Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Hopefully there will be time tomorrow to talk of cats and kings, wax seals and rings.  Actually what I wanted to address is semantic confusion fueling moral panics on the left (the right too, but our moral panics are in general less panicky, because to get a good panic on you need a stampede and the American right’s (anyone to the right of Lenin, really) motto is “you’re not the BOSS of me!” even when the person is.  So the individualists fail to stampede.  We also fail to organize. You got to take the bitter with the sweet.)

However it’s just gone seven O’clock and we’re running half an hour late to hit the road and head back to Colorado.

And I’m telling my body it can’t get this lovely con crud it’s trying to hatch till AFTER Liberty con.

Fyrecon is one of the most serious TEACHING cons (for writers artists and creators) that I’ve ever attended.  I’m just sorry I missed the class on making your own patterns for plushies.  I mean, I can do it, but it might have taken me to the next level. Also, stop judging my hobbies.

On the writing side, even the “kids” listened closely and asked a lot of questions, and they were pertinent. (Kids take to mean high school and college.)

I like teaching, and it helped me figure out a few things to offer classes in.

Also we got to see friends.  And of course, like the Derp Canoe I often am, I carried the book plates all the way to Utah, then forgot to ask Larry to sign them, so I could bring double-signed ones to Liberty con. I’m sorry.

So… heading back the fastest (not the scenic, this time) route.  I have three short stories and a cover to deliver before Wednesday.  And I’ll write a real post tomorrow.

See you on the other side.

Yesterday, just as I was falling off to sleep, a disturbing thought hit me: so, my kids and their friends are fanning out into the world.

Because they are a gifted and responsible bunch and perhaps because my friends tend to be artsy-fartsy (eh. Guilty) and/or in entrepreneurial/self employed jobs, their kids seem to have gone out of their way to get the most responsible/serious positions they could. Which means many are in the military, health professions, engineering, civil-engineering or simply writing the software for all of the above.

So I was thinking of these goofy kids who used to get in epic battles over COMIC continuity, and who are now responsible for keeping people alive.  They hold our lives in their hands.  Or people’s hands at any rate.

And because I was falling asleep, I then thought “but we all do, don’t we?”

Which might seem weird for someone whose only (ah!) responsibility is to write a few blogs, make up stories. Silly right?

Yeah, sort of. Except I know my life was saved at least once (in terms of my not giving in to awful illness) because a book kept my spirits up.

And hey, I know the letters I get.  Sure, I can’t reach out with my words and kill you.  Probably a good thing, honest, given how many times I wake up like a bear with two heads.

But there are times to believe fan notes, that I have the power to keep you going one more day.  Which would mean I have the inverse power too, right?
And then there’s the other side.

Our world is so interconnected — hello, social apes! — that we all influence each other.  Do I know one of you reading this isn’t a surgeon who will be made more (or less) hopeful and alert by my post? Or an airline pilot ready to go out and fly a plane with 360 some lives in his hands?

And note above –most of the no-account, free0lancers that were my friends in my twenties and thirties raised hyper-responsible, hyper- powerful kids.

Mothers influence their children , and a circle of friends and acquaintances.

It’s a web. We all hold each other’s lives in our hands.

And there’s always been — always, since I’ve been alive — a deep and powerful current of “Humanity sucks, I hate it, let’s kill or prevent the lives of most people right now.”

It’s only recently the counter current got any hold, because it’s only recently we acquired a voice.

Remember that.

We’re fighting back against a deeply entrenched position. And it’s time.  We need a lot of hands upholding hope and the future, and a value for humanity at large and people in particular.

It’s time.

Richard Fernandez equates it to the principle of good (or at least the defender of mankind) finally waking up, almost at the brink of destruction.  Finally fighting back.  He explains it all not supernaturally, but through infective “thought memes”.

He’s not wrong. And I’m not wedded to how you explain it. What matters is that we do it.

There is value in life and humanity. Dead nothing might be beautiful, but who is there to admire it.

You hold my life in your hands. We all hold each other’s lives in our hands.

You can’t always be good, and a force for life and strength and light. No one can.  We’re humans. We’re fractured and cracked wide.

But you can strive and work to uphold light and life and good and hope and that the future can be better than the past. You can do the best you can and on balance, positively, save more than you doom.

And that’s enough. And that’s plenty. And that should be more than what we need to fight back.

Because darkness and nihilism are exhausting and dreadful.  And light propagates light.

Go and carry the light. Go and build. Go and push upward, and push others upward, too.

You hold my life in your hands.

You hold the future in your hands.

Be not afraid.

*Sorry I didn’t post yesterday.  This is the hotel room with the FEWER plugs I’ve ever seen, (at least plugs that work) and my connecting on the net for any length of time requires my having a place to plug phone AND computer. (The phone eats battery on Hotspot.) Today I found a place to plug in in the area Fyrecon takes place.  So post times might be weird, but I CAN post tomorrow.  Today we have Amanda with a guest post. (Hurray, the Hamsters got it to me!) – SAH*

Stand up and be heard – Unfreedom of the Press, pt. 2 by Amanda S. Green

There is a fallacy in this country that many people still believe. It’s a simple one and one that’s easy to understand. We expect those in the media to report the facts without obvious bias. We expect them to be fair and impartial in their reporting, leaving opinion and emotion to the editorial page. Unfortunately, that era of journalism is long past—if it ever really existed.

Before I get to the second fallacy, one Levin falls victim to, let’s talk about the book, Unfreedom of the Press. Mark Levin does a decent job in an early chapter of giving a history of the media in this country. He talks about the early pamphlets and presses and how they were the product of those who fled Europe to escape religious or political persecution. They were slanted but, unlike much of the media today, they also were meant to cause discussion and philosophical debate. Those behind the pamphleteers and the press braved seizure of their printing presses, imprisonment and worse for speaking their “truths”. But they persevered.

