Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

It was a clear day like today.  A Tuesday in September.  Still warm enough, but with a chill in the air.

Before I walked the kids to school, I’d checked the internet and seen that a plane had hit the towers.  I didn’t think anything of it, because recently, a small plane had hit the Empire State Building.  I thought the same thing had happened again and remember a vague annoyance.  Was this going to be a thing, now?

I walked the kids to school five blocks away through the beautiful morning, thinking of the novel I was writing and of what I could do after, because I didn’t want to be stuck in literary fantasy forever.  My first book was a month from being on shelves.

I was in many ways an idiot, an internationalist Libertarian who believed frontiers were a construct. How this managed to coexist with my patriotic fervor for the US is a mystery.  I did mention I was stupid, as well as young, right?

Maybe not that young, because I was 38, but still young because the world was a marvelous place.  Sure, horrible things could happen, and we’d deal with them.  Sure, even then, the left was crazy (remember the hanging chads?) but they hadn’t completely departed reality, and I hoped with the gradual reality check of the internet over the MSM they’d integrate into reality.  I wasn’t certain, mind you. But I had hope. The world was a bright and hopeful place ahead, just like that crystalline September morning.

I’d give all I have and some besides to go back to those hours, to have the attacks never have happened, to have the towers never have come down.

I’m sure it would not be without issues.  Bush would probably have given a bad name to Republicans.  If he’d got his hands on social programs and got to play around with them unimpeded, who knows?

I’d still rather then than now, and the hysterical denial that has sent the left’s oikophobia into a spiral that has them now unable to accept anything but the dreams of their religion and its coming paradise.  That has the two halves of this country on a collision course.  That has the world on the brink of a long slope down, because whatever they think, if America falls, civilization will not long stand.

People have compared 9/11 to Pearl Harbor.  It is not.  It’s something far more terrible.  Terrorist attacks (undeclared war) against our military is terrible and I realize it traumatized a generation. But this was an attack on civilians: on people like you and me, living our daily lives and pursuing our happiness.  It killed children on the way to Disney  world, just like my kids who’d visited the year before.  It killed office workers, and writers, executives and cleaners and waiters.  People who, whatever their private failings, had no reason to expect to die by enemy action.

We’d been scheduled to be on vacation that week at the WTC Marriott (I think.  The one in the towers.) We were going to spend points from Dan’s traveling job and take the kids on a real vacation, not our pokey 3 days in Denver. But two weeks before Dan was called back to work for a project they needed him on.  (He could be on the bench for a month at a time back then, and having just finished a big project, expected at least that much.)

It struck at the heart of the city that for us born abroad and aspiring to come here WAS America.  (I still have a soft spot for NYC. The hardening of politics has made it so I wouldn’t consider living there now.)  It is the place immigrants came and made good.

Our last president was fond of saying we should get over it already.  Not two months after the accident someone no-longer-a-friend told me that more people are killed on the roads in America per year than were in the WTC, so what does it matter.

What it matters is that it showed the hostility in the world towards us, for nothing in particular that we’ve done except existing.  (Yes, I know, our involvement in the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.  Given the persistence of memory i the Middle East, as well our being mad at them for their involvement in Europe.  It’s an excuse, not an explanation.  We’d done nothing except keeping them from obliterating each other, and pouring rivers of money in aid to the region.  Yes, I know foreign aid is aggression, but you need to understand economics a lot better than most Middle Eastern people to get that.)  And that they could reach in, and kill innocent citizens.

By doing that they punched the mirror of our self-regard, our security and our certainty in ourselves.  And the world splintered.  And we fell through.

It split us as neatly as if those airliners had been flown through the center of our political landscape.

The same half of the country that was communist or at least socialist in the hopes they’d be eaten last is now hating their own country and insanely trying to claim the role of victims of our own culture as well as protectors for all the brownz people.  IOW running around like chickens with their heads cut off, hoping they’ll be eaten last.

The other half of the country has about fifteen years in gotten tired of it, and just wants a return to reason.  The other half also understands peace through superior firepower and thought the last administration conclusively proved there is no peace in bowing, apologizing, and handing out misspelled “reset” buttons.

Metaphorically speaking that window has broken and we were pushed out by the fire behind us.

As a nation, we’ve fallen from the towers, and are suspended mid air, knowing we won’t survive the impact.  Not as we are.

It was the day the universe changed, for a significant number of us.  Sure, I’d have shed the illusions of youth eventually.  But it wouldn’t happen for so many of us at once.

It won’t be forgotten, because we can’t forget.

The mirror shattered from side to side, and the shards flying from it, have cut our polity into new and strange shapes.

We can pray and hope and work to its not coming to blood, to its not coming to the end of our country as it is and more as it should be.

Sometimes miracles happen and something there is that protects drunkards, fools and the United States of America.

But it will be a miracle.  And looking back, it is at that inflection point that it broke, under the impact of an attack on civilians by men who thought they were pleasing a 7th century cult leader and his bloody god, who would, in turn, give their co-religionaries domain over the Earth.  It’s not politically correct, but one of the many fall outs of this is that many of us have have grown tired of political correctness.

Perhaps just in time.  If  a miracle occurs.

It never fails.  It’s kind of like, you know, going out side when it’s raining and getting wet.  Or being hungry if you don’t eat or sleepy if you don’t sleep.

If you go to a blog in which someone has denounced the crimes of communism, you can expect two things in the comments: one, that there will be idiots saying that what we’re talking about is not communism, because true communism has never been tried.  The other is that there will be idiots saying that our system has too many issues NOT to give communism a try: we have discrimination, hatred, crime, poverty, homelessness (at some point on that second one a lot of crazy sh*t will be thrown in, like GMOs, the fact we need vaccines, or the fact we kill animals to eat.  I’ve never actually seen anyone throw in the Heartbreak of psoriasis, but let me tell you I also would not be shocked.)

