Year: 2015

*There will be post later (probably) — for now, I forgot to put my book prices back up (what? I’ve been in pain!) so the novels with Goldport are still at holiday promo price: Witchfinder, No Will but His, the Magical Shakespeare series and all the Musketeer Mysteries.  Witchfinder is 3.99, all the rest are 2.99.  I’m going to raise the prices sometime today, so if you haven’t inflicted er… given my books to someone of your acquaintance, today would be a good time.

I will, everything going well, resume free chapters next week.*

The Almost Weekly Promo Post – Free Range Oyster

Greetings, and welcome back to the kinda-sorta-almost-weekly Promo Post! After receiving nothing last week, I’ve a haul for you this week. In related news, I’ve had a code project in the works for a few weeks now that’s nearly ready to share with you. I’ve created a handy repository for all the books that have been submitted to the Promo Post in the past. It’s functional and ready to go, all the fun code stuff finished (Angular.js is a blast to work with), I just have to do all the tedious data entry now. Heaven willing and the creek don’t rise, it’ll be up to speed in the next few days and I’ll throw you all a link. For now, go read some good books, share them with your friends, and make sure to leave useful reviews. As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four is just too, too many – I’m going to take a nap now.

Sam Schall

Vengeance from Ashes

Honor and Duty Book 1

First, they took away her command. Then they took away her freedom. But they couldn’t take away her duty and honor. Now they want her back.

Captain Ashlyn Shaw has survived two years in a brutal military prison. Now those who betrayed her are offering the chance for freedom. All she has to do is trust them not to betray her and her people again. If she can do that, and if she can survive the war that looms on the horizon, she can reclaim her life and get the vengeance she’s dreamed of for so long.

But only if she can forget the betrayal and do her duty.

Duty from Ashes

Honor and Duty Book 2

Duty calls. Honor demands action.

Major Ashlyn Shaw has survived false accusations and a brutal military prison. Now free, she finds her homeworld once again at war with an enemy that will stop at nothing to destroy everything she holds dear. Duty has Ashlyn once again answering the call to serve. She has seen what the enemy is capable of and will do everything she can to prevent it from happening to the home she loves and the people she took an oath to protect.

But something has changed. It goes beyond the fact that the enemy has changed tactics they never wavered from during the previous war. It even goes beyond the fact that there is still a nagging doubt in the back of Ashlyn’s mind that those who betrayed her once before might do so again. No, there is more to the resumption of hostilities, something that seems to point at a new player in the game. But who and what are they playing at?

Will Ashlyn be able to unmask the real enemy before it is too late?

Ellie Ferguson

Hunter’s Home

Hunter’s Moon Book 3

They say you can never go home. That’s something CJ Reamer has long believed. So, when her father suddenly appears on her doorstep, demanding she return home to Montana to “do her duty”, she has other plans. Montana hasn’t been home for a long time, almost as long as Benjamin Franklin Reamer quit being her father. Dallas is now her home and it’s where her heart is. The only problem is her father doesn’t like taking “no” for an answer.

When her lover and mate is shot and she learns those responsible come from her birth pride and clan, CJ has no choice but to return to the home she left so long ago. At least she won’t be going alone. Clan alphas Matt and Finn Kincade aren’t about to take any risks where their friend is concerned. Nor is her mate, Rafe Walkinghorse, going to let her go without him.

Going home means digging up painful memories and family secrets. But will it also mean death – or worse – for CJ and her friends?

Mary Catelli

Over the Sea, To Me

A novelette retelling an old ballad.

A castle of marvels, by the sea – full of goblins and sprites. Many young
knights come in search of adventures, and leave in search of something less
adventurous.

A knight brave enough to face it could even woo the Lady Isobel there, but when
Sir Beichan and she catch the attention of her father, the castle has horrors as
well as wonders, enough to hold him prisoner. Winning freedom may only separate
them, unless its marvels can be used to unite them, over the sea.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

Jewel of the Tiger

With their lands withering for want of protection from the wind, they hear a demand from the wizard: the jewel of the tiger.

Jyron, realizing it may be simpler than it looks, sets boldly out to get a jewel from the lair of a man-eating tiger. To find that simplicity does not mean ease.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

The Maze, the Manor, and the Unicorn

A short story of banishment and magical intrigues.

Cecily had been a lady-in-waiting. Exiled to Clearwater – for her health – after she angered Queen Blanche, she has nothing to do but wait.

Until an ambassador is sent there, for his health, and Cecily finds that the court intrigues reach farther than she had known they could.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

The White Menagerie

In a court of decadence and intrigue, only Maya’s enchantments hold in check the snow-white creatures they keep in a menagerie to amuse themselves. But when Lady Tatiana arrives, and all must outdo themselves to win her support for the king, Lord Dariko is certain that she can hold in check a gryphon as well, and will hear no warnings of danger.

Her most careful watch and her most powerful spells might not save them – but nothing else will.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

Dragonfire and Time

An angry dragon demands justice of the king.

Mae, a royal wizard, is assigned the task: the dragon had metted out her own justice, burning a thief with dragonfire, but she had seen him since, whole and sound, and this she will not tolerate, so Mae must put an end to it.

Mae goes to discover the truth of this before the dragon leaves its lair to extract her own justice. And in her search of the spring festivities, learns more secrets than the dragon had even guessed of.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

The Dragon’s Cottage

When the dragon does not come for the annual maiden to devour, the knight Theodore sets out for adventures, hoping to find what the dragon is doing.

He finds more than he thought he would.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

Enchantments And Dragons

Omnibus

A wizard must produce justice enough to satisfy a dragon.

A young man tries to rob a tiger’s lair.

An enchantress tries to keep a court safe while they ignore the perils of misusing her magic.

A lady finds that court intrigues can spread even to the countryside.

And more tales.

Includes “Over the Sea To Me,” “Dragonfire and Time”, “The Maze, the Manor, and the Unicorn”, “The White Menagerie”, “The Dragon’s Cottage,” “Jewel of the Tiger,” and “The Sword Breaks.”

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

*Guys, sorry this is so late.  If it’s not been obvious from hints, I’ve been having some medical issues, one of which has gone nuclear these last three days, preventing my sleeping and interfering with my thinking.  It took me two hours to write this post.  And yes, help has been called for, there’s a medical appointment on Monday which was the fastest it could be managed, and there might be a pain prescription called in.  Anyway, some stuff I thought of over the mess yesterday.*

Every time I think I’m out of politics for a while, they pull me back in.

Yesterday, it was the disturbing trend both on face book, on this blog and on their blogs, of leftists soft and hard saying “You know, the right-wingers defending Charlie Hebdo are stupid, because they made fun of Christians and Jews too.” Or, of course, my favorite, starting back when I quoted a Simon and Garfunkel song here “You know, you can’t identify with/like their art/think they shouldn’t have been killed for cartoons/whatever because these people were leftist.”

The answer I have is: What in HEAVEN’S NAME IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Yes, I would have shouted that, if my son who worked till two thirty am weren’t still asleep.

Of course I know what is wrong with them, and it is a serious problem for us, and also part of the reason they instinctively defend and identify with Islam.

They’re not, in any sense, autonomous individuals who flock to other individuals that happen to agree with them. They are a tribe. As a tribe, to fit in, they have this list of things they must mouth. But it’s not even very important they adhere to these “principles.” If it were, Clinton would have been kicked out. As would have Obama, for his favoring of Wall Street for that matter.

What is important is that you SAY you belong to the tribe and that you don’t turn against the tribe or other people who say they belong to the tribe, ever, no matter what.

