Don’t Hate Me ‘Cause I’m Human — A blast from the past post from 12/9/2010

There’s this disturbing trend I’ve observed recently – okay, the last thirty years. [My read-about experience goes back a few centuries, so that feels recent.]

It’s part of what I was talking about yesterday, in a way. For a book to be considered serious, or introspective or relevant, it has to attack the past or western culture or civilization or tech or… humanity.

Not that there is anything wrong with attacking these, mind, to an extent. And they used to be shockers and a very good way to attract attention immediately. And I’m not saying the mindlessly chauvinistic “our people, right or wrong” was much better. For instance, the cowboy-and-Indian trope became really tired after a while. [Not that the Native Americans were noble ecologists trope isn’t really tired too.]

I’m just saying that these days, by default what you hear is against-whatever-the-dominant-culture is.

I first realized this when I was studying for my final exam in American culture in college. The book changed opinions and contradicted itself but it was ALWAYS against the winners and against whatever ended up being the status quo. So, the book was against the North of the US, because the North… won. Even though it had before been against the South because slavery. It was very much against modern US and raged against… embalming practices for three or four pages. (Because they divorce us from the Earth. Just SILLY stuff.) [I now wonder if it’s based on Zinn’s fantasies.]

And then I started noting this trend in everything, including fiction. Think about it. Who is to blame in any drama: the US; the successful; the British; the Europeans; the… humans.

Years ago when Discovery Channel put out its “future evolution” series, my kids and I were glued to the screen. We’re the family for whom the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is home away from home, the place we will visit if we have an afternoon free, the place where we have watched lectures and movies. I refer to it as “molesting dinos” and it’s usually my way to celebrate finishing a book.

So we were glued to the TV. Except that after the beginning, I realized the way it was going, and I started predicting it. Instead of taking a “what might humans become” the people who wrote this went down a path where first humans and then everything VAGUELY related to humans became successively extinct, till the only warm-blooded survivor was a bird, and then that too became extinct. In the end, tree-dwelling SQUIDS inherited the Earth.

Yes, you DID read that right. Tree. Dwelling. SQUIDS.

The contortions were capricious and often absurd, but you could predict where it was going.

It’s been a while since we had cable, but I understand there was a very popular series called “Life After US” about what would happen to the works of humans if we were suddenly extinct. And people watched it, fascinated and – from the tones of posts about it – a little wistfully.

This is when you must step back and go “What is wrong with us?” “Is this a sickness of the soul?”

The answer? Yes and no.

Part of it, of course, is wanting to shock, wanting to revolutionize, wanting to be innovative… in safe ways – in (dare we say it?) politically correct ways. It’s easy and approved of to attack: males, America, western civ, humans.

People who select works at publishers and studios and all that are often liberal arts graduates and they come from this curious world where they still think the establishment is circa 1950s and that they’re telling something new and wonderful.

Part of it is, of course, that we do see problems in our own culture, in our own society, in our own species. Of course we do. We are an introspective culture. We examine our consciences, we find ourselves lacking, we try to improve. This is, in general a good thing – though perhaps a little perspective is also in order.

Part of it is politeness/sensitivity to other cultures, mingled with the consciousness our ancestors were often wrong. We’ve been taught the crimes of colonizers in various lands and most of those colonizers (and colonized, at least for most of us) were our ancestors. We’re conscious we’re big and others are smaller. It’s a peculiar form of noblesse oblige. We don’t want to trample others by pointing out faults in other cultures or other species. I understand this, because I learned to drive in my thirties and lived in a mountain town with lots of foot traffic downtown. I was excruciatingly careful driving through there, because I could crush a pedestrian and not notice. This is why we tend to turn our flagellation upon ourselves.

And part of it is sicker/darker. I notice this tendency every time we discuss a great figure of the past, from George Washington to Heinlein – as different as they are. I call it “counting coup.” George Washington? Well, he was slave owner. And he had wooden teeth. And Lincoln? Well, he was very ill, and besides, he was probably gay and in the closet. Heinlein? Despite all his efforts at including – for his time – minorities and giving women starring roles, he must have been closet racist and sexist, donchaknow? Because he doesn’t fit OUR superior notions of inclusiveness.

What is going on here – besides tearing at our own past, and thereby continuing the self-flagellation – is being able to prove we are “superior” to these high achievers. We might do nothing and achieve nothing, but we are superior beings because we’re more moral than they were.

Individually, none of these trends is really bad – or at least not for those of us who grew up with the opposite tradition.

Oh, the constant and predictable chest-beating becomes boring. At least it does for me. Maybe it doesn’t for other people?

But think of (grin) the children. They have no perspective. All they hear is how their country, their culture, their SPECIES is evil. How things would be so much better without us… How things would – ultimately – be much better if… THEY hadn’t been born.

It’s not healthy. It’s vaguely disgusting. And the best it can do is engender the MOTHER of all backlashes and bring about a cultural chauvinism the likes of which you’ve never seen. The worse… well, one of the other cultures we don’t criticize because they’re small and we’re big becomes the norm.

And before you cheer them on, let me put this in perspective: Western civ has committed crimes. ALL human cultures throughout history have committed crimes. Slavery? Since the dawn of time. Exploitation? Since the dawn of time. Murder? War? Genocide? Yep, and yep, and yep. And many of those cultures STILL do all of those things and don’t feel in the slightest bit guilty, mostly because we handily and frequently blame OURSELVES for their behavior and they get our books, our TV series and our movies.

Such as it is, the West has brought the greatest freedom, prosperity and security to the greatest population.

Yes, there were crimes committed, but a lot of them were the result of a clash of world views – tribalism met the state. Look, it’s not that Native Americans or Africans lived in a state of innocence and harmony with nature. If you believe that, you need to study history and put down Jean Jacques Rosseau. [Preferably with a shovel. He’s one of those people who can never be dead ENOUGH.] And get out of your mom’s basement. And take the Star Trek posters off the wall. And the Avatar poster, too, while you’re at it.

To the extent the native were innocent and helpless, it was because of their mental furniture. What gave colonizers the edge was not their weapons or civilization (Oh, come on, back then, there wasn’t that much of a distance.) It was their mental furniture. To wit, they had overcome tribalism and organized on a large scale. Most of the colonized (excepting some small empires) hadn’t. So they would attack in ways that worked in tribal warfare: exterminate a village or an outpost. And the reaction of the colonizers (who by the way also didn’t understand the difference in mental furniture and therefore thought this made the native peoples’ “bestial” or “evil) was to exterminate all of a tribe or a federation of tribes. And it worked because westerners were united as a MUCH larger group. Which made them stronger. Western civilization started overcoming tribalism with the Romans. That was the real innovation.

If you think that we’re rich because of those acts, you must study economics. It doesn’t work that way. If anything those acts made all of us worse off. We’re way past any wealth we could plunder off others. We’ve created wealth. The whole world lives better than it did five hundred years ago.

And if you’re going to tell me the fact that all humans are flawed proves that we’re a bad species, you’ll have to tell me: As opposed to what? Dolphins are serial rapists. Chimps commit murder. Rats… Every species we examine has our sins, but none of our redeeming qualities.

Heinlein said it was important to be FOR humanity because we’re human. Beavers might be admirable, but we’re not beavers. He was right. But beyond all that, we’re the only species that tries self-perfecting. We exist – as Pratchett said – at the place where rising ape meets falling angel, but as far as I know, we’re the only species reaching upward. (Of course, we wouldn’t know if there are others and again, we have to assume we are it. The others have flaws too.)

We are part of the world and in it. To love the other animals of the Earth – or the hypothetical alien – and hate us is strange. Are we not animals? Are we not of the Earth? And who the heck can compete with sentients who exist only in the story teller’s imagination?

