It’s long been my belief that sometime the 20th century will be held on a par with the 14th for “centuries you’d prefer not to live in.”

Of course the 20th century saw a lot of advance in technology, life expectancy, cleanliness, the ability to feed the masses of humanity.  On the other hand, just like the 14th century is marked by the black plague, the 20th century was marked by state killing. Masses and masses of humans went to their death at the hands of their own governments.

And because the 20th century was more industrialized and efficient, these killings were done in big batch lots by the numbers, or at least with lots of paper work.  In the past it took sun-worshiping cults and stepped pyramids, and even then they mostly killed prisoners of war, not their citizens.

The thing is that in the twentieth century most citizens became prisoners of dreams.  Both the ideologies responsible for most of the non-war (war too, but) killing of people in the 20th century were “dream ideologies” that inspired, promised and drove people towards an imagined utopia and incidentally promised the birth of a new man.  And yet Aryan Man or Soviet Man were both completely impossible, had no basis in any factual reality or history.

They were pieces of dream, incarnate, striding the land, attracting people with their shining beauty, and hiding the dark carrion evil within.

This last week, under the stress of trying to figure out thing in Portugal (which might or might not happen. Paperwork seems delayed in ways that make no sense, unless of course someone hasn’t liked my articles on the American Council of Bishops and their shilling for illegal immigrants.  In which case that someone should perhaps consider that they really don’t want me upset. Or “never pick a fight with a woman who buys pixels by the bushel.”[UPDATE: Apparently I was maligning the local guys, and it was Portuguese unease with email causing issues.] ) and packing, and a head cold that descended on me out of nowhere, I ended up reading a lot of posts on the supernatural/occult.  I have no idea how I fell into it.  It had something to do with the private detective who goes to hell, and I wanted the name of a minor (and crazy) fortune teller, and next thing you know I’m reading articles from religious people telling everyone how shocked they were that something that looked beautiful and good turned out to be evil/have evil effects.

This practically made me rock back on my feet, because, I’m sorry, what kind of emotional infants is our civilization raising? I thought “a man may smile and smile and be a villain” was well established. And if a man, why not an entity, or for that matter a group of people, an ideology or a dream?

Then I remembered being in a group of female sf/f writers and getting excoriated when I pointed out there’s a long history of male characters who appear horrible, but who do their charity secretly, (as one is supposed to.) And how to me the most powerful character is the one I at first misjudge, and which later shows to be a good person.  This brought a clamor of “No, we have to signal all the right beliefs/politics, etc. upfront, otherwise he’s a villain!”

When I understood they thought “Anyone not politically correct is evil” I shut up. Because these are moral and emotional infants, who have never examined what their own dreams would be like in reality.

Like many mal-adapted teens, I had dreams that would be nightmares for anyone else like “One morning, science stops working, and magic comes into the world.”  The death and destruction that stuff like that would cause did not hit me till I was about 14, but it did hit me by 14 and has, since then, made me the enemy of “if only we shout loud enough, or march shoulder to shoulder, there will be paradise” school of dreamers.

Because you know what? Paradise doesn’t happen when the dreams try to work in the real world and with real humans.  The dreamers always forget the non-glamorous things like sewage, waste removal, or even growing food.

The problem with the twentieth century is that it was saturated in dreams.  Because Marxism infected academia, news reporters and entertainers of all kinds, bits and pieces of it infected everything.  Still does at times.  And the problem is NONE of it works in any way better than the rest.

I woke up to this seemingly innocuous article:  Workers Love AirPods Because Employers Stole Their Walls.

Seemingly innocuous because, even as they base the entire article on the fact that a cherished piece of collectivist dream was dreadfully wrong, they give it an anti-capitalist spin.

The entire idea of wall-less offices (or even cubes, though that, mostly, was an attempt to expand really fast without having to build/spend a lot) was part of the collectivist dream.

It started with wall-less schools, in which the kids were supposed to learn so much better, because in the ur-story of the socialists, humans were created as collective creatures, only happy in the group and it was the invention of private property (the oldest skeletons we find have their own arrows and their own implements that likely they used in life, but never mind. The dreamers want the past to be perfect communism, so they declare it so and shout and stomp their feet) that brought evil and strife into the world.  So they built a lot of elementary schools without walls.

Look, we’d already tried this, and we knew its limits. Most monasteries in the middle ages were supposed to be “everything in common” and they worked, up to a certain number of VOLUNTARIES.  Once the conditions were broken and you got too many people or people who were involuntarily shoved into the monastery, things… went wrong.

But the dream required that children be naturally “communal” so…  So, it was a bloody disaster.  Which is why by the time younger son went into a school originally designed on the open plan, someone had made very sturdy walls cutting willy nilly through the original plant.

Those were popular when? The seventies? But someone failed to learn.  And no, it wasn’t the employers, except to the extent that the employers were brought up in the public school system which extolled that failed dream, and listened to “consultants” that were the product of humanities degrees that were infected with it.