Which is why they tell us things like “They made fun of Christians and Jews” and “they were leftist” as though this should mean that we wouldn’t grant them right of speech or right of life regardless of speech.

They are wrong, of course. We – at least most of us on the libertarian/conservative/constitutionalist right believe that the right of free speech is non-negotiable. Libel and defamation are already illegal (though hard to prove) but other than that, there are no restrictions on free speech. And NO ONE should die for cartoons.

To the extent that you are trying to prevent the often offensive humorists at Charlie Hebdo from working, you’re preventing me from working.

Oh, sure, I’m not likely to make fun of Christians or Jews. (Well, not most of them. I can make fun of individual Christians and Jews, of course.) I’m not likely to make fun of Western civilization, unless it’s the parts that are really funny.

But no one knows what people might read into what I write. I’ve had people accuse me of being a militant leftist because I had gay characters in A Few Good Men. I’ve had people say it’s obvious I’m anti-Christian because I make fun of Earth worship in Darkship Thieves. I’ve had people tell me I obviously hate smart people. Heck, I’ve had people read my books with gay characters and tell me I’m CLEARLY homophobic.

What I’m trying to say is that my grandmother was right: opinions are like backsides, everybody has one.

It’s not just that as human beings you should be allowed to say whatever you want and think whatever you want. It’s that as artists things go into your writing that you don’t know you’re putting in and have no idea how people will interpret.

Punishing art – No matter how bad you think it is – with death is closing down all art. Punishing expression with death is closing down all expression.

I don’t care if Charlie Hebdo were Satanists who drank puppy shakes ever Tuesday and sacrificed pencils to the elder gods – they were killed for cartoons. CARTOONS people.

Compared to the evil of killing people for lines drawn on paper, everything short of human sacrifice is a minor infraction.

Je suis Charlie because like them I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

My political convictions are not tribal. They’re born of reason. Attacking them from a tribal perspective just makes me angry – at the attacker.

The other part of this is if I’m reading these attacks right, the attackers, like all tribal cultures think it’s all right to kill people who are not in their particular tribe.

And that, my friends, is something I’d rather not have found out about our fellow citizens.

 

Here I was, trying to make this blog less political.

Not because I’m afraid to be political, and I intended to continue to say things that need to be said, but because I have said most of what I want to say. As in, I don’t want to force topics. If a political/social topic presents I will write, but for the rest, I thought, I’ll write about writing, and home and kids, and— And resume the free chapters, and post more about writing and literature, because that is as important to me as politics and my area of expertise, even if I write about writing as it reflects/influences society.

And I woke up in the morning to the news of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.

It wasn’t going to be an easy day. I think I have a touch of the ninja flu. (Think? Well, it could be hormonal.) Anyway, so—

My first thought was grief.

We’re going to be clear here. I thought most of the humor Charlie engaged in juvenile. It was about at the level of college newspapers in the US. Or like the Onion. But they were further up the tree in French culture, because French culture or at least what I get of it, is a lot about cocking a snook at everything that’s respected or revered.

But they stood out. Oh, they made fun of every religion. But they made fun of Islam too. And when Islam threatened them, they weren’t scared. They published this cover:

You can’t help liking people like that. Oh, I’m fairly sure they would have bothered me or at least bugged me, had they been my friends. I’d eventually have gone “Stop with the itch powder and the fart jokes, guys, and grow up” – and then we’d have gone out for a bottle of red.

I’ll never know how I’d have got along with them, even should I get a chance to meet them, because they paid for their courage and their unbending gallantry with their lives this morning.

This was sad. I felt sad, and very angry at the  cochons sales (an insult to every decent dirty pig) who did this. I wanted to cry

And then…

I went to facebook.

If there is one thing that my “community” – the community of my so called colleagues – can do is take a bad situation and make it worse.

The people who speak truth to power TM  were alternately worrying about the backlash against poor defenseless Muslims and whining that no one was giving the same attention to a victimless bombing of an NAACP office – or the hair salon next to it, of course – in Colorado Springs, for which they said there was a white suspect. (Was there a white suspect? Who knows? If it’s true, none of the sources in town know it. They don’t even know who was supposed to be bombed (the bomb was faulty and mostly achieved a lot of noise.) The fact that no one in the press is running with this makes me suspect it’s a non-event.)

Let’s suppose, however, that this non-event in my home town was everything they think it is. Someone motivated by race hatred decided to bomb one of the most institutionally ossified civil rights organizations. Someone who is lame and tried to bomb the offices after closing. Okay.

Which piece of news do you think deserves more attention? The one that somewhere in the US there might be a racist who wants to scare a lobbying/lawfare organization? (Don’t they always tell us racists are everywhere? So this shouldn’t be news, right?) A racist who didn’t kill anyone? Or the one about nineteen innocents murdered because they insulted the prophet of a barbaric and intolerant religion?

And which one should a bunch of white women who make their living by writing be more interested in?

The one where they’re not scared they’ll get their necks cut, of course.

Which is when I started to see red.

The film of red grew as these asinine cowards, these craven and self-regarding poltroons, started saying things like that the brave men and women who risked their lives for free speech should have been more careful of the feelings of others. These are the same people who routinely, three times a day, post some dig at Christianity, some mockery of Americans, some pseudo-witty comment about Republicans. But see, none of those people threaten to kill them.

The brave social(ist) justice warriors are ever ready to speak truth to the power that will not hurt them. Towards Islam, otoh they adopt the crouching position and kiss the terrorists gangrenous blood-soaked pudenda.

Is this their pathological admiration of anyone who has the cojones to do what they’d like to do and cut the throats of everyone who disagrees with them? After all, these are the idolaters of Che, he who clubbed children and puppies to death. Are they, in their heart, hyenas who dream of being lions? Or perhaps – since the lion is a lazy beast who relies on size and intimidation – they are lions who dream of being hyenas.

But I might give them too much credit. Perhaps just as after nine eleven, they find themselves scared. After all these barbarians they keep trying to dress in the robes of the noble savage, might not know that they are quite willing to betray their countrymen in order to be the ones killed last.

And so they hasten to lave the hand that would behead them, and to denounce their countrymen loudly. Hence, the next batch of screaming, saying that this is all the right wing’s fault – somehow, in another country. That they’re afraid of what the “right wing” will do – no you’re not, you base flees on the scrotum of a traitorous dog. If you were scared of us, you’d also kiss our behinds – and that the right wing is “gloating” over this and being “racist.”

First of all, we are not gloating over this. It takes such a state of moral corruption to gloat over someone killing cartoonists for funny cartoons – even when the someone is a band we consider dangerous – that I don’t think any sane man or woman could try it. Yes, I know, you could feel that way, but you are not sane. Your double think, your fear and your hatred has long ago driven any sanity from your poor Social(ist) Justice Warrior minds. Such as they ever were.

Second calling us racists is an act of idiotic projection that simultaneously reveals your ignorance and your real feelings. I have no idea how you managed to convince yourselves Muslims are a different race. Most Muslims (though there are Muslims of every color) are the same race I am (Hispanic/Latino is a cultural definition, not a race one): White, of Mediterranean sub-race.

Oh, sure, we tan a little better, and some of us have a sort of ‘fro. That does not another race make, unless you’re going by the nineteenth century definition of “every country a race.”

And you probably are, because in your beffudled, endarkened mind culture is hereditary. This is why multiculturalism is necessary and classes in every language under the sun for third generation Americans, because culture can’t be changed and can’t be learned and can’t be unlearned.

