Year: 2015

So the endless recovery – tm — comes with a load of depression. I’ve been assured this is normal (oh, no. Tell me it’s abnormal. At least I’ll feel like I’m unique.)

Part of the way depression manifests in me as thinking everything I do is bad, and everything and everyone around me is tarnished by my incompetence, and…

Yes, I do know what part is real and what part is Memorex, because being me requires me to spend an enormous amount of time watching myself and making sure I’m not telling myself stories. Because it’s so easy to do.

I have been thinking of that – for obvious reasons – because of the whole “drinking your own ink” effect of our elites, and also because I’m thinking of stories in relation to culture and how to change culture with stories, and how that is in fact the only way to change it in the long run.

Not that the culture is ever exactly like the stories. I mean, look, if you don’t believe me go read a bio of Leonardo Da Vinci from the Renaissance, one from the Victorian age and one from our own time. You’ll see the gloss that was “approved” at the time. (It is common to blame Victorians for doing this, but every culture does it. Ours delights in picking on scabs and trying to bring geniuses down to our pedestrian level.)

Part of what’s fueling the depression is that I really want to write, but even doing these posts makes me nauseated. I think that is partly the effort of thinking through painkillers and partly the fact that I bet my astigmatism has changed completely yet again (the sort of seasick nausea is typical of when my astigmatism is out of whack.) This is to be expected since it changes with every hormonal shift and has been in continuous change the last two years – so bad I can only drive for a month or two after new glasses – and there’s nothing to be done there, because I am not going to get new glasses until April 30^th to make sure I’m past all of it, because I can’t afford to. So. So I’ll have to bite the bullet.

Anyway, so instead of writing, because I can’t force myself to sleep all the time, I’m watching a lot of documentaries while sitting on a recliner. If you want the full horror of this you should shashay over to mad genius club, where I describe some of the gems.

But the documentary I watched tonight is about the terracotta army, which was apparently built by the first emperor, a tyrannical warlord that conquered China by the force of arms.

Note that one of the things he did first (and a lot of his successors did) was burn books and forbid grannies to tell stories. This means he knew the importance of stories, and when he was making a country out of many warrying states, he wanted to make sure the only tales were the ones he allowed.

The other thing was the terracotta army. I don’t know how widespread belief in an after life was in China at that time, but it clearly existed, and he believed in it enough to conscript hundreds of thousands to build him an army to protect him after death.

None of us has been there. We might have experienced supernatural (I have) but these things are possible of other explanations. So what he believed in, heart and soul (and fortune) was a story. A story that (probably) turned out to be wrong (unless there are realms where those terracotta warriors mean something.)

The Egyptian elite did something similar.

I don’t want you to consider it (just) from the point of view of drinking your own ink, though both of these were insular cultures that considered themselves superior to every other. But I don’t want to mock even their religious beliefs, simply because that is a realm where none of us can say we know how others are dealt with or in what way things are arranged. Yes, I know what I believe, but I have friends who believe vastly differently, and Himself up there, if He’s there, is a multidimensional time-ignoring creature and who wants to second guess Him? Or who can even approximate His thoughts?

No. What I want you to think about are these powerful rulers, facing the ultimate oblivion. And all that stands between them and the eternal is ultimately a thin veneer of story.

Enough story to conscript massive resources he could have better employed.

Faith? I wouldn’t call it that.

He didn’t go willingly, precisely. He wanted to live forever, which seems to be a peculiar Chinese madness.

But he needed that story to take him into the darkness.

And he knew the power of stories because he burned the stories that opposed them.

For decades now, our gatekeepers have been involved in an attempt to forge a people without past (or future) by metaphorically destroying or making inaccessible all the stories that don’t support the narrative they want us to believe. News, History, Stories, even religion, they’ve tried to deprive us of all of them (one of these is the however many ways to die in the west, which is trying to destroy our idea of the old west as a land of heroes.)

And now we have the internet.

I don’t know how long the freedom will last (I would bet it will be restored, if it fails) but I know they’re trying to clamp down on it already.

I also know the more widespread the use of these free means of communication, in story and news, in history and eventually perhaps in movie, too, the harder for them to snuff it out fully.

So run like the wind my friends, and sow story to the winds in all your voices.

To change a culture in a short time (and they’re betting on a short time) they need that single focus. They need to “burn” everything they disagree with, by either making inaccessible or discrediting it.

Read the forbidden. It puts hair on your chest and gives the SJWs the vapors (not that this is difficult.)

Stay free.

 

I am one of those people who doesn’t get along with her body. Or, as my son calls it “inadvertent suicides” by which he means in his work at the emergency room he sees many people come in who are at or almost near the point of death but who put off coming in because they were convinced that their symptoms were “nothing.”

I add another layer to that in that I don’t trust my body further than I can throw it, and at the current avoir du pois I can’t jump that far. I.e. I expect my body to be influenced by my mind and my mind is full of iniquity. It wouldn’t be the first time I tried to write something that I darn well DIDN’T WANT to write, and my body did the good ol’ shut down and “we’re going to turn off in five minutes.”

Well, maybe that wasn’t true. Because you see, there’s always another way to look at it. That’s what I assumed the problem was at the time, but it now seems fairly sure I was actually in horrible shape, and could sort of force myself to write books I really wanted to write, but the others just let the body win, because the body was all screwed up.

In fact, in view of recent discoveries, it’s a miracle I’ve functioned as well as I have for the last 15 years or so, and not a surprise at all it came to near total shutdown these last two years.

That’s not the subject, here, but it is important to know that every time we find out there was a reason behind behavior I had trouble combating, I am relieved: it wasn’t my fault after all. I’m not trying to avoid work, and I’m not very lazy. There is a physical root to all these troubles, and the route can be taken care of.

Even if the route couldn’t be taken care of, it would be a relief to know it wasn’t my fault. And I probably could fight it better knowing it was “real.”

Maybe I’m peculiarly put together (No duh, Sarah?), maybe not. Even if I am peculiarly put together, we all know our country is peculiarly put together too.

(Yeah, I heard that “What?” Bear with me. I haven’t had Percocet since last night having reached the point the pain is preferable to the nausea, but it takes a while to clear from the system.)

Part of the problem with self government is that we each of us blame ourselves for the mess we’re in. Actually what is really funny for people my generation is that we tend to blame ourselves for pretty much everything.

The problem with taking a snapshot of the country as it is in this position in time and seeing all the problems is that we tend to despair. You hear all the variants “Oh, look, the thing is, the country isn’t the same it wasn’t at the founding, and so…”

No, and that’s a given. Fortunately humanity, technology and the world aren’t what they were at the founding, either. (Trust me, you wouldn’t like it.)

And the US IS change. We’re an engine of change in the world, which is why someone either Bill Whittle or Ed Driscol, (can’t remember. Percocet) coined the phrase that “the future comes from America.”

We are the scary-serious kid who not only comes in and takes the lead in the class, but who is always inventing new things no one would have thought of without him.

The problem is this: the ideas of our founding, that grand resounding poetry of the declaration of independence are so new, so strange, so revolutionary that it couldn’t come to fruition in the world as it was now.

I’ll let CACS talk about it some time, but the more I study, the more I see those grand ideas honored more in the breach.

Becoming America is a job of retreat and stumble, of standing up and of crawling, of moving by inches towards being what we said we were, and of being buffeted almost all the way back.