By the early two thousands (Twentieth century- the hangover years.  I think it will take all of the 21st to recover from the 29th) I was reading article after article about how people were so happy and more productive in wall-less offices, and how the younger people — ah, that fabled Homo Sovieticus — was NATURALLY social and communal.

Turns out, no. People do not work better in groups. As all of us who have been forced into group work growing up KNOW.  Turns out, that, as we explained to older son’s second grade teacher “no, the future is not more group work and collaboration, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work very well.  The future, with work from home tech being easier is more likely to be for self-starter and individualists.”

But the dream persists.  And when it blows up, it must be the fault of those evil employers and “greedy” capitalists.

Because at least in the minds of born extroverts — yeah, people like me just wake up screaming — the dream that we’re all really collective creatures who’d love to live in a pod and share all our thoughts and feelings persists. And is too beautiful to give up.  Even when the reality proves to be a crab bucket of petty bickering, mistrust, paranoia, empire building and lack of production.

In fact, there is a non-trivial overlap between those who can’t do and those who dream.

Keep your eyes open.  Reality isn’t always pretty, but dreams are dangerous things.  Beautiful dreams have killed millions of human beings.

And even the pieces of them are harmful.

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:  Miners and Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Five.

Aedelbert Starken shapes stone, not magic. Or so he thinks.

The town of Garmouth depends on the mines for life. Aedelbert comes to the city with his partner Caedda Quaedel in order to build three new smelters for the ore. Aedelbert and Caedda, master stone-cutters, just want to work, collect their wages, and move to the next job. Nothing more or less.

To their chagrin, building smelters and training an apprentice pose the least of their problems. A noble with a grudge threatens the mines and the city, leading to a race between the men of Garmouth and the mines, the noble, and the forces of ice and water.

Aedelbert wants nothing to do with any of it. The Scavenger, however, has other ideas. And what He gives, He can also reclaim…

C.J. CARELLA: To The Strongest (The Bicentennial War Book 1).

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: hair.

Marx Attacks! (Go for the illu, stay for the article- SAH)

So the left-wing Marxist soldiers are engaged in a systematic and widespread attack on Western Civilization, armed with the weapons of critical theory: radical feminism, social justice, identity politics, the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism, and the accusations of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and evangelical religious oppression. The battle is waged against what they view as the establishment of “whiteness.” The equinsu-ocha, the white devil, is the enemy, and has to be destroyed at all costs in order to bring about social justice and cultural transformation.

The strategy? Criticize, demonize, disrupt, divide, and destabilize Western society and its institutions so that they can be dismantled more easily and a new social order can replace them. The criticism and accusations don’t have to be true, and they almost always aren’t. Truth doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the Marxist narrative, to be accepted as dogma through blind ideological conformity.

Go read the whole thing.

A friend of mine posted this on facebook, and I thought it was too good not to run with/expand/share:

Look, I get that, and we can test this theory with insults:

You Utter Puking Cat!
You Utter Water Bottle!

Likely, of course.
But consider “I was utterly carpeted” might work for drunk. Or “I was utterly scribbled.” but depending on context both could also work for angry or worried or more likely flabbergasted.  Consider:

Those utter bran muffins!  I was so completely lawned that they said that.  I can’t believe anyone could be that completely flowering bush!

What say you.  My husband is of the school of thought that ANYTHING can sound dirty said suggestively and with a wink.

“Hi there. I’d like to help you cook!”  Or “I see you’re moping the floor” can be utterly obscene the way he says it when he’s … well… you know… when he is trying to make it so.

What other completely inappropriate to the task words can you pervert?

Come on, you peeled carrots.  I’m sure you can give it an escaped balloon chance.

(And yes, I’m AWARE that this wasn’t the type of linguistic post you expected.  But it is one of the ways languages change and grow. Eh.)

Hi, guys. Can we talk?

Blogging is going to be spotty for about two weeks, starting Tuesday.  I’ll log in, and post, maybe even pictures, but I’ll be in Europe, so making it coordinate with early morning here will be difficult.

Heck, it has been difficult for about a month.

And perhaps that’s why hits on this blog have gone from 4k a day to about 200.  And why comments that were once around 300 or more are now struggling to break 50.  I don’t know.  I know we’re getting low hits, and at some point I wonder about spending an hour of my day on that.

There’s other stuff going on.  In November my mainstains for income fell apart within a week.  The later change in one of them only made things worse, as in, technically now that’s not paid at all.  (Yes, I know, and I’ll explain in private if you wish, but let’s say that my chances of getting paid anything in any month are lower than 0%)

This is a problem because we were counting on my income to not completely crash and burn the final year of supporting kids through their degrees.

And yes, I know.  I even try to find meaning in it.  Sometimes in public (but I always wash my hands afterwards.)

