If This Isn’t the Real Thing … — a guest post by David Pascoe

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

If This Isn’t the Real Thing … — a guest post by David Pascoe
I’m too tired to be angry right now. Or witty, for that matter. It’s been that kind of month. And on top of it, the Hordes of the Perpetually Offended have been remarkably quiet in the last week or so. Or maybe it’s just that I’m learning to tune out the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the outer dark where such reside. In absence of any particular foolishness from the publishing industry, the world certainly seems to be going to hell in a woven container of choice.

Close to home, celebrated government officials are enjoying the attention of the very faceless minions with which they (and progressives like them) would use to oppress those of us who believe in concepts like individual liberty and individual responsibility. Apparently, the opportunity to serve the public as an elected official wasn’t enough for Mr. Yee, who more deserves a title like Doctor or Professor in his pursuit of Bond villain level shenanigans. Facilitating illegal weapons transfers from sources in Russia, Chinese gangs and rebels in the Philippines. Not content with breaking weapons laws while campaigning for greater restrictions on the citizenry, Mr. Yee decided to try his hand at unduly influencing the legislative process in return for contributions to his campaign for Mayor of San Francisco.

Out on the world stage, everybody’s favorite former soviet strongman is flexing his muscles. Vlad Not-the-Impaler is making noises about “reclaiming” those territories that Russia possessed under Stalin (everybody’s other favorite former Soviet strongman and orchestrator of millions of human deaths in service to the idea of his own ego) and also under Tsar Nikolas II. He’s suggested that the Bolsheviks and Communists made mistakes, which the source (a former chief economic czaradvisor) suggests is a reference to allowing Finland independence in 1917.

So, we have a man who runs one of the largest countries in the world more or less to his own tune, eyeing his neighbors with covetous eyes. He’s orchestrated the acquisition of territories in the past, and repeatedly thumbed his nose at the world’s remaining superpower. Not that the current dis-administration has made it particularly hard for him to do so. An administration, it is of note, whose people are running afoul of the law left and right. Laws which then (see the last link, there) seem to lack a certain something when it comes to enforcement. Odd, that.
It has been argued that the last century is abnormal through all of human history. Prolonged periods of peace punctuated by widespread conflict; conflict that seems to be gathering steam once again. We are living in times of wars and rumors of wars. If these aren’t the Crazy Years, they’ll do until the real thing comes along.

That said, I wonder. I keep asking people if they felt this un-secure when they were my age. Did it seem like the world teetered on the knife’s-edge of chaos? Did past presidents abuse the office and the American people in the ways this one has? Reading through history, it seems like most people have experienced this kind of uncertainty. Were Romans in the streets concerned that Hannibal might take their city? Did the citizenry of Venice worry over events in London when Great Harry broke away from the control of the Vatican? Did American citizens watch the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars with the same kind of worried intensity with which we pay the events ongoing around the world? I imagine they did, at least in part.

I firmly ascribe to Pratchett’s words about the teeming masses of humanity, that most people want today to be pretty much like yesterday, and tomorrow to be pretty much like today. I’m not really comfortable with that. I want tomorrow to be better, and the day after that better still. As a species, we’ve touched the stars, and I want to reach back out and seize them. If I had to do it over again, I’d try to make that happen in a more direct manner, through science and engineering. Probably. I’m told I’m pretty good at putting words together in a manner people enjoy reading, so I might not do a single thing any differently. Disregarding all the what-ifs, I have skills that can serve to further those goals. I can spin yarns that encourage others to take up the fight. I can tell stories where decent people triumph over adversity and opposition; stories where evil in its myriad forms falls to good.

That’s our responsibility right now, not bowing to fear.

199 thoughts on “If This Isn’t the Real Thing … — a guest post by David Pascoe”

  1. Writers of science fiction can have just as much impact on space exploration as scientists and mathematicians. Writers inspire the young to push through the difficulty and reach for the stars in a more literal manner. After all, think about how many astronauts followed that career path because of Star Trek or Star Wars. :)

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    1. Meh. Neither Star Wars nor Star Trek had the impact on the space program the pulps have.

      But, then, by the time the Star Trek and Star Wars fans were working, we had abandoned space.

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      1. IMO Star Trek and especially Star Wars weren’t something to inspire people like Heinlein was.

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      2. Really?

        The shuttle stopped flying only recently. Star Trek fans were would have started in NASA in the 1980’s.

        So, when are you saying we abandoned space?

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        1. One could make a good case that we’d already effectively abandoned space by the mid-1980’s. NASA’s culture had grown so bureaucratic that repeated warnings of problems with the shuttle were ignored… until it caused tragedy on January 28, 1986. At which point the program was shut down for, what, two or three years to fix the problems that should have been fixed earlier?

          It doesn’t matter how long the person continues to walk around after receiving the fatal wound: he’s a dead man walking. And the Challenger disaster wasn’t the fatal wound, it was just the first time the fatal wound was visible. Our space program was already a dead program walking by 1986: a viable program would not have needed to be shut down for three years. The missions after that, while still valuable, were like the last actions of a dying man, trying to do as much as he can in the limited time he has left.

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  2. This level of corruption and disregard for law in the U.S. government is unprecedented. When I was a child, we had Watergate, but the system worked: Nixon was impeached. Two decades later, a President committed perjury and got away with it. And now we have a President who has no regard for the law at all, and a Congress and Supreme Court who will not call him to account.

    On the other hand, the foreign-affairs situation is pretty much as it always was. I spent my whole childhood expecting Russia to attack its neighbors; I more than half expected a Russian nuclear attack on us.

    So, really, when you ask whether I was as anxious, at your age, as you are, it depends on how old you are now (a detail you neglected to mention :) ) When I was a teenager, Carter, the President who was shocked that the Russians had lied to him, was in charge, and I fully expected the Russians to take advantage of his naivete.
    So, yes, I was anxious about world affairs almost every day. Domestically, everyone was screaming that there was about to be an ice age; I was worried about that too.