You can read the history, it’s there. From the Alien and Sedition act, to situations as dire as the Woodrow Wilson Admnistration. And then the interesting vortex of soviet propaganda and population glut of the sixties which seems to be destroying our culture from within.

But it isn’t. Or not really. It’s just another step on the road to becoming America. Okay, maybe it’s the baseball bat to the face and set back six feet. But the game started LONG before anyone now alive was born. And it will go on long after we’re dead.

Think of it as sort of my relationship with my body. By all that’s right and holy, born at home, in the middle of winter, extremely premature, I shouldn’t have survived the night. I certainly shouldn’t have functioned enough to finish elementary school, much less advanced studies. I spent the greatest part of my childhood on bed rest, though that’s not the part I remember (Though it’s why I’m bookish, I think. Otherwise I’d never have stopped long enough to learn to read.) And most of my life has been negotiated against the perpetually breaking down body.

But if you don’t know that, if you don’t see, as I do (and despair of) the long periods of silence and illness, it seems like I’m always on the go.

Because there’s things I must do to be me. So I do them. When I can. The hardest thing being to have patience and to take it slow with the down periods.

America is like that too, because it’s such a huge idea it has trouble fitting in with the human condition.

Which is why we go through some pretty dark periods.

It might look like the end, but it’s not, because our founding is one of those ideas that once unleashed on the world can’t be put down. We just have to figure out how to bring reality in conformance to it. And a great part of the despair is that we (my generation in particular) feel guilty. We weren’t taught. We didn’t know. We collaborated with the enemy unknowing.

But all that is small, in the spread of time from the founding and the spread of the time to the future. And we were just picking up the standard where it lay, and now we’re carrying it. The game will go on a long time. We shouldn’t try and can’t expect to win it all today.

The patient has been sick a long time. We must be tolerant of relapses and naps.

Teach your children well!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Don’t despair. You’re not supposed to do all of it today. It doesn’t all rest on your shoulders. Be patient with the foibles of humanity. Be patient with our occasional crawls in the mud. See where the standard bearer last fell. Pick up the flag and run with it.

America comes from the future, and that’s where we’re headed. That future where we’ll finally figure out how to live up to our founding.

Lift that flag. We’re becoming America.

Creative Destruction – Cedar Sanderson

 

I was introduced to this term this week when I was invited to create a presentation for a panel of this title. I’d never heard it before, and didn’t know precisely what it was all about, but the summary I was given sparked my imagination.

What can destructive forces create? What can they precipitate from the solution, sparking the coalescence of something new, and sometimes unpredictable, from human civilization catalyzed with tragedy?

I began my presentation with the Black Death in Europe. It’s the little things in life; that kill us and change our world. Fleas, in this case, carrying a disease between rats and humans. The numbers are soft, but estimates range around 25 million deaths from that epidemic, during the time it raged hotly over the continent, and many hundreds of thousands more in the centuries after. However, in the wake of all the death and destruction, there was change.

It is arguable that the Black Death led to the fall of serfdom, as labor was no longer readily and cheaply available – there simply weren’t enough bodies left standing. The plague led to the fall of the Roman Catholic Empire as it was, and the rise of Protestantism. And in a burst of pure creativity of the Arts, the Black Death led to the Renaissance, Shakespeare, and the glory that was that movement in art and literature.

But it was not the first time the plague had touched Western Civilization. Around 600 ad, the Justinian plague had struck, felling what was left of the Roman Empire, and establishing the course of the initial burst of European world domination. Both pandemics were much, much later confirmed to have the same originator, Yersinia pestis. It is the microscopic things.

There’s a song, which I can’t remember all the lyrics to (and I don’t know who performs it) but this much I recall: War! What is it good for?

The answer is deeply complex. I will leave the political and social considerations aside to talk about the benefits to medicine. Indeed, most modern medicine has been altered in some way by battlefield hospital needs. But during the Crimean War, death skyrocketed. Not from wounds received in battle, but disease. Florence Nightingale, who most people think of as the Mother of Nursing, was also responsible for mothering another field of medicine as she plotted when and why men were dying, and ferreted out the correlations and causations. It was war that led Florence Nightingale to leave her comfortable home and give birth to Epidemiology.

But a virus can also end a war. World War I, or the Great War, might have dragged on and on into the Eternal War, had not the influenza pandemic of 1918 taken all the wind out of the warring nation’s sails with the deaths of millions of relatively young and healthy people. And in an example of how telling the truth can sometimes get you in trouble: Spain was initially blamed for the pandemic, because they were a neutral nation, and their reporters were allowed to talk about the sickness, unlike those of France, Germany, and the US.

And enduring myth – one that is still taught in schools, is that disease helped conquer the ‘New World’ (in reality, an old one, just like buying a used car, you still call it the New Car) as the European explorers brought previously unknown diseases with them to the shores. The reality is that the Incas fell to a vastly inferior Spanish force because they had been racked with a ten-year drought, and a plague epidemic. Many other diseases were endemic to the region, and famine was Death’s stalking-horse long before Europe got involved.

In return for the new diseases, the trade went both ways. Europeans took home many new and interesting things from the ‘New World’ including foodstuffs. Sometime later, after the aristos with their financial interest in marketing the new foods made potatoes popular (Marie Antoinette, in an effort to popularize the potato, wore potato flowers in her hair), the inevitable happened. Overreliance on one crop, and that crop was struck down with a plant epidemic – the potato blight. Back to the ‘New World’ only now it was starving, desperate men and women, serving terms of indenturement that was virtually slavery, sold into servitude by the failure of a food crop.

We rarely consider what would happen should a viroid (a plant virus) get loose and strike down one of the ‘staff of life’ foodstuffs that virtually the entire world depends on. The Staff of Life was almost kicked out from under us once, when wheat rust threatened to diminish the food produced by the US and shipped globally. Only through the efforts of a small team including Norman Borlaug (the Father of the Green Revolution), a process that took fourteen years, was wheat bred into a more resistant variety and stopped the threat of the rust. Borlaug went on to help countries like Pakistan and India develop their agriculture to the point of self-sufficiency, and that came from the threatened ruin of wheat rust.

I ended by talking about telomeres. The heterochromatic caps that protect the tips of our chromosomes, they do not replicate because they are so compressed, and as they wear away with age, we slowly self-destruct. Yet in that destruction, is there not also creativity? Would we be so driven to write, to create art, to live with passion, if we knew we had more time? In our own destruction, we create new life, and know that life is good, and will endure.

I must admit that though I learned to read sometime between four and six, I learned to read Disney comics.  it was easy, after having the stuff read to me so much to sort of remember the words that went with the actions.

My brother did character voices, which made it easier to remember.  After that I read Disney comics whenever I didn’t have much mental space for anything else.  This is weird since — unlike my kids — I never got into “people” comics, which included mystery comics (really big in Portugal) and romance comics.  As for superhero comics, I liked Superman.  Also, for a brief time there was a comic series that might have been Brazilian or Portuguese (or at least I haven’t been able to trace it in the US) called something like Heroes of Atlantis.  When Atlantis was doomed, a few people managed to save themselves in a secret base under the North Pole, while most of the survivors descended into barbarism.  Over time the ones preserving civilization (and living essentially forever) become “gods” of ancient myth and go around the world, doing good and having adventures.  By the time I read that one I was deep into mythology, and I liked the not-quite resonance, which you often also get in fantasy and science fiction.