There is something human in trying to find meaning, to find “where I’m supposed to go” particularly when you’re in a year of “things fall apart” which seems to be the theme for 2019.  You build, it collapses. You build, it collapses.  And you think “What do you want me to build?” And “what am I supposed to do?”

Maybe there is something that wants me to do something. (NOT Ilhan Omar’s something.) Who knows.  I have trouble with “lives guided from outside” because, what part of it is hindsight? And wouldn’t it violate free will?

I don’t know.

I know some hard facts: I never wanted to do political commentary or, in fact, non-fiction.  Time there was that I worked really hard to write an article, even a blog-post-like article, and it took me about a week, while I could dash out a short story in two hours.

I felt compelled to blog, and it seems to have helped some people, but it was never something I wanted to do.  I’m still not amazingly fond of it.

Fiction writing seems to be — now — designed for my talents, since indie is a volume game, and I am/used to be a volume writer.  It’s just that between the blog and various other things going on, and particularly financial worry as we try to get through this very bad year, I don’t know how to get back “there” again.  I’m going to try again today.  But other than a story that was contracted, nothing has got finished and very little has got finished since the end of last year.

I’ve done some cover work, but that doesn’t have the joy it once had. (It pays. And I’ll have a site soon where you can order them, and I can do it when I’m about dead.  All these are helpful. They just don’t feed the “must create.”)

All of this is distorted and influenced by the fact that right now I’m having a massive auto-immune attack presenting as a head cold/massive URI.  I know it’s autoimmune because my eczema is ramping up with it, which never happens with real viruses, and also because it ramps up with each new worry/upset.

I had to stop singulair, which was giving me ADHD and memory issues (as well as depression.)  I don’t know if I’m depressed out. I’d classify it, rather, as extremely stressed.  Both work on the auto-immune, though.

Now, some of the lability is still the come down from what the singulair was doing, but the issues are real.

Unless hits on the blog pick up — and yes, I know, it might be throttling. But it could also be “one of those things.” — I can’t justify the time I spend on it. It’s a “duty” hanging over my had every morning, that consumes a lot of the energy I have, first thing.

I can do more guest bloggers (I’d need more guest bloggers, of course) but that’s not a long term solution, and the current hits are too low to attract much.

As I said, this is going to be weird till the 15th of May, which won’t help hits, but shouldn’t alarm you. I’ll just be in another time zone and probably very busy. It’s not the statement of any decision.

You guys have been here a long time, some of you from the beginning, so I thought I’d turn this over for discussion.

As I see it my options are:

1-Shutter the blog.

Pros – This would free a ton of time and remove the obligation from over my head.  Kim du Toit, in former times, advised me to do that multiple times.

Cons – I like you guys, and this blog has formed into a sort of little community.  And sometimes I do have things that must be said. This is a much-diminished platform, but it is still a platform.

2- Reduce the blogging to 3 times a week on specific days: say Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Pros – much less work, much more free time to attempt to sit down and do fiction.

Cons – my guess is that would take the hits to about 20 a day.  Blog reading is a matter of habit. If you don’t do it every day, you’ll eventually not do it at all.  And then it will not be worth to keep open. So I see 2 leading to 1.

3- Do long blog posts when the mood strikes, but post something every day.  A quote from something I’m reading; something that struck me as funny in a facebook exchange; a link to a blog post that interested me.  I mean, there is something that amuses me/interests me every day, but not necessarily something that I need to/want to write a long post about.

Pros- I’d still be posting every day, and maybe you guys would still come back every day to see what’s up.  If I make it amusing enough, maybe the discussion will be interesting, too.

Cons – is it enough? What do you guys think?  It’s not hard to do, and there would still be the occasional long post once a week or more. But is it enough to keep the blog alive, even if it just stays in this diminished state?

4- go on as I’ve been.

Pros – traffic will probably come back. We’ve gone through low times in the past for two/three months, but it always comes back.

Cons – it’s an hour and sometimes two every morning.  When I say “I haven’t written” it ignores the 1 to 2k words poured into this every morning. And since it started mostly as a vehicle of promoting my fiction, it’s counterproductive if it’s eating my fiction.

So — I’d like your opinions.  #3 is the most feasible to my mind, I just don’t know if it will be enough.

Additional to that is that I must find some way to make money.  Yes, fiction writing will do it, if I can get back to that, and I’m going to try very hard.

But I won’t lie that having say 10k in the bank right now would clear my mind wonderfully and allow me to write.  (For perspective, it’s just the cushion is gone, from well, stupid university tricks, mostly.)  It has occurred to me to teach an online workshop or two, but it would have to make a good amount of money, so I don’t know.  No, Gofundme isn’t an option. It’s not that I’m not making money from fiction (Not this last year, but I also have not written much.) It’s more that oh, at random, delivery payments, not to mention royalties are paid unpredictably in my field. And non-fic used to provide the cushion.  I feel even more need of a cushion before jumping to indie, and right now…

I realize this is mostly psychological.  And maybe Himself is trying to tell me something, lead me a new way.  I don’t know. If so, I’m an exceptionally bad listener. (What else is new.)