Most of these people are young but not all of them.  Many are my age and older, and completely missed — possibly due to being immersed in a leftist ideological soup — the horrors revealed by the fall of the USSR. Or papered over their dissonant feelings with that whole “not real communism” though they might very well have believed that the USSR was “on the way to communism.”  At least on odd Mondays.

Part of this is that the USSR was very good at pseudo-logical explanations.  The whole of Marxism is, for obvious reasons.  Papering over their dissonance and horrors was the only way to continue existing as a regime. For that matter any convinced Marxist has to be able to justify six impossible and mutually contradictory things before breakfast.  Which is why the ranks of convinced communists are half and half stupidity and malice.  If you meet a convinced communist and he’s obviously not stupid, then he’s malicious.  His greed for power over others is such that he’s convinced himself he’s using an “altruistic” philosophy to attain it, and it will, in the end, be for the good of all.  The rational, sane part of him might whisper that this is bullshit, because it can never happen, and therefore all they get is power to destroy those they hate and elevate those they like for a time at least, but that rational sane voice is tiny, and the monstrous ego that believes if everyone understood Marxism as the communist does and played its part in the mental play written according to the Marxist exegesis of the communist, then there would be utopia.

It’s a powerful siren song for the maleducted and ambitious, which explains for instance, Obama, who hated Reagan for causing the fall of the USSR and wanted to undo everything Reagan did, because without Reagan’s intervention, we’d already have achieved utopia.  Before you laugh, for my entire time in SF/F professional circles, which started about ten years after Reagan’s presidency, I heard people who should be more thoughtful repeat the same inane pap.  “If only Carter had had a second term.  If only we hadn’t elected Republicans.”  Then, in their minds, Utopia would already be here.

The USSR as the genesis of our “progressives” explains much of this, because the USSR was really good at creating Potemkin philosophies and then infecting the west with them viat propagandists and (witting or unwitting) agents in academia and the soft sciences.

For instance, by the seventies, if my (then future) sister in law’s psychology books (required for her MD.  All of them coming from America and in English, and, because her English was not great, lingering at our house for my brother to translate (you know the rules. A book came into the house, I read it, even if I had to read it with an English dictionary in the other hand) psychologists tried to explain away mental illness as being the result not of a malfunction that would lead to self-destruction, but a reaction to an unjust environment.  They would take things like schizophrenia and glorify it as a reaction to the unbearable burdens of capitalism (ah!).  This is at the root of the ambivalence in treating mental illness in the US, and also in the elevating of the homeless (many of them untreated mental patients) into some kind of culture heroes.  It’s honestly at the root of a lot of the left’s inversions such as the idea that our speech is violence, their violence is speech, the idea we live in a patriarchy (where males get short shrift in schooling, marriage law, employment and cultural stereotypes, but never mind) and that we live in (this one is new, not coincidentally born with BLM, for obvious reasons) a white supremacy.  (Proving they never visited South Africa in the old days, btw.)

The left feels that way because they have a vast number of the maladapted and the mentally ill in their most vocal sectors.  And therefore, if they are maladapted and mentally ill, someone must be oppressing them.  The game after that is to claim the greatest possible oppression, because that justifies anything you might want to do.  Hitting total strangers, whose opinions you misunderstand or distort with bicycle locks is totally an act of heroism, because look how oppressed you are.

Like the end game of the European Kings was to claim they were descended from Jesus Christ, and therefore ultimately from G-d himself, the end game of the devout Marxist is to claim the whole of society is oppressing him or her.  Imagine how much leeway you get from that. You can do anything and STILL be a hero.

Anyway, if it were just a few crazies, we could ignore this notion of “a nation must be perfect to criticize any other nation” or “a culture must be perfect to criticize any other culture” (try to criticize a culture that dresses its women like sofas and pitches its sexual non-conformists from roofs or pulls walls on top of them and you’ll get hit with “patriarchy” eating disorders and the elusive and unprovable — or disprovable — “rape culture.”)

But it’s not a few crazies.  Our children in our schools — and for this assume I’m talking for the entire west — are taught all the flaws of their own culture, while being dissuaded from examining the flaws of any others.  Sooner or later, they’re exposed to the “progressive” (my kids?  Middle school, every fricking teacher.  Okay, except two one of which was a navy vet) ideals and the idea that it’s supposed to create the perfect society for everyone.

By that time the kids know everything that’s “wrong” with our system, but haven’t been taught to think rationally about history or culture, or to see the flaws in everything human, outside that fabled “arrow of history” in which “progress” (defined as Marxism) has slowly been winning throughout history.

It’s no wonder the poor mites comes screeching onto blog comments yelling that “it wasn’t real communism, and if you give us time, we’ll build utopia.”

A similar process was used on my generation, under the cold war, to convince us communism wasn’t that bad to live under (“I bet it’s really warm in the bear’s belly) and that the systems were roughly equivalent and only opposed in trivial stuff, and only at each other’s throats because capitalism requires imperialism and the stealing of resources from undeveloped countries (hell, I was taught that.  Fortunately (?) there were enough refugees from Africa to tell me how the Soviet “liberation” of former colonies was progressing.  Don’t ask.  And don’t look into what Cuban mercenaries did to the Portuguese parts of Africa unless you have a really strong stomach.

So, you get those too.

But the problem is this: Utopia is impossible for real humans.  This applies to communist utopia, to Christian utopia, to just about every kind of utopia imaginable or even guessable at.