By all means, let’s protect the weaker. Let’s shelter the little. But let’s not beat ourselves because we’re bigger and stronger. Let’s USE our powers for good instead.

Am I saying that you shouldn’t tell these stories then?

No, I’m not. I would never repress anyone’s right to create, or anyone’s opinion. But I’m asking you to think. I’m asking you to pause and go “The west is bad… as opposed to? Humans are bad… as opposed to?” And tell your kids that, ask them those questions. [Not just because it’s essential not to browbeat the kids, but because, frankly, all the hatred of humanity and western civilization is becoming tedious.]

And then, perhaps, every now and then, try to imagine a story from the contrary view point. Just to wake things up. And to keep others thinking.

We live in almost comically crazy times.  Yes, yes, I know, Heinlein coined the term The Crazy Years. But as I have pointed out before, you only wish these were the crazy years.

In point of fact, these are the “pants on their head, running around saying wup wup wup years.”  They might also, in point of fact, be planning to build a bridge across the Atlantic and the bridge is made completely out of soap.

One of the weird things about our society is how presumed “oppressed” minorities can accuse presumed “privileged” people of any possible or imaginary attack, and once they’re proven to be lying, people excuse them and don’t even give them a slap on the wrist.  (Why are those words in quotes? Look, guys, when we say that holocaust survivors have white privilege, we’ve lost the definition of privilege.  And when Malia and Sasha are considered “oppressed” by reason of being female and dark skinned… may I interest you in enough ivory soap to build that bridge?)

The latest greatest hoax most of us are aware of was Jussie Smollet.

Apparently a middle school girl thought his stunt was worth emulating. I mean, it’s not like he’s been punished…

This burst onto my circles this week, and I was the one who went “Uh… this is all wrong. ALL OF THIS IS WRONG.”

Let’s count the major red flags on this first: every article I’ve seen mentioned Pence’s wife. Which frankly is insane, because no one is saying she had anything to do with it (if it had happened.)  The family is “destroyed” and “seeks legal retribution.”  Look, guys, I had kids in Middle School. I also have a lot of friends, relatives and acquaintances who had kids in Middle School. Let’s assume that the entire incident was true, and the kids called her ugly, cut off her hair and told her she should never have been born.  … who CARES?  In Middle School, with all the hormones running around, this is called “Wednesday.”  And despite the different races there is absolutely no guarantee that it had anything to do with race. In fact, chances are pretty high it was personal animosity. Sure, tell the school. Sure have the school investigate, but what’s with the assumption of racism and the idea that it’s somehow national news????

Then let’s get into the “slightly less sure, but this smells wrong:”  The boys cut off her hair?  THAT’S NOT A BOY THING. It just isn’t.

White, black, purple or polka dotted, if a boy hates you that much, he’ll punch you in the mouth.  If he kind of likes you and has no clue what to do with it, because Middle School Hormones, he’ll do something strange like write on your with marker or steal something of yours.  Or make fun of you for something that doesn’t even make any sense, like hwo you spell your first name. Even if it’s completely normal.  Cutting your hair, though?  Not unless he really likes you and wants a bit for a souvenir.

Boys DO NOT hold a girl down, call her ugly and cut a bit of her hair off.  I’d be more likely to believe all of this if she’d accused GIRLS.

But the thing that really made me go “what?” was the “nappy.”  Look, I have a vast vocabulary, that includes slurs and slang.  But I only learned “nappy” when what’s his name years ago referred to someone as a “nappy ho.”  I’m not even absolutely sure what it MEANS.  I have my doubts  that any white kid now in middle school knows the word “nappy.”  Or would use it derogatorily.

So in a group of my friends, I was the one saying “guys, this doesn’t sound right.” while they were saying “I hope that the boys get punished.”

So I lay in a small bet she was just Jussying it.

It turns out I was correct.

So the girl has apologized and the school made mouth-noises about how both sides have suffered.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

This is what’s known as a power imbalance.  Any minority, including women who are only a “minority” by fiat, since they’re the majority of the human race can accuse men or white men of anything.  And none of htem will be punished in any substantive way, even if is proven to be a lie, and to have, obviously done damage (to the boys’ reputations, the school reputation, distantly to our national soul) and even if the claim was in every possible news outlet INCLUDING the NYT, and the retraction won’t reach most people who believed the claim.  Women and minorities can do no wrong.  And they can accuse anyone who even vaguely upset them of anything. And these people will be punished by the mere notoriety.  And there will be NO repercussions to the person who started it all.  NONE.

This means you’re handing random women and minorities the ability to punish anyone who annoys them, or whom they envy, or who happened to not notice them at all (ignoring with malicious intent, I believe that’s called.)  WITH NO PRICE TO PAY.

The amazing thing is not that the list of fake hate crimes (someone link it in the comments. I’m too lazy to look) just keeps growing longer and longer and longer, or that women DO lie about rape (early, often, and with amazing abandon) or that the #metoo movement went from zero to “he looked at me funny! I’m oppressed!” in about ten seconds.

What we have here is exactly the same situation that prevailed in the bad old days when any white woman could have any black guy lynched on her say so.

Sure white guys aren’t lynched on someone’s say so — yet — but in these ubiquitous social media days, they can be made unemployable and probably undatable.  Not to mention impoverished with legal fees and waste the best years of their lives fretting over legal matters, DESPITE BEING COMPLETELY INNOCENT. (Yes, for the skim-till-offended. I’m sure some of them are guilty. Humans are like that. But note that the fake complaints are so many they hide the real and create an assumption of being false.  So, these accusations are ALSO bad for the real victims.)

Honestly, I’m surprised we don’t have a false accusation a day.  Unless the ones that are being widely publicized are the most credible, in which case the others must be doozies.

Which makes society a very bizarre place, where accusing the completely innocent of unlikely crimes is supposed to be somehow a step in the direction of justice.

And then the unintended consequences set in.

What consequences? you ask. And if you’re a leftist, you’re blinking rapidly and going “There ARE unintended consequences?”  For the left, in fact, it’s unintended consequences all the way down.

I’ve already found articles lamenting/blaming men for being reluctant to hire women in the wake of #metoo.  (Or refusing to meet with women privately. Or to have women as friends at work.  Or… other situations that have a woman alone with a man or a group of men.)

Apparently it’s the most misogynist thing evah for men to refuse to put themselves at risk for having their career and life destroyed because a woman feels like destroying it.  And women are saying they’re now more oppressed than ever.  But they don’t see the link with the excesses of #metoo.

If the Jussieing goes on, we’ll soon see parents of white boys refusing to have them in school with black girls.  Or for that matter parents of boys refusing to have them in school with girls.

And what you’ll see from the left is an amping up of the “racist, sexist, homophobic” cries, which in turn will give people the idea for MORE fake crimes, which will exacerbate the protective measures of those who might be a target (since people can figure out risk assessment.)

Or, you know, we could treat people as people, not jump on unproven accusations and bandy them all over as though it were national news.

We could assume people are innocent until PROVEN guilty.

And if accusers make up accusations that damage others’ reputation or peace of mind, they should be given the punishment the innocent people they accused would have got.

REGARDLESS OF SKIN COLOR AND SEX OF ANYONE.

It’s just crazy talk, right?  I mean, what would journalists publish, if not scurrilous rumors at all levels.

Which is why we’re stuck on this crazy train, taking a soap bridge across the Atlantic to Unintended-Consequences-Ville.

Sit back and enjoy the ride, because the arrival is going to be a heck of a bump.

There is a bizarre connotation in our culture, almost as strange as “child, therefore perfect” which is “Smart therefore morally good.”

Unlike the first one, which I think comes from the idea of the holy fool in the middle ages and, more recently from Jean Jacques Rosseau and his insanity about noble savages, I have no clue where smart=good comes from.