To fully explain how pathetic I am, the auto-immune is increasing my stress because I’m afraid of gaining weight, as I usually do when it’s going nuts.

Yes, I’m aware what I need is a long week away in the center of the city, near the museums, with my husband and just writing.  What’s actually ahead is a two week trip to Portugal, with the stresses that always brings (through no one’s fault. It just piles on the guilt and the grief to see how much everything has changed, people included. There’s also the fact the older I get the more I hate and dread traveling, no matter where REALLY.  Which is why the relaxing weekends/weeks are half and hour to an hour from home and in well-trod ground.) And then two conferences before the end of June.  If I could I’d totally fast forward to July and start writing and cocooning, but life isn’t a DVD.

So, guys, give me your wisdom (such as it is.)  And yes, prayers and well wishes much appreciated.  This year isn’t BAD like oh, 2001 was bad. People aren’t — knocks on head — dropping dead left and right.  It’s just a time of transitions, sudden inversions, things falling apart.

The way life goes through these periods is in itself interesting and almost evidence of external plotting.  If that’s the truth, then there’s something I must do, a change of course I must effect.

Well, a change of course is in the plans anyway, because what can’t go on, won’t.

But right now, I literally don’t know which way to turn, and nothing seems to work.

So…. give me your wisdom.

This too shall pass. It’s just a rough patch.

There is a rolling and dreadful (in the original sense of “inspires dread” poetry to the words about the final judgement “when the secrets of every heart shall be laid bare.”

To someone who loves her privacy and who is also very sure she’s not the same twerp she was at say 12 or 14 (but a completely different kind of twerp) and who frankly has forgotten most of her misbegotten growing up years, it would be embarrassing to have the thoughts and deeds of that little twerp not only laid bare but pinned squarely on me.

On the other hand, to someone who loves truth and who in recent years has become very aware of how many of the things that are SUPPOSED to be the truth — news, scientific studies, etc — are in fact packaged narrative manipulated by a small set of people for the purpose of giving themselves power (and quite indifferent to the fact their plans would make it hell on Earth for most people) there is a part of me who hungers and thirsts for that truth to be revealed, for us to see, finally and bare for all how many people and organizations who plume themselves on how just, righteous and CARING they are have been screwing… well…. everyone for decades, intentionally, lying intentionally, trying to destroy what is still the last best place on Earth, intentionally.

There is a cleansing power to the truth. My fourth grade school book, unironically advised that you have a window that opens in the kitchen because sunshine “disinfects.”  which is true, I suppose in a mostly humid climate where your greatest danger in the kitchen is mold and mildew.

It is true in the metaphorical sense, too.  But more importantly, the lack of sunshine, the lack of truth, slowly corrodes. Because we’re humans.  We’re attracted to having our own way, to the things we want to do.  I was never particularly interested in power, except to the level of controlling my own surroundings and environment, though there I can be outright demanding.  I was never interested in power because the saving grace in my character is its immense laziness. Power over others is a lot of work, and it will take time away from writing.

I’ve long since realized that while I’m not alone in that, neither am I the majority. Most people are more industrious than I, they want to control more. And absent public censure and watching them, they will try it by means fair or foul.

Oh, and the means they’re trying are foul indeed.  See Seattle’s Revolt of the Elites, for what they are trying to do to shape opinion.  They are planting misinformation in a ton of channels, so they can then point to it when the mess they made with handling the homeless is brought home to bear and maintain that their destructive policies are “good” and “helping.”

At that this very sophisticated lying is a new thing.  And, yes, stupid.  It can last for a while, but overall, people are going to believe their own eyes/living conditions over what the left tells them, no matter how many times.  Even the Russian people, far more heavily propagandized, figured out “there is no truth in Pravda.”  The greatest danger from this is that they propagandize JUST ENOUGH that people fleeing Seattle will think the problem was “they didn’t spend enough” and buy more and worse homelessness for their new towns.

Note, btw, this is being done by supposed charitable foundations.  Because they don’t actually care that their “solution” is making it worse for everyone, particularly, possibly, the supposed targets of their benevolence. No. They care that it’s done their way and according to their (mostly progressive and “let the good people do it) delusions.  They’d rather reign over hell than serve those who need it in heaven, is what it amounts to.  “Charity”seems to be other name for “command and control.”  As, btw, is everything they touch.  And if they went into this — once — which some of them might have with the intention of “doing the best thing to make it better,” it’s now devolved to “we’ll just virtue signal and pretend it’s the best.”  Yeah.

But they used to get away with this with far less effort.  I realized this when I read this post:  The ideologue who wrote the textbook calling Trump and his supporters “racists”.