They were, in short, the foundation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press.

In the next chapter—the third, I believe—Levin jumps to modern media. Referencing the “party press era” that followed the Revolutionary War and lasted until around the Civil War era, he draws comparisons with todays media. During those early years, Levin points to newspapers that were basically nothing but mouthpieces for a single party. He uses a few examples to move into what we see in the media today.

To say much of the MSM is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party is putting it mildly. The problem is how Levin handles the problem. He steps out of the realm of drawing comparisons between the “party press era” to flogging a dead horse. And this is where many of the critics of the book zero in. He sets forth page after page of examples of how the media has targeted Donald Trump as the newest, and worst, evil to ever walk the face of the Earth and doesn’t look much further.

While I agree with him about the MSM and how it has handled the Clinton loss and Trump presidency, his move from quasi-scholar to screaming mouthpiece for the Oval Office detracts from the message of the book. It turns it from a lesson both sides should take to heart to what could be seen as a partisan attack on the media—which is exactly how the media is playing it.

In short, it takes it away from being an instrument to encourage dialogue and discussion to diatribe.

If he’d wanted to be more effective with his arguments, he would have taken a broader approach in condemning today’s media outlets, especially those who are the “major players”. An example of what he could have done is seen in a recent article that appeared in The Federalist.

In the Federalist article, Mark Hemmingway gives a number of examples of how the media either soft-pedals stories to fit the narrative or they outright adopt the narrative of those who want to see our nation fall. Reading some of them is like listening to Ilhan Omar extolling on the virtues of certain Middle Eastern regimes or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez schooling us on economics and the joys of socialism.

But not going beyond the “They hate Trump!” mantra, he is more effective with his condemnation of how much of the MSM “reports” the news today.

If Levin wanted to really show how many in the MSM—not to mention certain members of the Democratic Party–would dearly love to see the foundations of our nation crumble, he would have done well to go beyond their hatred for Trump. He would have listed some of the many stories where they’ve tried to write the narrative and then show how other media outlets, both here in the US and elsewhere, have covered the same story.

While there might not be crickets along this line in the book, it is close to it because his “Trump! Trump! Trump!” bandwagon drowns everything else out.

To be fair, he does discuss how the MSM uses techniques that mingle fact with propaganda. How, if you look at the front page of a major paper, you will see maybe half the stories that are true representations of what happened and half that are, shall we say, slanted to the max. But, in doing so, he gives more information about the whys and wherefore of this technique than he does of examples his readers could identify with.

In other words, there is no “ah ha” moment.

You know what I mean. That moment when the examples suddenly come to life and you remember reading that exact article or one like it. That moment when you look back and realize how the article took the so-called facts and manipulated them, leading you—or at least trying to—to the favored conclusion.

The lack of this “ah ha” moment is a major weakness in the book. Those of us who already understand how the MSM attempts to shape our thought process get it. But it is those sitting on the fence, those who sort of understand what has been happening but aren’t quite ready to accept it without concrete examples who are being lost. Levin misses a wonderful chance to bring more folks over to his way of thinking by failing to move past the “They all hate Trump” mantra.

A perfect example of this how Iran shot down our drone the other day. I first heard about it yesterday morning when I turned on the news. Yes, yes, I know. I’m a masochist. I watch a few minutes of morning news each day to see what lies the media is trying to feed us for the day. When they finally mentioned the incident, it was well buried under more “acceptable” stories. I’d already read about it after seeing a link on Drudge and at a few other sites I visit regularly.

But there was basically nothing but passing mention of it in the MSM until Trump started talking about striking back. Why? Because Trump said something. He was going to take action! Trump bad!

Even now that he’s walked back taking immediate action, they are still trying to spin the story. Lost in it all is the action by Iranian forces to shoot down our drone.

Another example is how we aren’t hearing any outrage from the MSM or the Dems on a map that showed up on the New Zealand government’s website that removed Israel. Instead, it showed “Palestine” and “East Jerusalem” as the capital. The map has since been removed—after outrage which, again, the media hasn’t covered—but the internet doesn’t forget. There have been similar occurrences, incidents Levin could have included in the book and didn’t.

And that is my biggest complaint about the book. Levin falls victim to his own political blinders. He took a very important topic and limited it to basically anti-Trump condemnation. While I, too, am tired of seeing how the media is doing all it can to perpetuate the Dems’ hatred for POTUS, I believe the danger of what is happening goes much deeper than just their attempt to drive Trump from office.

Our MSM is not—yet—a state run media, but it is damned close. It is a true party-run media. It makes little effort to be fair and honest in its reporting, especially when it comes to politics or certain “social” issues. It has lost touch with what much of the country is interested in and has turned into nothing more than a mouthpiece for parts of the Dems and their ilk.

Freedom of the press is their cry. But their truth is they only want it to be their freedom. They want to silence the those who don’t believe in their narrative. Our best answer is not only to stop giving them our money—them and their sponsors—it is to question and challenge them at every turn. It is up to us to find alternatives to the MSM and, when we can’t then to make them.

We are the new pampleteers, the new town criers. But we have a duty not to fall into the same trap the MSM has. The same trap Levin eventually fell into with this book. We give opinion. We welcome discussion. But we also give the facts, making it clear which is which.

I know, I know. I can hear some of you now saying that we can only defeat them by playing their game. But the dangers that come with playing that game are great and do we really want to go down that path?

Honestly, we don’t have to. We just have to keep speaking out and challenging them. The fact their number of subscribers and viewers proves they are losing the battle. What we need to be prepared for is that they are going to double- and triple-down on their attacks on the foundations of our nation as they get ever closer to their final end. That means having in place our own alternatives and supporting them. It means reaching out to those who have been sitting in the middle, trying to figure out why that have that prickly feeling at the back of their necks when they read or hear much coming out of MSM outlets.