And it’s not even because “humans are flawed” — though it is that, too.  At least in the darker portions of our society — it’s “Humans are different and bring the baggage of their childhood with them.”

For instance, my mother had — by and large — my best interests at heart.  My best interests as she perceived them.

We are actually vaguely similar facially (she’s much prettier, possibly still.)  But I have dark eyes, and dad’s dark olive coloring (note if you saw me before, oh, two months ago you might pause here, but trust me.  Now that my thyroid is close to balanced, I’m holding pigment again. Hypothyroidism makes you pale and sort of swollen.  Even before I started losing weight, my face became less of a moon shape as the thyroid supplements worked.) Mom is pale (well ruddy tan because she spends so much time outside) with light brown hair and green eyes.  She is heavy on top and slim on bottom.  I’m a pear.

She could not — COULD not — realize this.  Even though by profession she picked the best colors and fits for her clients, she kept buying and making me clothes that looked great on her, and insisting on dressing me in greens, browns and what I call “dead reds” (no, not pictures of Che) which made me look ill.

Similarly, having come from a ah…. difficult area, with a culture where women were often the only ones keeping the kids fed (when they weren’t also drinking it away) and where wife beating was a sport everyone took part in, and being unable to fully internalize the culture of dad’s family (granted only my generation of women went to college but all the women in my family, time out of mind were literate and often read for fun, which was still weird when I was a kid, and must have been bizarre centuries earlier.) she tried to prepare me for the world she’d grown up in.  This included pushing a lot more house cleaning on me than was sane for me at that age, discouraging complaining, and telling me illness or my schoolwork were no excuses.  (Okay, this was partially bolstered by the fact some idiot doctor telling them I was so premature I’d be mentally retarded.  My parents have such faith in “learned people” that until I passed the exam that gave access to university prep, they regarded my grades as proof of the sad decay of education, that a poor slow girl could have As.  One of my earliest memories is hearing them talk late at night in their room and saying it was okay if I was stupid.  Mom would train me to make some man a great wife.  Fortunately I was young enough that I remember the words but didn’t internalize them or apply them to me.  In fact it took me years to realize they were actually talking about me.) At the same time she did this, she was telling me never to let myself be abused.  But she was in fact training me to accept and live through abuse (which has served me very badly in my professional career) because in her back brain this was equivalent to my having a stable and happy future in the horrible world she’d been brought up in.

This is my mother, a smarter than usual individual, who really thought she was doing her best for me.

And she not only had no idea who I was or what I wanted, but if she’d designed a utopia for me it would have been hell. And she’d never realize she’d put me in hell.

As my boys lives are playing out, and their wishes and desires taking turns, I can pretty much tell you I can’t design paradise for them.  They have to make their own.

In the same way…

Well, in many ways any of our ancestors, even possibly in the 19th century seeing how we live would think it was utopia.  And sure for many people, it is hell.

But you can’t create a utopia, in which there’s no suffering, be it physical mental or emotional. You can’t because no one can know what is best for others.  I used mom’s and my example because though biologically related our upbringing and interests are so different (and yet, pursuing from the same impulses.  Mom is intellectually curious, rebellious and wildly creative.  But he upbringing channeled those another way.)

Now imagine some anonymous bureaucrat with the writing of Marx in his head trying to make a perfect society.

You don’t have to imagine.  We have the records of a century of multiple experiments.  The result is always death.  In the millions.  Many argue a hundred million is a low estimate, and I agree.  No one was counting in Africa, for instance.

This is because, even given the best intentions — and as explained above those are almost impossible, because smart people can’t help but see the contradictions in Marx — it is impossible to create “perfect communism” or any other utopia, because you don’t know what other people need or want, or what would constitute paradise to them.

I get a lot of push back from people on the right, for instance, because my favorite place to live is (would be.  Husband’s is opposite, so we compromise) the center of a large city.  I  have my reasons for this, including the fact that I’m an introvert and get bored easily.  One of my best friends, Dave Freer, lives in a remote Australian island and makes most of his living off the land.  He loves it.  To him that is Utopia.  To me, it would cause me to jump in the sea and swim to the nearest large city.  And I can’t swim.  And I’m sure the distance is too large.  And yes, this is a friend, someone I esteem and respect.  And yet, our ideas on where to live are diametrically opposite.

Now imagine a faceless government bureaucrat deciding where each of us would live and work.

“But there wouldn’t be bureaucrats,” says the indoctrinated innocent.  “In perfect communism everyone just gets what he needs and works at what he wants.”

Pull the other one, kid, it plays jingle bells.  No matter if you come back with superabundance, and everyone being educated the same way by robots — two already big begs that are unlikely to come to pass — humans are too different for this to work.  It’s not even two people wanting the same thing when there’s only one of that.  It’s that people might not be able to tolerate the way their neighbor lives.  Sure, live and let live.  But if paradise for your neighbor is beating dogs to death in his backyard, how long will you let it go?  And some people feel just as strongly about other things that YOU might consider paradise.

The only way to make everyone act the way some ideologue thinks they should is to have a totalitarian government, a strong police state, a structure of spying on every action, every thought, every idea.

What those utopians are saying is that they want everyone to live in what’s a perfect society FOR THEM.  In other words, they want power over your very soul.

I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it.

There is no utopia.  Some people will be miserable in the wealthiest, cleanest, most considerate society ever.  This is also not a conjecture.  They are.  And they scream about patriarchy and oppression and white supremacy that exist only in their heads.

My solution is to work towards a society that’s even safer and more prosperous.  Because then fewer people will fall through the cracks.  And more confident, so we give people the tools not to be driven mad by excess wealth (this seems to be a strong correlation throughout history, if you look at the scions of very wealthy families.  Maybe because being built on a scavenger frame, man needs to struggle at least somewhat.)