Advanced students are being taught this insanity as the truth. They will be expected to “answer properly” in order to make it to colleges.

If you think this is recent, I have news for you. It has been going on at least since the early 80s because my history book when I was an exchange student contained whoppers at least that large (if more skillfully disguised and about the more distant past.)

It’s just that in the past if a parent noticed it, what was he going to do? Tell everyone that the school books were left wing biased? And then what?

You couldn’t do that in public. First of all, you thought you were alone, because the control of the media gave the left de-facto control of what “everybody knew” so you’d be outing yourself as a right wing loon and the punishment has always been swift on that.  The other part, of course, was that even if you complained, as a parent who read the school books you were a tiny minority, compared to the parents who never read them AND those who had no kids.  So everyone would think you were crazy and “denying history.”

Now it can be posted and talked about in public, and no matter what the disinformation campaign, we know we’re not alone and the truth WILL out.

This of course gives the impression that society is on the verge of fracturing and that the left has gone insane.  They have, of course, but it’s not recent. As for fracturing…

I’ve known marriages where one side never dared criticize the other.  There were several reasons for this, but for whatever reason, one side never said anything the other side did was wrong.  The end result was that the person who was never called to reality spun further and further from reality and became more and more addicted to “my way.”

Years ago, a critique group fell apart on this.

Even the best people in the best marriages periodically get way too far up their own backsides, because we’re human and things happen.  At that time it’s important — perhaps the most important — function of those close to us to say “Uh… that is not so.”  Or “Why on Earth did you do that?”

Years ago, I told a friend that I voted Republican, not because they were that much better than the Democrats, but because the press hated them and would keep an eye on them, while the left got a complete pass, which meant they could get crazier and crazier.

I find it bizarre they’re furious at the leaks of Hillary’s malfeasance because it “gave Trump the victory” which is somehow “cheating.”

I don’t think they’re right about giving Trump the victory. I think enough of us just wanted the Clintons to eff off, and when they got there eff off from there, and when they got there–

BUT EVEN IF THEY WERE, this amounts to “we’re furious because we couldn’t hide our candidate’s iffy and outright criminal behavior, and so she didn’t win.”  Come again? Why do you want someone who is AT BEST a careless loon and at WORST (and more likely) a (indicted)  criminal in power over anything? How is it “cheating” to tell the truth?

It is cheating, in their minds, because it never happened before. The electorate should always, ever, think any corruption is on the right. They should be fed outright laws about the left so they think they’re Simon Pure and give them more power.  Why?  Well, because “they’re the good guys” who want “the best for everybody.”

Only they don’t. The stories are too numerous to share, but the corruption runs deep in the Democrats. Arguably deeper than among Republicans.

The difference? The left has no checks. No one calls them on their sh*t.  If the governor of Virginia were a republican photographed in black face/KKK robes? He’d be out of office. He wouldn’t be able to get a job as a dog catcher.  But he’s a Democrat, so most people have never even heard of it.

However, some have.  Which is a beginning.

The window is cracked. The sun is starting to shine in.  What it illuminates ain’t pretty, but being seen is the first step to dealing with it.

So are we close to a national divorce?  I don’t think it’s possible. Not for a couple of generations of selective separation, at least.  Though I’ll note most of the marriages I know where one side cannot be wrong, ever, end in divorce, if they don’t end in death first.  Some hold on, but… I’m not sure they’re good for both parts.

Perhaps this correction, this ability to see things, comes too late for a course check. Perhaps not.  The beauty of the world is that it’s born again, every generation.  I know younger conservatives don’t know and can’t comprehend that sense of “I must be wrong, because everyone else thinks this other thing” that the lot of us had growing up.

Perhaps it’s a matter of time.  Perhaps sunlight truly will disinfect the national kitchen and the sausage made there will be cleaner.

Until then, remember the words of power “I see you.”

The deeds done in dark? Shout them from the rooftops. Do not give the left their presumption of good, or even of good intentions.

Be not afraid. In the end we win, they lose.  Because we fight under the banner of truth, a close cousin of reality. And reality is that which doesn’t go away no matter how much you ignore it.

In Portugal there is a set of chapels called “unfinished chapels.”

If you’re passionately interested in their history it is here.  But it amounts to buildings started by a king who died, his master builder died, someone continued them a hundred years later, and then again 300 years later.  And yet the majority of them are still unfinished.

And still beautiful.  I remember because I visited them as  a kid.

In Portuguese they are known as “The Imperfect Chapels” (Capelas Imperfeitas.)  I mean, they know they’re unfinished, of course, but it’s more considered as though they lack something of perfection.  And part of it is perhaps the attitude of the Portuguese, at least in the time when they were built.

Because they figured they’d be perfected sometime, and when didn’t much signify.