Give them a fair alternative. One that will be critical of both sides of the political aisle. One that remembers why this nation was founded and what our core values are. Freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, etc.

“Molon labe!” is our rallying cry. Let them know we will not let them take away our freedom, our country or our voice.

(Help Amanda drink enough to keep snarking the unbelievable twaddle that passes for deep political thought these days.  We’ll collect for her liver transplant later. Hit her Pourboir jar now! – SAH)

But for Wales, Richard? – A Blast From The Past From October 2017

As you guys know I’ve been reading about von Braun.  Mostly I’ve been reading about Von Braun because I visited Huntsville for TVIW and got curious.  Before that all I’d heard bout him, as a person, was, dropped in a conversation “I figure he was a true psychopath who didn’t care, so long as he got to space.”

After reading four biographies (two for, two against) I regret to tell you that I’m not sure that was true.

I come neither to bury Von Braun not to praise him.  I doubt if he knew, in himself, if he was a villain or a hero.  And I doubt he was a psychopath.  The reason I doubt he was the later is that he didn’t take to a totalitarian regime like a duck to water.  Instead he tried to compromise his soul a little at a time, a vestige of humanity and decency obviously holding him back.

If a man of his intelligence, not to mention charisma, had wanted, he could have been in the “high councils” of the oligarchs, but mostly he seemed to do the minimum necessary to a) not get killed and b) keep the rocket program going.  And before you say the rocket program hurt the allies, he himself admitted “When a country is at war, a man wants his country to win, even if he hates the regime.”  And before you poo poo that, remember that a country is not land or borders. It’s your family, your friends, the places you love.  He also admitted he didn’t feel bad about bombing London because the allies had destroyed Berlin, a city he loved.  All these responses are very human and very normal.  Flawed, painful, morally tarnished, maybe, but human.

I’ll confess my bias up front.  One of the “against” bios (the other just kept repeating “Nazi, so bad.” which is senseless) was specious enough to make me want to come to his defense.  Among other things they quoted his words about milking the golden cow in a context that made it sound like it was about the US.  It wasn’t.  It wasn’t about Hitler’s Germany either.  It was about the Weimar Republic, for whom Von Braun had started the rocket program.

Also, they narrated hearsay about the Americans not treating them well enough “overheard by his driver who didn’t talk about it for 60 years” and then talked to the Nation which might as well be the organ of CPUSA.  I’m here to tell you that criticizing your host country is the first phase of every acculturation/immigration.  I saw it with my fellow exchange students, who were here by choice and who suddenly talked about how much better it was back home.  It’s a group bonding exercise in unstable circumstances.  It means nothing.  (No, I didn’t do it, but I’m fairly weird.)

These things predisposed me to “like” him, but the pro bios were also a little weird.  I find it mendatious to say that the Von Braun attached to Mittelwerk — the labor camp attached to Dachau — must have been his brother.  Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but suggesting it as an excuse is a little goofy since Magnus Von Braun was also imported to the US.

And the “he was a loving father and a good neighbor” doesn’t cut it either.  Because, you know, here’s the thing, Pratchett had it absolutely right when the torturer has a coffee mug with the saying “World’s Best Dad.”

So on the character of Von Braun I’m going to say “I don’t know” and in fact, I doubt he did.

The thing that none of the bios seem to take into account is the corrupting power of a tyrannical regime.  This applies with boots on to things like Fascism and Communism but it applies to minor tyrannical regimes too, where behavior you consider unethical is required of you in order to get something you want/need.

Dave Freer commented on the Harvey Weinstein case here — Wiles —and said we writers do things like that too, though usually not sexual (and if you met the average writer you know why.)  He is right.  We’ll get back to that later, just keep in mind that like the Hugos are the Oscars for ugly people so is the book business Hollywood for ugly people.  We’re not (usually, though I’ve had attempts, when I was much younger) required to put out, but we betray ourselves and sell our souls in myriad other ways.

Did Von Braun know that people were being worked to death to build his rockets?  Impossible not to.  Look, guys, seriously, I suspect even the uninvolved unconcerned Germans knew about the Holocaust.  Could he/they do anything about it?

What precisely?

The movies make it seem like everyone rises up at once and overturns a dictatorial regime.  That is not the way real revolutions work.  Time and again, we’ve seen that it’s when a regime softens that it’s overturned.  Before that, attempting an overturn is suicide and often death to all your family and friends too.

He’d started building rockets under Weimar.  He’d come to the Nazis attention.  After that, he’d continue building rockets and like it, and do what he had to do to keep himself and his family alive and well.

One of the biographies claims he tried to/got some prominent scientists out of concentration camps to “help” and live with them and eat what they ate in an attempt to save them.  I haven’t tracked this down to verify, though at least one (French) professor claimed after the war that he was offered just such a position, in an attempt to better his lot.  This professor refused because he didn’t want to aid the Nazi war effort.

In the same way Von Braun was arrested (and let out on probation) twice, for saying that rockets built by slave labor would be defective.

On the other hand, when he came to the states, he brought with him people who were unavoidably more guilty than him, obviously so.  And tried to bring others who were too “dirty” to make it here.

Surely that’s proof he was a villain?

No.  It’s proof that he was human.  You hang around with a group of people long enough, you’re going to like some of them despite despising their opinions or actions.  I didn’t feign my liking for a lot of my liberal or even outright communist colleagues and bosses in NYC.  I can see where they went astray, I despise what they do, but I like them as people, and think some of them are salvageable.

And I’m very glad I’m not the ultimate judge of anyone’s soul, not even mine.

All I’m going to say about Von Braun’s character is that until you withstand his temptations and his fear, you don’t know what you’d do.  It’s very easy for people who are free and at no risk of being killed summarily or having their whole family destroyed, to say “I’d stand above it all.”  But very few people do.  I find it helpful that in the New Testament the man who was chosen to lead the church, in the same circumstances denied the man he believed to be the son of G-d not once but three times.  It’s a good demonstration of frail humanity faced with dictatorship and corruption.