But the duck comics remained favorites, because they’re introductions to “geek culture” as well as very easy to digest.  Whenever I was “fried” (and given my school load, I was often fried) I’d read the comics.

Years later, in the US, I found myself with the problem of getting younger son to read.  Because verbal is not his main thing, he managed to get past the complexity of books he could actually read.  What I mean is, he was at a level to read picture books, but they bored him stiff.  His mind was not interested in simplistic plots told in five pages.

So I thought of Disney comics.  I went through the net looking for who was publishing the comics then.  And I found that the company was going out of business and for 2k they’d sent you a copy of every book they’d ever published in like 10 years.

Well, I didn’t have that, but I had $500 which bought something like 1 thousand assorted comics.  I remember the day the box was dropped on the patio.  It was… interesting.  It worked too.  Within a year my boy was reading for fun, and getting upset because the comics didn’t last long enough, which is when I introduced Heinlein juveniles.  In the process I renewed my love for the comics, and his older brother became a fan too.  We still go into old comic stores and look through the used “trash” comics bins for old Disney comics.  It’s a part of our ritual in any new place.

So since my babysitters husband and sons decided I’ve been overexerting (they have some support for this in the fact that today I felt seedy as heck) and because the wild Sarah of the West is hard to restrain, younger son unearthed his carefully boxed collection and is letting me read it.

Yes, there is a point to this post.  Hold on, okay?

I like the really old comics — Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson and also Don Rosa, who is my sons’ idol — not so old as to be the daily strips or to have Mickey run around with only shorts, but old enough to have fun adventures.  Stories where Uncle Scrooge and the boys tumble into Atlantis were my first introduction to the mythical continent.  And Gottfredson wrote good mysteries with an edge of the fantastic for Mickey.

Now, I’m not going to say that all of the modern stuff is dross.  Obviously it’s not, though some of the writers seem to aim more at… well… children.  While the animal comics were always interesting for children, they always had more depth than that.

But a lot of the modern comics are from Europe and… oh, wally wally wally.

I think there is a reason these companies that publish the comics tend to go under when they start de-emphasizing the old stuff and pushing the new translation-from-Europe.

First, let me say that like all the other geek interests, from SF to gaming, Disney comics are our people.  In face when I first bought the old comics, I giggled at finding many familiar (fan and author) names in the letters to the editor.

And I think like the other parts of geekdom they were invaded by SJWs, only earlier, and through a strange route.

You see, in Europe most people read Disney comics.  Omnibuses(eseseses) of various kinds are published all the time, and they’re sold in train stations and airports.  Most of the writers are therefore European.  And Europe, poor sods, swallowed the SJW thing hook line and sinker much earlier and deeper than we did.

(I blame it on the shock from WWI and WWII.  But really, their schools teach stuff like patriotism is bad, making money is bad, etc. etc. etc.)

Anyway, when companies get the Disney license in the US they tend to first publish the classics, then slowly move on to European translations.  Then they go under.

Since mostly when I re-read (and there are hundreds, and I hadn’t touched them in 15 years) I read one or two and then store them again, I hadn’t noticed the pattern.  But I’ve spent days reading them, in order.

The recent ones don’t get thrown across the room only because they’re younger son’s and he’s parsnekity.

But…  I reached the culmination of a story and the hero walks away from a deal that would make a miserable little village rich because “money is bad and would just give them problems like ours.”  Then there are avowals that Scrooge would never deal in guns.  And…

And I realized the problem with the modern stories from Europe is not that I disagree with their “morals” (I mean, Scrooge keeping all his money in a megabin was not exactly a moral I agreed with either) but that they’re no fun at all.  Just when the action gets serious or the dilema important, instead of solving it, one of the author-puppet characters, which are usually the “women” or the “kids” stand up and do a little speech about how righteous they are.  Everyone agrees.  The end.

I sought out younger son to discuss this.  He said “oh, yeah.  The problem is I don’t think they know how to have fun.  The whole concept of “writing something fun which might have a moral in it” evades them.  They think lecturing people and preening on their superiority is fun, so they don’t get why you wouldn’t ENJOY being lectured.”

It was a bit of a shock, because it made sense.  These are people whose idea of “fun” is “being good little girls” (even the boys.  Particularly the boys) and being praised for it.

They honestly have no clue how one would have any enjoyment of life on one’s own. Fun must be had in the fashion currently approved of by the “better people” — this is, I think the reason why their doddering presidential heir presumptive thinks adults in the US need “fun camps” to regiment them into having fun.

We’ve often referred to lefty politics being a sort of religion, but the sad thing is that it’s not even an inner improvement religion, but the sort of religious practice you do in public so others might admire you.

Realizing this brought to mind years back, when for reasons known only to the psychiatrist I’ll eventually have, I found myself as a member of a Romance Writers’ group (honestly, the kids were little, we were (very) broke and I hoped to be able to write the stuff because it made more than SF ever did.)  When talk turned to heroes and characters that are ideal, I mentioned that my favorite type of man is the one who is introverted enough in the beginning of the book he might seem uncaring, until you find out that while he might despise beggars or phony “needy” people, he’s been secretly giving money to help single mothers with small children, volunteering at a school for disadvantaged children and giving poor people business loans to start their own business.

I expected maybe disagreement, but what I got instead was screaming and yelling and telling me my idea of a hero was “plain mean” and so was I.  Apparently these people thought what your left hand did without the right knowing was not only NOT more laudable, but was mean.  To be a good man/good person, you had to do the approved charities and TALK ABOUT DOING THEM AND ABOUT WHY YOU WERE SO GREAT FOR DOING THEM.

I still don’t get it, but I guess in a universe where lecturing people is the only worth in a story, bragging of your charity is the true charity.

None of which is going to convince me to like their “approved” stories; make me believe the color/gender/orientation of the author is more important than the writing; or give a good goddamn about their ideas of good and evil.

I have considered stories outside my opinion/comfort zone, and sometimes changed my mind because of a story (gun control.  Red Planet.)  BUT the story was first of all fun in the sense of being a narrative with beginning middle and end.  And then it had a message woven through, in a way that when I put the book down and thought about it made me consider the author’s point of view.

Now, I don’t require a message to enjoy a story.  My favorite (Don Rosa) Uncle Scrooge story is one in which under attack by Magica DeSpell, Donald and Scrooge forget the funniest things.  (The story is, I think, called Forget It.)  The spell is that if someone says your name, you lose all memory of the thing they mention next.  So when Scrooge says “Donald, open the door” Donald loses all memory of “doors” and can’t figure out how to get out of the room.  And when Donald shouts “Uncle Scrooge, the Stairs!” Scrooge forgets how stairs and falls.

Now, the story does have a message, though never brought home: in the end of the story Donald can’t walk or talk, so Uncle Scrooge, who also can’t walk, uses him as the log for log rolling and to stop Magica stealing the #1 dime.  So there is a “never give up, never surrender” moral to it.

Is that why I like it?  I don’t think so.  As a woman who is both enamored of words and scared of dementia, I found the premise turned something I flinch from as terrifying funny, which is one of the keys to humor, of course.