What I can tell you for absolute sure is that I’m sick of getting into some moral argument, say “eating people is bad” and I get told something like “There is this ethicist who says we should do it, and he’s smarter than you.”

Blink, blink, blink.

What in the actual double dipped purple moron behind does one thing have to do with the other?

Since when did we stop believing in evil geniuses?  Granted most evil isn’t a genius. Most evil isn’t even particularly imaginative.

However, let me assure you, having known several people who are very smart that they are more prone to hating all humans and often themselves than others, not less.

Why? Well, because most very smart people stick out like a sore thumb, which means that they are usually picked on starting at babyhood. Which does not predispose you to loving the rest of humanity.  Which means you’re more likely to hatch plans to kill them in batch lots because they annoy you and — humans being tribal — you view them as “not human.”

Look, yes, most of evil is not really smart, as I said above. Evil geniuses are rare.  But “They called me mad, mad, but I’ll show them” is a cliche is because almost all of us have known someone who wanted to “show them” though usually, you know, not by holding the Earth hostage for a million dollars.

But we all know — I think, or at least I did, starting with college professors — people who are really brilliant and just the most evil creatures you ever met.

Just as we know people who are brilliant and near saints. And people who are brilliant and perfectly well-adjusted human beings who have never done anything remarkably bad or good in their lives.

The truth is that “smart” particularly in the sense it’s applied here, which is mostly “Has lots of credentials and big degrees that allow for interesting letters after his/her name” is actually of very limited application.  Sure, we like it, particularly in our own field.  I like to have commenters who are “Smarter” than I about history or language (though I don’t actually ask you what your credentials are, and I don’t particularly care.)

I appreciate that husband can calculate very strange stuff in about ten seconds.  So that, for instance, if I need to know if we can carry 300 bricks in the back of my car without popping every tire and/or handling so weirdly I go off the side of a mountain road (well, I transported the library makings — oh, yeah, I need to get a picture of that for y’all — from Connifer and it was a close thing) he can get this cross-eyed look, weighs a brick, and goes, “oh, sure, 300 would weigh x, and since your car can handle x and the axis of handling is y… you’re fine.” Or “Dear Lord, NO.”

But this doesn’t mean either of us can tell you how to sow your wheat.  Or how to build a wall, or even how to sand a cabinet, or sew a pair of pants.

Intelligence is one thing. Training is another thing. Morality is another thing. And specialized knowledge is yet another thing.

You with me so far?

You can be a brilliant physicist but suck at spelling, so your shopping list is completely incomprehensible.  Or more likely, you can’t cook a meal for yourself to save your life.  Or — you guys heard about Einstein and all matching pants and shirts, so he didn’t need to match them in the morning?  This is my life with my family sometimes.

Or you can be a wonderful cook, amazing housekeeper, etc. but you can’t balance your checkbook.

Or–

Look, there might be, somewhere, someone who is good at everything and isn’t a neurotic mess, but I haven’t actually met him or her.

“Smart” in one field doesn’t mean smart in the others.  And certainly you can be an amazing artist or writer or whatever, and have clue zero about… oh, climate science.  Or, randomly, how to cross the street unassisted.

And neither artistic talent, nor knowledge of science, not even being very good at politics (which is kind of like an art crossed with used car salesmanship) means that you’re a moral human being, and therefore can make pronouncements on who should live, who should die, and whether we should kill and eat humans. (This example, btw, isn’t random. Some idiot “ethicist” really said we should do that to save the Earth. Which means I don’t care how many letters he has after his name, he’s a moral idiot. Yes, I can actually explain why but briefly, because if you don’t respect the human in others civilization unravels from the root outward. Yes, I can give details, but that’s not what this is about.)

In the same way — and trust me, I got exposed to this fairly regularly when I was going through writers’ groups coming up — if you have a writer who only reads and writes romances, and she tries to write, say a mystery, I don’t care how good she is at romance,t he mystery is likely going to suck, because she doesn’t know the conventions of mystery.

And I’m sure for most of us it’s like that even in our fields.  I mean, I’ve been known to ask younger son a question and get back “I don’t do x engineering. I mean, I can make a guess, but it’s not expert knowledge.”

So “intelligence” — meaning some mix of aptitude and training — isn’t even portable within a specialty, much less to something completely and randomly different.

And now we get to why this myth drives me bonkers. Because people who believe, “But he’s so smart, so he’s qualified to make moral decisions/direct the future” are the type of people who deep down to the bottom of their curly pink toes think that centralized planning should work. Or not even should work or think: THEY FEEL centralized planning WORKS if only you get the smartest, bestest people with the shiniest prettiest credentials and the most sonorous letters after their names.

And unless we make sure that illusion is killed time and time (and time and time and time) again, we end up with orders to sow wheat in winter in Siberia and a hundred million dead.

There is no one smart enough or “good” enough or cunning enough or empathetic enough, or whatever enough that they can decide what you my friend, yes, you, sitting there on your chair, reading this blog, should have for breakfast.  (Even if human is not on the menu.)

NO ONE ELSE is qualified to tell an adult in full possession of his faculties how to live his private life and go about his private pursuits.

Not only does no one else have the right to tell you what to eat, what to wear, what to do for a living, or whom to marry, but no one can do it better than you personally.  We have had millions of experiments, if you count everyone ever under the rule of “experts” and none of those experiments ended well.

Unless you’re being commanded for a very specific purpose (say you’re part of an army) and a limited time, or it’s a collective endeavor (and no, not like being a nation. More like “let’s all cook breakfast or build a house together”) no one controlling a group’s decisions will have better results than each individual choosing for him/herself.

Because YOU — yes, you with the hair on, sitting in front of the computer  or staring at the phone — know what’s better for you. (And if you think what’s better for you is human ala mode, you’re a danger to others, and ultimately to yourself, because someone will shoot you.  Unless, of course, you’re some famous ethicist trying to convince people this should be legal, in which case you should be laughed off the public square.)

Sure, humans are often wrong about what they should do.  Yes, humans often cause unwitting (and witting, but that’s different) damage to themselves and others. But to cause damage on a truly grand scale, you need to have one individual making decisions for a vast crowd, and amplifying his error to truly amazing mass-grave proportions.

Because that illusion, “he’s so smart, so good, so amazing, therefore he should rule everyone in this country/this continent/the world” always ends the same way.

The result is always death. Death in epic proportions.

Appreciate the intelligent person for what he/she can do. (If indeed he/she can do something and not just spout purposeless trivia at awkward moments.) But don’t assume that this “intelligence” makes it possible to run other people’s lives.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are individual rights.  And the best antidote to this kind of illusion.

I’m going to be a terrible woman.

Yes, everyone sent me everything they were supposed to, both books to promo and prompts.

It’s just that I’m not fully awake yet, even though it’s about 9 am my time, and I have a lot to do today.  Yesterday my family kidnapped me and it was lots of fun, but it was not exactly a productive day. And I’m REALLY running very late on… well… everything. So, things will get done, but I don’t have the time or mind to do promo this week. (It takes over an hour to make sure links are right/correlate everything, etc.)

Take the picture above as a prompt, and I’ll see you tomorrow morning.

And your first question is: what is a nice girl like you doing with a theme like that?

And the answer, for those of you who know me — all together now! — is “this thing isn’t entirely under my control.”

Though you know, my first published short story was a vampire story and I wrote three others, over time. But did I ever intend to write a vampire novel?

Well, I read Anne Rice, like who didn’t in my generation, until we got to the whole men-bad theme and the pseudo mythological explanation of vampires, at which point Queen of the Damned hit the wall hard and I never bought anymore. Because, you know, I was young, but not that stupid.  And when things annoy me they hit the wall and I stop buying.