And the way to get there is freedom.

Not the red-throated “freedom” of the lock step masses and the groups of widgets fighting against other groups of widgets, but the true freedom of the individual to — to coin  phrase — be all that he/she can be.

It ain’t utopia, but it’s as close as we can get to it in this world.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike & Sunday Book Promo The Better Late Than Never Edition

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 SARAH A. HOYT: Trade Winds

*I’ve read this one! ;) – SAH.* It’s an eclectic collection of short stories, all science fiction, ranging from alternate history to alien encounters, to mil sf (three of them.)

The stories in it were written between 1998 and 2015.

And Not To Yield is a novella in the Darkship Universe (A Few Good Men Continuum.)

A collection of science fiction short stories by Sarah A. Hoyt.
Are there truly aliens among us? What do they really want? And what if our creations could come back in lethal form? Could we resist them? If there were a time police, would we know it? And really, why do people expect enlightenment from the stars? What if aliens needed us for their moral compass? You think our illegal immigration is bad? Wait till its coming from the stars? And what happens when the coin falls on edge? Can you reproduce it? Those not particularly moral aliens might set fiendish traps. And you can never go back again. Also, why would you want to? The future will invent completely new ways of making people miserable. Also how well would a generation ship get us to the stars without humans getting in their own way? If you read the world of Darkship Thieves, there’s a story ten years after the revolution in Olympus. It bridges the gap to the second wave of novels of the Earth Revolution which will be written, eventually. And what if the Carthaginians had sowed salt on the ruins of Rome? How long is memory?

C. J. CARELLA: Outlands Justice (A Crucible of Worlds Book 1)

(This book is a collection, and it would be difficult to give all the story synopsis wihtout detracting from space and attention for the following books, so this is just ONE of the stories.  The descriptions sound great though.)

A Gathering of Heroes:They once were Justiciars, defenders of a great realm, each gifted with unique abilities. An immortal from fabled Atlantis; a master of arcane sciences; a warrior princess with a taste for death; a Greek demigod; and a Fey sorceress. They will ride forth once more and challenge the Warlock and his army of beast-men and demons.

FROM MARGARET BALL:  A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4).

Thalia Kostis is a budding magician (depending on how you define it), but she has a theoretical mathematician’s grasp on socialization and people skills. When pressed into spying on a rival magician’s company retreat to find out where kidnapped coders are being held, she expected things to go completely sideways.

She didn’t expect to end up mistaken for her rival’s fiancee…

Now she has to juggle her own impending wedding, her cover, her magic, and company politics that might turn out deadlier than anyone expected!

FROM PAM UPHOFF:  Cooking Hot (The Directorate Book 10).

Tenth Story in the Directorate Series

A Novella, sequel to Project Dystopia

Ebsa Cloustuone is back from a perilous assignment, and in a sort of quarantine that’s going to keep him on the Embassy World for a few months until the Empire decides it’s safe for him—and the other survivors—to finally go home.

And someone has to feed all these people, so Ebsa’s back to work, cooking and feeding anyone who shows up hungry.

Including Ambassador Ashe, who sees a number of opportunities in the presence of a Warrior with a cooking hobby.

A challenge leads to a Multi-world Cookoff, that devolves into a spontaneous city-wide fair. Should be fun, right? Right?

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Daughter of the Pearl.

Count Chang wants glory. Leesan dreams of marrying. Neither can foresee the power that awaits them—or the danger.

Cloud-dancers use magic to keep the world in balance. But the Great Northern River ails, and strange, twisted and evil things move across the land. The humans along the river cannot see the danger, but the Great Sky Emperor does. He grows angry. His wrath will remake the world and none of the cloud-dancers want that.

Count Chang hears a rumor of a Chosen One living far to the south, the only human able to heal the river. Instead he finds a corrupted naga and Leesan, the unwanted third daughter. Valueless, cursed, ignorant, Leesan would be better off dead, or so her father’s mother insists. Instead Chang claims her and takes her north, to train the gifts she unknowingly carries.

Chang detests the idea of marrying. Leesan cannot imagine a woman with value of her own. Together they must find the cause of the river’s ailment and heal it. Evil lurks in the land, and it will take all their power, trust, and strength to do their duty and save the world from the Great Sky Emperor’s wrath.

That is, if they can.

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: Clean

I’m alive, yeah, but we’ve been in an antechamber of heck (not the full h*ll) this morning, because Dan is updating software in all my computers in rotation, so I think I’m safe, and in comes the tech support to do necessary stuff I didn’t know it was necessary.

Now I know how the cats feel when — to their mind — I chase them from room to room with the vacuum.

Anyway, if you haven’t read this article from Richard Fernandez, you should read it.

It’s been bothering me.  It’s something I’ve sort of perceived before and been afraid to say anything about.

It’s easy to get caught up in conspiracy theories and say stuff like “the left plans it that way” but let’s face it, that’s like having a conspiracy theory of all males in the world, or of all left handed people.  Frankly most humans can’t conspire their way out of a wet paperbag.

And yet, I can predict all the paths the left will take, even the craziest ones: they always lean to the paths that favor destruction, everything that’s anti-human, and everything that will foster human misery and degradation.  Always.

Take the eco restrictions.  They don’t make any sense.  Most of them don’t do what they advertise.  But the water restrictions force us to waste time flushing our toilets repeatedly (and ultimately use more water.)  The low water washers don’t wash clothes properly and get fungus and weird smells.  (They’re also hell on people like me with extremely sensitive skins.)  The new detergents don’t wash, particularly if you have hard water, but really not at all.  So they basically make people go around in dirty clothes that smell bad.