You racist pustules on Hitler’s backside!

Humans prove you wrong every day. EVERY single day. Including the Jews Hitler tried to exterminate and who came to the US with no help, no special classes, no help in keeping their culture and their traditions, and adapted and changed and became AMERICANS and successful. You are proven wrong by barely literate Italians, by French, by Germans, by people of every nation who came to this country and became fluent in English and capable, and whose children competed with and intermarried the children of people already here.

You are the racists, you who believe that because someone comes from elsewhere, or has a tan, or speaks with an accent, they are less than human and less than capable. You cling to your imagined superiority and go around shouting at other white people that they have “privilege” trying to be more touchy-feely than they are.

And you believe that if only America – or the west, for whom, in your mind, America is a proxy – withdrew from the world, the little brown peoplez would be happy and peaceful. (And probably sing spirituals on their doorsteps every night, right, you depraved, unthinking racist scum?)

This would be okay if your diseased, craven cowardice didn’t leak out from the holes of our leftist mass media and go out to keep the monsters who keep Islam at war with the world and the world at war with Islam in power in every Islamic country.

It would be forgivable if your inability to reason and logically process facts didn’t mean that the kleptocrats in Arab regimes didn’t wave your words as an excuse in order to send their young men out to kill us, instead of staying at home, challenging the authority of their loathsome satraps.

With your words, your mollycoddling, your excusing of abhorrent deeds, your covering them under the tattered blanket of victims of racism, you prevent a sick, murderous culture from changing. You keep human beings in subjection. And you encourage the murder of innocents for no greater crime than speaking their minds.

The blood of the staff of Charlie Hebdo is on your hands. No matter how much you wipe them on the cloth of self-regard and self excusing, you cannot run from yourself.

I hope in the back of your mind, the horror of what you are doing burns like acid. I hope you wake in the night screaming “mea culpa.”

I hope so, because that would mean you are redeemable.

But I doubt it. You’ll continue, in your smug way, bending knee to every tyrant and kissing the backside of everyone you are afraid of.

Depart from us. Forget you were ever our brothers.

We, the Liberty Tribe, we, the proud, we free men will bend no knee to tyrant or king, to caliph or to prophet.

We will respect those who’ve earned our respect, not those who say “convert or die.”

We free men mourn the staff of Charlie Hebdo. We might not have agreed with them on most things, but they were our brothers and sisters, unafraid in the face of threats or attacks.

Rest in peace and may free men remember them and honor them. And may their example light the path.

ONLY speaking unafraid and confronting the worst movements with unbended knee will we reform the tyranny that holds most Muslims in subjection. Only knowing they’re beyond the pale will bring reform. And only then will there be peace.

WELCOME INSTAPUNDIT READERS and thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

I was recently struck by this meme going around. You know how about Paul McCartney doing the surprise song with Kanye West, and West’s fans saying stuff like “I love it when he discovers unknowns” and “McCartney will have a career now.”

A lot of people a little older than I, and even my generation and a little younger were in shock over this.

… I don’t know why… I don’t know why, because what it brought to mind was two things:

My brother’s shocked gasp when my kids – then eight and thirteen – asked what the Beatles were, after a casual reference of his. And then he told me I was miss educating my kids.

And a book I read long ago which I cannot remember either by title or author, about the sixties and the student activism in the schools in the sixties and early seventies.

That book (though I can’t remember title or name of author, because I read it while moving into this house 11 years ago, and what I pull up when I think about it is carrying boxes into the basement) was like a revelation to me.
You see, because the future comes from America, and America sets “how things are done” in this new world, (and because unfortunately the people in other countries are remarkably bad at evaluating American experiments and take the bad (and the very bad) with the good) I saw the effluvia of the change to education in America due to the summer of sixty eight and the subsequent “student take over of college.”

For instance, in Middle School art, instead of learning perspective or lighting, we spent the entire summer painting a mural outside. Which for me mostly meant dodging the older guys who tried to splat girls with paint. Instead of having grades given for our work, we were supposed to grade ourselves. This became an exercise in seeing who was clueless enough to give themselves a C. I gave myself a B because I saw all my issues. Mostly the dumb kids gave themselves A. This was however better than having your classmates grade you, in which school grades became the Hugos. It was all popularity and the mean girls all got As and screamed if anyone else got more than C.

Fortunately that only lasted for a year.

But I found that the background of something else which had baffled me throughout my school career was also traceable to the student movement in the US.

Look, dad went to a school that was (comparatively) way worse than the ones my brother and I attended, both of which were “Magnet schools” for bright kids. And yet, he came out of it speaking Latin with ease, reading Latin poetry with fluency, being able to identify the style and time of a painting at a glance, and with a knowledge of world history and literature that left me speechless. (True story, the equivalent of my Master Thesis (It’s not that. It’s… complicated) was in American Literature, on Flannery O’Connor. She’s so unknown in Portugal that I had to ask my then-fiance to send me some of her works I couldn’t get there, as well as biographical information on her. This was, of course, pre-internet. When he came over to propose, he brought a bagful of books, because yes, he’s a sweetheart.) I was in the living room, surrounded by books in English. Dad wandered in, picked up one of the books, said “Ah, Flannery O’Connor” and proceeded to give me an extemporaneous lecture on the symbolism she employed. (His degree, btw, is art and textile engineering, not literature.)

My brother still had Latin, but only two years, and it never stuck to any depth. I never had it at all. Instead of Latin we were taught “relevant” things, like whatever was current at the time. We studied headlines and commercial jingles, in language classes; we were encouraged (to the point of nausea) to express ourselves in song and theater and story (and most of it was what you expect) and painting.

Music was no longer on the menu. Latin was no longer on the menu. I did get History but almost subversively and under the table, because my curmudgeon of a teacher refused to NOT teach and just let us play around.

Most of my schooling, except for two years in a stealth gifted class (gifted classes being outlawed) I found myself scrambling to try to learn more than what I was being taught. Because what I WAS being taught was to the previous’ generations’ knowledge base about like a candle to the sun.

And meanwhile things came in that we had to learn: who had written what protest song/poem; what the currently fashionable attitude on sex-drugs-rock and roll was; the “wisdom” of people ten years older than I.

All of this baffled me, until I read about students taking over universities in the US and the older people caving to their demands.

Turns out it’s EXACTLY like when the revolution introduced “revolutionary councils” to our schools which were run by kids (for about two months, before the parents stepped in, because revolutionary times or not they were not nuts and thought 11 year olds should NOT be playing around all day.) These students in the US really did have “revolutions” and “sit ins” to force the colleges to give them more ice cream, free time, and sex classes. Or, as they called it, “more relevant learning.”

I understand it, to an extent. Look, the boomers were a massive swell. The fact that those who took “action” were often also acting on Communist propaganda is something else. The fact there were so may of them of more or less the same age produced the illusion of a group that “belonged” together. Instead of trying to integrate with the culture, they tried to create the culture.

It’s not their fault. The fault is of the then-adults who, whether in guilt at the long wars of the 20^th, or out of blinkered ideas that youth would increase forever in proportion to the population, decided to give in.

And by the time I came along, a lot of these “kids” now adults and with teaching degrees were the teachers. They couldn’t teach what they’d never learned or demand a rigueur that had been done away with for them.

Instead, what they taught us were the touchstones of their generation, including the importance of protesting, sit ins and tearing down the culture, (Well, it wasn’t perfect, you know?) and the names of their idols, mostly in pop music, because real culture is hard. (Though from science fiction we also read a lot of their cohort in school. Because SF was then cool in Portugal. Socially relevant SF.)