I’ve read other vampire books now and then.  I prefer the kind where vampires are unalloyed evil, and humans aren’t. Flawed, sure, but humans win.  (Team human, yay!)

I also, obviously, like ones that set vampires on fire.

But part of what attracts me — and others to the theme — is the “sentient evil.”  When do you cross the edge to where there can be no redemption.  Yes, I know the christian myth of the vampire and that what’s in there is no longer a human being, but a demon.  And demons are by nature unredeemable.

That’s fine, if what you’re doing is just setting up the vampires as a straight up “you shoot them” type of thing.  But that’s not where the power of the vampire mythos lives.

No, even if you assume the dead body is taken over by a demon… It has all the memories, the thoughts, part of the human left behind.  What if it was a very good human?

Also there are medieval myths of even demons (who are after all only alive through the volition of G-d, as is everything else) longing for redemption.  Well, now this demon remembers being human. It’s all he remembers. And he longs for redemption.  Which is against his very nature.  If you don’t see the epic struggle in that, and the literary possibilities, well… I can’t help.

There is the other myth — which I chose to go with — which is that you only lose your soul when you choose to feed.  So, what can you do if not feed?  Yeah.

Anyway, that one attracts me, because how many times do we sell pieces of our souls “just to survive.” And because when I wrote the book, I was starting to see the time I couldn’t go on, or it would be irretrievable.  There’s only so much you can say and do without it tainting who you are forever.

That’s sort of what vampire stories are about: you can get these powers, and eternal life, but it will cost you, and the cost is more or less always to allow evil in.

It will surprise no one who reads here that my answer to this is “not at that price.” Not even if the alternative is awful death. But then Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid is my spirit animal.

Other authors make other choices, which is called “not everyone is me.”  But I sort of had to write mine and make it a bizarre story of triumph and laughing in the teeth of hell.  (Over the entire trilogy, a very steep and thorough triumph. You’ll see.)

Of course, that’s not why I wrote it. I wrote it because I couldn’t not write it. I sat in my car, turned the key, on a hot August afternoon, and suddenly there was the whole trilogy in my head.  I came home and typed random bits at Kate on messenger.

And that’s Vampire Musketeer, real title Sword and Blood and yes, only first book is done, though the second is almost done, and third is still in my head.  Life and health interfered, and there are other things I’m writing…

But right now Sword and Blood is in a bundle with story bundle, and if it does well, I’ll have to finish the second one in the next couple of months.

Of course, if you’re not a vampire-story reader, buying a bundle for just my book is silly.  (It’s also on Amazon.)

But if it’s your poison blood, it’s a good buy.  So… here’s the link, and I’ll go finish editing Deep Pink (Which has no vampires at all, though it has demons, which meet stainless steel baseball bats.)  I’m late on it, because life has been really interesting, but I’ll be asking for betas for next week, so stand by.  And then there’s the new improved Alien curse.

Anyway, I got to go work. Here’s the bundle.

This week something happened that put who we’re dealing with and how bad it’s got.

The full story is here, but here is what happened:

Carson King, 24, raised over $1 million after holding up a sign during ESPN’s “College GameDay” on Sept. 14 in Iowa. The sign asked for Venmo donations for his “Busch Light Supply.” King donated the funds, which were matched by Venmo and Busch Light, to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital.

Okay, let’s pause here and admit several things:

We have no idea what this kid’s political affiliation was/is.  Heck, I don’t know if anyone knows, yet.

He was running for no office, asking for no charity, not doing anything that required us to know about his character in any depth.

What we know about him is that he’s a college student who (probably as a joke) asked for beer money and got way more money than anyone could expect.

Which is when he did something I — personally — couldn’t do.  Look, guys, if someone gave me 1 million, I’d pay off some of the kids’ loans (we only paid half their undergrad tuition each, plus living expenses/supplementary expenses) And depending on how much was left after taxes, pay down our mortgage or get us cars younger than 25 years.

I don’t think I’d have the courage/fortitude to donate it all to a children’s hospital.

The other thing I THINK I can say for sure is that despite the culture war we do all still agree that sick kids deserve treatment, right? We do still all agree on that, right?

So, this kid, whoever and whatever he was, was a hero and almost a saint in a way most of us couldn’t do: being a young man, with his life to establish, he didn’t say “I’ll start a business” or “I’ll buy a house” or even “I’ll have the biggest party.”  No. He said, “You know what I wouldn’t have this money normally. Let’s do some good with it.”

So this is the part that made me go “In heaven’s name why?”

Des Moines Register reporter Aaron Calvin reported on two tweets written by King when he was 16 while compiling information for a profile on him, published Tuesday. The tweets were brought to King’s attention, and he apologized before the Register published the profile, including the unsavory comments.

The kid isn’t running for anything, guys. He’s not selling the public anything. He’s just a private citizen going about his private business.  Who would go digging through is twitter feed to find SOME dirt from when he was too young to have a filter?  WHO IN HECK EVEN THINKS of doing that?

I have no idea what the politics of the journalist are, either, that’s not the important thing.  Pay attention to the actions, though.  What this reminded me most of was the Covington kids, who weren’t selling anything; weren’t doing anything and yet the media looked to destroy their characters as thoroughly as possible, in public, with the potential for severe backlash and destroying their abilities to find a job… for no reason.

The left will say it’s because they were at a pro-life demonstration, but the left is full of sh*t.  If that were the thing that would turn most people off, they’d have broadcast that, instead of inventing smirks and “rude to tribal elders” and “racist” bullshit, none of which actually happened.

And you can say what you will of the wisdom of taking teens to pro-life demonstrations.  I went to demonstrations at 16 and I think I did it of my free will, and am still rather proud of them. In fact, I more or less dragged mom. Was I indoctrinated? Only if it was reverse-indoctrinated, since I got the other viewpoint in every class and civic occasion.  Sure. For me, that probably counts.

But anyway, whatever you think of it, teens go to these demonstrations and the left lionizes the ones on their side, so kids don’t deserve that even if dragged to a demonstration. And yet the media gleefully set out to destroy their futures because they didn’t like the politics of the demonstration they were at.

This is what this incident reminded me of, only, so far as I can tell there was NO political motivation.

So, what was it?

Well, the journalist, whatever his politics — and I’d bet leftist, both because of his field and what he got away with for years without anyone doing this kind of dig — is immersed in a very leftist work culture.

I’ve said before that the left makes envy their cardinal virtue.  If you’re envious and you hate, then you’re someone to be listened to.

I’d assumed — I have some naivite still I guess — that this envy was only for material goods.  Apparently not.

What happened was that the journalist saw someone who was admirable, someone who had done something truly good for no personal benefit.  And he thought “AhAH! This person has done something I couldn’t do. I MUST tear him down.”

And then did a deep dive for anything the kid might have said incautiously.

Sure, the journalist was fired — for his own stupid tweets — but what good is that to the big-hearted young man who donated what would be a great way to start out in life to kids with cancer? What does he do now? Every place he applies to, he’s going to come with a big, and I’m sure undeserved — why am I sure? Because he didn’t donate with any conditions as to what kids could be helped — label of “racist”.  No corporate entity will hire him, lest they get submerged in wokerage.

I have no idea what politics the journalist has. But I know what he grew up reading, and I know the ethos of it.  It is “Nobody is clean.”  It is “There are no heroes, everyone is corrupt and evil.”  It is “We shouldn’t look up to anyone, because everyone has flaws.”

And that revolting and vile insanity is at the feet of the political side that has controlled media, entertainment and literature my whole life: the left.

Why do I say it’s insanity? Aren’t humans all flawed?