The showers don’t manage to reduce our water flow to diurectic-gerbil-European-levels, but they do make it way harder to wash long hair, say.  Or rinse yourself properly (weirdly I read somewhere that the levels of eczema are increasing — uh?  Total mystery, right?)

There’s no low flow dishwasher that works properly UNLESS you wash your dishes first, and when we shopped for our last one, we found they’re trying to eliminate the heat drying/sterilizing.

It’s this way across a board section of things, and there is no REASON for it.  No sane reason.  Yeah “ecology” but that’s complete bullshit.  And yet it’s everywhere.

If you watch programs, like the one on future evolution from Animal Channel (I think) you can predict what species will survive by going further and further from humans every time, till in the end even birds get it and only cold-bloods remain.

Something there is that hates us, that really really hates us.  An intelligent or at least self-willed form working through humans, perverting our culture, destroying us.

Richard implies self-actuated memes.  I don’t know.  Memes are for us, now, funny pictures with words.  I get what he’s saying, but…

The traditionally religious will have opinions, of course.

And sure, it could be that…

Or it could be some kind of collective subconscious that has a death wish (fighting with our will to live as a species.)

We could be the deeply traumatized child (WWI? The French Revolution? the discovery of fire) in a world we don’t understand and wishing we could escape through suicide.

Whatever you think the force is, obviously the way to combat it is the will to live.  Which is important not to give in to despondency and despair (I know how hard it is, yes) and to fight, fight, fight with all we’ve got for life and love and light.

Even if we were destined to lose (I don’t believe we are) how would you want to go out.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.  And never surrender.

The Shadow President—Another Liberal Hit Job – By Amanda S. Green

Well, I’m at it again. This time, I’ve chosen the recently released “The Shadow President” by Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner. Now, the subtitle to the book tells us everything we really need to know. “The Truth About Mike Pence”. Well, perhaps it should be “The Truth As We Want You to Believe” but I’ll let you decide. I’ll also be honest. I don’t know if I will be able to get all the way through this. The authors make no attempt to hide their bias. But maybe I’m just cranky.

Let’s take care of a couple of things before we get started. I am reading this as an e-book. All quotes below, come from the first chapter of the book. That chapter’s title? “The Sycophant.” Yeah, they aren’t biased at all.

As for the authors, D’Antonio wrote, among others, “The Truth About Trump” and “A Consequential President: The Legacy of Barack Obama”. Eisner, on the other hand, has mainly written books about World Word II until now. At least he doesn’t, on the surface, have a political score to settle with Trump.

And now for the book.

From the beginning, the authors make it clear their disdain not only for Trump but for Pence himself. Yes, much of this first chapter is spent taking jabs at the president. That doesn’t surprise me. But, damn, these guys have a hard-on for Pence. At least they begin on Inauguration Day. Apparently, if we had been paying close enough attention, we’d have seen just how dangerous Mike Pence is to the nation. The first clue came when he stepped forward to take his Oath of Office.

What was that clue, you ask? Pence chose Clarence Thomas, “one of the most conservative Supreme Court justices in U. S. history,” to administer the oath of office. But, just in case we missed it, the authors say the “symbolism was complete” when Pence placed his hand on Ronald Reagan’s Bible as part of the oath. I guess it’s a sin or something in the eyes of liberals to have a Conservative administer an oath of any sort and we all know touching anything that was Reagan’s is evil. (Yes,yes, my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek and I am rolling my eyes so hard there’s a danger they’ll roll out of my skull, across the floor and outside.)

But it gets better. After taking the oath, Pence did what every other new vice-president has done since the beginning of our country. He hugged his family, shook hands with those present and then stepped back to wait as the president-elect took his own oath of office. Except the authors couldn’t leave it at that. “Pence struck his humility pose—brow furrowed, mouth downturned, eyes focused on some distant point—as he had on countless public occasions.” What? Would they prefer he puff out his chest, ala Superman, and stand, hands on hips, jaw thrust out?

It would be easy to simply quote each paragraph of the chapter and take it apart. However, I don’t have the stomach for it. Besides, at least for this first chapter, it all comes down to this: Pence is evil because he male, white, Conservative and Christian.

According to the authors, Pence’s “self-declared identity revealed both his priorities and the source of his power.”

What were these priorities and the so-called “source of his power”?

It seems Pence spent 30 years leading the party into a close relationship with those members of the clergy who wanted to take evangelical Christianity into a “political crusade that engaged in a culture war against nonbelievers”. While the authors don’t say—yet—that Pence’s goal was to defeat abortion laws, remove protections for gays and “prepare the nation for the Second Coming of Christ”, they strongly allude to it.

Note also how it is wrong for evangelicals Christians to have strong beliefs and feel those beliefs have a place in politics and yet there is not even a passing nod to Sharia law, etc., all of which liberals seem to have no problem letting into our way of life.

But they don’t stop at the Christian aspect of their condemnation of Pence. They, like so many “good” liberals, have to go for the money (read evil, rich white men) aspect as well.

“Pence’s allies in his war included hugely wealthy donors who, despite their vast wealth, accumulated at a time of historic inequality, also posed as victims. As libertarians in the mold of Ayn Rand’s cardboard characters they felt inhibited by in the pursuit of even greater riches by a government that imposed foolish regulations and would redistribute their wealth to the supposedly indolent poor.”

This, the authors claim, led to the denial of science aimed at “environmental protection”—their fancy way of saying climate change, or global warming or maybe even the Al Gore effect. Oooh, and these evil libertarian rich folks, the Ayn Rand cardboard cutouts, demanded tax cuts to protect themselves. Evil, evil rich men who demanded “massive reductions” in all those programs that served anyone who wasn’t rich.