Now, the moral didn’t hurt.  The same sort of story that ended with “We must destroy all machines and live as primitives” as a background moral would probably spoil my enjoyment of it somewhat, though I might still like it at the “gag” level.

However, the same story with Magica taking time in the middle to explain that language is patriarchal oppression (in a non-funny way) would get tossed against the wall (and then I’d explain it to younger son.)

Is there anything we can do to redeem these people who think preening and doing the “approved” stuff is the “only” fun?

I don’t know.  I can’t even conceive their state of mind, so it’s hard to think how to reach them.

I guess I’ll keep writing stories that are both fun and non-preachy, even if there tends to be a background moral.

Eventually they’ll get tired of things that fall into their hands tanking and find something more in line with their talents.  Preaching or forming the convent of our lady of perpetual redistribution or something.

And meanwhile the rest of us will ignore their careful gatekeeping and read and write and have fun too.

… or I will once my jailors family lets me up and allows me to work again.

Until then, there’s Disney comics.  I haven’t even broken into the stock of Mickey Mouse from when Mickey ran around chasing ghosts with guns the size of his head.

And Carl Barks and Don Rosa often have more explosions than a Baen book.  Sometimes even rockets.

And hopefully next week I’ll be able to write without passing out for hours at a time.

Tribalism in SF – Sanford Begley

Humans are a tribal species. We all have tribes we belong to and resonate with. That doesn’t mean the tribe is monolithic for us, just that those in various tribes have similar views on various subjects. For example I fit into the MilSf tribe rather handily. i like the genre and communicate well with most of the tribe members. While most of us will read some varying amount of social consciousness SF we are not driven by its precepts. If the social consciousness drowns out the story we are unhappy. Similarly if the gun geeking that can be a part of MilSF overpowers the story line it will drive away the social conscious readers.

The problem then becomes how much is too much. It really depends on how powerful the story is. Speaking for myself the social consciousness in Scalzi’s Old Mans War was more than covered by the gripping nature of the MilSF elements. I know others who felt his message got in the way. Joe halderman’s Forever War actually had more message but had fewer people bothered by the messaging.  On the other end of the scale we have If You Were A Dinosaur My love. Which was all message and not even remotely SF by my standards. Those of my tribe use it as an example of what is wrong with the other tribe.

The problem with this is that tribes have traditionally gone to war over differences. We in SF are little different. The ones who favor hardware and story are engaged in a long running battle with those who favor message. The war has had gruesome casualties. Any number of authors have been driven to other genres, even quit writing rather than engage. Neither side seems to be able to read what the other side actually writes. We filter through our own prejudices and don’t necessarily even understand what the other side is saying. This leads to a well known author on the Social side printing what are, in effect, flat out lies about what an editor on the MilSF side wrote in an editorial, The authors fan base rallied behind him. They all claim that the lies he wrote were what the editor said rather than reading what she said and seeing the truth.

Similarly I have seen bloggers on the MilSF side read objections from the social side and go on the attack. not because the person on the social side actually said anything that wasn’t true, simply because the blogger interpreted things in the worst possible light.
The sad thing is that except for the extremists on either side, neither is right or wrong, simply different. This is seriously exacerbated by a small but vicious and vocal minority on one side that attacks everything said by the other and flat out lies constantly. Besmirching the name and reputation of others, even on their own side that will not Kowtow to their radical stance.

What i would like to see on a daily basis is for both sides to reach out and try to find common ground. We will never agree, but we should remember that we have a common enemy. The Mundanes may overrun both tribes some day if we can’t join together. We all mourned the passing of Spock. I wish we could remember our common grounds without the loss of more of our own.

A brush with voter fraud

By Tom Knighton

There’s been a lot of talk about voter fraud through the years. For very good reason, it’s something people take seriously and want to kill with fire. Well, a lot of us at least. However, people often have a misunderstanding about the forms that voter fraud takes. Having looked into events surrounding a local election here in Albany, Georgia, I have a unique perspective on how it actually happens.

My understanding started with a phone call. A woman, who I’ll call “Kelly” since she asked me to remain anonymous, had worked on a local campaign for a mayoral candidate I’d endorsed. That year, we had several new candidates and Kelly worked with one and was friends with another.

“I’ve got to tell you about what happened,” she said. This, however, requires a bit of time travel. (Hey, I’m a science fiction writer. I can do that, right?)

Kelly was in a downtown Albany restaurant when she was approached by a woman who wanted to talk about Kelly’s candidate and the campaign. The woman asked Kelly if they had “done their math” regarding how many votes they needed to win.

Unsure of what she meant, Kelly tried to answer.

This person told Kelly, and the candidate of another race, that for the right price, she could provide however many votes they wanted.

Now, I don’t think Kelly bought this, and neither did the candidate who is named Melissa.

Election night arrived, and I’d put the weekly issue of my newspaper to bed. I just had to get up at ridiculously early in the morning to get the physical papers from the printer, but that was nothing. It was election night!

I hit the first election night party, the one for Kelly’s candidate. It was early, and the mayoral elections would probably go to a run off anyways based on what I was seeing, so I only stayed a few minutes.

I then went around the corner to a watch party being held by a couple of candidates, including Melissa. The returns were coming in, and it looked like one of the candidates was about to lose to a veteran incumbent who not only held the seat, but has served as a mayor in another town several years before and was a well liked college professor.

Melissa’s race looked much different, however. She was winning.

As I left the party for the serenity of my bed, one of the local TV stations arrived to interview Melissa. After all, they were about to call the race of her. I had to agree, it looked like she had it easily.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I got up the next morning and saw that she’d lost.

A few days later came Kelly’s call. The woman Kelly spoke with told her that her method worked beautifully, and no one got caught because they used absentee ballots.

I started looking into the matter. Sure enough, in Melissa’s race, there was a massive number of absentee ballots coming from just one precinct.

Now, Melissa’s district was mostly working class folks, and this was in November. This wasn’t the time when people would go on vacation.

Every set of numbers I looked at failed to pass the sniff test. Melissa decided to hire an attorney and file a lawsuit regarding some irregularities during the election. During that process, she got records from the absentee ballots themselves, and based on what we both saw, we now understood how voter fraud happens and where reform efforts truly need to be directed.

The people selling the votes worked in a nursing home in that precinct. By Georgia law, an individual can have assistance in filling out their absentee ballot. However, the law also dictates that a given person can only help a few folks with their ballot. This, obviously, is done to prevent one person from having too much sway on the electoral process.

What was really happening, however, is that the “crew” involved would fill out the ballots for the residents of the nursing home. A handful would be signed by the individuals directly, but only as many as permitted by law. After that, they used other names.

So, how do I know there was something hinky going on?

Well, one of the first clues I noticed was the incredibly high rate of absentee ballots form that particular precinct. This wasn’t a presidential election year. These were all local elections. To be frank, most residents in nursing homes aren’t that concerned with local elections. For better or worse, they’re insulated from the effects of local government. This was shown with how few absentee ballots were filled out in other precincts with nursing homes.

Next, there was the fact that a large number these were single race voters, meaning they only voted in Melissa’s race. A single city commission race drew more attention than a mayoral race? If you buy that, you and I need to talk about some bridges I think you should own.