You don’t know what you’d do in the circumstances.

I do, and it doesn’t make me proud.

Sure, I came out politically, when I could afford to, when there was indie and Baen.  But before that, I not only swallowed a lot but said ambiguous “supporting” things when the discussion turned to keeping those undesirable libertarians/conservatives and their “hatred” out.  Because otherwise I’d have lost my sole opportunity to make money with the skill it had taken me almost two decades to acquire, and babies needed shoes.

Looking back it feels a lot like the quote from A Man For All Seasons:
It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales, Richard?

And yet people do, for far less important reasons than getting man to space, or even winning a war so that your family estates aren’t plundered (and if you don’t think that matters you don’t understand attachment to the land) and your family sent forth, homeless and destitute.

Almost every writer, unless they’re dyed the deepest red, made the same compromises.  It’s a bad thing, even in that scale.  Like the actresses giving up their dubious virtue for a role, we give up a part of ourselves when we do that.

But when a system is corrupt and oligarchic there is no way to go around.  And so we keep doing it.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore.  And I had the opportunity to escape.  More or less what Von Braun did.  I’m trying to make good on my second chance, impaired only by stupid health tricks.

But I wouldn’t stand in judgement.  Like the people who escaped the USSR and who were party members, or “little pioneers” or like Pope Benedict being in the Hitler youth, if you stand in judgement of these people, you’ve never experienced even the nano-version of it I and other writers/actors/people in fields where gatekeepers are few and implacable have experienced.

I don’t know if Von Braun sold his soul for a shot at space; I don’t know if he sold it for safety for his family and himself.  I know I sold mine for Wales, metaphorically speaking.  I have no high mountain on which to stand, and my only redeeming realization must be this: that I realized a bad system makes good people bad.

One of the books went on about how evil Von Braun pushed for the Americans to “win” space when the USSR would have done just as well, since it was all for humanity.

Perhaps having experienced the corrupting effects of dictatorship and distorting ideology, he wanted space to be free.  (Yes, I know, he wanted the US to have an orbiting station and bomb any country that misbehaved.  Heinlein modified it and used it in Space Cadet.  It would have gone very badly, particularly if the US gave it over to the UN.  But I can also understand the appeal of the idea for someone who believed in the US.)

People who have sold their souls try to reclaim bits of it in the weirdest ways.

Let that serve as his epitaph.  And our ladder to freedom and redemption for the rest of us.  Do what you can, where and when we can, and may our efforts achieve more than our poor selves can manage.

One of the things that would puzzle any time traveler about our time — arguably more than our gadgets, our extraordinary ease of life, or how discontented we are — is the word “natural” in everything, as an unalloyed good.

Well it might not have surprised certain dippy (though only proto-hippie) philosophers of the eighteenth century, but it would surprise anyone else with half a brain or the capacity to reason.

It should take even us by surprise, if we thought about it for two minutes, and weren’t simply translating the word as “good” in our back brains with no rational thought.

Of course “Natural” is the “improved” and “atomic” of our age.

One of the really fun things of living in a time capsule, with books, as I sometimes think I do, is to stumble on these keywords for the past, now and then and go “uh.”  And yeah, in the fifties atomic  was it, even when it made no sense whatsoever.  “The new, improved, atomic shoes.”  Yeah.

That “Natural” yogurt you just bought is no such thing. Which is a good thing, since natural yogurt is basically milk that has gone off, and no, it isn’t particularly good for you, and certainly doesn’t stay good on a shelf in “winter temperatures” for a couple of weeks.

Also natural man, in his natural environment grows to maybe 3 1/2 feet, is toothless by twenty and dead by thirty.

The idea we have that it would be best to be “natural” is all part of the romantic movement and its philosophers.

(BTW this has nothing to do with the natural rights in the Constitution. Or rather it does, but more on the basis that it prompted a lot of thinking back to that which exists without interference. Our natural rights are negative rights. The ones any human has if they’re not taken away.  The bizarre, novel and highly UNNATURAL idea in the Constitution is that government exists to secure these rights. As opposed to you know, to any type of government or leadership among humans being the first instrument of taking those rights away.)

The whole “Natural Man movement” of which Jean Jacques Rosseau (though not only him) was a prophet, was something different.  I don’t remember if it was Rosseau or another of the deranged people of the era who penned this DELUSIONAL thing where  “Natural man” basically lay under a tree and eat the fruit that fell from it, and copulated at will, etc. without care.  Until evil civilization.

I know that recently on twitter there was a twit expounding on how NATURALLY toddlers want to share everything they have. So communism is natural and greed/capitalism has to be learned.  This led to a bunch of parents asking her if she’d ever had a kid or, you know, seen one up close and personal, ever. Because like dogs and cats, kids will play with/eat something they don’t want just to keep a rival from having it. Grown people will share, at least with those they’re closely related to, because there seems to be an inherent sense of fairness in great apes, as well as a sense of “band or tribe.”  Beyond that, sharing or living in communitary societies is an act that it is profoundly unnatural and will only happen when some overriding imperative (often religious or doctrinary) pushes it.  And even then, it only works in relatively small groups.

Let’s face it, what the “natural” pushing movement of the eighteenth century was was a bunch of over-civilized twits, dissatisfied with their lives, trying to blame someone or something else — in this case all their ancestors, and the slow climb of civilization — for their troubles or their Weltschmerz.  Which is a highly civilized thing to do.

Unfortunately it hooked up with the idea of fallen humanity and the Judeo-Christian idea of paradise, only removing the supernatural element. Which means removing the one thing that might make it work. Because a state of Edenic happiness is highly unnatural to man, this ape who was born to survive and endure.