Of course they are. We are all flawed in ways small and big.  Which does not invalidate that a lot of us are saints and heroes.  In fact, the proportion of saints and heroes is much higher than that of fools and criminals. More importantly, it had withstood a culture that tells us — social apes — that heroism and sanctity are impossible and faintly ridiculous.

I know why the left needs to believe that.  If no individual can be good, then we need iron-clad laws (which, remember, they think are magical and make everyone even criminals magically obey) that make us act properly even in the tiniest and most personal aspects of our lives.  And we need government to be totalitarian, to keep all these horrible individuals in check. (Keep in mind that to them government isn’t composed of humans.)

The left is wrong. Oh, maybe it’s that way in their circles. Among humans, social apes all, the most conformist and that follow what’s expected the most, seem to be the left, with their virtue signaling and group-think and thought-leaders. So maybe over the almost a century they’ve controlled communications in society they’ve made themselves into horrors.

But it’s not the way SOCIETY is.  Observe any kindergarten class.  Sure, you’ll see horrible spoiled brats. But you’ll also see kids who help others and try to be good. Heck, sometimes they’re the same person.

However, this is where the culture war has got us. The left has turned a vast number of people into despicable creatures, incapable of doing anything good, but more importantly, DESIROUS of tearing down everything that anyone else does or achieves.

Which of course also explains why they want to tear down civilization and take us back to before great humans created and fought and worked for centuries so their children wouldn’t die in infancy in the mud.

And why they are fascinated with the end product of their own digestion, in “culture” and “art.”

Oh, and with sex, that appetite we share with dogs.

They truly, absolutely, passionately hate anyone or anything who does things they’ve declared to be impossible: create, build, care for others, lift others up, do the best they can or die trying.  They hate that with a bloody purple passion.

Let’s make them mad.

Go out there create, build, be!  Show that there is more good than bad in this human creature.  You can’t be perfect, and no one is asking you to be perfect. But you can TRY to be good.  And it’s okay, you know, even a minimal amount of good is enough to drive the left into frothing rage.

So hold your middle fingers aloft to them — metaphorically — as you pass and do the things they say are impossible.

Be the best human you can be. Fully.  And enjoy it. The left really hates that.

Dum Vivimus, Vivamus.

Guys, pssst?  Can someone check on the left? Because something is seriously, bizarrely wrong.  I mean, wrong enough that if the left, collectively, tripped into a hospital’s ER, they’d be slapped with a psychiatric hold.  These people — collectively — are not well.

Look, when I was growing up, one of our merry band was schizophrenic.  When he felt his insanity coming on, he’d go and commit himself, because he didn’t want to hurt anyone.  We can only hope (in vain) that the left could have that kind of insight into their mental processes.

Recently, I heard of someone also suffering from mental illness, who removed every electrical wire from his house, bashed his laptop, the radio, the TV and his telephone, sent in his own obituary and generally posed a danger to himself and others because the aliens/CIA/someone was spying on him through all of those.  He might be saner than the left.

No, seriously. I was texting to Bill (Reader) yesterday and I said something like “the left is so crazy it’s starting to scare me.  What kind of rational human being thinks we should reorganize our entire economy because an indoctrinated SWEDISH teen needs to allay her anxiety?”  And then he said, “Or for instance, that Biden is corrupt, therefore impeach Trump.”

And then I realized there were a ton of other things just as insane from that side of the isle, and I had to think, and then…

Okay, we’ll ignore people like Rashida Tlaib going on about how black market vaping cartridges have coffee and alcohol and other things that can’t be digested by the lungs, and Alexandria Occasional Cortex going on about filming the poisonous effluvia of fracking at a place where no fracking was happening and therefore it was just heat waves from drilling machinery.  We’ll ignore this, because stupid is as stupid does, and the concentrated stupidity in the “squad” is denser and harder than the core of some stars. On the other hand, consider, ladies and gentlemen, that the democrats and the press (but I repeat myself) think that creatures of such impressive density, whose stupidity is even now influencing the orbit of distant galaxies, are worthy not just of being in congress (I mean, the Romans, famously put a horse in the Senate. Who are we to complain about mere donkeys?) but are people we should listen to, and give any type of attention to and/or look to for the future of this country.  No, think about it for a moment. It will prepare you for what is to come.

As I sat there, staring at my phone screen, I realized some of the crazy is so crazy that the mind has attempted to erase it. I always said that the Obama administration had the interesting strategy of covering scandal with scandal, but I swear the democrats/progressives/ happy face socialists, (whatever the hell they call themselves this week. They keep changing names like a bad Chinese restaurant that cooks the neighborhood pets) these days cover crazy with crazy, until your mind rebels at the sheer amount of insanity and regurgitates it, like a cat that has swallowed half a bag of marshmallows (I’m looking at you, Havelock.)

The crazy has been so, you’ll pardon the allusion, fast and furious that I forgot one of the incidents first time through, and probably am forgetting some now.  We won’t even go back till the Mueller investigation was revealed as utterly hollow and probably fraudulent from the beginning.  Mostly because in the aftermath the NYT admitted it was trying to distract us with “racism, racism, racism” and such poor scholarship that even other leftists called them on it.

But somehow, somewhere along the line, the dime dropped that these days you can put the American people to sleep with “racist!” or its new hip variant “white supremacist.”

In between there, sometime, there was the bizarre obsession with “children in cages” which they never seemed to comprehend were ALSO from Obama’s tenure. (And we got the picture of Occasional Cortex staring forlornly into a parking lot, and a lot of other nuttery) And also somehow this morphed into “detention of people trying to illegally cross our border is like German death camps.”  Because you know, the problem Nazi Germany had was all those Jews trying to cross the border to come in.  WHAT?  Yes, it’s exactly like it, except where it’s not like it at all, which is all over.

But the left has minds so completely virgin of history that they make virgin olive oil look like promiscuous olive oil, and so from this bizarre a-historical comparison, they jumped not only to attacking ICE facilities and defacing American flags (question for the audience, what flag do they think they would prefer? Do they really think an invader would put them in charge? Don’t answer that. “Think” is a misnomer for what passes for their mental processes at this point. It’s like the random firing of defective, partially wet fireworks) but also to thinking that “free health care for illegal aliens” and “abolish ICE” is a winning point for their 2020 platform.

Look, guys, can thorazine be made into tranq darts? I think we’re going to need them.

But somehow, this fail-safe way to win American hearts and minds failed (save for a few empty heads in the suburbs who kept bleating “but the children” as though it were kind to encourage unscrupulous parents and kidnapping strangers to grab the kids and drag them the length of the Americas getting raped along the way by making “but the children” a get out of jail card to walk dry shod onto American soil.) I know, un-possible. And yet it failed. Possibly because as the fiercely heterosexual Cory Booker says, so many of us are “despicable.”

And so — because, as I read somewhere (might have been the NYT) they’re counting on (I swear I’m not making this up) scandal fatigue (attached to Trump!) to win them the 2020 election, the left decided to go completely, pants on head, writing obscene words on your naked bods with indelible marker, dancing a jig in subzero weather nuts.  We’re not talking the gentle madness of planning a transatlantic bridge made entirely out of soap. No, in retrospect that was the Mueller inquiry.  This… this is something completely … well, crazier.

So, what have  we seen:

Well we saw Beto O’Rourke not only saying that damn the second amendment, full speed ahead, if he won the election he was coming for our guns, but — mark my words about this, please — having T-shirts printed up with this, as though he thought, nay, was SURE this would be the making of his campaign.  No, seriously.

It is as some liberal but still sane guy said recently as if “The left thinks it’s campaigning in a country slightly to the left of Sweden.”

I’d say more than that. I’d say they think they’re campaigning in a country as disarmed as England.  Let me assure them we still have not just our knives, our screwdrivers, our sharpened spoons, but also our guns.  And saying “you’ll let me take them because I say so” doesn’t sit too well with us Americans. I suppose it’s not Beto’s fault that he never met any of us. I’m going to assume he landed, the day before that debate, from some other parallel world where there are no Americans.