As you can tell today I’m having issues with time management.  Yes, there are reasons: I woke up with symptoms of either a severe cold or a severe auto-immune attack.  Either/both are possible, because I’m under a great deal of stress right now, stress that likely will not clear until around about the fourth of July.  This made yet another visitation this morning under the guise of various bureaucratic issues that had to be solved right then, which means my writing hasn’t happened yet.  Heck, I showered at 11, have only now finished my first cup of coffee, feel a great need to go back to bed, and frankly am rather sick and tired of this rollercoaster/transition year we call 2019.

Which brings me to…

People used to build slowly and in the belief that future generations would finish it.  This came to mind recently about Notre Dame which took, if I recall correctly, 200 years to finish and was added to 300 years later.  Yes, it was also a massive government project, paid for by the taxes of the unheard citizenry.  But let’s face it, in a time with little surplus, that was — more or less — the only way things ever got built.

And sometimes, sometimes the future generations failed you, and things never got built.

Is it paradoxical that in our longer-lived times we must have things faster — and replace them faster? — and that we never trust future generations to finish them?

I don’t know.

I know that while we might lose something as to the span and artistry of what can be done, we also give future generations more latitude.

People going to Europe often are convinced it must be very rich because of all the monuments. But really, they’re not. They’re people living off the long-term investment of previous generations. They have zero capital they can realize, in all this.

What they invested was time, and a certain confidence they could indenture future generations.

We’re back to that community versus self again.

Can a multi-generational project indenture the future and accept that the future will pay?

I don’t know.  I’m against it. Let each person, and each generation make their own mistakes and establish their own priorities.

And then I remember that every child born in the US today is born owing what was it? 40K? 80k?  It’s so absurd, that it’s hard to remember and in a way meaningless.  I understand why the socialists think money means nothing and you can just always print more.  But of course money is a symbol for wealth used.

The truth is that we’re spending not just on those unwilling or incapable of working, but also on easing the way for corporations, and various cronies boondoggles (hello Solindra) the money for several unfinished chapels.

Only instead of taking several generations to complete the project and spreading the pain, we’re charging the future for destroying the productivity and culture today. (What? You thought welfare didn’t do that? You thought it only eased extreme cases? You wish.)

We don’t even know if the future will exist, much less have the surplus.  But we’re confidently sticking them with the bill.

And they won’t even have some cool unfinished buildings to attract tourists, when our time is done.

When you jump out of a (perfectly good) airplane, you free yourself from its trajectory, but on the other hand, you are under the pull of gravity.

Freedom is the right to determine what you will be and won’t be subjected to.

I pursued a comment someone made here about religion making a comeback in urban areas in France.  It is. Most churches are reported to be standing room only.  But it is returning because of something odd.

You see… indulge me.  This is a highly abbreviated history of the psycho-social movements in Europe in the 20th century till now.

Europe had just gotten aware enough of the rights of individuals, the idea of individual worth the rejection (to an extent) of classes to be really bothered by WWI which was in many ways an old Europe war.

To make things worse, it was a war you could commute to by train, and a war the press covered extensively.

And what it was blamed on was… nationalism.  Which was not precisely incorrect though it wasn’t correct either, precisely. Bloody stupid alliances and the state as a tin god was as close.

Coming out of it, Europe thought that it would replace the feel good of nationalism — humans don’t live of bread alone, and they need to feel they’re part of something bigger, the something bigger being usually a big idea, a big group, a tribe, something that goes on after them — with the feel good of Socialism. Or at least Marxism. The idea of the social good, the inevitable progress of humanity, and the shiny new future took over.

There is a reason in many ways the time between the wars was great for science fiction.  In Europe the only time that was good for science fiction.

Like WWI, WWII got blamed on nationalism. It really wasn’t. It very much was about the state as divinity and the infinite improvement of humans as a race. That it took the form of poisonous eugenics was just part of that idea that humans can and should be “perfected” to bring about heaven on Earth.

And WWII should have put paid to that idea.  It didn’t. It didn’t because Marxists, by then, had become all the “smart” people and captured all intellectual institutions.

Socialism just went softer in Europe and took other guises.  Christian socialism. Democratic socialism. Purple socialism with stripes.  Okay. I made the last one up. But it wouldn’t be as crazy as some of the variations I grew up with.

But socialism doesn’t mesh really well with those things, or make them better.  Socialism in the end is the drop of sewage in the barrel of wine. Sure, it adds flavor. It also makes i undrinkable. It doesn’t work with humans, and we’ve proved conclusively humans won’t change to work iwth it. Its end stage is a sort of crazy feudalism.

And it fails.  Part of the way it fails is making the societies it takes over, those where it’s the only alternative, into what I call “occupied societies.”  It — particularly in its international variety. National is stupid, but not that way — turns against its host societies. In the name of eliminating nationalism, and leading things to “progress” towards the perfect and shiny new future, it turns on and hates the societies that establish it, eventually hating humanity itself.