    If, on the other hand, you are in your twenties rather than your teens, then, no. My twenties were a bright spot, because Ronnie — Ronald Reagan — was President, and he had the measure of the Russians, and for the only time in my life America was a safe and happy place to be.

    Then Bush senior was elected, and it’s been all downhill from there.

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    1. “When I was a child, we had Watergate, but the system worked: Nixon was impeached.”
      Er, no, he wasn’t. Only two presidents have ever been impeached, and Nixon isn’t one of them.

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      1. Right. Nixon resigned because he knew he was going to be impeached. Whatever. He was out of office. The system worked.

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      2. IIRC:

        Andrew Johnson, who in the long run preserved the racist terroristic electioneering of the Democrats in the south.

        The rapist, William Clinton.

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        1. Nice April fools day prank.

          The FBI had long been searching DC politicians for blackmail. After Hoover died, the politicians tried to put a stop to it by appointing an outsider to leadership.

          The Democratic Party of the day was a de facto terrorist organization. De jure, it seems it gets an exemption because it had enough people backing it, and that seems to grant a measure of protection under freedom of speech. It was too big to take on.

          There were over fifty branches of the Democratic Party. Some of them had terrorist era vintage movers and shakers, and political technicians active and influential into the 2000s. What might have truth for one branch might not for another. Whether or not the national Party knew, and intended to continue to support such might’ve had some law enforcement relevance.

          The FBI had a history of seeming to overlook the terrorism. Note how they helped stamp it out once LBJ decided the dogs wouldn’t hunt to the benefit of the Party any longer, and lifted the protection.

          One of the FBI insiders had been passed over for promotion to head of the FBI. Disgruntled over this, or merely seeking to keep DC politicians afraid of the FBI, he hands over some information.

          The only really damaging secret of the Democrats seems to have been LBJ’s successful rebranding of Jim Crow into the form of the knock off that exists today. Even if documentation of that wasn’t in the files, if public slights aren’t revenged, an organization looks too weak to protect against bloody power politics.

          Hindsight suggests that even if he had been impeached, Nixon might have been able to brazen things out, maybe even counter the accusations by pointing out the criminal nature of some of the Democratic Parties.

          Problem is, if successful, such a defense would have entirely cut off the Democrat’s path of retreat, leaving them little to do but fight. Not even the Radical Republicans after the Civil War committed to that. It might also supported other precedents bad for the Republic.

          Nixon bowing out might well be in the ‘do an enemy a small harm, for the sake of the Republic’ traditions of Lincolnism-Shermanism.

          It was ultimately dependent on private revenge. Saying that ‘it was the system working’ strikes me as fantastic hagiographic revisionist history.

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    2. Humbug. The Democrats started the civil war because they anticipated that the rug might be pulled from beneath some of their crooked schemes. After the war, they spent a near century deeply involved in various illegalities, explicitly including felony murders to the point of mass graves. I count the old style of political killings as stopped, I assume because they couldn’t keep them quiet, and they were no longer cost effective that way.

      Scope and degree might be new, but the kind and quality is nothing they haven’t done before, and the Republic survived.

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    3. Nah. The system works as it has for about a century. Dems get away with everything, unless the Left turns on them, like they did on LBJ. If Obama were GOP, he’d have been impeached after Solyndra.

      Nixon was hounded out by a media drumbeat. He shouldn’t have been. Millions in Vietnam and Cambodia died horribly as a result.

      Wilson twisted the Constitution. Threw people in jail for printing stuff he didn’t like. Harding got whacked for what some friends were up to at Teapot Dome (happened to Grant over railroads, too) – but it was nothing to Obama’s energy scandals.

      Hoover started the New Deal and was loathed. FDR kept it cooking for a decade to grow government while kids went hungry, and he was loved. Media.

      FDR gave away Manchuria at Yalta. It was part of an allied country! Gave away North Korea, too. Truman lost China, then immediately bumbled us into Korea. What a Cold Warrior.

      FDR wouldn’t sign anti-lynching legislation. He stuck American citizens in internment camps. Truman was the last of the Jim Crow presidents.

      Ike broke Jim Crow. He got us out of Korea by promising to nuke. Ike warned against Vietnam involvement, coining the term “quagmire.” If JFK hadn’t stolen the election in 1960, we’d never have sent troops there.

      JFK’s serial sex scandals (he was Bob Crane in a tie) were scrupulously ignored – Clinton bristled about this when his own weren’t. JFK’s bumbling gave us the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs. He made his kid brother AG (and that worthy tapped MLK’s phones), then sneered at the nepotism of his South Vietnamese allies. He fixed that by greenlighting the coup against Diem.

      Nixon had his faults – creating the EPA and baseline budgeting. He was BigGov GOP, like Ike. But it took BigGov guys to break Jim Crow: Nixon integrated those stubborn Northeastern construction unions, much to the Dems’ outrage. (That’s why they chopped Agnew, too – big Civil Rights guy.) Nixon integrated schools in the South, after JFK and LBJ did nothing about it for years.

      Remember the head of the Senate Watergate Committee? Sam Ervin, big segregationist and CR filibustered. Nixon had all the right enemies.

      Pascoe’s right – nothing that new here. Wilson created the IRS. FDR pumped the racist unions with his newfangled Labor Department. JFK let the civil service unionize. Without all that, Obama couldn’t have turned the IRS on us. It’s not new. It’s just happening to US!

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    4. Nixon (who I despise, BTW) was hounded from office for doing more or less what the two Democrat Presidents preceding him had done. The Left never did forgive him for defeating Helen Douglass (who was an unrepentant Stalinist bitch, and a much uglier customer than Tricky Dicky).