Maybe in that world, the Swedes rule America.

Then there was Kavanaugh thing.  You’re going to say “Oh, old news.” Oh, au contraire, mon frere in suffering through this craziness.
No. Kavanaugh was brought up again, and the left wanted to impeach him — yes, impeach him — because some book recently published said he’d wagged his penis in someone’s face when he was eighteen. The book also said, mind you, that the woman denied and said she didn’t remember any such thing.

And when the supposed victim of this crime said “never happened.” they said that just because she couldn’t remember it, it didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Yes. The left, ladies and gentlemen, small dragons, wingless birds and feathered mammals, the political side that #believeallwomen, even people who suddenly remember things that supposedly happened forty years ago in a house that doesn’t seem to exist, when a designated victim says she doesn’t remember anything of the kind and it never happened says, “Forget the drunken slut. She doesn’t remember but that don’t mean nothing. Wouldn’t remember her own name if it weren’t tattooed on her butt. Listen to us. We must impeach a supreme court justice because we say so and will stomp our little feet and scream till you do what we say.”

Which funnily enough, between Sweden and tantrums brings us to the next item: Turns out the left believes that the best way to treat a child’s anxiety is to rearrange the entire economy of the world.  No, seriously.

I was on a forum where a woman said we shouldn’t discount the opinions of Greta Thunberg just because she’s mentally ill.

Okay, then. I suppose the guy who ripped out all the wiring of his house should be listened to. I mean, perhaps there were in fact aliens spying on him through the wires.  I’m sorry, if you’re merely depressed, your opinion might have some validity.  Distorted, maybe, but there might be something there.

But if you’re a child who suffers from both a cognitive disorder that makes it impossible to identify irony, hyperbole and lying AND from depression, why would anyone in their right mind pay attention to what you have to say?  Worse, note the CHILD in the last sentence. Greta Thunberg is a child who has not, in fact, finished the equivalent of high school.

Now, I know that children can be geniuses. I am the mother of a diagnosed “profoundly gifted” son, and another who is “at least one standard deviation above him.”  I’m here to tell you that both of them can be very knowledgeable about whatever their field of specialty is.  Which at sixteen was…  Do you know how many bizarre arguments I endured over the best way of making ME a body replacement robot, so I wouldn’t have auto-immune attacks? Or the life history of various comic book heroes, with and without retconning?  I would absolutely listen to them, then, on those subjects. Because they were probably the greatest living authorities on them, and also on various convolutions of Asterix the Gaul. Or in the case of one of them, the economic policies of ancient Rome.

You know what they weren’t authorities on? What international policy and economics should be. You know why not? Because they were sixteen.

Even adults can’t grasp how one could change world economics without killing most of the population, to avert global warming if it were a problem (hint, it doesn’t seem to be. Or at least not within foreseeable future. Or at least none of the people who claim to believe in it actually act like it is a problem.)

But, oh, dear Lord, the left, and Europeans — WTF really is the Monaco Royal Family thinking? Have they reached the level of inbreeding where they’re as dumb as Occasional Cortex? — and the press, think that this girl, because she’s sincere and angry is somehow worthy of talking in front of our congress and the UN (as if the UN needed to further beclown itself) on how we must all change things because we Faiiiiiiiiled her.

I realize that throwing tantrums has got her parents to structure their entire lives around her dictates, but what no one has explained is how and why they expect the rest of the world to do so.

Look, any of my kids when they were young and living with us, telling us we needed to change something like our dinner time because we’d faillllllled them and were ruining their childhood would be told “Tough. Also shut up child the adults are talking.”

But the world is supposed to stop for Greta Thunberg, because she’s disabled and really, really indoctrinated? Oh, and has pigtails.  Well, then. Neither of my boys had pigtails. Must be the difference.

And of course, just in case this failed, the left organized a massive, all out tantrum by giving the kids time off to leave school and demonstrate, stomping their feet and demanding we stop everything because they’re scared.

I guess because they don’t have kids, the left exaggerates the power of children tantruming?  because for us parents, that’s called “Wednesday.”  We used to look at our kids, throwing themselves to the grocery store floor, pumping arms and legs and go “Cute.  Okay. We’re leaving. Call us when you have a job.”  This usually stopped the tantrum and got them walking sheepishly beside us.

Metaphorically speaking, that’s the only response Greta, who comes from a country as far left (in fact) as Sweden deserves from the United States. I don’t care how “sincere” she is. If her fears really were of man-made global warming, she’d be lecturing India and China, not us.

So, take her away from her horrible, insane parents.  Give her to human beings to raise. Whipping the parents in the public square till the blood runs freely is probably not practical, and besides they might enjoy it.

But wait, wait, “You must give us socialism because this Swedish kid is upset and besides we have all these other kids who will take a day off school and hold up signs” isn’t the sum total of the left’s madness… Oh, no.

No. Possibly the best part of the last two weeks is the left demanding that we impeach Trump because Joe Biden is corrupt.

Sure, there’s other stuff there, but already the wheels are coming off, between Trump releasing the transcript of the call, and apparently the “whistleblower” not actually having heard the call to Ukraine, so he’s blowing his little whistle on … hearsay? and… Oh, yeah, this guy works for the Clintons, seems like, or at least that’s what I got from the convoluted chain of who is paying whom…

Is your head hurting yet?  Mine is.

Guys, in my misspent youth, I looked after friends who were suffering through bad acid trips and who were more rational than the left has become.

I fully expect sometime next week they’ll start an inquiry in the House on “Why is a mouse when he spins?” and return a resolution of “The higher, the fewer.”

Which would be hilarious, if these people didn’t have the power of the purse, if (through their press branch) they didn’t manipulate the perception of the US abroad, and if we were absolutely sure that we can beat the margin of fraud.

As is, though, it’s like being locked in a small room with someone who has gone completely and utterly insane.

Any minute now, they’re going to swagger over, wave something in our face and say “See, see? I told you the US is evil and Trump is a dictator. I have proof. Proof, I tell you.”
And we won’t know how to break it to them what they’re holding is a fistful of their own excrement.

The Complete American Disassembly Manual – Bill Reader

Today’s article is dedicated to the Democratic party. In an act of generosity, and in very simple terms, I’m going to explain to you how you can have everything you want. Every last thing I disagree with fundamentally. Every single dark socialist desire that you wish to see supplant the fundamental freedoms on which this country is founded. I am, believe me, not particularly happy about doing so, and there are no tricks. You may question my motives, but humor me and I’ll reveal them in time.
Among other things, it may be clearer once you understand the small, regrettable detail of the price.

Now, first, of course, we’ll have to define what it is I think you want. Depending on whether Sarah is able to publish this article in time, this list should cover at least the things I think are most important. It is by no means comprehensive, but allow me to do my poor best at catching, say, the top 10 key ideas.

At present, to a greater or lesser extent—this is from following your primaries and your leading politicians— you would like:
1) Mandatory gun confiscation/ “buybacks”

2) Universal centralized healthcare— including things not universally agreed to be “health care”, such as free sex-changes, free and utterly secret abortions for any female old enough to physically become pregnant, and mandatory contraceptive coverage without exception

3) A centrally planned economy with regards to energy production, the better to expedite “green” technology being implemented

4) Mandatory car confiscation concurrent with massively expanded public transportation initiatives

5) The banning or heavy taxation of “inefficient” foodstuffs, especially beef, in favor of theoretically energy-efficient vegetarian diets and even—I can hardly believe I’m having to write this— insect-based foods

6) Unrestrained censorship of conservatives in media generally

7) The right for government agencies to remove through extrajudicial means a sitting president whom you personally dislike
8) Universal basic guaranteed income

9) Slavery reparations

10) Essential dissolution of the nation’s borders in the form of absolutely uncontrolled immigration.