The problem is however not how ridiculous the whole idea is. It’s how far out on a limb (a natural limb, with a tiger creeping along from the other end, and a bear waiting below) humanity has gone on this “natural” thing without its making the slightest bit of sense.

The Freudian idea, for instance, that humans are born with all these impulses and needs which, if thwarted lead to neurosis and “repression” — at least the Freudian idea as interpreted by pop science. The man itself was more nuanced — has led us down a limb of “all of us should sleep with whomever we fancy all the time, to avoid being crazy.” and “If a responsibility makes me unhappy or thwarts my desires at the moment, it is bad and should be ditched.”

This is not just insanity, it’s complete insanity.  The only way complex society works is that we hold on to a highly artificial set of values.  For instance, we don’t kill infants for disturbing our sleep, no matter how much they do it, day after day and night after night for no other reason than that they prefer to be carried than lying in their bassinet like normal human spawn. (He’s twenty seven, so chill. I obviously didn’t kill him.) For instance, we get up in the morning, even though we don’t feel like it, to go and do work we don’t particularly feel like doing, because at the end of the month this gives us money to continue living (and maybe do a few things we want to do?)  For instance, we don’t eat whatever crosses our sight without regard for whether it’s a pet, belongs to someone else, or is unsanitary. Other things: we write angry songs/blogs/stories rather than bash a rival over the head. We wash regularly, even on days we don’t feel like getting out of bed, much less washing.  Etc.

The entire vast edifice of civilization is built in fact on humans repressing themselves, or sublimating their non-constructive impulses.

If you want to see people acting “naturally” with very few repressions or any act of will to prevent them doing whatever they wish, read some true crime books (I fell into a streak of some of those last week.) These are people who act on their “natural” desires in the middle of our highly unnatural society.  Only idiots or malicious ideologues would consider them examples of how one should live.

When a few years back I went on a streak of reading about the indo-Europeans, I came across several digs, in the steppes of Russia, where they would find a man living with several women (well, their skeletons) and if you analyze them, you find that the women are his daughters, and so are the babies they bore.  That too is natural.  When that lunatic in Germany kept his daughter in the basement and sired seven children on her? Perfectly natural. Go back far enough, and I suspect most — if not all — of us are descended from such unions.  It is only the voice of civilization, the understanding that to hold together above an animal level we must restrain such impulses that makes it unusual and repugnant.

In the same way Cain and Abel and Romulus and Remus are natural brothers. Trust me, raising two boys, I saw plenty of struggles for supremacy and dominance. I’m very grateful the boys are civilized and one of them didn’t bash the other’s skull in, so we skimmed through it with a few bruises and sulks, and now they’ve hit the portion where they’re becoming friends or at least buddies.

But there is in our society that impulse, the same that considers “natural” high praise to “return to nature” in the idea that in nature they will find all the dreams that civilization has denied them.

This doesn’t consist of studying real humans and seeing the immutable characteristics — like a tendency to band together and display. All part of being social apes — but an airy-fairy Rosseaunean dream, that goes something like “Society doesn’t share with me, or coddle me, and I have to work and I can’t sleep with my friend’s boyfriend/girlfriend, and I’m expected to look after my own kids, and–” and then imagining that because the desire exists — feelings are REAL! — for something different, it must mean that something is “natural.”

This is the force unmaking society and pulling it apart. Because when each individual — naturally — completely fails to repress him or herself, when there’s no sense of deferred gratification, no sense of “yeah, I want this, but I want this other thing more” there is no civilization and no future.

Without the ability to have our mind suppress natural impulses in the search for other, better desires and dreams, we’d all still be following mammoth herds and living in feast and famine.  And there would be about 2 million of us across the world.

Of course a lot of the “natural” pushing people of our time think that would be fine and dandy.  But they imagine that they somehow would hold on to jets and the benefits of civilization while the peasants starved to a “sustainable” level.

Never happen, of course. The Natural Humans would have them roasting on a spit in no time.  But never mind that.

I’m now going to take a very unnatural shower, and wear unnatural clothes and go about doing some unnatural work.

To keep civilization going, and spite the would be “natural” tyrants.

Sorry I’m so late with this.  I’ve been fighting some kind of weird virus, this time brought home by the kind, sharing efforts of #2 son. Mostly stomach, URI and ABOVE ALL extreme tiredness.

It was so bad that over the weekend (It was on the way out, but whomped me hard after I overdid it with house cleaning. So Saturday and Sunday I had brain fog and could barely stay awake.  I was starting to wonder if my thyroid had gone off kilter again.  However today my head is clear, though I slept late and might need a nap once this blog is up.

This week I’m teaching at Fyrecon. So if any of you guys are in the area and want to come on down…

Other things being considered, because we still have that massive hole in our finances due to the Norwegian Airlines fiasco (I will explain it, honest, probably after LC.)

One of the things you guys have asked me to do for years is publish a collection of my political essays.  Beyond the fact that it’s going to be a pain (but not impossible) to collate, there’s the issue that I don’t want it on Amazon, because I am not PRIMARILY a political non-fiction writer.  Or at least I don’t want to be one. (Which is why the implosion of PJ as far as payment for me is a help. It helps me refocus on what I really want to do.) So I don’t want people looking for my latest novel to trip on it. Because my books are, if not apolitical, not primarily political (I’ve been doing a re-read of Simak and realized that I still enjoy his stuff, though I disagree vehemently with the politics embedded in it.) I don’t want to turn off readers I don’t need to turn off.

Which means I don’t want it out there in Amazon.

But I still need to pay the 10k we’ve gone in debt due to the snafu. And we probably need another 10k to get through till indie picks up.

Which means… I’m going to do a book of essays and offer it for private sale here. Probably sometime in July. Probably towards the end.