Are you getting the picture yet?

“The victimhood claimed by both the libertarians and the Christian Right permitted the construction of an alternate reality that denied their own power and masked their ambition to make politics and culture conform to an ideology that included white Christian supremacy and predatory Capitalism. It also denied the progress they had made in their construction of their own political might.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Alternate reality”? Really?

But the authors can’t leave it at that. They once again have to get back to their digs at Trump as well. This time, they return to Inauguration Day and the end of Trump’s speech. The authors pull the widely reported quote from George W. Bush. You remember that quote. “That was some weird shit.” But it isn’t enough to just report what the former president said. The authors have to continue with their editorializing. “Weird was the mildest word one could attach to the forty-fifth president of the United States as he launched an administration.”

So what was Pence supposed to do in this new administration? According to the authors, he faced the so-called historic and “daunting” challenge of “dealing with an erratic and undisciplined commander in chief.” It was a role where he would, from the beginning, “seek to be a stabilizing force in a government rocked by presidential whims and mood swings.”

Then, just to be sure we don’t forget just how troubled—and troubling—the current Administration is, we have the mandatory dig at Pence regarding the Mueller probe:

“What did Pence himself know of the Russian scandal and all the efforts made by the president to stop the investigation? Was he one of Mueller’s targets? Could Pence survive scrutiny if a scandal or crime forced Trump out?”

All valid questions, but then comes the innuendo this chapter and, I assume this book, is filled with. After all, you can’t do a hatchet job without it if there are not facts to back you up. “Within weeks of Mueller’s appointment, Pence hired a criminal defense lawyer to represent him in the probe.” Ooh, bad Pence. He must be guilty or have guilty knowledge because he hired a lawyer.

In one of those topical jumps that seem to be inherent in books like this, we are suddenly back to Pence and his faith. This time, we have an anonymous source—don’t you just love those? In this particular instance, an unnamed aide, someone the authors call one of the vice-president’s “closest aides”, said Pence believed he could bring Trump to Jesus and was ready to do whatever it took to save Trump’s soul. They go on to contrast Luther’s theology and the belief that their (conservative Christians) faith made their actions righteous to Aristotle’s belief that “good deeds make a good man.” Of course, falls in line with their stance that Pence basically believes in predestination and how that means God intended for Trump to be elected. Pence’s role, according to the authors, is to play “Daniel” to Trump’s “king of Babylon.”

“As the pastor of Pence’s church back home in Indiana once explained, the wily Daniel occupied a place ‘like the vice presidency’ and served both God and the king of Babylon. As the king, Trump could be dangerous and disturbing, but the threat was less frightening with Daniel, or rather Mike, by his side.”

Finally, we get back to that “pose of humility” they started with. “Humble superiority had been Pence’s default setting during his twelve years in Congress and four as Indiana’s governor….” And bad Pence, he’d alienated some of his fellow Republicans because of his attitude. He could be harsh in how he treated his opponents. Golly gee whiz, he’s stubborn and he actually believes in something instead of just saying he does and then proving the opposite. How dare he have principles he holds dear.

The authors then spend what seems like a great deal of time comparing Pence to Joe Biden. Biden who, you know, reassured everyone that he was the leveling and steadying hand behind Obama. Except, of course, when he was groping the nearest woman. But Pence, with his strong Christian values, wasn’t nearly as good of an influence as Biden because he hadn’t sponsored all those bills in Congress like Biden had. Pence, you see, is a power-hungry Christian, more focused on climbing the ladder than being a good politician like Biden. Oh, and let’s not forget how wonderful it was that Biden was “an openly emotional man who made his feelings plain at every occasion” (remember all those photos of him groping women?) as opposed to the always composed and distant Pence (who is smart enough not to be alone with a woman who isn’t his wife in this age of #MeToo!).

Oh, and Pence is bad because in one political race—ONE—he supposedly “smeared” his Democratic opponent and, according to the authors “used his campaign’s checkbook to pay his own personal bills.” Wow, as if no other candidate, and no Democrat, had ever done anything like that before. I don’t know about you, but I can name any number of candidates, especially Dems, who have smeared their opponents or misappropriated funds.

Here’s where I wanted to finally plant the tablet against the wall. The so-called telling moment about Pence and his character came for the authors when he “claimed Charles Colson as his mentor.” For those of us old enough to remember Watergate, Colson is a familiar name. What the authors never do, at least not in this context, is say when and where Pence said this about Colson. Oh, they do finally admit that Pence might have seen Colson as a “dear friend and mentor” once he became a born-again Christian, but the disdain and disrespect is there for all to see. The footnote they finally give close to a page of condemnation of Pence for his so-called association with Colson is ‘For Christian supremacy, see Jeremy Scahill, “Mike Pence Will Be the Most Powerful Christian Supremacist in U.S. History,’” with the appropriate links, etc. Sounds like a nice, unbiased report to me. Doesn’t it to you?

If you guys want, I’ll continue with the book. But the call is yours. Who knows? The authors might surprise me and actually cite a few facts to back their claims about Pence. Shall we see? Or would you rather me move on to something else? (If so, what?)

For now, I need coffee and some mental bleach to get this dreck out of my head. Until later!

(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)

Kiss Your Ash Goodbye: The Yellowstone Supervolcano, Part V, A Vulcanology Primer by Stephanie Osborn

Excerpted from Kiss Your Ash Goodbye: The Yellowstone Supervolcano, © 2018

By Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

Images in this article are public domain unless otherwise noted.

What Would Happen If Yellowstone Erupted Today?

That would depend on the type of eruption. Because, you see, sometimes Yellowstone vomits, sometimes it coughs, and sometimes it only sneezes.