However, the most damning evidence came from Melissa. You see, she and her attorney were the ones with the ballot stubs. While they couldn’t see how anyone voted—nor should they have been—they could see who voted. Two piece emailed to me included the ballot of a woman, probably a resident of the nursing home. This woman, for whatever reason, required assistance filling out her ballot. In and of itself, nothing major.

What was significant, however, was that this woman was apparently able to help someone else fill out their ballot.

OK, let’s let that sink in for a moment.

Yes, she was unable to fill out her ballot without assistance, but was able to help someone else fill out their own.

Here’s where the problems come into play. For all the joking about the dead voting in places like Chicago, and I have little doubt that happens, those kinds of voter fraud are kind of tricky to pull off. They’re difficult and complicated, especially as ID technology becomes more advanced. In Georgia, our state issued ID cards contain codes that are scanned and make it harder to fake for voting purposes.

Absentee ballots, however, are a different matter. They’re designed for people who can’t physically be at the polling place. This is the only means for the vast majority of people serving in the military to vote. Also, there are voters in nursing homes who want to take part of the process, but are bedridden and unable to go themselves.

However, the standards for identification are significantly lower. This makes them an excellent tool for those who wish to influence elections for their own gain.

Further, groups can pull this off in almost any town. You don’t need the large numbers of people like Chicago or New York. No, you only need a few nursing homes or other places where registered voters reside but are unable to go and vote.

Much of the discussion on combating voter fraud focuses on ID requirements. Proponents of tougher ID requirements argue that requiring ID for all voters simply makes sense. Opponents argue that it will disenfranchise voters. Frankly, the opponents are full of it. We’ve been requiring ID in Georgia for years, and it’s worked out fine.

However, the flip side is that proponents are fighting on a front in a battle and have no clue that entire divisions are flanking them. The truth is, using absentee ballots simply makes the ID discussions pointless. Make it tougher to physically vote in a precinct all you want. There’s an easier way for them to do it already, and I suspect they’re already using it quite effectively.

So, that leaves us with how to fix this. After all, pointing out a problem only helps so much. Floating ideas on how to fix the problem is also important. Unfortunately, we find ourselves butting up against two problems. One is making sure that everyone entitled to vote has the opportunity to do so. The other is not preventing people who have difficulties from getting help.

However, I’m biased as hell. You see, I’ve watched my home town mimic Detroit in far too many ways to make me comfortable. My solution is to eliminate the “help” for people with absentee ballots and require an ID on file with a signature that can be compared to the ballot’s signature.

There is an alternative, however. Ballot helpers should be required to be registered (similar to voters), and must provide a state issued ID card to register. This eliminates the ability for the crew to just make up names for people to “help” with ballots.

Also, if you need help with your ballot, you do not get to help someone else. This may hamstring the ability of fraudsters from being able to recycle names such as we found with Melissa’s race.

Our electoral process is one of the greatest things about our nation. If we dislike our leadership, we can overturn it the next time around. It deserves respect, and the people who sell votes and use corrupt methods to get preferred people elected aren’t doing that. They’re playing with a system that made our nation the model for so many others throughout the world.

Like it or not, this is how a lot of fraud is happening, and it’s being ignored by those with the power to do something about it. That needs to change.

We interrupt the scheduled program for an update on the state of the Sarah.

So, I had surgery Monday, and first I want to say that the anesthesia was a oh, wow. Partly, I was lucky getting an anesthesiologist with a sense of humor. When I told him I started problems with anesthesia by not going under with chloroform (Portugal 65) he solemnly promised me not to use chloroform.

But the fact is he put me under at 2:30 and next I was aware of was at 7, and I was very cold, and they were piling blankets on me. (Took till 9 for my temperature to stabilize.)

I’m sure he talked to me before that, because he said I should be able to partly respond to him as I left the OR. I have no memory of this and am somewhat curious about it. You see, I’ve been known to answer from deep in a story, where someone talks to me while asleep. Like, say, Dan comes in to the bedroom, doesn’t realize I’m asleep, and says “Sarah, did you see my wallet?” He’s likely as not to get “Oh, Dragons. Yeah. You kill them with magnets.” Or something of the sort.

Don’t care. Though there might be an anesthesiologist wandering around town going “But she seemed like SUCH a nice lady.”

Hopefully I didn’t regale him with my political musings, but who knows?  I hope he had his asbestos underpants on.

Anyway – sat up for the first time middle of the night, and was raring to go by morning, so they let me come home. Where I promptly passed out for several hours.

They sent me home with Super Motrin! Or something like that, by prescription only. I’ve been taking it religiously every 8 hours. They also sent me home with one of the many variants of morphine and that I’ve been trying to avoid taking, because as always it makes me woozy and useless. (I say I have a sensitivity to it, but I don’t know if that’s true. It’s entirely possible that’s how it’s supposed to work.)

I’ve been editing, between bouts of sleeping ( a lot of bouts of sleeping.)

Yesterday I had to take the opiates because the alternative was curling up in a ball and crying like a little girl – and that meant I slept a lot, and at night had a very weird dream about a guy named Eno and one named Pepto, in a murder mystery set some hardscrabble farm in rural Colorado.

My first thought on waking up was “Pepto didn’t do it” and the second was “I’m tickled pink” which as you see is a good reason to avoid the strong stuff.

Today I’m feeling better. Not pain free, but bearable with Motrin, and I’ve finished editing, and I’m hoping to get some writing done in the missing Through Fire chapters, so I can finally deliver this thing.

I took a mile walk (could use better weather) and am doing laundry.

Now on what was wrong… More was wrong than we thought. Apparently my first caesarean really was butchery and things weren’t… right. Which makes second son even more of a miracle. (We just wish we knew WHICH side.) The first one too, I suppose, since we probably should both have died.

Over the years there’s been explosive scarring in my abdominal cavity as well as hormone-bearing tissue which probably is responsible for some if not all of my… interesting health issues. (Not the respiratory ones, though there’s something as always being a little under.)

I didn’t realize I’ve been in low level (mostly, sometimes medium level) pain most of these years, until I was given pain killers. Sleeping without pain is… different.

Most of this pain should go away once it’s healed. Right now it feels like someone scoured my body cavity with an exacto knife. Which I gather is not exactly true. They use scalpels.

And that’s about it. If I don’t answer your emails/am late on stuff poke me with sharp sticks, as I still only have at best half a brain.

But… the state of the writer is improving.

And now I work.

 

A Good Servant But… – Jeb Kennison

[This post was originally published at JebKinnison.com in 2014]

I’m writing about the history of government thought control and the means of
restraining it by constitutional limitations on its powers. Western
governments are more and more intrusive on private decisions, and modern
activists and feminists strongly influence government policy and propaganda
from their positions in academia, government, and nonprofits. Restricting
government’s powers to interfere in private decisions and control the media
message would give private personal decisions more room, and everyone
(except the nomenklatura) would benefit.

Feminism started out with a quest for equity in job opportunities, voting,
and freedom to choose. This initial agenda (“equity feminism”) won a lot of
support from fair-minded men and women, though even then there was a strong element of
special pleading in the movement.