Now, you may only want some of the things on this list, I admit, and hence consider yourself a moderate. It will not surprise you to know that in my opinion—and I say the following merely so you understand I’m not trying to lull you with false flattery— believing in absolutely anything on this list means you are not only not a moderate, you’ve forgotten, or never learned, key things about the fundamental philosophy of America. We’ll beg to differ from one another for the duration of the article, though, because it’s not really important. We have plenty of time to clash about philosophy later.

It may interest you to know that you can, in fact, have these things. Really. Oh, there is a problem, of course. The problem is that the current laws of the United States, including, yes, the constitution, make it completely illegal for you to simply proceed with several of them.

Mandatory confiscation or a mandatory buyback—which is expensive confiscation, but by right of the fact that it is mandatory is definitionally still confiscation— contravenes the 2nd amendment. If you are guaranteed a right to bear arms, and the government is confiscating your arms, you can try to spin it any way you like, the government has officially infringed what it is explicitly forbidden from infringing.

If a person’s employment in a certain field means they work exclusively for the government, for whatever wages, on whatever terms, with no alternative except not working in that field—then you are advocating a form of slavery, in contravention of the 13th amendment. That applies not only to doctors being forced to work under nationalized healthcare but any people whose work is forcibly reassigned in the midst of setting up a centrally planned green economy.

If you plan on taking coal plants from their owners, remodeling houses whether owners like it or not (as the Green New Deal advocates), confiscating cars, confiscating foodstuff or animals either from consumers or the producers of same—all these things are in contravention of the 4th amendment. You cannot just take people’s things at your own whim with no rationale other than you want them because your cause of the moment demands it.

You can’t use governmental powers to censor conservatives because of the 1st amendment. Obviously. Though I have to say that so far Silicon Valley is doing a good job of sparing you the necessity and the useful idiots over at, say, “The Bulwark” are assisting you.

Also, Republicans do get to be elected. Read the 12th amendment if you don’t believe me. Just because you don’t like the system by which they are elected, just because you don’t like the Republican who gets elected, does not give you carte blanch to remove them by means other than a legitimate election. There’s a process laid out for electing a president and in no part does it read that the president can be removed by extrajudicial tampering by unelected agencies at the behest of his predecessor and his opponent in the presidential campaign. Nor, I imagine, would this process have been a welcome addition.

I grant you that not every single thing you want is explicitly forbidden by the constitution, but, on the other hand, as we can see above, much of it is.

Now, at present, your strategy is to just ignore that this is the case. Strangely, however, no provision was made in the constitution for it to simply expire when it became too old or inconvenient. Generally we conservatives feel that this was extremely intentional, given that the principles were designed to govern humans and the general nature of humans was considered fairly predictable within certain bounds. As I understand it, your side feels this was merely an oversight, and—I have to assume—that the rules were either derived for some other purpose than the stated one of preventing what have historically been the predictable over-reaches of would-be tyrants, or else, more incredibly, that human nature itself has changed.

Whichever you believe, proceeding in accordance with these beliefs would be relatively unwise. I don’t endorse violent changes to government for much the same reason I don’t endorse the FBI’s shenanigans regarding the Trump administration. I will, however, note that armed services personnel swear oaths to the constitution, not to any particular elected official. While I do not doubt that some portion of the armed forces would be in compliance if, as Swalwell suggested, they were directed against their fellow citizens for unconstitutional reasons, I harbor some doubts that all of them would be. “Befehle sind befehle” is not a phrase one wishes to find oneself resorting to, given its legacy, and I suspect some of our service men and women are aware of that fact.
Let’s make no bones about the fact that even if you had 100% military support, however, first, you’d be making orders in direct and unambiguous contravention of US law in a way that really doesn’t require a court to explain. Remember that at its core, the reason we on the Right are generally adamant that violence not be resorted to while there is any reasonable alternative is essentially because of what happens if the principle is universalized. If violence is an acceptable route to power, then we’re not even really pretending to be a Republic, or a Democracy, or a country any longer. We’re an argument with borders. There’s a reciprocal agreement that the government will not do anything requiring violence, (and no other reasonable course of action), to redress. What things actually fall into what category—I would argue because our education in civics is completely remiss— are increasingly arbitrated by the judicial system.
Insofar as the judicial system is mainly used as the arbiter of late, you might find yourself—in fact from listening to you I know you find yourself—wondering if there is anything at all that is such an obvious abuse of power that the courts wouldn’t need to be called in to arbitrate. And following closely on that thought, you’re wondering where that line is mostly so you can walk right up to it. Put another way, what you’re attempting to do is call the bluff of the American people, and argue that there is, in fact, no practical, ultimate check on government authority at all, apart from you being “polite” enough not to just blithely ignore the laws that restrict what laws you can make.

Yet I hope we can at least agree that even if you think that should be an allowable way to run a country, it’s still a dangerous way to run a country. If nothing else, in the abstract, when A) the country in question has a civilian populace better armed than many nation’s militaries, and B) the culture of the country includes a substantial percentage of people who draw the line of when violent resistance is acceptable a little more, pardon the pun, conservatively than you and perhaps even I do, I hope you can at least see why you are, at best, courting civil war by engaging in constitutional brinksmanship.

Why not do it differently?

It may shock and amaze you to know that there are laws even for the changing of laws. Yes! There’s an actual legal framework available to you. Amazingly, the drafters of the constitution imagined that perhaps we would someday want to amend it. They even put in place a method of doing so. In fact, it has actually been done! Several times, in fact.

“All” you have to do is get a 2/3rds majority in the House of representatives and the senate to support your change, or get 2/3rds of state legislatures to call a constitutional convention and agree to it. Then, three quarters of the states need to ratify it. Interestingly, the president isn’t strictly necessary, though sometimes he signs something for the look of the thing anyway.

I hasten to add that the fact that a process was added for changing the constitution further shames those of you who just want to ignore it. See, I suspect that many of you know damn well that we have legitimate rules that you are willfully ignoring. I suspect that many of you are willfully ignoring the rules precisely because you know that you don’t have nearly the support or the mandate necessary to play within them. And instead of doing the self-reflection that ought to be stimulated by the fact that the system seems designed to prevent precisely what you are attempting, instead of wondering why that might be, your response so far has been to simply refuse to play by the legitimate rules. All this in an exceedingly misguided attempt to force your beliefs on the entire American public, as if the rules for changing the constitution were just one more limitation whose reason and origin was a mystery to you. Whether you admit it or not, if that characterization defines you, you are already exactly the tyrant the constitution was designed to restrain. You already think of yourself more as living on the brutal and direct terms of power and force than any civilized articulation of raw nature that’s come after, and you kid yourself if you think there’s any kind of compassion motivating that. To you, I say: the limits you are hitting are not at all arbitrary—au contraire, you personally are the reason they exist. I hope I am not being too cagey on this point.

But let’s say, entirely for the sake of argument, that you hadn’t heard. It’s entirely possible, in this world of state-run education designed more for propaganda than didactic value. I said I was not glad to provide this information, and I meant it. There was a time this wouldn’t have warranted an article. The modern Democratic party shows that those times are behind us.

Of course, you may complain that the bar for constitutional change is a very, very high bar. That is because, as I previously mentioned, the constitution—especially the original amendments— were drafted explicitly to prevent formation of a tyrannical government, by people who were highly motivated insofar as they were rebels against a tyrannical government. You’d be surprised how hard such men can make life. Ask England.

But what if you’re unwilling to play by those rules? Surely the bar is too high?