Most of the people my generation and a little younger have spent most of their lives catching up on the general culture stuff we were never taught. Even in stuff like cooking and cleaning, it’s like we were raised by wolves, and have to relearn civilization by ourselves.

Turns out “learn what is fun only” and “express yourself” doesn’t give you a good grounding in western civ.

We acquired – those of us who did – the timeless knowledge like purloined goods, in street corners and back alleys, from used bookstores and older friends, and sometimes just by sitting quietly while older people talked.

But since the sixties/seventies, there has been an emphasis on the “now” and only the “now” counting.

For a while that “now” was frozen in the boomers’ youth. (Again the swell of population, the numbers of people just distorting things.)

But it couldn’t stay there. It moved on.

The boomer teachers/professors couldn’t give the younger generations the grounding they never had. My generation being just after theirs, sort of caught on, by listening to parents. We at least knew what we didn’t know.

The kids after? Clueless. It’s all express yourself and whatever is going on Now, Now, Now! And it’s not their fault. Who created the culture of ephemera? Not they.

In the long run, I doubt if either McCartney or Kanye West will be more than a footnote in specialized histories, (of music and their times) though McCartney will be relevant too for the story of a generation, for the influences of the first mass-media and largest age-group to go through the culture. Okay, he might be more than a footnote, at least as part of the Beatles, but it will only be in reference to that time, that place, and to music.

Because in the end, music was very important for that generation, but it is not science, nor Earth-altering. Whether it will turn out to be “art” in the sense of echoing through the centuries… we’ll see. The kids don’t seem to feel it now, but those eclipses are sometimes temporary.

The more important thing about the episode of MCartney/Kanye, is the problem with our culture. We are a culture that was taught only the ephemeral, the pop culture markers of a generation are important.

This is the real root of stuff like the young kids in our field thinking that, yah, writing about non-binary gender was this thing they invented and that SF/F before them was all white males. It’s not just that they don’t know, but that they acquired a pop-culture image of the past.

Civilization – such as we’ve known it since we learned to write and pass on ideas – consists of knowing from where we came and where we’re going.

In a world that is not perfect, it helps to know where some of the imperfections (and the unexpected grace notes, too) come from. It helps to know, for instance, that until recently media went through a narrow channel that set what was “acceptable” because everything was broadcast by half a dozen people. It helps to know that yeah, perhaps women had less participation, but it wasn’t the plotting of men keeping them out. It was the plotting of mother nature.

If you don’t know the past you’re caught in the perpetual now and fighting against “injustices” you assume are willfully caused by some group or another – until the next reaction sets in. And you’re perpetually “discovering” things everyone else knew.

Some of that effect is inevitable, but some grounding in your own culture should be provided by your elders who KNOW they’re not inventing the wheel fresh.

Until we correct that, until we make sure the kids learn some of the basics of history and their own civilization, Oikophobia, pop-culturism and rewriting the past shall ride with us, and (cultural) death shall be at our side, ever ready to pounce.

Fifty years of the equivalent of ice cream for lunch and recess all day is more than enough. It’s time that (real) teachers stepped in, instead of leaving the kids alone.

Teach your children well – even if to do it you have to teach yourself first.

 

Honey, they shrank the science fiction! — a blast from the past post 8/2011

*Not only was I — at this time — still trying to be in the political closet, I THOUGHT I was succeeding.  (Shakes head.)*

As we all know the ticket to fame, fortune and er… whatever it is we get from writing is to write fantasy. At least I was told as far back as the early nineties that science fiction didn’t sell.  As well as being told as soon as I broke in that ladies wrote fantasy. (No use telling them I wasn’t a lady. At that I escaped only lightly insulted. My friend Rebecca Lickiss was told she had the heart of a fantasy writer. She says she has the keys to that drawer and she can’t figure out how her agent knew.)

My clue to why science fiction isn’t selling came both with a review that insisted there was nothing new and no big idea to Darkship Thieves and therefore it wasn’t “important” and when a reader at Mad Genius Club – Hi Synova! – told me that she liked Darkship Thieves because it was science fiction as it used to be “before we made ourselves small.”

Before I proceed – and because this isn’t about me – the big idea in Darkship Thieves is that laws can worsen the problem they’re trying to control. Yes, I know the idea of growing someone as a spare body or spare parts isn’t new. You think I’m stupid? But I got sick and tired onto nausea of this being portrayed as an evil of OPEN and free market societies and “there ought to be a law” being recommended as a remedy for it.

Quickly – I’ve been told by no smaller authority than my son that these posts run way too long – laws don’t stop things. They certainly don’t stop technology. They just make it go underground. And in an open, free market society growing a full human being for parts or as a replacement body is insane. Humans are EXPENSIVE to grow. No matter what you do, you still have to feed them, clothe them, educate them at least enough to control them. In a society that doesn’t restrict science with stupid laws, ways will be found to grow the needed organ. Probably a lot faster, too. And anyone trying to grow a whole human as a replacement body will at the very least get shunned. (It is still murder!) OTOH in a society in which the IDEA of cloning has been forbidden for so long it’s literally unthinkable, people with money and power can have an “heir” grown as a spare body.

Unfortunately science fiction – excepting Baen, of course, (though that gets dismissed as “mostly military sf”) and a few non baen books that managed to get through the gauntlet – has devolved to a state in which two types of science fiction are accepted: 1- Hard science fiction in which the “new idea” has to be something startling, different and never used (this btw, is insane when it comes to readers. Readers don’t demand that every fantasy novel come up with a new, startling, totally different form of magic. The exploration of tropes happens incrementally, not by startling, totally new, never before voiced ideas. All of us, as readers, like the familiar with a new twist.) And 2- sociological science fiction.

For some reason to count as the second you have to pile on some social “issue” or danger that has been discussed to death in liberal arts courses in the last forty years. The anomie of modern society say. Or the aching pain of gender differences. To my knowledge the only reason the heartbreak of psoriasis hasn’t been mentioned is that liberal arts professors have yet to take it up. (And why should they? Eczema is a much more achy breaky hearty thingy. I mean, I have it, and this is ALL about my belly button, right?)

So, how was it different, before we made ourselves small? Well… Heinlein wrote about slavery and its social consequences in Citizen of the Galaxy. You don’t get much bigger social issue than with a young man being sold at the very opening. Stripping it of the racial overtones it has mostly in the US allowed him to analyze the institution in its full peculiarity (and irrationality) as well as the conditions that allowed it to occur. Ditto in one of the stories in Green Hills of Earth, whose name escapes me now.  Starman Jones?  A society controlled by guilds and unions.  Podkayne of Mars? Treat your children as commodities and see the results. Stranger? What the meaning of being human is. Is it genetic or inborn? The Lazarus Long cycle? What happens when our taboos meet life that’s prolonged beyond our wildest dreams.

Let’s take someone else – Clifford D Simak. They Walked Like Men. The big idea? Is fiat currency a good idea? City? What happens after Man and what is unique to Man? Way Station? Can a man live on out of his time? The werewolf principle? Can star travel change us to the point where we can’t be human on Earth anymore?

Other big idea books and series: A canticle for Leibowitz; the World of Tiers; anything A E Van Vogt wrote (the man threw out three big ideas per page,) Foundation and a ton others which I’d tell you if I weren’t too lazy to walk over to my science fiction bookcase this early in the morning.

What do all those have in common? Shout louder, I can’t hear you!