I’m also going to be teaching a limited number of writing workshops, this year only. Because we need to make it through May next year, after which we should be okay (though it will probably take a couple of years to recover from the she lacking we’ve got these last two years, in terms of “it’s not a disaster, but it will cost you money to get over it.”)  That too will be advertised here.

However, those things will be done with great care so as not to stop the writing, which is FINALLY going again.  After all the health issues, I got into this pattern where I wrote for three or four days, something happened and I lost the thread of it, then I started again.  So I have several almost-finished books.

How do I know this is not just one of those outbursts? It feels different. I actually have started day-dreaming stories in detail again. And the writing is coming easily, not like pulling teeth. I think a great part of it, is the reading of books I read while young, which I’m doing again.

And that’s the state of the writer.

Blogging will be unpredictable the next two weeks, because of Fyrecon and Liberty con, after which things should settle down a bit.

I’ve received book plates for Guardian. I’m going to get Larry to sign them this week, then I’ll sign them, and then I’ll tell you guys where to send the SASE for one, okay?

And I think that’s it. Except I might go take a nap. Because if I don’t rest a bit these next two weeks, most of July is going to be recovering from the two cons.

Eh. Things are getting incrementally better. The keyword being incremental. I wish I had the recovery times of when I was 20, but I don’t.  So…  I’ll try not to kill myself with work.

And now I’ll go nap and write.

The Hamsters Ate the Prompt

Lately I’ve been on the receiving end of pranks via the Internet Hamsters, Email Division.  Things arrive, don’t arrive or get put into trash or spam seemingly at random.  Thus it must have been with this week’s prompt, which I didn’t check earlier, because I’ve been under sustained and ongoing attack by a weird muse, as well as re-varnishing living room floor, to remove “crazy cat pee stains” the crazy cat (Euclid).

Note the picture above.  If you feel like writing, use that as a prompt.

Sunday Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN:  Clearly Familiar: Familiar Tales Book Five

Wandering wolverines, catfish in the sky, owls that can’t fly straight… Welcome back to the Familiar world, where magic and the mundane coexist (and collide).

These short stories introduce some new characters and revisit familiar (and Familiar) ones, including Morgana and Smiley Lorraine, Dr. William Lewis and Blackwell, and Shoshana Langtree. Sorcerers gone mad, heavy weather, and the thin line between insanity and magic, all standard fare in this Familiar place and time.

FROM EDWARD WILLET:  Worldshaper (Worldshapers).

From an Aurora Award-winning author comes the first book in a new portal fantasy series in which one woman’s powers open the way to a labyrinth of new dimensions.

For Shawna Keys, the world is almost perfect. She’s just opened a pottery studio in a beautiful city. She’s in love with a wonderful man. She has good friends.

But one shattering moment of violence changes everything. Mysterious attackers kill her best friend. They’re about to kill Shawna. She can’t believe it’s happening–and just like that, it isn’t. It hasn’t. No one else remembers the attack, or her friend. To everyone else, Shawna’s friend never existed…

Everyone, that is, except the mysterious stranger who shows up in Shawna’s shop. He claims her world has been perfect because she Shaped it to be perfect; that it is only one of uncounted Shaped worlds in a great Labyrinth; and that all those worlds are under threat from the Adversary who has now invaded hers. She cannot save her world, he says, but she might be able to save others–if she will follow him from world to world, learning their secrets and carrying them to Ygrair, the mysterious Lady at the Labyrinth’s heart.

Frightened and hounded, Shawna sets off on a desperate journey, uncertain whom she can trust, how to use her newfound power, and what awaits her in the myriad worlds beyond her own.

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON:  Possum Creek Massacre (Witchward Book 2).

Renowned for her witch hunting skills, Detective Amaya Lombard knew that being summoned from the coastal rainforest of Oregon to the backwoods hollers of Kentucky meant the case was something special. From the moment she arrived at the magic soaked scene in an abandoned farmhouse she knew how bad it was going to be. She had no idea just how complicated it was going to get, professionally and personally. Now she must catch a killer before they catch her. The roots of evil plunge deeply into the past, and the blood soaked history of Kentucky’s witch warded houses and barns may hold the key to keeping her alive in the present.

We’re engaged in very weird bio-engineering experiments and we don’t know what we’re doing, or how it works, or what the results will be.

It’s become an open secret that many of the “mass shooters” are either people who are on anti-depressants or who just quit them.

My kids probably needed medicine for ADHD. Look, my husband and I have all the stigmata. There’s a very good chance. But I fought against giving the kids ritalin when they were really young, because I had seen a ton of kids where they got ritalin and their personality changed completely. Worse, they never learned to deal with themselves, to manage themselves and who they are, for lack of a better term.

We are now for the first time in history, as far as I can tell, having entire generations come of age who never knew who they are chemically unaltered.

And it’s not “just” ritalin and anti-depressants, either. It’s a ton of other things, some of which are not supposed to have psych or emotional side effects. But do. Perhaps in a minority of people, perhaps in a majority, but it does have effects.

I know that illnesses can, too, like the flu.  The flu can cause an “after effect” of extreme depression.  Doctors tend not to tell you that. But I’ve had it a few times. Now I know what it is and I discount it.

But there are other things. I got very, very ill with singulair.  People keep telling me that singulair doesn’t even have side effects of that sort. But get any doctor alone, a good doctor, and they’ll squirm and say “Yeah, we keep hearing that. We just don’t know how or WHY.”

The effects on me were terrifying. I’m just now starting to write again. It shouldn’t have anything to do with that.  Maybe. But I know that from about the first week, my ability to remember things started to come back. At the end there, I couldn’t hold a thought in my head for more than five minutes. So… It was affecting me, but I didn’t know.