The Sneeze: Hydrothermal/Phreatic Eruptions

A hydrothermal or phreatic eruption is by far the most common occurrence at Yellowstone. Put simply, it’s a cross between a boiler explosion and a geyser, and at least at Yellowstone, often leaves new geysers or hot springs in its wake. The USGS’s definition is as follows: “[A hydrothermal eruption is an] explosion that can occur when hot water within a volcano’s h

ydrothermal (hot water) system flashes to steam, breaking rocks and throwing them into the air.” And often throwing them a good distance…though NOT nearly as far as a standard volcanic eruption can chuck a lava bomb.

It does happen, and has happened in living memory — Porkchop Geyser in the Norris Geyser Basin was formed in this fashion in 1989. More historically, Excelsior Geyser generated a large, violent hydrothermal eruption in 1888, which was captured on film; it had been erupting in this fashion off and on through the 1880s-90s. Duck Lake, the ENTIRE LAKE, is the crater formed by such a hydrothermal eruption.

Hydrothermal explosion at Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone National Park.

Credit: USGS

IMPORTANT NOTE: Even when not in an active eruption, Yellowstone’s hydrothermal features are dangerous; some 22 people have died from falling into scalding hot springs since records began in 1870. One of the most recent, which occurred in 2016 in or in the near vicinity of Porkchop, resulted in the partial dissolution of the body before it could be recovered, thanks to the fact that the spring was essentially boiling acid; park rangers said had it taken much longer to recover the body, there would have been no body left to recover. (What was the victim going to do, according to his sister, who saw the whole horrible thing? He was going to take a hot tub bath in it. He fell in while trying to take the temperature of the water, when the thin, fragile mineral deposit on which he stood gave way.)

Yellowstone is far from the only volcano which generates such eruptions; I have been present for numerous such eruptions at Mount Saint Helens. There, they are usually called phreatic eruptions, and may carry some ash along with the steam vents. They are fairly common occurrences, and take place anywhere there is snow, ice, or other groundwater source in close proximity to magma.

Hydrothermal eruptions at Yellowstone are localized to the vicinity of the explosion, and do not affect the park as a whole. They can present a danger to bystanders, however, if observers are in the way of either the large rock ejecta or the scalding and often highly acidic water/steam.

This is THE MOST LIKELY TYPE OF ERUPTION to occur at Yellowstone.

The Cough: Ordinary Eruptions

The last “ordinary” eruption to occur at the Yellowstone hotspot happened only 70,000 years ago — yesterday, geologically-speaking. These tend to form fairly common lava flows, and may be somewhat eruptive (though trap-type flows have also occurred, according to geological evidence). It would devastate the park, and possibly some of the surrounding land, depending on exactly where and how the lava surfaced, but would not necessarily induce a supervolcanic eruption if there is insufficient pressure, or if the “surface shadow” of the underground melt is not large.

This is the second most likely type of eruption to occur at Yellowstone.

Yellowstone caldera’s northwest rim at Madison Junction in Yellowstone National Park. Note the presence of two overlapping lava flows from “ordinary” volcanic eruptions. Credit: USGS.

The Vomit: Super-eruptions

Super-eruptions take a fairly long time to develop, but as they progress, they accelerate. It can take anywhere from millennia to mere decades for the magma chamber to inflate and the signs to manifest, but once the chamber roof cracks all the way through from the surface, the rest takes place in a matter of minutes to seconds.

Once the cap has broken up, a giant plume develops some 12-20mi (20-32km) high. The initial plume collapses to form a giant pyroclastic flow that wipes everything out within 60-100mi (100-160km). Anything closer than 125-200 mi (200-325 km) is buried under vast amounts of ash and roofed/covered structures collapse within hours to days; aircraft can no longer fly over western USA/Canada, rapidly progressing to all of North America as the ash cloud spreads. Vehicles stall when air intakes choke on ash. Mud flows form in rainy areas. The first cases of silicosis develop. The ash cloud sweeps worldwide, reaching Europe in ~3 days. Global temperatures drop, and Earth enters a volcanic winter.

Modeled Extent of Ashfall in a Modern Super-eruption

Even Chicago would get up to an inch or more of ash, and the East Coast gets a solid dusting. The west coast of USA, Canada, and northern Mexico get no favors, either. The grain belt would be devastated in a matter of hours.

Some FEMA researchers estimate the US could take as much as $3 trillion in damage/loss. Other experts say that as much as 2/3 of the USA could be rendered uninhabitable.

The modeled extent of ashfall, with depth decreasing with increasing distance, of a modern-day Yellowstone supereruption. Credit: USGS.

Don’t Panic!

A supereruption is the LEAST likely type of eruption to occur. There are far too many panic-mongers out there.

The 2018 “Incident” That Wasn’t

While I was writing the ebook, I was pinged on social media about A DREADFUL SITUATION! OH NOES! HUGE FISSURE OPENS UP INSIDE YELLOWSTONE SUPERVOLCANO, AREA AROUND FISSURE CLOSED! ERUPTION IMMINENT!!! or impressions to that effect.

Well, I took one good look at the article’s source and snorted. And then I got busy researching.

It turns out there was a JOINT FRACTURE in the rock above Hidden Falls in GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, NOT Yellowstone National Park, and some SIXTY MILES (100km) from Yellowstone. The crack was HORIZONTAL (not vertical, therefore NOT able to reach down toward a magma chamber, which does not currently have sufficient melt in it to even inflate, anyway), and was considered a rock fall hazard, hence the real reason why the immediate area was closed by the Park Service. Cause of the fracture was most likely the usual freezing/thawing process that causes such things in mountain ranges.

Hidden Falls in Grand Tetons National Park.