      The government of the United States, like ALL GOVERNMENTS EVERYWHERE, has always been chock-full of opportunistic swine. Mitchell Palmer (Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General) was every bit as bad in real life as decades of myth-selling have made Joe McCarthy (himself no prize, mind) in reputation. Other examples abound. What is really scary is that the United States has been, nevertheless, a “Shining City on a Hill” by comparison to most to the alternatives. Certainly compared to the governments headed by the assorted half-wits, psychotics, and lunatics who have called themselves “king”.

      As an amateur student of history I am inclined to believe in God, because the notion that we amuse some sort of force that keep us alive for that reason seems all too plausible.

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  3. ” I want tomorrow to be better, and the day after that better still. ”

    That’s nice.

    History, particularly that of the 20th century, shows that attitude has been one of the leading reasons why tomorrow is worse than today, and the day after worse still.

    It is incredibly easy to break eggs and neglect to make omelets.

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    1. Mary for the love of BOB. Today is not worse than the early twentieth century. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Tomorrow is usually better than today. He’s not talking about MANDATING it be so.

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      1. Good heavens, Sarah, did you think socialist misery of Portugal was brought about because people WANTED to make things worse? No, they wanted tomorrow to be better, and the day after that better still. You saw the results.

        People who wanted a better future and had no humility about their abilities to get it were the leading cause of 20th century misery.

        Or, to put it more eloquently:

        As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
        I Make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
        Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
        And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

        We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
        That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
        But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
        So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

        We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
        Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place.
        But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
        That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

        With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch
        They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch
        They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
        So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

        When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
        They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
        But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
        And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

        On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
        (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
        Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
        And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

        In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
        By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
        But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
        And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

        Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
        And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
        That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
        And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

        * * * * *

        As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
        There are only four things certain since Social Progress began —
        That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
        And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire —
        And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
        When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins
        As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn
        The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

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        1. Not true in a lot of ways, Mary. THEY SAY — to the masses — they want to make things better, but not true in many ways. If you heard them talking in private, they resented all the THINGS these common people wanted and that their favorite beaches were full of peasants. From the beginning, in their own hearts, the socialists NEVER want to make things better for everyone. Some pigs are always better than the others.
          At any rate, I think you’re objecting to the wish and you’re wrong. We want to make things better. The difference is, do we want to upend everything and FORCE people into our scheme, or do we want to do our best to make things better?

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          1. “I think you’re objecting to the wish”

            No I’m not. I’m pointing out that neither wishes nor good intentions guarantee anything.

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            2. Who said they did? My issue with what you’ve said upthread is that it seems to be that you are telling us that we shouldn’t want things to be better because — gasp — things might get worse. Sorry, but that leads to stagnation. If we stop hoping for better and stop working for better — and that means we have to wish them to be better. We can’t sit back and twiddle our thumbs just because some people who have assumed positions of power — either by lying to the electorate, through power grabs or through revolution or other means — have told us they are doing something for the betterment of society or for the “greater good” and it has proven to be false.

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                1. In any number of ways, they assuredly do. I’ve walked through the streets of stagnate societies.

                  Unless we pointlessly constrain the definition to the literal.

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                2. As with Eamon I have been in stagnant societies and have read about many more in history. You know history, The thing that if we don’t learn from it we are doomed to repeat it. This is, at least for the average person the best time in history to be alive, Most of that is due to American innovation and dreaming, wishing for things to be better and working our tails off to make it so

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            3. Mary, what Sarah is pointing out, is not that the desire for better is wrong. It’s the _not paying attention to how it’s done_. The “elites” have always claimed that they wanted things to be better tomorrow. Their constant mantra has *always* been. “Just leave things to us, and they’ll be better.”
              Not to push Christianity as a religion, but if you look at the last 5,000 years of History, there is a clear set of change points. The first, roughly 2,000 years ago. Something changed how people saw the way individuals and Governing structures acted. 238 years ago, something changed even more. Residents of a country were no longer the servants of the leaders, but *leaders were the servants of the people.* The “Self Selected Elites” haven’t stiopped trying to change it back, ever since.
              They keep promising to “make things better,” but never tell the truth about what the “better” will be, or for whom it will be better. If you listen only to the SSE’s, you will _never_ hear about those want to “make it better,” and tell the truth about how they will do it. The ones who, wonder of wonders, want to *leave everyone the H–l alone.” (Unless, and until, they try to make other people do things.)

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          2. Ah yes, the crux of the disconnect between you and Mary is in the definition of “better.”
            To the avowed socialist better is that perfect world where the common folk live with just barely enough and like it while the “more equals” run those many lives with a velvet enrobed iron fist. Once we beat you into submission, err guide you into the proper behavior and frame of mind, then we will surrender control to the collective and all live in peace, harmony, and equality. All those perks and special privileges for we who currently run things are just compensation because we work so hard and care so much. But rest assured we will get there in the sweet bye and bye. Just tighten your belts until the latest five year plan works.
            Now to the average free range libertarian better is simply more freedom and fewer constraints. Get out of my way and leave me the hell alone unless I request an arbitrator to resolve a dispute, and in truth I’d rather hire someone than give that power to any government agency since you can never trust them to give it back.
            An arch conservative, at least in these parts, mostly wants things to be like they remember them. Trouble being they only seem to remember the good stuff. Rampant disease, fear of nuclear attack, crop failure and famine, all those were not real because they didn’t happen, or at least not to me and mine. Even so, a conservative expects to at least maintain the status quo with a few nice improvements, just not too fast or too big.

            The socialist method always fails, due in part because it fails to allow for basic human nature.
            The conservative approach is filled with bumps and disconnects since it’s based on perception rather than reality, and doesn’t anticipate the dynamic nature of reality.
            The libertarian schema always crashes and burns because the other two always get jealous and attempt to take them over and co-opt their success. Classic case of gutting the golden goose to get at all those eggs.