Oh, yeah, I KNOW! They were fun.  People enjoyed reading them.  They sold.  The ideas were wrapped around an adventure, something that made it fun. And they were written in such a way that people in hopeless situations knew they could get out, if they worked hard enough and had just the right breaks.

Polyanish, you say? Oh, sure. It’s so much better to pound into people’s heads, over and over again that they’re victims, can’t escape and are ultimately doomed. What are you? The guardian of Hades? “Abandon all hope ye who enter here?” Or do you abrogate to yourself the power of pulling people out of their hopeless situation through your “art” or perhaps the power of “advocacy” so “government” can intervene and save them? (Flash – government is composed of people too. If the individual can do nothing, government can do nothing too – only they do it faster, harder and with somebody else’s money.)

At the end of this we’re seeing science fiction which SERIOUSLY advocates that all our destiny and actions on Earth are set by our genes (oh, I kid you not) and that this is a “good” thing, and science fiction in which good aliens come to save us from ourselves (because they have nothing better to do with their time?  Save two humans and get an interest rate of a human per millenium.)

And then people are astounded – shocked, shocked, I tell you – that this stuff doesn’t sell well. Because you know, people are a) dying to hear again all the sad stories that were pounded into them in college. b) people like to be told they can’t do anything and are without the ability to save themselves. c) hard luck sob stories that don’t end well always are good sellers. This is why people stop to read the cardboard of beggars by the side of the road. “Homeless; parents died in a fire; dog got run over; have seizures; child has the gnats; can’t work.” Riveting stuff that. And totally plausible.

Will the future bring us big problems? I should hope so. The past had big problems too. Will we be able to solve them? I should hope so. After some truly horrible interregnums we have by and large solved the problems thrown at us.

To face the future we need to think about the future. (I have nothing against fantasy. I’ve been known to write fantasy. But a different muscle gets used for that. And it prepares for different things.) To have the confidence in what is right, we need to know what is right and not continuously berate ourselves and doubt our judgement because of what distant ancestors did before our grandparents were born. But to solve big problems, we need to be big.

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.

The current herd of cats in the Hoyt household consists of four feline masters:

Miranda, 14 year old Cornish Rex Tortoise shell. We acquired her with the proceeds of my first sale. You see, I had looked at our previous clowder (another four, which are now in urns on the mantelpiece. Sometimes it worries me that people will look at it and think we’re crazed cat killers.) and I thought they were all getting oldish (about 12 to 14) and I thought “if we don’t get a kitten, in the next four years all our cats are going to die one after the other, and that is going to leave me extremely depressed.” So I said “we need a kitten” and my husband, being one who doesn’t fully understand foreshadowing in our lives, said, “only if it’s a Cornish Rex.” He thought that in our relatively small town there would be none of this exotic breed. It turned out there was a litter. And I caught on at first sight that it was probably a kitten farm (those cats were cranking out a litter after another) but while I was finding a way to say “we’re not interested after all” Miranda climbed my coat (it was around this time of year) and got in my face and yelled, then settled down and tried to unbutton my coat. And I was lost. I asked, “Does she want to be a writer’s cat?” and she squeaked with glee. We bought her, which felt a little bit like white slavery.

Miranda is a termagant. She rules the household with an iron paw, even though she weighed, at her healthiest and best, about 6 lbs. She’s also affectionate, though only to one person at a time. Right now her “person” is my younger son and she more or less lives on him.

Euclid, 13 years old came into our life six months later. Our oldest cat, Petronius the Arbiter, was kidnapped and put down by a cat-hating neighbor (we never found out who. The vet put the cat down before listening to messages, including the one where we were frantically calling every area vet to ask if they’d seen a black cat with these markings) who kidnapped him from our front porch. While looking for Pete we’d seen this black cat that looked a lot like him except for his face, and we thought he was only momentarily lost (he was in the holding period where they say they’re notifying the owner or something.) After we found Pete dead, we decided to go by to see the cat who looked like him. He was for adoption. We went with him to the get acquainted room. And he was sneezing. We weren’t sure, because we still had three cats. We told the people at the desk he was sneezing, and they said, “Oh, we’ll look into that.” And we went home.

All night, I dreamed of Euclid. I woke up and was on the phone the moment the Humane society opened. They told me he had an upper respiratory virus, and he was scheduled for euthanasia in twenty minutes. I said “Wait, what? he’s our cat and we’re coming to get him. We’ll be there in twenty minutes with a carrier.”

Since the only way to get him was to pretend he was ours and we were claiming him, we heard a lecture about having our cat fixed. But we brought him home, and we gave him amox, and he was fine.

Well, by fine, you should understand that he is the world’s most neurotic cat. To begin with, he’s er… romantically invested in one of the other male cats. No. It’s not dominance behavior. But second, he has alien tail syndrome. When he’s asleep, his tail attacks him. He’s fought his tail for fifteen minutes. And lost.

Three years later, as we were bringing in groceries for my younger son’s birthday, and a snow storm was starting, a little eight week old black and white kitten, D’Artagnan, wandered his way in. My husband and older son, bless their compassionate hearts, went through the streets nearby, knocking on every door, asking if anyone had lost a kitten. They claimed they hadn’t. We think he was the son of our stray in the neighborhood and that night got too cold for him.

He’s… an evil mastermind. His other names are Butterpat, bah lamb, Monsieur de pink nez, Inappropriate Licking Boi (he once licked Robert’s eyeball and his tongue when he yawned) and Slinky McEvil.

Five years ago, when we went to a mini golf course, we found a little cat, skinny, and starved, and covered in grease, and we called him – G-d forgive us – Havelock Vetinary. Havey is… a case of arrested development. He’s stopped developing around 10 weeks of age. So he’s a huge, fuzzy, 16 lbs, baby kitten.

He never believes anyone wishes him ill. Which is a problem because D’Artagnan hates him with a purple passion. At one time, D’Artagnan figured out how to open the glass door bookcase. Havey would immediately get in the bookcase and D’Artagnan would then lock him in. After the third time I let him out, I told Havey “this cat is not your friend. This cat doesn’t mean well.” He looked puzzled. He still didn’t get it.

This cat plays with bugs till they die, and then he brings them to me to fix. He doesn’t eat them. He doesn’t realize they were ever alive.

He can’t believe anyone hates him. If you trip over him, he runs, but then comes back. We’re terrified he’ll get lost, because we’ll never find him again. Someone will take him and abuse him and he won’t even have the sanity to run away.

So, what is this all about, besides bragging about my awesome cats.

Characters.

I’ve said before – right – that among the very difficult things in this book is that I have to kill possibly the most awesome character in the book.

And people –

All of my cats are at least mildly nuts. We got… birds with broken wings. That was just what happened. They’re not the most pampered, sanest cats ever, except Miranda, who is sane but bossy.

Sometimes the last thing I want to do is go break up a fight in the middle of the night, or let Havey in to cuddle, because he’s scared and crying outside the door.

But we still love them, and they’re still ours.

And my characters… They have the virtues of their flaws. Particularly this one that I will have to kill.

And as I think about it I hope G-d is at least as forgiving as we are, of these creatures who really should know better, but who do weird things, and yet we still love them.

And on a less theological plane, it explains why I still have friends (not a lot) who disagree with me on virtually every political point. But I still like them. And they still like me.

The worst emotion the more deranged SJWs have aroused is pity. It must be terrible to see the world and people and everything through the lens of “they don’t believe yellow socks are the most awesome thing ever, so they must be destroyed.”