By choosing to notice only the bad things that happen to women in
our own time as well as other cultures and times, modern feminists have
failed to work for truly equal treatment of men and women. Instead of seeing
individuals and their rights as important, modern feminists and other Social
Justice Warriors believe that only a relentless focus on oppression of some
categories of individuals by others is the key to righteousness, and their
collectivist view of group rights leaves little space for sympathy for
anyone who cannot claim membership in an oppressed class. They believe as a
religious cult would believe that if only they explain their beliefs hard
enough to the unenlightened, the scales will fall from their eyes and
goodness will triumph. No amount of victory in achieving their goals would
ever be enough for them to end their battles, since new groups of the wicked
can always be identified to battle against; the battle itself nourishes
their egos and so it must continue. If all their enemies have been
vanquished, villainy is defined down to catch a new
class of micro-villains whose microagressions and incorrect thoughts must be
corrected.

Note that it is no longer enough that “victim” classes be treated equally by
government and in employment and public accommodations — theirs is now a
push for equal outcomes to overcome private rights of association and
contract, so women (or men!) who desire to work less or take out more time
for family would not be allowed to bargain for those conditions of
employment by asking for less pay for less work. Implicitly all employees
with the same job title and duties must be paid the same regardless of their individual
contributions or their own desires for a lesser degree of commitment to
the business.

Equal opportunity does not imply there should be equal outcomes, because
diversity of interests and abilities between individuals and the sexes means
there will be unequal interest in career options that require 60 hours a
week of work, intense focus on mechanical problems, manual labor, or
hazardous conditions. Similarly, you will not get or expect equal interest
in the highly social, helping professions that, on average, women appear to
prefer. Efforts to force equal employment in every company by race, sex,
age, or other class are simply doomed — any company which balanced its
workforce to match these desiderata would find themselves forced to hire
less productive employees, crippling them against their competition not so
constrained. Jesse Jackson has called for Federal
pressure on high tech firms to require equal employment outcomes in tech
jobs. When you talk to a Social Justice Warrior about this, you get an
answer remarkably similar to what socialists said in the 1970s when you
asked how any country could level outcomes (“to each according to his need”)
without the productive escaping to another country to achieve what they
could without the shackles: “Well, that’s why they had to build the Berlin
Wall.” To stop the defection of those who want to be free to follow their
own preferences, this preferred system must be extended everywhere or
somehow escape must be controlled and punished by, say, walls, machine guns,
and Gulags.

So what we have is a small but highly influential ideological group,
educated, generally well-off, and embedded in academia, media, government,
and non-profit work throughout the United States. They continually agitate
for larger and more intrusive government which would employ more of their
kind, the better to regulate away all imperfect thought and behavior.
Business and profit-making enterprise is viewed as suspect because it is
partly beyond their political control, so efforts to take control of
decisions inside businesses continue, and the expanding HR departments,
lobbyist payments, and political contributions of businesses reflect the
need to pay for protection against this bureaucratic tendency. Similarly,
hospitals and schools have responded to the increasing regulation and
government funding of their activities by hiring many
more high-paid administrators while shorting the low-level staff that
actually do the work, because they must do so to get along in an
increasingly bureaucratized, legalized, and centrally-controlled
environment. This employment of large numbers of high-paid staff that don’t
directly produce anything of value for customers has greatly increased the
cost of domestic services like healthcare and education, and the drag on
Western economies has brought economic growth to a halt in many places.

We have seen such bureaucracies before — the churches which for centuries
held both political and moral authority over weak governments in Europe
attempted to regulate thought and action to increase their own power.
Wrangling over state religion and power led to incessant warfare. The
solution to the problem of state interference in private thought and belief
was finally found in the Enlightenment idea of separation of church and state. As Thomas Jefferson
wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely
between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith
or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only,
& not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the
whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no
law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and
State.

The early history of the colonies which later became the United States is
instructive. Many of the colonies had an established church (the
Massachusetts Bay colony notoriously drove out religious dissidents and hanged the
Quaker Mary Dyer on Boston Common in 1660) and wished to maintain their
government support for a specific religion even as the Enlightenment took hold, but it became clear that any
government uniting the colonies would have to take a neutral stance toward
religion, and enforce a set of human rights (constraints on government
action to control individual thought and choice) to allow them all to
co-exist peacefully. The great flaw of this compact, its political tolerance
of slavery and second-class citizenship for slaves, was only corrected by
the upheaval of the Civil War, which cemented the primacy of the federal
government and its enforcement of the ideal of individual rights within the
states.

Albion’s Seed: Four
British Folkways in America by David Hackett
Fischer is an eye-opening look at the four founding British cultures of
colonial America, and how each of them continues to influence present-day
political preferences and power struggles. Other immigrant cultures (German,
Irish, Scandinavian…) were also influential, but tended to join with one
of the four founding cultures that closely represented their views,
resulting in the welter of memes of political belief now contending for
influence.

In New England, the Puritans from East Anglia settled between 1629 and 1640,
the years immediately preceding the English Civil War in which Oliver
Cromwell and the Puritan army defeated and beheaded King Charles I. Their
colony started with a rigid established church which was intolerant of free
thought.

In Virginia, settlers consisted of vanquished supporters of King Charles and
the established (Anglican) Church of England, primarily from the south and
west of England. They tended to be more relaxed about religion and more
business and trade-oriented.

Quakers then arrived in the Delaware Valley (Philadelphia area) from the
English midlands (and their religious kin from various German sects) between
1675 and 1715. Their way was strongly religious and pacifist, but recognized
the importance of freedom of conscience.

The good coastal lands having been occupied, the Scotch-Irish (referring
collectively to immigrants from the north of England, lowland Scotland, and
Ulster) settled the Appalachian hill country from 1717 to 1775. Scrappy and
suspicious of any effort to tax and control by hated distant governments,
their attitude of automatic resistance is still visible in today’s politics,
with Sarah Palin an example of the type.

Only a government which respected and mediated the difference between these
founding cultures could work for a larger United States.

As time has gone on, these Enlightenment understandings have been eroded,
and “Americanism” (the practice of tolerance and “minding your own
business,” belief in progress, self-sufficiency, and freedom of thought for
all citizens regardless of sex, race, wealth, or heritage) is less
practiced. Our Social Justice Warriors say they value freedom of speech and
thought but only for approved speech and thought; heretical ideas are to be
stamped out by denying speech and punishing the heretics. It is no longer
surprising to hear a college activist suggest that certain kinds of speech be forbidden by law.

There are signs that popular culture has taken note of the tendency toward
totalitarianism and government propaganda from the Social Justice Warriors.
Dystopian YA novels like The Hunger Games show a
population repressed and manipulated by a media-controlling central
government. The movie version of the novel The Giver takes some
shots at this mindset; a thoughtful review of the movie version in The
Atlantic “What Is the Price of Perfect
Equality?” gets at its politics:

Engels saw the institutions of family and private property as
deeply entwined. Part of Engels¹ objection to the institution of the family
was that it involved a ³progressive narrowing of the circle, originally
embracing the whole tribe, within which the two sexes have a common conjugal
relation.² Marxism¹s benevolent tendencies are swallowed up by concern and
preference for one¹s immediate family, which becomes the unit of basic
inequality…. Commerce and trade, it turns out, are just as dependent on
the passions as the passions are dependent on commerce and trade in The
Giver. The true nightmare of a dystopian world is that all of these
things are interconnected, and that by losing one or the other, by
engineering it away socially or medically, nightmarish unintended
consequences will ensue.