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            1. The “socialists” I was born under in Portugal came from conservative motives — “we’ll keep the good.” Stuff like, if the land was agricultural, it couldn’t be built over, unless you went through a bunch of licenses. Farmers shouldn’t change professions.
              They were looking at the misty eyed past that never existed — the past of medieval ballads, with the peasant walking his oxen home and no one to make him afraid.
              What they did was make people desperately poor — statism from left or right always does — and make them ripe for the socialists.

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              1. “Farmers shouldn’t change professions.”

                Oh, that’s a very old trick! Have you ever read Duggan? Lovely historical fiction. It took the Roman Empire a few hundred years to stagnate, but it fell very fast indeed. Capital punishment for not following your father’s trade!

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                1. I can’t see my brother as a Rabbi. Or myself as a Rabbi’s wife. Being a clergyman’s wife is a hard road to hoe. I’m much happier as a nerd’s wife.

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          3. Great thread, thanks. You both have valid points.

            Americans expect more prosperity for their kids because that’s been the common experience. Work hard, send them to college, they’ll live easier. It’s the product of free markets. If Carter had won a second term, that expectation would have been over a lot sooner.

            That the nomenclatura in socialist societies like their perks is true. They also like cheap servants and exclusive beaches.

            But Krushchev was serious when he said they’d bury us economically. “Scientific Socialism” teaches that, and you have to internalize that patter to rise in the nomenklatura. They really think that getting rid of the “middle man” and planning centrally will boost prosperity – they have to think it to do all the hideous crap they do.

            Look what Mao did in the Great Leap Forward. He collectivized the farms and instituted Lysenko’s nonsense – stuff like burying seeds a foot down to increase the root systems. The grain didn’t sprout, but people were afraid to tell Mao – he didn’t take bad news well. Mao thought it would be a bumper crop, so he sold most of what grain there was to the Sovs. Result: 50,000,000 Chinese dead of hunger. Cannibalism. Horror.

            Mao was a despicable raping murderer in private, but he fully expected his public policies to transform China into paradise.

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    2. Mary, I have to disagree. The attitude that damages is wanting more and instead of working for it, empower other people to take it and give it to you. If you and your friends build something to provide a good or service you can make money and better other people’s condition. If you and your friends build an organization to steal things, you damage everyone else for your benefit.
      That is pretty much what the Kipling poem is about, getting something for nothing, and the only way of doing that is by stealing honor, property or labor. Was Kipling foercasting Post Modernism, where reality is what you want it to be until it crashes, or did PM thought just take a bunch of bad ideas and pretend it burst from their heads new-minted?

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      2. Exactly! It’s the method not the wish.
        Look, I don’t care how disgusting things were in the interval, if you think you want to live even in the GOOD parts of the early 20th you’re wrong. I did you see, as a kid. We were easily 50 years behind. People STILL died of trifling little colds.
        This was the mistake of Portugal’s regime pre-revolution. The import policies strictly kept out foreign products. Innovation had to be very carefully weighed. The opinions people could hear were carefully watched — yes, they were socialists, like FDR, not socialists like Lenin. BUT they probably did it “for the good” — they were most of them Jesuit-trained. Not to “keep things better” but to”preserve the good” against what seemed like an onslaught of disorder and communism.
        In some ways the society I grew up in up to the age of ten or so was admirable. Very little violent crime, for instance. No pornography accessible to anyone, child or adult. You couldn’t swear in public. For a kid it was a perfect environment — though for an adult it must have been h*ll.
        OTOH the crime there was tells its own tale. YOU HAD to bring your clothes in from the line at night, or they got stolen. Chickens got stolen, sometimes at great risk. Any accessible fruit tree got stolen. And I’m told the priest would tell you at confession if you stole because you were desperately hungry it wasn’t a sin.
        Now the problem with the revolution was enforcing the manner in which we were to “progress” — no one is saying that.
        But if you really think your contribution to the world however small doesn’t aspire to make things better… why bother? We can all be dumb animals doing the minimum to live and things will spiral down into the grey hell of terminal communism. In fact that’s what communism does. Rob the individual of wish, intent or interest in making things better.

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        1. It is exactly the confident belief in that this time, we’ve found the right method that makes me wary.

          The Law of Unintended Consequences reigns supreme over all methods.

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        2. “Look, I don’t care how disgusting things were in the interval, if you think you want to live even in the GOOD parts of the early 20th you’re wrong”

          Would you prefer the BAD parts? Which is where the desire for a better world really got to run wild.

          As for its being better now than then, the obvious question is to look at how those who actually improved it did so. One notices that the less they were motivated by the desire for a better future the more good they did.

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          1. Change is good for some, less so for others. The plantation owner’s loss was the industrialist’s gain and now the nerd is eating the industrialist’s lunch..

            Yes, those feet did in ancient times. And they will again, someday. Meanwhile, Arthur is drunk as a skunk in Avalon, tippling with Barbarossa, Ogier and Oscar Gordon.

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    4. Mary, I want my kids (Working Title #1 about two months from world debut) to have a better life than I did. For me, life as a kid was pretty decent, all things considered. What I want for my spawn is to be better and have more opportunities that Mrs. Dave and I did at any point along the way. I most emphatically do NOT want them to have an easier existence. Overcoming adversity and challenges is one of the things that makes us better people. Wiser. Gentler. More likely to give a hand up. That’s what I want. I don’t think my kids will have an easier life than I have, but I’m expecting technology and the changing face of the world to give them plenty of opportunities to make wise choices and grow from the consequences.