That we aren’t like that, that we can say “Oh, yeah, so and so is politically nuts, but I still love his/her books” is a weakness of course. We’re less ruthless in denying employment/publication/exposure to artists/professors/writers we disagree with, which means over time their marginal advantage makes them dominant.

But it is also a strength. It keeps us saner. It keeps us from say being a German person who calls other people Nazis because those other people refuse to “expel people from the human race.”

It allows us to keep thinking of people as people. And that’s important.

Oh, we’ll continue making fun of them. (Anyone else think the author is getting sloppy with the foreshadowing and naming? I mean, naming she-who-makes-scientists-cry Rose Eveleth (Evilest, really?) means He really should attend a workshop now and then, maybe.) And we’ll continue particularly making fun of their ideas.

But we won’t excommunicate people on our side because they’re slightly different. And as has been noted about the members of the ELoE – our opinions are all over the place, and some of us are almost opposites – but at the end of the day none of us wants to kick anyone else out of a professional organization for their IDEAS. (Now, if they, say, went out and killed and cooked hobos, that would be different, but since that professional organization had members in jail who earned their membership while in jail, I still wouldn’t deny them membership.)

Because we recognize people are people. Just like my stupid cats are their own creatures and not cute stuffed animals, whom I can discard when they grow old, or sick, or decide to have wars to the death in the hallway in the middle of the night.

And that allows for some pretty strange bedfellows. Like Havey. Whom I’m going to let in, because he’s lost in the hallway and lamenting, and that’s a terrible thing to happen to a five year old, sixteen pound, twelve week kitten.

Soundtracks- Alma Boykin

So, a week or so ago the usual crowd got to batting ideas back and forth (before they ended up under the deep-freeze, as usual. The ideas, that is) and started talking about movie soundtracks as a gateway to classical music for the younger generation, much as certain films and books can be on-ramps to sci-fi and fantasy. Growing up steeped in classical, Boroque, and folk music, and Bugs Bunny, I tend to take for granted people meeting symphonic music from an early age, but apparently I’m an Odd. Which got me thinking about the history of soundtracks, and what works or doesn’t.

You can blame opera and the Romantics for the first soundtracks. The Romantic movement played up the idea of instrumental music setting a mood or invoking mental images and stirring certain emotions. At the same time in the late 1700s, composers began experimenting with the idea of using a certain pattern of notes or tones as a musical cue for the audience. Karl-Maria von Weber did it for his opera Der Freischutz, although Wagner took the idea and ran with it. He is often credited for what is now called the leitmotif, the motives linked to various characters that recur when the characters do. Other composers picked up on this with varying degrees of skill.

750. Erich Korngold, the great swashbuckling-movie composer, introduced leitmotivs into symphonic sound tracks. Recall that in the beginning, movies had no set sound track. Often, the printed material accompanying the film canister included vague instructions to the movie-house pianist or organist as to what sort of music would work where in the film as she played along, but no one sent out a set of sheet music cued to the movie. A few college music departments still occasionally have “silent movie nights” where they revive the tradition, and it’s interesting to hear what the conductor picks for his “soundtrack.” But once sound came along, now movie producers could have music custom-written and played for the films. With the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, Erich Korngold assigned Robin, and a few other characters, musical tags. By the way, you can still find many of Korngold’s pieces on compilation albums. He did a bunch of the historical films like Robin Hood, Captain Blood, and others. The music made no pretense at being period correct, and 40 years later, when criticized for the score he wrote for LadyHawke, Alan Parsons shrugged and said that if he’d done a Korngold score like the critics seemed to want, he’d have only been 700 years out of date instead of 750. (But if you can track down the full soundtrack to LadyHawke, you will hear a bunch of “period music.” But listeners tend to recall the electric guitars more than the mandolins, lutes and chant. The liner notes and two versions of “The Chase, the Fall, and the Transformation” are fascinating insights into how movie scores are developed and sometimes changed at the last minute.)

After Korngold came Henry Mancini, who shifted from classical-sounding compositions to jazz. Pink Panther, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Hatari, Peter Gunn, made saxophones and clarinets acceptable in major movie scores. But the idea was still to support the film, not overpower it. If people forgot the movie but whistled the soundtrack, the composer failed at his job. And so it was until 1977.

And then the Heavens opened forth and behold, a nice guy with slipping hair and a penchant for brass playing in perfect fifths appeared, and it was Very Good. Yes, John Williams, the man string players love to hate, who made other composers toss their pencils into the garbage and say “That’s it, then. I’m going back to selling encyclopedias.” Williams managed to make the score both support the movie and memorable in its own right. In the beginning there was Jaws, and a repeating pattern that still makes people give the sea nervous glances. Who can see Darth Vader appearing out of the smoke for the first time without hearing “dum dum dum dumdadum dum da dum” in their mental radio? Yup. Or see Luke and Obi Wan walking into a dim, dusty bar without the cantina band starting up? And he did it again with E.T., and Indiana Jones.

The next generation gave us Hans Zimmer and Howard Shore. I’d argue that Shore’s music leans more closely to classical and Romantic (in the music history sense) than does J.W.’s but they are scoring different things: space opera and high fantasy. Their tracks fit the movies and both contain the enormous feelings of the Star Wars epic, and the world of Middle Earth.

In the process they inadvertently, along with people like Alan Hovannes (The Mysterious Mountain is a good place to start), redefined classical to mean symphonic music in general, including contemporary composers, rather than music from the period between roughly 1780-1850. So John Williams, and Howard Shore, and Hovannes, are all good teasers to use to lure new listeners and players into a very rich musical world. And Williams, Shore, and Zimmer all have a certain “sound” that makes their compositions easy to recognize: Williams and the brass with their perfect 5ths (even though every time you write a perfect 5^th, Bach’s ghost kills a kitten), Zimmer uses waltz figures (“The Black Pearl Theme” for example), and Shore’s sweeps of sound cut to a single theme, often played by woodwinds, before filling in again.

But what about the soundtrack? It is still supposed to support the film, TV show, video game, or commercial, to stir proper audience emotions, to give watchers and listeners cues about what’s going on (or about to go on) without overwhelming the action on screen. Some scores are so entwined with the film that you almost can’t have one without the other (Return of the King and How to Tame Your Dragon come to mind.) Others flop.

And then along came “Epic Music,” bits of soundtrack for movies that have not been made yet. Or trailer music, which is how Two Steps from Hell got started, before people kept asking where they could buy the singles of the trailers. One of the complaints I read is that the snippets on epic music recordings are too short – they are usually between two and four minutes long, like commercials and trailers. This is also changing, and it will be interesting to see how epic music develops, if we start having more symphonic recordings of soundtracks that never had a movie. Which takes us back full circle to the Romantics, and their sea symphonies and orchestral poems, operas without words.

 

 

It was 1993 and Clinton was making us prosperous and balancing the budget, and equality and amity flowed throughout the land. We were glad the “me decade” was well in the past.  Everyone was altruistic and full of care for the poor.  And weren’t we lucky that Reagan had not nefariously caused WWIII.

We know this because if you pick up practically any movie or book from the decade, this will be beaten home with a jack hammer.

I have actually howled with laughter while reading a book published in the late eighties going on about how Reagan was a murderous so and so who intended to kill all the Russians, or the like. You see, I remember the rather soft-handed treatment when the USSR actually imploded (and having seen what came after, I’m not actually convinced we shouldn’t have done as Heinlein wished and tried and hanged all Komissars. Sure some of them were just following orders. Like Nazis, after all. And yes, I am actually aware that was under George HW Bush. But the groundwork was laid under Reagan.)