The problem is that we know what happens with occupied societies: the women become whores, the men become craven, and there are very few children, unless they’re the children of the invaders.  It’s how the species eliminates the societies and strains that lose a contest.  Except that in socialism there is no more successful society invading. To the extent that it was believed in, between the wars, and briefly (until the collapse started being obvious) after WWII, the “progressives” took over the children of others and tried to build their shiny future. Part of that was the baby boom, and the bright new schools and indoctrinating kids to hate the old society and build the utopia.

Only it’s been painfully obvious since the baby boom came of age that the things they were indoctrinated in don’t work. That being “compassionate” to the evil begets more evil.  That paying for poverty buys more poverty. That refusing to teach or raise the children doesn’t create noble savages.  It doens’t even create savages. It creates neo-barbs simultaneously predatory and curiously helpless.

People know this. They know it even if the cultural outlets are taken over by people who refuse to let it be seen. It shows in cartoons, in jokes, it comes out in off hand comments even by people who would consider themselves devout progressives.

So the end result is that societies feel they’re oppressed by occupiers. Unreasonable occupiers that don’t bring any hope or future. The society, the “something to believe in” is being exterminated.

After the Soviet Union collapsed and this became obvious there was a period of denial and a period that often happens in cults after discomfirmation.  A period of trying to silence the opposition super-hard. Now, even harder.  We’re still partly in that, or at least segments of society are.  They’re trying to silence any dissent with the “occupiers magic words” (And yes, I found hilarious they named their movement “Occupy”)  “Rascism, sexism, homphobia.” Or, of course “Nazi” which honestly is the enemy they fear, because they can’t conceive of anyone NOT being socialist. So being international (effectively Russian national) socialists, they fear the national socialists the most. And miss that we’re not even i that spectrum, and that it was Bernie who identified himself as a national socialist.  (It’s okay. They know he’s lying, so that’s fine.)

But that’s a side show.  It’s a distraction.  If the after-effects of socialism hadn’t already turned Europe into a vast old age home, the next thing would already be obvious.  Oh, it’s starting here too. Sure it is. And it’s just as crazy and perhaps more poisonous.

The… for lack of a better term call it the culture’s mind knows socialism is poisonous and more importantly socialism is done. It doesn’t bring the shiny. Again and again it brings death, misery and feudalism.

So humanity, which needs meaning beyond our small, restricted individual lives, and people are blindly trying to find it.  In Europe, same as it ever was, they’re going back to nationalism, and the traditional religion. They’re doing it for COMMUNITY and common goals.

When I went down that rabbit hole I got a lot about how individualism was wrong and individuals shouldn’t have rights, and the church is about community.

As many of you know, I’m religious. I believe in community, even. But that doesn’t negate the need for the rights of the individual. France is just making the same mistake it made with its revolution, where it took the rights of the individual and made them communal guarantees.  Not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but equality, fraternity, liberty.  You can’t have liberty with equality and fraternity. Because enacting those requires other people. They think where socialism went wrong was ‘rights of the individual’ when socialism is all about the rights of the group.

Our own manifestation of this is the same, in a different way. Instead of addressing the central hole in socialism, of treating people as widgets, they just want to attribute different values to those widgets, as though that solved anything.

Which brings us back to freedom — or liberty — and the rights of the individual.  Individualism versus community.

You can only free yourself so far.  At least if you want to be part of something greater than yourself. (And if you don’t you’re either lying to yourself or not human.)

When you let go of the plane, you head towards the Earth.

OTOH sometimes the plane is on fire.  Was talking to an about-to-go-indie midlist friend this morning about the endless compromises, kissing up and begging required to stay employed in traditional publishing and how it was like trading in your soul piecemeal.  Kind of like the French believe to embrace that old time religion they need to renounce individual rights. (Because apparently they missed the part about INDIVIDUAL free will.)

If that were my choice, I’d be happily d*mned.  Fortunately I think they’re wrong.

And fortunately I have other choices than trad pub.  I might starve, yes, but it won’t corrode the soul.  And hell, with two or three year exceptions, I’ve “starved” anyway, if you take in account the amount of work.

It’s a trade.

Sometimes you have to shout “Freedom” and jump and hope the parachute engages.  It beats joining the new cult, same as the old cult.

Years ago — the record is here somewhere — I decided that to be able to write I needed to get out of the house.

That wasn’t exactly wrong. I had identified the fact that I needed to set regular hours and that the kids being late high school and college were in and out at all sorts of odd times, interrupting the flow of words.

The problem is the place I picked, which was downtown Colorado Springs (half an hour walk from then-home) on Bijou, between Tejon and Nevada (I think.)

You see, I hadn’t realized the building in which I rented a one-room office I could afford at the time was depopulating.  And also that it had no doorman or guard of any sort, and being near the library was subject to strange people wandering the halls.  I think it was $250 a month for my little one room, and we made it very pleasant, and for about a month it was great, even if my mind was slipping from hypothyroidism.