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    5. “most people want today to be pretty much like yesterday, and tomorrow to be pretty much like today. … I want tomorrow to be better, and the day after that better still.”
      You can, perhaps, have both… IF you can learn to make haste slowly, and have a decent respect for the difficulty of making things better for most while not making them worse for many others.
      Take the time to discover the limited wisdom and “unexpected side effects” of almost everything done by way of social engineering and great plans, be modest in the sizes of the steps of improvement you’d make that your errors be also modest, and fixable.
      Maintaining the political and social will to make tomorrow better a little at a time is difficult, at least until a cultural habit is formed. It’s not a one-decade project. And I think, maybe, the hardest part is learning an attitude of continuously improving what we have, rather than always rushing to throw out the bath water (complete with baby) to try something gloriously new.
      (The above applies less to the members of this community than to the impatient progressives around us…)

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      1. The problem I see is not that those who want to change things for the better throw out the bath water, with or without optional baby. They prefer to write a new regulation for the disposal of bath water and maintenance of baby every time some faction decides what constitues “better” for their subjects. And the other factions can be persuaded to go along, so long as there are also funds for rotating cats in their districts included in the bill.

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  5. I am dealing with the health-care system right now and am ready to explode– I just want that to be better and not worse as it has been mandated by our socialists.

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    1. Oh, yes.

      You know they admitted that they were doing it as a stepping stone to single payer.

      Some people have speculated that the disaster was intentional, to destroy the system so we would have no choice.

      I suspect their egos would interfere with that. That they really thought it would be wonderfully wonderful so we would run to put everything else in their hands.

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          1. 20,000,000 dead, the rest of us in re-ed camps. That was Obama’s pal Billy Ayers’s estimate. You remember him, the guy who bombed an enlisted women’s bathroom in the outer ring of the Pentagon.

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        3. From what I can see, they’re desperately working for a Supreme Court decision that effectively eliminates freedom of conscience.

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            1. Yes, exactly.

              Note also that Obama says “freedom of worship” instead of “freedom of religion”.

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            2. Notice they shut down the Federal government (and stationed their stormtroopers at the national parks) rather than allow the Republicans to impose Obamacare delays less extreme than those the administration itself has inflicted.

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        1. I OTOH firmly believe in their good intentions…
          For themselves. The rest of us are just herds of cattle to be managed, manipulated, and fed from. And I include both the current powers that be and the loyal opposition under that blanket. Our founding fathers would weep at the very thought of career politicians. Had they even conceived of the idea I’m certain they would have built safeguards against it into the Constitution.
          It is both my fear and my hope that they will very soon learn that what they suppose are cattle are in reality stobor. (Heinlein reference from Tunnel in the Sky, generic term for things that unexpectedly bite you back.)

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              1. I need to. It’s not like I couldn’t use the cash. I’ll try to get it up this week. (Couldn’t use the cash — we’re gearing up to move, and stuff needs to be cleaned/fixed/staged. We’ll do a lot ourselves, but….

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                1. I’d buy, certainly the two we’ve seen this week.

                  Ach, moving. On the one hand, Yay!! New place, better suited, progress and light! On the other, moving.

                  Luck!

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                2. Heinlein was one of those funny people with words… Moving to town made that obvious. I can tell you where he was when he wrote about kettle belly baldwin. Judge “kettle belly” Baldwin’s is downtown. There’s a clock int he center of town with Dum Vivimus Vivamus AND this is the man who named an imaginary title of nobility after his cigarettes: Doral. So…

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      3. With what’s been going on, I doubt seriously any rational adult (and this would include a lot of mugged Democrats who’ve found themselves on the receiving end of high premiums and deductibles) would be supporting Single Payer.

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        2. A Rational Adult would not have supported Single Payer even before this giant clusterf***, but the useful idiots will say it’s the salvation of the health care industry.

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        3. Rational people could look at Canada and Great Britain and realize the folly of single-payer. But when you’re an idiot, you buy into the zero-sum nonsense and believe obvious lies like government bureaucrats being more moral and kind than for-profit companies.

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          1. Please note that the entire American education system is geared to prevent the development of a rational adult.

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            1. Very apposite to this is The Road to Damascus, a Bolo novel co-written by John Ringo and Linda Evans.

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              1. In Ringo’s Tavern, I commented that the title of _The Road To Damascus_ gave away the ending and there were people there who didn’t know the context of “Road to Damascus”. [Frown]

                Oh, the context is from the Book of Acts where Saul of Tarsis (spelling) was traveling to Damascus in order to persecute Christians there. He has a vision of Christ before he reached there and later became a Christian.

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                    1. Even the idea of “Road To Damascus event/experience” being “an event that makes major change in your beliefs” seemed to be missing from some in Ringo’s Tavern. [Frown]

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                2. Yeah. I once read a woman lamenting that she had tried “the lilies of the field” out on her college classes, and none of the students had known what it meant.

                  I lamented that online once and got a response, “Huh? I know that — and I’m Jewish!”

                  (“And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”)

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                  1. I’ve had to explain: pussyfoot, cockatoo, dagnabit, the green-eyed monster, and what a St. Bernard dog is. And various historical references, some regional, some general. I expect I’ll hit more as time passes (noting that most of these are not class related, but things the students encountered in textbooks or typing programs, or from formerly-common phrases that I’ve used.)

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                    2. I could maybe see needing to explain The Green-eyed Monster (which now that you mention it I haven’t heard used in a while) but I would think most of the rest were either self explanatory or very common knowledge. Who hasn’t heard of St. Bernard? They used to be all over the TV and movies, as well as in books, even if people had never actually seen one in real life.

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                    3. Try explaining Soylent green, or Zardoz.
                      I am old, I am old, I will wear my clichés double rolled….

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                  2. I knew the one about Saul on the road to Damascus and I’m Jewish too. I knew the one about the lilies but not where it was from.

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    2. The company health insurance where I work increased its premiums 25% this year. The copays went up, too, by 30%. And out-of-network coverage, which was never very good, is now all but nonexistent.

      Progress!

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          2. I got tossed out of my plan. New one has lower per-month BUT I have a far higher out-of-pocket and none of my primary and specialist physicians, or my drug store, are in their “network.” On the up side, all my docs give nice cash discounts. It’s still Run-Over-by-Bus insurance, nothing more.