It was 1998 and we were living in happy and prosperous land with the budget balanced and the worst danger on the horizon was a resurgence of the “right wing militias.” The future was an endless lot of “progressive victories” under “enlightened technocrats.”

It was 2004 and George W. Bush was going to put every gay person in internment camps. On the street corners people were searched for possession of Muslim religion or liberal ideology. Most of the country had got strip mined and toxic piles of toxic stuff lay everywhere.

You lived through the time and it was not like that, you say? Next thing you’re going to say we don’t live in a land where one in five women gets raped while in college, and where men have this magical thing called “privilege” which is a get out of jail free card in every situation (except when arguing with a feminist, when being called on the possession of privilege means it’s off to the dungeon with me.) You’re going to tell me that in this land, women in powerful, well remunerated positions aren’t oppressed night and day simply because they have a vagina and “institutional patriarchy” oppresses them night and day because institutional. Also patriarchal.

You’re going to tell me that women aren’t paid less than men just because they’re women.

You’re going to tell me that and you’ll be absolutely right, of course, because you know what you’ve seen with your lying eyes and it’s nothing like the narrative you can find in every book, in every movie, in every newspaper, in every report, and in the majority of the presidential speeches, too.

It’s like there are two lands, one that the media-industrial complex writes from, and then the land we live in.

And after a while the suspicion sets in, that they can’t be that blind accidentally, that the lies and coordinated purposely and for an end.

You’d be right. And wrong.

The big lie that informs all the little lies the media-industrial corporations tell is uniform, taught in the schools, and pushed at every kid and adult who has even a modicum acquaintance with formal schooling. This is because the ideals of Marxism have slid into our society and become the “overculture” of the elites. Not only through Marx, himself, mind. He fit neatly into a matrix of despising the present and your countrymen in favor of the past and the exotic, which had been propagated by all the custard head romantics heading back to the eighteenth century. But the Marxist lie was absolutely manipulated and shaped by the USSR who infiltrated just enough of the media-industrial complex to create the sense that all the good people were hard left.

After that, it’s not needed to tell people what to say, they can deduce how to shape the narrative from their oikophobia and their “hierarchy of victims.” Once you know whose victimhood trumps whose, you know how to shape the narrative. You also know only the “oppressors” can be villains.

Are the lies told for an end? – oh, sure they are, but the end is not necessarily consciously sought. To an extent the lies are told to make the liar fit in with what they perceive as the “upper crust.” To another extent, the lies are told to bring about what they’ve been told would be utopia, to wit, the rule by enlightened technocrats. But to another, the lies are told because even these people see the bad results of what their supposedly enlightened elites are doing, and want to deflect blame.

To wit, for how long have we heard Reagan closed the madhouses? Untold was the fact that the madhouses he closed were largely empty, since due to a campaign by the enlightened purveyors of enlightenment (and this one REALLY was financed by the USSR) we’d defined our madhouses like the communist madhouses. They used theirs to imprison political dissidents, so in equivalence world, then we must be using ours to imprison political dissidents. And if what the people in the madhouses thought was that they were the son of Mary Magdalene by Napoleon and that G-d himself had ordered them to kill every person named Ned, that was too political. Their madness was brought about by the inherent injustice of the capitalist system, you oaf. How can you not see that? Don’t you know many wonderful people who are poor and many rich people who are asses? Then how can you not agree that capitalism is unjust and makes people insane? (Never mind that people are more or less insane from birth, and that no better system has ever been devised. It’s unfair and therefore everyone who goes mad, goes mad because of Capitalism.) The left had waged a war on the very concept of mental illness, but when the hordes of crazy hit the street and then the madhouses closed, they had to blame someone, and the someone was the person who formally ended a system that had already ended in practicality.

Well, yesterday I came across a similar thing. I was watching Scorpion with my husband. He had saved a huge stack of episodes going back to October.

Now, I didn’t set out to watch it. I was, instead, intending to work in front of the TV, because my husband was there and also yesterday was very cold and the room with the giant computer screen is warm.

However the series captured me, mostly with its depiction of very smart people. They’re Odd, like us, and that was interesting.

Oh, sure, there were burs under the saddle. Like the fact that the main character at 11 supposedly got upset because his software was used to bomb Kabul. Of course he did. Because every smart person is against the war and wants our enemies to thrive, right? I mean self-defense is such an uncouth value.

Never mind. I could get over those little moments. But then we came to an episode where the plot was that a good populist politician had got murdered by (of course) an evil corporation, which did so because he would prevent (!) their stealing water from smaller agro-businesses in… California. California, by gum. The place where small farmers ARE being run out of business, the place being given over to a desert, because Nancy Pelosi and the eco-freak lobby have chosen to let the water flow through to the sea to keep alive the delta smelt, a sort of schrodinger fish that might or might not exist, and if it exists might or might not be endangered.

At this moment, I needed to go out of the room and not Hulk out. Because think about it – how many people know that Nancy Pelosi and her merry band of idiots are the ones responsible for the suffering of small farmers? How many people follow the shenanigans of politicians. And how many will immediately assume that having seen this on television, it must be true, and the evul large corporation must be the ones stealing all the water?

A few more repetitions, and “everyone will know” the desertification of California is all the fault of big agro-business. And then we’ll empower politicians who will, of course, be bought by big agro-business, and make it even less possible to be a small farmer, but never you mind that, because the narrative tells you what to believe.

And the beauty of it, the sheer beauty of this, is that you don’t need to tell all the lies yourself. Just have people hear the same explanation three times and most of them will assume they came up with it on their own through REASONING. And then they’ll tell the lies for you.

This is how those raspers, like that Reagan was going to destroy us all in WWIII ended up in the middle of an otherwise completely apolitical cozy mystery. This is how you find episodes of Muslim harassment and hate crimes against Arabs as being common in America today, even though most of the hate crimes in America are committed… against Jews. Most of them by Arabs, but that’s something else. You will hear every time there is an episode of Sudden Jihad Syndrome that “we fear backlash against Muslims.” And having heard that often enough the man on the street assumes it must be happening, every time, otherwise why fear it? And thus it creeps into books, like other myths, such as Clinton’s balanced budget and devotion to feminist ideals.

All of which brings us to where we are today. And before you slump and say “we know. It’s all up.” – Pfui.
It’s not all up, and we’re starting to make substantial holes in the narrative. The fact that they get all up in arms these days about stuff that doesn’t ACTIVELY SUPPORT the narrative: Interstellar not blaming the destruction of the Earth on humans; American Sniper not condemning the war, means that they are both afraid and desperate. They want to control every single peep coming out of media, of entertainment, of news.

But time has moved on. Back in the eighties or nineties, they mostly had it as they wanted it. You see, the trick to constructing the narrative and fooling the maximum amount of people is that you have to both show only those of your field who are most rational and coordinated, and manage to not show any opposing views that accord with what people’s lying eyes are actually seeing.

Fail at one of those, and you’re going to have holes in your narrative. Thus, when the representatives for your side are a chick who made up a gang-rape story to attract a guy who didn’t care for her; or even moderately successful science fiction writers who scream they’re being oppressed and attack men for using the word “ladies” or, of course, Rose Eveleth, Vagina Vigilante, pissing all over the victory of a guy who landed on a comet – ON A COMET – because she doesn’t like his shirt… Or a vast group of supposedly educated women going on a crusade to make men sit as though they didn’t have male organs.. well, the idea that women are more peaceful or worthy of ruling than men goes out the window. So does the idea that feminism is about equality of opportunities. So, might the idea that women should ever have been let out of the drawing room and fainting couches, if it weren’t that some of us still insist on using the brains we were born with and in public, to boot. (The feminists can thank us later, if all women don’t end up treated as lunatics or children or lunatic children. Or they could thank us later, if they weren’t so busy acting like lunatic children.)