The thing is, the little room had no bathroom, so I had to leave my office to go to the bathroom a couple/three times a day.

I think I realized two or three days in that the names on the door were actually old, and that many of the offices, like the psychologist across from mine, were actually long-gone.

The building was mostly empty, and then it lost the thing that kept it alive: being used for meetings by AA.  And the hallways started to have… interesting characters.

One day I was leaving my office to go to the bathroom, and stepping out I met with a man who looked… well…

It wasn’t that he wasn’t human. He was. It was that he was a feral human.

I’ve been in situations where people were directly threatening me, where I wasn’t as scared as just with a glimpse of that man’s face.  He was human, but as though the long slate of human civilization had been wiped clean.  There was no higher self, no mercy, no thought. He was as blank and feral as an infant, driven by impulse.

I retreated into my office before the impulse acted.

Looking through a crack near the hinges, I saw him standing there, staring at the door, hunting me.  Like a cat waiting for a mouse.

I could have called my husband, waited for him to come get me.  But I needed to get to the bathroom and I wanted to get out of there.  It occurred to me to play an audio book that was read by a man and sounded like someone talking, REALLY loudly.

It worked.  Five minutes later, he was gone.  The idea the office was probably larger and a male might come out didn’t sit well with him. He apparently only hunted smaller and older.

I waited a little longer, went out carefully, and ran out of the building, to the street, then home.  That was the last time I worked in that office.

Did I make too much of it?  No. There was no security in that building, and I understood why the little offices, usually occupied by a person, alone, were emptying.  If I’d had a buddy in town who’d share the office with me, particularly a male, who would walk with me to the bathroom and wait outside, that office was tenable.  As it was, though? No.

As for the feral man? Who was he?

I don’t know.  Maybe drugs were involved.  Almost for sure drugs were involved, but I didn’t get the feeling just then.  He was homeless, for sure. Not overly clean. Not wasted from drug use.  He was wearing clothes and carried a backpack, but the feeling was like looking in the eyes of a feral ape.  Not even the zoo ones.  They had more … humanity.

This came to mind as I was reading about San Francisco Poop Maps.

The belief these days, about humans, is that we are the apes that domesticated ourselves.  Sure, of course, natural selection, but I wonder how much of that.  Natural selection is relatively slow, and the ferals, which we largely know as psychopaths tend to still leave lots of children.  Women fall in love with convicted murderers and marry them on death row.  Etc.

A lot of it, I think, is raising.

Cats and dogs left to hunt for themselves from an early age, go feral.  Hogs more so.  And hogs, like us, are scavengers.

For years now we’ve gone soft on feral behavior. From children, too. We’ve refused to curb the “Want” and “Impulse” under the belief that the natural man is some kind of angel.  Having children raised by strangers that couldn’t care less is not helpful.

But now we’re doing the same to the adults. There is a difference between compassion and enabling.

We all know of addicts who use compassion as a weapon to get to what they want.  I’d argue that’s the way of feral man.  Wheedle and creep until you can pounce and tear. Except that they don’t even need to wheedle and creep.

In Denver as in CA (and because the state was taken by the same kind of pettyfogging day-dreaming, too wealthy to understand harsh realities party) they’ve now made pooping on the streets legal, because they don’t want people to be deported for “just that” as though people who ignore a basic rule of human decency and public hygiene were precious resources to keep around.

They’ve already made vagrancy and begging de-facto legal.

And I’m sure they plume themselves on their compassion.  But what they’re actually doing is being nice to the ferals and encouraging them to make everyone’s life miserable, and to drive away small businesses, to drive women from public spaces, to destroy the fabric of society.

Man is the self-domesticating ape.  How many feral humans can our very wealthy society tolerate?

I’d bet not as many as the lotus-eaters at the top think we can.  And when the productive people get tired, it will get very ugly very fast.  Civilized man always wins over the ferals and the apes, who are incapable of loyalty higher than a small band.  They also, arguably, always win over the lotus-eating mandarins.

It’s a story as old as time, but it will still surprise the heck out of those who think that in feral they’ll find the noble savage.

When in fact it holds nothing but destruction, including of the feralized individual.  You see they are not WILD apes. Not really.  Only feral.  Just like abandoned cats and dogs aren’t wild animals, just animals who’ve learned to get what they want from human society while not submitting to it.

If society, and our present abundance falls, the ferals will go as fast as the pampered.  They have no ability to fend for themselves more than the pampered do.

And neither they nor the mandarins will ever see it coming.

I’m writing a post, which will be up soon.  It’s been a very weird day.  Until I get it written, though:

To all my fans and friends:
I’m very careful about which gofundmes I boost. Usually only those of very close friends where I know the need is real.

Oleg is a very good friend, one who has helped me unstintingly when I was in trouble.