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              1. I’m outside the o-care system, thanks be to my father’s military service. I was able to get different coverage through them. The new plan kicked in before the imperial extension. Even so it’s still a pain, and if this gets cancelled, I’ll see about talking to my docs about payment plans and other ways around.

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                    2. Some Medicare docs can’t, or they run the risk of losing their status and no longer getting reimbursed (such as it is) by Medicare.

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                    3. I know some doctors who converted to cash-only practices. They fire their insurance claims clerks, drop their prices and make more money.

                      A retired doc acquaintance has been consulting on how to set up these. He says that in the last five years, medical continuing education seminars on the topic are the most popular topics among MD’s.

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        3. Fifty percent. This past year. And more hikes to come, so I hear.

          Dagnabit, this year I’m canning vegetables a lot more. Might get to the point I can sell a good scratch cooked meal, if anybody has the scratch left to pay for it! *grin*

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          2. yes, ours had gone up 50% before.
            Well, this is the other reason we’re selling the books — though the main reason I swear is that we have a borderline hoarder situation. it’s not what it is, it’s that we’ve been accumulating books for 21 years without time to cull/dispose of them. And we have a friend who gives us books and a thrift store that sells them for $1 on weekends. However, I’m worried for my mental health as every room in the attic is full of boxes I’d forgotten, which are in turn full of books. Well — we’ll sell them and hopefully finance the move…

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      3. Somewhat related, I find I’m annoyed to the point of growling at the latest radio commercial push:

        “Now we’re covered. For the first time…”

        Blech. Cubed.

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        1. You should see some of the stuff over on Healthcare.Gov’s facebook page. “I haven’t been insured in 30 years! But thanks to Obamacare I can now get a Platinum Plan for my entire family with no deductible for $20 a month!”

          I swear, it’s like they’re computer generated. Lots of other people are posting very different stories – massive premiums and insane deductibles, which I suppose COULD be seen as ‘affordable’, for certain values of ‘affordable if you don’t have to pay for housing, food, transportation, clothing, or utilities’ – but from what I’m seeing this whole ACA thing is a massive, massive fail.

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          1. Predictably a massive fail. Oh, and Harry Reid says all those other folks are lying.

            I believe I’ll avoid healthcare.oops like a plague. Without a cure. Because…healthcare.oops.

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            1. No, now he is saying that he never said that. Video evidence doesn’t mean a thing.

              On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 12:42 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:

              > Eamon commented: “Predictably a massive fail. Oh, and Harry Reid says > all those other folks are lying. I believe I’ll avoid healthcare.oops like > a plague. Without a cure. Because…healthcare.oops.” >

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              1. Oh, my mistake. Clearly I misheard him when he said…

                Wait-a-minute. Those wily politicians, they nearly snookered me! His sneaky opponents crafting such dastardly evidence against him. They oughta be ashamed.

                :D

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              1. Hey, it’s a crime to threaten the life of a public official.
                Hmmm does that mean that the person who registered Mr. Obama with the ACA is guilty of an attempt on the President’s life? Naaa, would only be true if he, Harry, et al. were forced to actually use it.

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  6. I suspect domestic and international travails have always occupied the minds of those who noticed. Threats, real and anticipated have certainly always been present. And in many ways Americans have had the luxury of disregarding many of the threats the rest of the world has been so keenly aware of.

    The current crop of governing fools pierces that bubble, a bit. But whether or not this particular moment is more significant, of higher risk, in greater peril… I’m not sure we can say. Feels like we’re on a cusp, poised.

    I’m inclined to lean as hard as I can toward the better, and tomorrow, and the stars. If we’re going to slide down the other side, I wanna make ’em pull me down howling in rage and clawing for the other side with the stubs of my worn finger bones.

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    1. Have you ever been in an accident (or fallen) and that perfect moment when you are sure you can catch yourself and you don’t?
      I feel that moment right now– I am freaking scared out of my mind.

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          1. Yeah, there hasn’t even been enough time for anyone to forget this recent history. And here we are. Repeating it. If the midterm elections are a disaster, I swear I really will build a bunker. I don’t think MAD is going to work much longer.

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        2. I keep expecting to see news coverage on RT of an attack on a Russian TV station with the attackers in Polish military uniforms … just for symmetry.

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            2. Putin is nothing if not a traditionalist. What surprises me is that he’s auditioning for the role of “Hitler.” I would have thought, with his embrace of Muslim Terrorist States, that he was trying to be “Stalin” — you know, the party in this remake of World War II who makes all cuddly with the demons and assumes that they’ll spare him for that reason.

              Instead he wants to be the guy who gets to off himself in the bunker in one of the two climax episodes. OK …

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                1. I don’t know very much Russian history, maybe Putin is aiming to be a traditional Tsar? Ivan the Terrible perhaps. I think that Putin is too sane to be another Hitler.

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                  1. I’m thinking Alexander III, personally, or Catherine the Great (southern expansion) minus the lovers and visiting philosophers.

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                    1. Alex III, although I’ve heard that getting and keeping a warm water port is a perennial Russian objective.Aside from Finland, has Russia ever tried to acquire parts of Scandinavia?

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                    2. “minus the lovers and visiting philosophers.”

                      I could see skipping the philosophers, but everybody likes horses.

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    2. My fears tell me we’ve been tolerating the corrupt and venal too long, that the margins our forefathers built into the systems have been looted. Katrina didn’t flood New Orleans because it was a mega-storm, but because local pols preferred lining their pockets and living high over doing their jobs and ensuring the water works worked. Has that been repeated so widely we will not be able to stand a big enough disaster?

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      1. Katrina is a fine example of corruption — In New Orleans. It’s not a good example of much of any place else, fortunately. Just looking at all the areas around NO, and the areas that mobilized to respond to the troubles of NO illustrates how far below average NO was.