The narrative is leaking like the titanic after striking the iceberg.

Then there is the fact that the repellent Lena Dunham had her narrative of rape-by-college republican exploded by citizen journalism; that Herr (Schickle)Grubber’s lies on behalf of Unaffordable Care were shown by citizen journalism; that Rolling Stone had egg rubbed on its dirty face by citizen journalism. And there is the fact that other books are available, books that don’t have to go through traditional publishing’s “must reinforce the narrative mill.”

Suddenly you realize the narrative is already fracturing. Or to keep our metaphor, starting to list and fill with water.  If it weren’t, if someone in that big den of conformism that is Hollywood weren’t starting to get the sense the narrative is not one size fits all anymore, we WOULDN’T have got Interstellar. Or American Sniper. Not without the narrative.

Someone once told me they shriek louder when they’re losing. Ladies and Gentlemen, small furry folk and dragons, it’s time to do like Ulysses and plug our ears lest their shrieking drive us mad. Interpret their cries simply as meaning one thing: we are upsetting them. We’re disturbing their control. Which is exactly what we want to do.

Lay into them good and hard.*

In the end we win. They lose.

 

*To the SJWs reading this (oh, come on honey. EVERY SINGLE LINE, and you know it.  I  elevate your heart rate as much as exercise, but you like your ragey rage more.) yes, this is a rape metaphor. Just like a medieval sword is a phallic metaphor and the stuff between your ears is a potato metaphor. Or you could, you know, learn something of real life and history.

Of course that would disturb your belief in the narrative and in the end – heaven forbid – you might start thinking and join our little rebel band… er… I mean group of privilege who are privileged to be kept out of all positions of power by our immense… privilege. Better not risk it. Go back to sleep. It’s a rape metaphor. That’s it. Just like umbrellas. And rolling pins. And fish.  And a thought intruding on your head.

 

So this week, while commenting on Mad Genius Club, I realized something odd about this ideological fight we’re engaged in: It’s largely one sided. I mean, we have lately bestirred ourselves to respond, but only because we realized utter silence and ignoring them has lost us a lot of ground.

However, even now we engage half heartedly.

If I wanted to, I could spend the entire week, every day, pounding on the idiocies emanating from the left side of the isle. The Genius of the Guardian, for instance, is still whining about how Larry tried to rig the Hugos. He’s also saying there’s no proof that the SJWs ever rigged anything. (Rolls eyes.) The irrationality in that tweet and the repetition of comfort-blanket aphorisms that have been disproven could fill entire notebooks.

But I am only mentioning it, because someone mentioned it to me. In the same way, I heard that some people got all bent out of shape by my post indicating that mollycoddling women and demanding more of men is not good for women, nor men, nor society.

That’s fine. I didn’t bother going to their page, because what are they going to say? They’re going to call me mysoginist or perhaps even racist and definitely evil. But I’ve heard it all a million times before, and it wouldn’t be engaging what I said, or even who I am, but an imaginary enemy, someone that the media assures them everyone who disagrees with them is: fanatical religious, ill-educated, fearing the change in the course of “progress” which is what they call anything they want to happen.

I know Larry Correia engages them on Twitter – sometimes – and other people on our side spend considerable time disproving their greater insanity. Now and then we all write about them, but then we forget and write about other things.

However, they write about us all.the.time. More importantly, they read us ALL the time. Every comment.

My first thought about this was – and this is paraphrased, because I can’t find the precise book and quote – PJ O’Rourke’s view on Arabs vs. the US. After being told, in the same breath, that someone hated the US and was waiting for a student visa, he said something like: they hate us and they love us. We are a ravishing 20 year old girl and they’re a pimply 13 year old boy. They want to punish us and they want to have us. Every minute of their waking lives is filled with thoughts of us, and they can’t stand that we rarely give them any thought at all.

The loves part might seem odd, but the more I turned this idea in my head, the more it made sense, in the same way the Arabs “love” the US. They want to live here and make us like them. It’s the love of an abusive spouse who wants to control you.

In the same way, we know how the left acts about minority and women who don’t toe the line. They “love” us in the abstract and can’t imagine why we will not let them “love” us for our own good. (Gee, no wonder these people inflate rape statistics in colleges. This is their idea of love and support.)

Further, like a 20 year old woman has ideas an concerns beyond the realm of a 13 year old boy, we have ideas and concerns beyond them. Once we’d exploded the Marxist lies, a whole world was open to us that those clinging to the safe “narrative” they were taught and afraid of their peers derision can’t imagine.

Further, just like most Arab societies are prisoners of the dictates of Islam that retard scientific (and other) development, these people are prisoners of dictates, such as the hierarchy of victims, which neither allow them to think nor to create freely. And they can’t imagine why or how we do what we do? Can’t we understand this makes us “apostates” from polite society? How can we NOT care?

We fascinate them. More importantly, we disquiet them. Allow themselves to think about our experiences, thoughts and education that brought us into opposition with them, and their way might start to seem less than inevitable, less than revealed truth, and just a set of not particularly coherent syllogisms they were taught. Allow themselves to think about it, and they might come to believe as we do, and then they’ll be apostates and isolated by all “good” people.

So they peruse every post and every comment and loudly denounce it in their sites, not because the post and comments matter that much (why would they matter if they were so sure of their ideas?) but because this ritual denunciation, which always centers on a disproportionate shunning of everything we are, allows them to calm their fears and to stop thinking. They pronounce the magical incantation: “Racis” “Sexis” “Nazi” “evil” and suddenly they’re on the side of the good people again, and averted the fear that they might unknowingly trip over the invisible line and become one of us.

This is why they intone ritual condemnations from their “voices” in the media and blogsphere, even when they make no rational sense: “binders full of women” “tried to buy the Hugos” etc, etc, etc.

But they have to come back and keep denouncing us, because we’re not kowtowing, which they’ve been told will automatically happen when people are exposed to their “inevitable” truths. We insist on committing bad-thought, and force the poor darlings to keep denouncing us, just to keep themselves sane.

And that – ladies and gentlemen – is the amount of thought I’m willing to give them for the month. Because the truth is I have a life beyond their concerns. I have friends, family, work, and I can go weeks at a time without thinking of their desperate need to be noticed.

We don’t have to surround our opponents in incantations to keep the bad-think away. I couldn’t care less what they think and believe, and if they left us alone and didn’t try to interfere with our ability to earn a living; or to slander us personally, I could probably go entire years without mentioning them. (As is I don’t read their blogs or twitter feeds, and largely delete their spam unread.) If they didn’t make scientists cry, we’d never give them a second thought.

Which of course is why they must keep throwing their tantrums, in a vain effort to get us to submit to their “claims” on us.

Because tantrums and obsession are ever so much more fun than metaphorically speaking buying Clearasil, having good grades in school, and eventually becoming a young man some woman might be interested in.

Which is why in the end we win, they lose. Because we have lives, skills and goals beyond “look at me, look at me.”

Be not afraid.

 

I can’t really post today, because house, cats, family, book. Nothing bad, just posting not happening. What I meant to post was best and worst of 2014.

Makes puppy dog eyes. Ya’ll could get started in comments!