Which is the most terrible part of this. We trust the thinking meat, but what we’re thinking with is affected, and you don’t know it…

This came to mind because the boss over at instapundit had an article at USA today about selling contraceptives over the counter.  And I was talking with a friend about the weird psychological effects of the pill on some of us.  They put me on it twice, once while they were doing a bunch of tests for the infertility treatment and, in terms of liability, they couldn’t risk my being pregnant.  Once a few years ago, trying to figure out what would fix it.

Both times, I had a major side effect of depression and the hormones didn’t work as they should.  I got pregnant while on the “menopausal pill” which is weirdly weighted and very small.  Apparently it made me more “normal”.  Eh.

But there are psychological effects, and those are the worrisome ones.  Women on the pill prefer more “feminine” men, men who are less aggressive and have softer features.

Since most women these days pick their husbands or boyfriends while on the pill, they’re changing what the next generation is selected for.  And btw might have a lot to do with “toxic masculinity” because that type of men tend to have a more underhanded “dominance” than larger, more masculine men.  There’s a name and a pattern for it, and Dave Freer has told me it’s the same in ape bands, so it’s something very deep.

But heaven help us, that’s what the west is selecting for, without even knowing it.

In the same way, we’re feralizing our pets, animals who are practically our symbionts.

This occurred to me a while ago, and then I realized that other people have been thinking the same.

Think about it.  We know from the Siberian fox experiment you can tame an animal in ten generations of selective breathing.

Now think about the best cats and dogs.  None of them are reproducing.  In the US compliance with spaying and neutering is so complete that shelters are importing strays from other countries to be adopted. (Dogs. Cats are more likely to escape young and reproduce in vast feral colonies.)  Even twenty years ago there were guys with boxes of puppies outside walmart. Now we have to get puppies (or dogs) from elsewhere.  And then we spay them.

Now, I understand this is really bad in places like Australia, where felines can take down vast swathes of marsupial wild life.

In the US, the impact of feral cats is not the same as that of one “eco-power” windmill.  Not saying they don’t have an impact, mind. It’s just not the same.

We’re not going to eliminate feral cat colonies. And maybe that’s a good thing, because escaped or discarded cats that are still predisposed to like humans are still reproducing.  Dogs… Dogs who’ve been our best friends and without whom we’d not be where we are? The ones we allow to reproduce are either bizarre or come from countries where they’re practically feral.

What does all this mean?  I don’t know.

It looks like we’re conducting these bizarre experiments, which I’m not 100% sure where they lead.

Yesterday on Facebook someone said something about “we’ll go to the stars. And when we go, we’ll leave the Earth so clean no one will know.”

And I wonder. I wonder if it’s happened before.

What if there was a great civilization before us, and they did the type of bizarre biological things we’re doing, to themselves.  And what if they feralized their pets with their “responsible breeding.”  Perhaps some of the animals who now hang around humans and are domesticated but not tame are what remains of those pets.  Perhaps the great symbiont of humanity’s last civilizational interaction was the Raccoon.

And what will our descendants look like, as we’re allowing all these chemicals to change who we are, how we think, with whom we mate?

I don’t know. And neither do you. And neither does anyone else.

And maybe it’s for the best….

Humans are, after all, the self-domesticating animal.  We change the world, but most of all we change ourselves.

Perhaps we’ll get to the stars and we’ll meet aliens who are us.

And perhaps–

Perhaps it will turn out for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

But I’d feel better if anyone at all were thinking about it, instead of careening merrily down the same path, all together, without a thought.

Yeah, it was supposed to be a guest post, but the hamsters ate it.

So, since I’m actually being nibbled to death by ducks (in league with the hamsters) we’re going to devote today to “D*mn it, Babylon bee, you had one job!”

I mean, I understand they’re supposed to be satire.  They probably do too. But when Poe’s law reigns, the Bee has become…

America’s paper of record!

Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Everyone’s Pay Should Be Equal, But My Pay Should Be More Equal Than Others

Chick-Fil-A Celebrates Pride Month By Serving Delicious Chicken Sandwiches To Everyone Just Like All The Other Months

House Democrats Draft Legislation That Would Make It A Hate Crime To Eat At Chick-Fil-A

Vox Calls For Dictionary.com To Take Down Definitions Of Words They Don’t Like

I mean, really.  How hard is it to write satire.

This one is a good example, actually.  Who would promise to cure a disease if elected?

Elizabeth Warren Promises To Cure Smallpox.

Oh, wait, never mind.

It is one of the distressing things of our time that we have a semi-functional (when not engaging in happy fun circular firing squads. Also, still unable to do anything about massive voter fraud in any coherent fashion. Also still wanting to be loved by the dying press) political party and one that has lost its frigging mind.

Okay, to believe Heinlein the Democrats lost their frigging minds on or about the second world war, by being infiltrated by communist agitators.  But this kind of alien taking over (and wearing an Edgar suit) takes time. Anyone who listened to them and had lived abroad had a pretty good idea what was going on from the late 70s or so, and heck, at the very least we knew — because of the fashionable left entertainment creators in the media and literature, not to mention the news which were part of the same complex — that they’d decided the Soviet Union was gong to win, and all they could do was lose slower.

This didn’t make those people particularly different from the Republicans, who also thought that Communism would win out, and maybe had some kind of upper moral hand — at least as punishment for our sins, I guess — except that on the left side of the isle they seemed more willing to actively collaborate with it, perhaps for a dascha on the Ptomac.

The fall of communism shattered that.  Even though the truth didn’t come out (I can’t do enough to recommend you buy and read Judgement in Moscow) and in fact the wholly-owned left refused to let the people know just how horrible life behind the iron curtain was (which has allowed them to engage in tu quoque and attack the minds of our school children with the idea that our free economy is “just as horrible” because it’s not paradise.) the shock still propagated through the system.