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        1. You really believe NO is uniquely corrupt?

          About 15 years ago I lived in Detroit. At the time they were suffering a water shortage. “Detroit” is from a French phrase meaning “the straits” — the city sits on a channel between two of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. Sure, I wouldn’t drink it as-is, but it’s treatable.

          They “didn’t have the money” for new water treatment plants. Because the money had been shuffled off to union pensions and graft and parties. Just like the pumps in NO.

          Heck, they “didn’t have the money” for repairing roads — I’ll never forget the first time I discovered Detroit considered sheets of plywood suitable for covering holes in an OVERPASS. Because, again, the money was being used for featherbedding and favoritism and set-asides.

          School districts all over the US claim they don’t have enough money to teach kids even basic skills. Yet the pupil-to-teacher ratio is at an all-time low, and the number of administrators per pupil is at an all-time high. Again, featherbedding and corruption and plain old waste.

          We’ve been eating our seed corn. Our taxes cut so deep people cannot really plan for the future — and the few places we’ve been given to save for the future are being eyed by the very same people who provided the cash for all the corruption above and more.

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          1. I think NO is a fine example of NO and Detroit a wonderful example of Detroit. I also think looking at cesspools and drawing conclusions about other bodies of water is likely to leave a fellow thirsty.

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  7. “If these aren’t the Crazy Years, they’ll do until the real thing comes along.”

    God help us if the real Crazy Years happen.

    “I keep asking people if they felt this un-secure when they were my age. Did it seem like the world teetered on the knife’s-edge of chaos?”

    OH YES! Growing up in NYC I knew I was living in the bull’s eye in the center of the target. I expected the USSR to wipe out NYC with bombs, not the terrorists to down the twin towers (which were not built yet). In any case I knew that my goal was to get out of NYC.

    However, even more than expecting the destruction of the city I was expecting the takeover of our government from within by the enemies of freedom. In those pre personal computer or Internet days, I thought buried caches of books might help in the eventual recovery.

    The details might be different, but some of my concerns have come to pass.

    On the other hand I had children, and now grandchildren, and believe that in many ways they will have better lives than we did. Those who said “I can’t bring a child into this world” are ultimately suicidal.

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    1. Try being stationed at a missile base in the ’70s.

      The joke was that we’d be the first to know of WW3 – for about a tenth of a second.

      As far as books go – I STILL buy hardback copies of reference materials. Our e-books depend on power that may or may not be available, and our ‘betters’ in the environmentalist movement seem determined to take our world of 24/7/365 reliable electricity and turn it back to the 1920s or earlier to ‘save the planet’.

      They’re luddites – they’ve just adopted the term ‘progressive’, IMHO.

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            1. It’s the dream of the anti-humanist crowd that 95-100% of Humanity dies to rid Gaia of the human cancer afflicting it.

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                1. Exactly. They are the enemy.
                  Totally OT but I highly recommend Swamp People. It’s in its 5th season and great viewing. You don’t have to have seen any of the other seasons to enjoy this one. It’s about alligator hunters in Louisiana.

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      2. There are environmentalists who want a Pleistocene rewilding in North America — to bring back the nearest equivalent of the megafauna that were wiped out by the advent of humanity. They like mustangs and feral burros, because there were equines in that era. And they want camels, elephants, jagaurs, cheetahs. . . .

        Rambunctious Garden is good for an overview, and the author has a fair amount of good sense.

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        1. I wish they’d all kill themselves and let the rest of us turn things around in our own individual, technological, non-statist, ways for the better.

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          1. To which their reaction was that the Africans have to live with dangerous wild animals for environmental purposes, why not the Americans, too?

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  8. That said, I wonder. I keep asking people if they felt this un-secure when they were my age. Did it seem like the world teetered on the knife’s-edge of chaos? Did past presidents abuse the office and the American people in the ways this one has? Reading through history, it seems like most people have experienced this kind of uncertainty. Were Romans in the streets concerned that Hannibal might take their city? Did the citizenry of Venice worry over events in London when Great Harry broke away from the control of the Vatican? Did American citizens watch the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars with the same kind of worried intensity with which we pay the events ongoing around the world? I imagine they did, at least in part.

    The only certainty throughout human history was uncertainty. (That sounds like something that was said by someone important, but I _THINK_ it’s a Jimbo original. Unless I poached the idea without meaning to.) Nobody ever knows what’s coming next, and in the case of the Useful Idiots(TM) they’re never sure if they’re going to win, until they do and find out that they’ve lost.

    I think Tom Clancy said it best when he stated that, “The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.” Who would honestly have thought, at the time and given the fact that it was the first Communist government, that Russians would fight to give power to a government that would massacre so many of them? It boggles the mind, but they did it.

    As for your examples, it’s hard to say. Romans who knew something but not enough about the situation probably did worry about Hannibal. (He had no chance to take the city due to lack of seige engines/engineers.) The rest though…uhhh… Who knows? What American would worry about the French Revolution with an ocean in the way, but then the French had saved us during the American Revolution sooo… Yeah, I dunno either.

    What I can tell you, from talking to a man who was writing a book about the subject, is that United Auto Workers members were scared half to death during the 1950s when, legend has it, everything was wonderful and rosy. They were all afraid of losing their jobs, the increase in educational requirements (I remember talking to my uncle and how surprised he was when a high school diploma became mandatory) and rising prices, etc. (For those that don’t know I live near Detroit and graduated with a BA in History from Oakland University, about thirty minutes north of the city.) Those were the _good_ times. Of course, over all of it was the threat of nuclear holocaust as well, but why let that ruin a good time? I won’t mention McCarthy. That would just be rude.

    No time is ever easy to the people who live through it and yet I still think we’ve got it worse than most. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out though.