Ah, well, here we part ways, my friend. But I can tell you now, you’re a fool if you think the height of that bar is adjustable merely by writing down an easier-to-reach number.

Look— Let’s say you really, genuinely, had 51% absolute majority in the country. I don’t think you do, in fact, though nobody can really say one way or another since last I checked non-voters who could legally vote were either at or close to the largest majority in the country. But let’s say you did, purely for the sake of argument. I think that in your minds, 51% of the country abrogating the basic rights of the other 49% is some kind of stable, tenable configuration for a country. You seem to think, intrinsically, that there really wouldn’t be anything you couldn’t do with a solid 51%, and certainly so if you could bump it to maybe 52 or 53%. Majority rules, right? Because laws—in this as in all other things—are some kind of magic in your heads, and you can just ignore the ones you find inconvenient but also, all the ones you pass are going to be immediately followed.

But that’s not how things are written, is it. Why not? Why such a high bar?

Because where your goal is just to win whatever things your cause wants today no matter the long-term consequences, the goal of the drafters of the constitution was a stable society. That meant some kind of nod to how humans work and think. You may have noticed that a stable society does not look like, for example, what I predict the general response would be if you tried to confiscate guns. On some level, precisely because nobody really knows exactly what would happen, except the smart money is that it would be messy and you wouldn’t like the outcome. That’s not exactly what a popular mandate looks like.

No, you want to know ultimately why 2/3rds of both houses need to approve a law? Because 66 people against 33 have a much, much better chance of winning in a straight-up fight than 51 or 52 or 53 against 49, 48, or 47. Such a good chance, in fact, that the fight is unlikely to happen. And the constitution is drafted in such a way that people aren’t supposed to feel tempted to have a violent argument about things that are passed into it and then people have to live by. Because—assuming, again, your goal is stability— laws on what laws may be passed shouldn’t themselves be  passed unless they are really, really popular. Barely tolerated is not enough.

This is why, when you’re talking about fundamental basis of a country’s laws, what you would probably think of as a nearly unreachable clear majority doesn’t come anywhere close to what you really need. And yet, dislike it though you may, that threshold is yet another fact imposed by nature itself and arrayed against you. It exists precisely because of the instability inherent in defining things otherwise—such as in the way you would prefer.

Maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’d still rather pretend the law is other than it is rather than follow it.

Just remember, it can be mighty hard to tell a populace to do as you say, not as you do.

What do you do after you lose trust in your institutions? All your institutions? What happens to a civilization when every public institution, everything we are supposed to trust and believe has provably lied to us?

From the media with their increasingly crazy and public lying and insanity, to professional associations (“gun epidemic”), to our schools (really, really, children walking out to protest climate change? Because yes, children know things you didn’t tell them), to our scientific studies that no one can actually reproduced, to our contaminated, cheating elections (really, Arizona? We’ll keep the polls open till the leftist wins?) to the fact that one party in the US is fronting candidates that no one can actually believe and who seem to be living in a parallel universe, to our corrupted statistics for both census and production and cost of living, to the frigging polls, to–

Look, all “elites” lie to the people, and arguably our institutions lied a lot more to us in the past. Or if not more, at least as much.

Now for the first time, though, there are ways to verify and to question what we’re being told, and again, I must ask: What happens when the people lose all trust in their institutions?

Perhaps it’s an effect of catastrophic technological change. Perhaps it’s why it’s not so obvious in the rest of the world?

Or is it obvious in the rest of the world? There seems to be a lot of “unexpectedly” in foreign elections recently.

Or perhaps it’s the result of our elites going off on a kind of determined vision of what the future is that prevents them from seeing the reality that everyone else sees.  But then again this has happened to a lot of elites throughout the ages without people losing all confidence.

Except of course, when people have and Madame la Guillotine worked overtime, and when there were sudden and horrible upheavals.

Look, I’ll be honest, with people losing all respect for all institutions and credentials, we’re running close to the idea of the people who take revenge on the elites after nuclear war in A Canticle for Leibowitz: “Yes, we’re simple, and we shall have a great simplification.”

I don’t see any way out of this that doesn’t involve an upheaval and the throwing away of the baby with the bathwater.  Some things are possible, like the replacing of the corrupt mass media by people on the scene.  And perhaps other things, like replacing corrupt politicians (we hope.)  But how do you replace scientists? how do you investigate scientific knowledge and determine the wheat from the shaft? How do you regain trust in our government agencies?

Throughout the world, when people have bragged of bodies composed entirely of women (Sweden) and awards given on the basis of everything but what the award is actually for, how do you regain trust.

Trust is built slowly, over generations. It can be squandered very quickly.  Once it’s squandered, how do you regain it?

Look, guys, we make lots of fun of people who think the Earth is flat. Rightly so. But there are things you can’t verify for yourself.

If someone tells us that Iran has launched missiles at us, do you believe them? What institution would you believe, if there were a big explosion somewhere and we were told “Oh, that was an Iranian missile.” Or, alternately “That was a meteor.”  Any?

Because I have to tell you — I’m all out of trust, and I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Is this survivable?  Or are we like a marriage where you come home and find your spouse in bed with the paper boy and she tells you “I’m completely faithful. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”  Where divorce is the only possible recourse.  But how do you divorce your own institutions: schools, universities, professional certification bodies, corporations, agencies, the press itself?

In this year of the great unmasking, where the kings and queens dance naked in the streets, how do we survive this perilous times? Whom can we trust?

Build under, build over, build around.  Tell the truth or at least don’t lie.  Remember to build in truth, because there is no hiding from it.  We live in the times when the secret of every heart shall be revealed.

Build under, build over, build around.  Build solid. Because the only other bridge past this time of troubles is built of blood, of human bones, and of a dark age that might or might not flourish again into the light.

Be not afraid, but be aware.  And don’t be lulled into either complacence or despondence.  We’re surrounded by lies. It’s up to us to find our way through them.

The anti-hooman wave- A Blast From The Past from October 2012

Good morning oppressed children of story and plot; inglorious workers in the vine of words!  I bring portentous news.  Your brothers and sisters, the rodents, are on your side.

You probably thought the Rodent Liberation Front was merely a flourish of – running dog of literary imperialism and gender traitor – Sarah A. Hoyt’s imagination in Gentleman Takes A Chance.  You were wrong!  We exist.  Struggling and nibbling at the margins of society, we have formed our plan to take over the world one nut at a time.

This being so, it will not surprise you to know that we found it necessary to reclaim for the people the property heretofore known as According To Hoyt or Sarah A. Hoyt’s Blog.  First, because it was being self-evidently written by a nut, second because many of the regulars appeared to be nuts, third because it often strayed into the field of science fiction which is, you might call it, a nut rich environment.

Since our primary goal is the redistribution of nuts to those who grow them, harvest them, own them, steal them, we had to claim this blog as the glorious conquest of the RLF.

Now that the blog is ours we enjoy enjoin you to forget the nonsense about a human wave.  You will never be anything as individuals.  The purpose of the individual is to serve the greater good of the state.

Join the RLF.  Like us, you are oppressed and downtrodden.  Think of all the people who don’t like your books.  Think of the evil corporation Amazon who sells your book in mere electrons, instead of comforting paper.  Think of all the poor publishers, who shall perish without your work and money.

Like us you are fond of nuts.  You are our natural allies.  In the collective, you shall write exactly what we tell you to – think of the joy of not having to think for yourselves – and you shall be free to share your royalties with us.

The nuts, united, shall never be defeated.  Talent to those who don’t have it! Redistribute the benefits of the writing, not the writing work.

Together we shall win!

Squirrel Castro

PS -Ignore the thumpings from the basement.  Sarah A. Hoyt is securely tied fit to be tied enjoying a lovely time at a reeducation camp