The solution to this contention over social preferences and culture is
analogous to the separation of church and state. To accommodate all
religious and social beliefs in a framework of law and justice that respects
all such beliefs that can be consistent with universal human rights, a
government has to be prohibited from interfering when those beliefs are
practiced without harming an individual’s rights. We might call this
generalized idea “Separation of Culture and Government.”

While the modern feminists would wish to eliminate such current cultural
communities as Mormonism, ultra-orthodox Judaism, socially conservative
evangelical Christians, conservative Catholicism, and unreformed Islam from
the scene, a bargain must be struck to prevent further strife: the law will
not take a position on any social belief — it will not take sides for or
against social conservatives or Social Justice Warriors. Any individual is
free to practice their beliefs with other like-minded individuals in
voluntary association. Attempts to bring the force of the law to bear on
changing social mores and behaviors that are not in violation of individual
rights would be prevented. The law of marriage would revert to the law of
contract, with social conservatives free to enter into perpetual marriage
contracts with features like dowry, alimony, and discriminatory child
custody and support arrangements, while others would be free to bind
themselves to marriages which maintain individual property and call for
equal arrangements for child custody, with no alimony implied unless
provided for by contract. No group could punish an individual member for
behavior contrary to its beliefs except by private action: social sanctions,
excommunication, and shunning. Lobbying the central government to adopt your
preferred social arrangements by law would, ideally, occupy far less time
and attention in national politics as such efforts were struck down by the
courts.

Currently modern feminists have won considerable power to use government
support and propaganda to free women of some of the obligations of the
patriarchal culture they wanted to replace. Not only to correct injustices
in law and employment, but to increase government spending and regulation to
provide support that women formerly might have had to negotiate and serve a
partner or employer to obtain. Both ever-expanding social welfare states and
the failed Communist states reduced individual accountability and replaced
allegiance to family and employer with allegiance to the state’s goals, and
that is the model modern feminists prefer and are now working toward in the
US.

Under such a controlling regime there is far less reward for striving. Hard
work is replaced by contentious committee meetings and political struggles
for pieces of a shrinking pie. The increasing numbers of academics,
government workers, and nonprofit workers operate detached from practical
considerations of serving customers. It becomes easier to slack off, and so
more people slack off. The endpoint occurs when the productive have fled or
chosen more leisure over work, and the economy collapses after years of
stagnation. In the family sphere, we already see the endpoint in entire
communities where single mothers struggle to raise children without benefit
of a father to help and guide, young men are either in prison or involved in
gangs, and intact families with bourgeois values are forced to move away.
Women are taught that they are victims of oppressive males, and the enlarged
State will take their side in any disputes and support them directly if they
have children. What had been a safety net for people in tragic circumstances
became a way of life for millions.

Men and women who don’t want to take the role offered them in the culture
they grew up in have the choice of not doing so, or bucking their culture to
find a partner who more closely reflects their chosen values — this is
America, where you can be who you want to be! But under a government that
micromanages social arrangements and decides family custody and support
decisions based on “victim feminism,” men are never safe from rape
accusations, your children can be taken away from you easily, and the
population of women one might productively partner with has been programmed
to see themselves as victims entitled to use government to win any disputes
that might come up. If you are hardworking and successful on your own, you
are taxed heavily to support other men’s children and fund the politically
correct bureaucrats who harass your business. This thumb on the scale of
justice makes marriage a negative-sum game for many men (especially the poor
and disadvantaged), and the elevation of bureaucrats and academics above
workers in the private sphere damages men’s career prospects, unless of
course they adopt the conformist ideology.

The limited government crowd doesn’t want no government. It is generally
recognized that externalities and free-rider problems can only be handled by
a government; defense, civil justice and policing, pollution regulations,
and public health regulation (quarantines, vaccination requirements, etc.)
are areas that can only be handled by a monopoly state. But political
decision making is a blunt and inefficient mechanism, and those matters
which can be handled by private business and voluntary social organizations
should be, both for efficiency and freedom of choice. The libertarian and
smaller government crowd wants a government that concentrates on effectively
and efficiently handling matters only it can handle well. The expansion of
the government sphere at the expense of the private sphere is analogous to
Microsoft’s destruction of most competitive software applications companies
in the 1980s: using its near-monopoly in operating systems and the enormous
profits to enter the applications market, marketing its mediocre
applications and funding them when any normal company would have given up.
Eventually competitors were worn out and stopped funding new development;
Office products took over, ending most of the progress in the field for a
decade. Using the power to tax and the lack of any mechanism to disband
failed government programs, mediocre government-funded services (like
monopoly elementary and secondary education) crowded out the
privately-funded community schools, and after a century of increasingly
centralized control, local parental control of schools and their curricula
has almost vanished. Education is now heavily influenced by modern
feminists, and children are indoctrinated in feminist and anti-masculine
ideas.

It took generations for feminists and Progressives to capture the commanding
heights of government, media, education, and non-profit foundations. From
their perches they have directed a campaign to change the culture and
enlarge the State, and they have won. Federal government authority has
expanded to directing university handling of rape allegations and defunding
men’s sports teams under Title IX. Meanwhile, antiquated family law (as in,
for example, Massachusetts) remains
unreformed, designed for an era where the woman was assumed to be a fragile
flower needing protection, and forever a ward of her husband even after
no-fault divorce.

Some of these problems of feminist excess are now getting more mainstream
attention, but the best solution is the libertarian one of limited
government. Both major US parties are flirting with libertarian ideas like
an end to the War on Drugs and government surveillance excesses, but the
bureaucratic underbrush that limits freedom the most has been a part of our
lives for a long time, and few see how damaging it is becoming.
State-by-state reform of divorce and alimony laws is happening, but slowly.

Few candidates for office believe voters will support a pledge to do less.
Efforts to reduce bureaucratic and centralized control of people’s lives
have been politically difficult, until perhaps now when the incompetence and
waste of large government projects has become more obvious. While there is a
temptation for men to join feminists in playing the victim card (“Men are
victims, too! Help us!”), men don’t need special programs to regain
fairness; they need a government that stops interfering and lets organic
social relations between men and women resume a more natural course.

—

The Substrate Wars series (Red Queen and Nemo’s World) is a
fictionalized account of a revolution that tries to put this kind of limited
government in place for an expanding humanity.

—

Who’s Jeb Kinnison?

Grew up in Kansas City. I read everything I could in the school and town
library, and discovered science fiction in second grade, starting with Tom
Swift books and quickly moving to Heinlein juveniles and adult science
fiction.

When I was twelve, I discovered the collection of city telephone books in my
local library. I pretended I was doing a paper and called Isaac Asimov; we
spoke for a long time, and he sent me a postcard encouraging me to write. So
thank you, Isaac, wherever you are, for being so kind and generous with your
time. Robert Silverberg had no time for that kind of nonsenseŠ.

I studied computer and cognitive science at MIT, and wrote programs modeling
the behavior of simulated stock traders and the population dynamics of
economic agents. Later I did supercomputer work at a think tank that
developed parts of the early Internet (where the engineer who decided on ‘@
Πas the separator for email addresses worked down the hall.) Since then I
have had several careers‹real estate development, financial advising, and
counselling.

I retired from financial advising a few years ago and have done some work in
energy conservation (ask me about two-stage evaporative coolers!) and
relationship issues. My books on attachment theory have done well enough to
try fiction again, and the Substrate Wars series is the result.