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    1. I’ve been living in the 17th century again recently, and no matter where on the planet you were, life was uncertain. Civil wars (Iberia), the 30 Years War and a few others (north of the Alps), Manchu invasion (China), Europeans vs Ottomans vs Persians, droughts, floods, freezes, famine around the globe, plague, life just sucked if you needed certainty. But out of it came, slowly, a better world.

      What makes me growl now is that we know bad things that could happen, and those in power can’t be bothered to make the investments in people and infrastructure to ameliorate, if not prevent, most of them. Instead they prattle about -isms, economic unfairness, and sing “Its a Small World” in anticipation that Czar Putin and his fellow travelers will pick up the chorus. Flippin’ idjits. (And apologies if anyone got an earworm).

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      1. Remember back in 2000 when they declaimed:”Drilling in ANWAR is no use — it will be ten years before any of that oil reaches the market!”

        Give them credit, there is one problem they want us to prepare for: AGW. Of course, their prescription for that is the same snake oil they’ve been peddling for five hundred years, proof that there is always a ready market for boys’ bands if you know how to stimulate the masses.

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    2. “No time is ever easy to the people who live through it and yet I still think we’ve got it worse than most. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out though.”

      Worse than most who? Not worse than most of the people in the world certainly. Worse than at any time in the past of the US? Maybe. Certainly the State keeps growing, so it’s worse in that sense. Are we at a tipping point? It feels more and more like that every year, but is that just because I’m getting old? On the other hand, there’s no denying that Obama is more of a constitutional criminal than Bush was, and Bush wasn’t good.

      On the gripping hand….which way do we tip?

      There are the governments of the world printing currency like there is no tomorrow. And there is bitcoin.

      There are feminists trying to get discrimination outlawed. And there are feminists funding charitable foundations to support women, and building companies that support women.

      There are State schools that indoctrinate our kids. And there are college kids who flocked to Ron Paul’s banner.

      There are an ever increasing number of regulations making it difficult to produce new and innovative products, or even to reproduce or produce existing products. And there is 3D printing.

      There are lots of attempts to ban and control firearms. And there are now more states where concealed carry is at least legal, and there are Defense Unlimited’s 3D printing blueprints.

      There are a lot of people who have relatively useless educations and not a lot of skills useful in a world undergoing serious disruption, and there is the Maker movement.

      There is the NSA spying on everyone. And there is encryption.

      There are central points where the Internet could be disrupted. And there is hardware and software that exists now for building mesh networks, when the time comes that we need it.

      In my opinion (in my hopes?) America *is* different. As the noose of the collectivists tightens, I believe our response will be unlike it has been anywhere else in the world, in degree if not in kind. I expect some things to get worse while other things are getting better, but I think the other side has already lost, they just don’t know it yet.

      Call me a crazy optimist, but it helps me sleep at night :)

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      1. “There are State schools that indoctrinate our kids. And there are college kids who flocked to Ron Paul’s banner.”

        Not seeing an upside on either one of those.

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      2. You can join my crazy optimist club, we’ve got room. We’ve always got room. And I firmly believe we’ll always have room.

        ;)

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    3. “Romans who knew something but not enough about the situation probably did worry about Hannibal. (He had no chance to take the city due to lack of seige engines/engineers.) The rest though…uhhh… Who knows?”

      I seem to recall reading that Hannibal scared the Bejesus out of the Romans. ALL the Romans. Both while he was wreaking havoc on the Italian countryside and afterwards. He was the biggest boogeyman in their entire history.

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  9. A bit off topic. We saw Divergent last night. Did Holywood actually make a movie about rebelling against enforced social roles? Did they actually have the well educated, politically active, social scientist (what do you get when you cross and Hillary Clinton with Nancy Pelosi?) powerful woman as the Bad Guy?

    And there were other ways the movie was an eye-roller. Unbelieveable world building (where’re the manufacturerers? Who makes those spiffy uniforms?) long build up, predictable plot, insufficient motivation of the Bad Guys, etc, etc . . . Oh, there was plenty of good stuff, but on the whole a bit of a strain to the suspension of belief.

    But the biggest boggle was just the whole “rebel against the round hole they are pounding your square peg into” theme. Maybe they just don’t understand what they just did. Maybe they think that they are the rebels. As they pigeonhole people by race, sex, sexual orientation . . .

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    1. I think they’ve always thought they were the rebels. As they grow ever more regimented in their thinking.

      Everybody else wields the hammer, doncha know?

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      2. Every body wants to be “different” – ‘most everybody but Hollywood grows out of thinking it’s really so.

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    2. “(what do you get when you cross and Hillary Clinton with Nancy Pelosi?) ”

      A HAZMAT incident from all the Botox(tm).

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        1. Be warned: the internets is mostly porn, so you might not want the neighbors watching when you unbox it.

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            1. Judging by the advertisement banners every time I check my email there is a noticeable percent of the internet that is pornographic social media.

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    3. I’ve been assured that the next books/movies explain the divisions in that society, and just wait for the next book/movie. I’ll shortcut the problem and not read/watch the first one. As much as I’d like to see them work, I’ve got characters to kill off, a city to besiege, empires to corrupt, you know. *wink*

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              1. Or read it.

                On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 2:30 PM, According To Hoyt wrote:

                > Jerry Lawson commented: “”The Princess Bride”. You’ll know after you > watch it.” >

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    4. I watched Firefly and was gobsmacked when I found out that Whedon was a lefty. So yes, they have no idea of what they are fighting for or against. (I swear Whedon killed the project when he found out who identified with the brown coats)

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      1. I think it had more to with Fox constantly switching around when it aired, but you could be right.

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  10. “Were Romans in the streets concerned that Hannibal might take their city?”

    Yes, especially after Cannae. It was their third major defeat at his hands, with no real victories to offset them, and left them with effectively no army and not even enough Senators to convene the Senate.

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