Before 91 I’d say there might have been some true-believing communists, some young, indoctrinated and thoroughly naive people who thought communism would bring about paradise on Earth.  Heck, some of them were my friends in college. They were too young to comprehend the disillusionment that Stalin caused in another group of true believers (leaving behind only the cynical and the opportunistic) and like today’s young people, in much of Europe and the “best” schools of the US had been kept in the dark and fed fertilizer.

Are there still young and naive true-believing communists?  Kind of.  It requires a level of stupidity or at least unthinking that makes us all make fun of Occasional Cortex. But even she is not so stupid that she buys into communism — oh, oops, sorry, “democratic socialism.” Gulags with a smile — without extra incentive.  The extra incentive is that tu quoque. I.e. the educational establishment has doubled down on the idea that the US is no good, very bad, practically a horror show, uniquely awful among nations.  In Europe they add that Europe is not much better.

So when you bring up people standing on bread lines as in the Soviet Union, or rummaging trashcans in happy democrat socialist Venezuela, that old horror, Bernie, afraid of dying before he gets his dascha on the Potomac comes back with nonsense about how at least they get a minimum, while in the US — a country in which our poor have obesity problems — they starve in silence.  (The only people close to starving are drug addicted homeless, and we wish they’d be a little quieter on the streets of our major cities, but no one can accuse them of being silent. Also, you know, our poverty and starvation is why Central America is trying to immigrate en masse.  No, he’s not that stupid, but he thinks we are.)  And always there is the “Capitalism is ruining the environment” with a date line no more than ten years off, because, you know, that’s scary and will stampede the sheep into socialism/communism even though the results — even from socialist-lite Europe — are always horrific.

In the name of making communism — that no longer can be held up as a perfect system — more appealing, the left has taught people to hate their own countries, their own cultures, and ultimately their own species.  We deserve to go extinct, or live like bands of foraging apes, for the “environment.”  As though the “environment” had some sort of sentience.  And their scares, btw, are always nonsense.  When global cooling, global warming, ozone and the heartbreak of alar all have as a solution “more state control” even though communist countries have some of the worst environmental records in the history of man, you know you’re dealing with something that has nothing to do with pristine rivers and green forests.

I think this is what has caused the latest attack of stupidity, the bizarre, sideways upside down nonsense they’re engaged in.

You see, man does not live of bread alone. Or of fear and disdain alone.  To motivate their troops they need a narrative.  Hell, to stop them thinking and straying off the reservation, they need a narrative.

What makes me giggle is that in this as in so many other things, the boomer who are older than I (I never considered myself a boomer, since boomer used to stop in 55 or 56 when I was young. And they called us stuff like they call the millenials now) the ones who had their hey-day in 68 refuse to believe the world has moved on or that their nostalgia isn’t our nostalgia.

We’ve seen this over the years in movies where the parents are still that generation, even though that generation no longer has kids in high school.  Or in which everyone still looks in awe at their “activism.” Or whatever.

Now they’re trying to bring nostalgia as a motivator into the political realm.  They’re trying to make Trump into “Literally Nixon.”  By bringing in John Dean to… I don’t know. Say Trump is worse than Nixon? With hilarious results. Also, note that every Republican president since Nixon has been “worse than Nixon” according to this fraudulent jailbird.

What do they expect from this?  Well, what happened in their youth. They expect people to fold and just believe them.

They’re missing several things:

1- They no longer have control of all the media, and their gabs at the tech companies are just going to get them treated as publishers and monopolies.  Some of what they’re doing borders on RICO.

2- People know they’re not the only ones who aren’t leftist. This is not going back in the bottle. It just isn’t. At best they can piss us off, but they can’t squeeze us back into that place of dark loneliness.

3- The democrats have for real gone completely insane.  (I almost typed inane and that applies too.)  Their electoral promises now amount to “we’ll destroy you faster.”

4- the people who remember sixty eight and were actually protesters, have a tendency to be in mobility scooters and tote oxygen tanks.  (Remember the peace demonstrations under Bush?)

5- They still have the press, but the press doesn’t have the power to amplify their nonsense into “really important” and “the wave of the future.”  The women’s marches for nothing much look and feel like the women’s marches for nothing much.

The thing that amplified the unrest in the sixties was that all the best minds were convinced each successive generation would be larger, and so the “youth” would be a massive and undeniable voting block. The kind you couldn’t ignore.  And the media gave the impression that everyone in that generation was ultra-left.

Neither of those applies. No one is afraid of nursing home protesters.  Heck, we’re not even particularly afraid of antifas who melt and cry when they meet with anyone fighting back.  And who can only have any type of foothold where the police connives with them.

What we must remember is this: People need something to believe in and something to fight for.  What the left is offering is “Lets all kill ourselves because we’re the worst ever, or destroy ourselves with socialism in expiation of our sins.”

That’s not — ultimately — a good motivator.  People who are chronically depressed and miserable destroy things, but they can’t build.

If we go around convinced that “in the end they’ll win” we’re just cooperating with them.  We’re also as wrong as people were in the sixties and the seventies.

In the long run nihilist cults never win. Are you going to let them destroy Western civilization in their self-immolation pyre?

No?

Then keep in mind that though things are going to get worse — much much worse — because the other side is dying and will fight back with everything: in the end we are on the side of reality.

In the end all they can do is LARP their big victories while preaching nihilism, punishment and death.

We don’t win tomorrow. And it’s going to get worse. As I said, they have corroded our body politic, our education, our press.  But note they’re not acting like they’re winning. Because they know they can’t.  At some deep level, they know they’re just trying to keep the illusion long enough to move stage (ah) left. But the worm is already turning.

Build and preach life.  The future is so exciting and limitless and all we have to do is open our eyes and work for it.  Build, learn, create.  The universe waits human colonies. (All species colonize. The ones that don’t die.) There’s amazing knowledge to gain.  The stars are calling us.  And in the stars there’s freedom.

In the end we win, they lose. Be not afraid.