight where that fight is taking place, and the horrible things that can result from trying, in vain, to hold on to a top-down manner of planning things when all our tech is now distributed and getting more so.

So, this won’t become a techy blog, or a political blog, but it will reflect – often on the way politics is out of touch with the tech and vice versa.  I am by nature someone who thinks across fields, and if there is something I can offer it is the distributed perspective of a non-specialist.

Of course, this will require I read even more of that stuff and make notes where I saw things, but that can be done.  It will take a little more time, which means I (sigh) might as well institute a subscription mode.  I’m noddling it and hopefully will come up with something next week supposing the flu lets up.  (It’s better today, thank you, though not completely gone.)

Mind you, there will still be – PARTICULARLY on weekends – occasional eruptions of cute cat pictures (well, I do have four cats) and odd, sometimes sideways thoughts about history and the primary causes of this or that.  It can’t be helped.  If I’ve been doing any hand work that doesn’t allow me to read – like gardening or carpentry or even ironing – the weirdest ideas come up in my mind…  There will also be the occasional rant.  Some stereotypes exist because they’re true.  When I get angry, the Latin Chick comes to the fore, or as my husband puts it, in the somewhat bewildered tone of a man descended mostly from New England patricians “You do get excitable, sweetie.”  So, rants will happen.  And there will be another episodic novel, though it might move to Saturdays, once Witchfinder is done.  It is – oddly – I think SF technically, but … well… It’s Starship Troopers meets Operation Chaos.  It’s still untitled, and it’s going to require I actually research a lot.  (Eep) Mostly about special forces.

If you’re okay with that, stick around.  My mind works at odd angles, but I try not to be boring.

And there is a lot of room to chronicle the birth of the future and everything that can go wrong along the way.

The Titanic is sinking and before the rescue boat in the shape of a future we can only barely glimpse arrives there’s going to be a long time where we’ll have to do the best we can and perhaps hunker down on the floating grand piano with a bottle of whiskey.

This blog will try to be the floating grand piano.  Here’s a blanket.  Shortly someone will pass the whiskey around.  It’s going to be a long night.  But I am determined we shall survive.

And since you don’t want to cross the Excitable Latin Chick, (trust me, even I don’t want to cross her, and she lives in my mind) you’ll do your best…