I recently visited the Mormon genealogical web site, which shows me as a
descendant of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Edward I Plantagenet (King of England!),
William the Conqueror (who you might remember from such historical events as
the Norman Conquest of 1066), and Rollo the Viking. It appears that my
ancestors in between lost track of their money, lands, and power, so I was
brought up in ³reduced circumstances.²

Visit my web site at JebKinnison.com for more: rail guns, Nazi scientists,
the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the 1980s AI bubble, and current
research in relationships, attachment types, diet, and health.

Sarah remarked that right now a number the people who write alternate columns for her are having interesting lives.

As my life has progressed I have pondered the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” I have concluded that what is considered as interesting times changes with perspective.

When I was in school I thought of the curse as quite a threat, generally encompassing great disasters and upheavals. I thought of interesting times as The Revolution (American and French), The Late Great Unpleasantness, The Great Depression and World War II. You know, those big things you learned about in the history books.

I guess that The Cold War would likely have counted as interesting as well. The Bomb and the threat of nuclear war have always been a part of my life. My earliest political memory is a speech given by President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (I admit I probably only remember it because it interrupted the movie King Kong.) To my parents and grandparents the Cold War was a real and active threat, but to me it was situation normal, an ongoing background noise that was always there.

As was racial unrest. I was raised with the stories of the Freedom Rides and Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. I recall being quite put out with my parents for not going down to join the protests in the southeast. The pastor and a few congregants from the Unitarian Church in center city Philadelphia had joined with others to take a bus load of people to participate. In my child’s brain I did not consider the real world responsibilities that my parents carried. At that time my father was working and going to law school, and my mother was taking care of me.

I watched on the TV as Watts was torn apart, as rioters and looters went on a rampage. There were major riots in the city in which I lived, although not in the immediate neighborhood. That seemed more urgent than the Cold War, but having been raised conscious of the situation, it had always been a part of my life. At one point I had organized all five year olds in my household for a protest march through my neighborhood. My mother kept the sign I made to her dying day.

Having always known the Cold War and racial unrest I did not think of them as qualifying as interesting times. They were simply what was going on, my reality. I now know better. I also sadly note, in spite of hopeful reports of their passing, that recent events have proved that they really are not gone from the world stage.

I am, obviously, older now. With experience, a broader study of history, and the wide availability 24/7 news I have long since realized that it is a truth that somewhere the world is going though some kind of interesting times. The political and social upheaval may not be on our immediate door step, but it is out there. While in the past distance might isolate us from the effects, with the global markets, it is more likely that some region’s instability will be felt.

I have also steadily expanded the definition of what constitutes interesting times. Living through a five year drought, reading about the effects of the great grasshopper plagues in the western planes, the 1927 Mississippi River flood and events such as Krakatoa have added natural disasters to the mix.

Yet the biggest change came with the realization that simply being alive meant that you were going to live through interesting times. Interesting times do not just involve disasters of cataclysmic proportions. They can be personal or familial, created by the upheavals that occur just because you are alive.

Just this year I have watched as people who I know (and their families) have had their lives change in a moment, when they receive a diagnosis from a doctor. A lovely young woman, a careful eater with an active lifestyle, had an unusual and entirely unexpected rare bi-lateral stroke. (She is slowly recovering, thank you.) A friend in her mid-forties with a loving husband and two young children had been feeling just a little under the weather throughout the summer. She finally decided to go to the doctor. Sunday morning she succumbed to leukemia after a grueling six month battle.

Moreover the circumstances do not have to be what we would necessarily call bad. A friend who has struggled to get pregnant and carry to term for years received the news that she is expecting twins. At first she struggled with fears of loosing them. Now, at twenty-three weeks along, everything looks good and she is thrilled. Still it is proving to be an exhausting challenge physically. (Those of us who have only ever had to deal with one small child underfoot at a time are doing our best to be encouraging and not to tell her of the exhaustion that comes with that.)

So now, my definition of the interesting times of the curse can be anything from the global to the personal situations that threaten to overwhelm. Even those who make the best of plans and prepared for their lives are going to experience them. We cannot anticipate or control for everything. So we best develop a sense of humor, and pray for some boring times. While you are at it make a conscious effort to treasure and enjoy those good things come your way even in the midst of your interesting times.

*Once upon a time Frank’s blog was one of the things that kept me from bursting from the (glass fronted) political closet brandishing an AK-47.  Now that I’m out in the open and everything, imagine my surprise when I found Frank was writing novels.  In science fiction and everything.  Give him a warm Hunnish welcome, and go buy his book. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate. – SAH*

Inclusive of Psychopaths – Frank J. Fleming

What makes good science fiction? Is it a fast-paced story? Interesting characters? Unpredictable twists and turns?

Unfortunately, I had those outdated ideas in mind when I wrote my first novel, Superego. But as we all know, the true purpose of science fiction now is inclusiveness. Entertainment is okay, I guess, but what we really need to focus on is making sure everyone feels cared for and included and that no one feels weird, no matter how weird they are.

This is difficult for me as a white, heterosexual, cisgender male. I’m basically committing a hate crime just by existing. I’m not even sure that in this day and age I should be allowed to write science fiction. Still, I decided to examine my novel to determine how inclusive it is.

I first used the Bechdel Test, as that’s a nice objective measure. I ran into a problem right away, though, because Superego is written in the first-person perspective of a male character. It’s like I didn’t even try. Still, there are a number of named female characters in the story, and a few times they do speak to each other. Most of the time, they’re talking about the main (male) character, but I did locate a short conversation between two women about one getting the other a chair.

Boom! Passed the Bechdel Test. It’s a very feminist novel.

But does anyone care about women anymore? It’s kind of passé to combat gender bias. Plus, are genders even real? Aren’t they just a social construct or something? Then again, if that’s true, I’m not sure where babies come from… but we’re not talking about science; we’re talking about tolerance.

Anyway, instead of being inclusive of a group everyone already knows to include, it’s best to find a brand new identity no one even thought of tolerating yet. I mean, there are things people wouldn’t even think to care about now that you’ll be worse than Hitler not to care deeply about next year. And these days if you’re the first one who recognizes a new need for tolerance and inclusiveness, you’re treated just like a scientist who’s made a world-changing discovery… back when people cared about that sort of thing.

Well, that is where Superego wins out, because it highlights a group no one has even thought to tolerate yet: psychopaths. In most fiction, the psychopathic hitman is stereotyped as the bad guy, but my progressive novel makes him the protagonist. That’s because I want all the psychopaths out there to know that I understand and sympathize with them and am against all the psychopath hate they see in other novels.

Of course, many don’t share my sympathies. For instance, look at all the Social Justice Warriors out there with their ostentatious displays of how much they care for people — how do they think that makes a psychopath, someone who is incapable of caring, feel? It’s really insensitive, but those scumbags with their empathy privilege never give a second thought to psychopaths.

But not me. I care about psychopaths and their feelings (or lack there of). Does that make me a superior person? Yes. Do I look down on everyone who doesn’t share these enlightened views of inclusiveness? Absolutely. Does this make me feel good about myself? Well, let’s just say I’m typing this with one hand while using the other to pat myself on the back.

Man, it’s really enjoyable being more considerate and tolerant than everyone else. Writing science fiction is fun!