Credit: National Parks Service.

The 2004 Incident

In 2004, there was a small kill-off of animals in Yellowstone, notably about half a dozen bison, in a hollow along the Gibbon River inside the park. This, as well as the slight inflation of the Yellowstone Lake bed, resulted in significant concern among both geologists and the public that the magma chamber was inflating and the caldera becoming active.

A nursery group of bison cows and calves makes its way through Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. Credit: National Parks Service/Neal Herbert.

However, that proved not quite the case.

You see, the caldera area “breathes.” Elevations go up and down by small amounts. Sometimes this is because the magma chamber is inflating, and sometimes it isn’t. In this case, the DEEP chamber (NOT the shallow chamber, from whence an eruption comes) had in fact had fresh magma pumped in, but the quantity was small, and it periodically slows, stops, or even reverses. Scientists believe this is because the “fresh” magma, upon reaching the bottom of the upper chamber, then flows away through deep horizontal vents (rather like what Kilauea is doing now), to cool and form plutons — small to very large bodies of underground, intruded, solidified igneous rock.

Often this ground swell is also because there is a tremendous quantity of ground water heated by the (mostly-solid but still hot) upper magma chamber. And when water is heated, it expands. As the heated ground water ebbs and flows, the ground in the area swells and shrinks. This, in turn, tends to change the activity of the hydrothermal features, increasing or decreasing with the pressure of ground water.

That last bit is important, because the animal-kill event occurred shortly after a cold front passage, when the air was frigid and still, and the animals took shelter in a low-lying area near the river, where those same hydrothermal features would help keep the air warm, and make foraging for food easier. Hydrothermal features such as those found nearby are also known to emit toxic volcanic gases such as sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide, often in significant quantities, WITHOUT the need for an eruptive event — pretty much continuously. And these gases, mostly being heavier than air, tend to flow along the ground and collect in low-lying areas. Normally, the winds in the region keep the air sufficiently stirred that concentration is not particularly dangerous, but certain meteorological conditions — such as those brought about by the cold front passage — can result in air that is sufficiently still to allow the vapors to collect and concentrate, and this appears to be what happened in 2004.

And this has happened before, several times in recorded history. This does NOT mean that the caldera is preparing to erupt. Nor does it mean that such an eruption, IF it took place, would automatically be a supereruption, as “ordinary” eruptions are more common, based on geologic studies.

But What if it DID erupt? What do you do?

Kiss your ash goodbye…?

No, seriously. What do you do?

In all seriousness? Unfortunately, there are some natural disasters for which it simply isn’t possible to do a lot of advance preparation. They are simply too big, too widespread, and too variable, to make plans. Supervolcano eruptions are one of these. Physicist Michio Kaku said it best, I think…

“All you can do is run.”

~Michio Kaku

To obtain a copy of Kiss Your Ash Goodbye: The Yellowstone Supervolcano by Stephanie Osborn, go to: bit.ly/Kin-KYAGTYSV.

Sorry this is so late, but apparently I had to write the world’s longest post for Mad Genius Club.  I needed to do it because despite the award this has been week from hell, and the only way to explain things I’ve chosen to do (now) and say without besmirching the innocent is to give the whole history.  Also I’m tired of people trying to “defend” me and making things much worse.
I don’t need people to defend me, because even though I made mistakes, they weren’t KNOWING mistakes.  For the rest, such as the quality of my writing, I make no claim.  How do you judge quality but by sales, anyway.  I writes a bit, though, and intend to continue.  Anyway, if you want to read this post, go here.

I did not forget Stephanie’s post, and it will be out tomorrow.  I would not post it this late, because I owe her better.

That post above is the example of a niche within our world today.  KJA used to say that only writers understand other writers, because by every metric the business if fucking nuts.  It is that.

I’m sick and tired of people sending me typos, critiquing my choice of cover OR my choice of audio book reader on the traditional published books.  I can’t fix the typos, I don’t get a say on either cover or reader, you’re complaining to the wrong person.  Ditto for “why did you change your name” and “why are you writing mysteries now.” Over twenty years (this month.  20 years from my first novel sale) I’ve done what I needed to do to stay published.

But I remember being “just” a reader and not getting it either.  Because it’s a niche. Very few people traditionally published in the long scheme of things, and it’s a very secretive (and a wee bit crazy) business.  Only writers (and editors, though sometimes I DO wonder about that) know what’s going on.

The same applies in time.  Part of the reason the idiots on the left call everyone nazi and march in the streets beating up people who don’t attack them first, is that they live in the niche of a rich and secure country and have never actually met a real Nazi.  They don’t understand the ethos of rising eugenics and national socialism which infected even the US, or how misunderstood Darwin led to the regular person on the street thinking that eugenics “made sense.”

A middle class writer — not particularly right or left — who wrote The Green Man of  Graypec in the thirties decried how our civilization had fallen, in his future history, for lack of “eugenics hygiene.”  He didn’t follow it to its ultimate conclusion, which yeah, kind of involves ovens.  He probably didn’t think of it.  But treating people as widgets in groups leads to dehumanization and from there to ovens it’s a straight line and the skids are greased.

The children who were maleducated in history live in a niche where Marxism is the way and always wins.

But everyone is in a niche.  This morning I was reading a mystery set during the blitz and written during the blitz.  The author had later added an intro in which she talked of setting up a meeting place in London, at the restaurant, or if it’s not there, at the movie theater.  If that’s gone, at x hotel.

I was born 17 years after the end of WWII and to me it was already history.  And I already knew we would win.  I have no idea what it’s like to grow up under the threat of what seemed from the outside the all-conquering German army. Like my kids have no clue what it is like to grow up during the cold war.  And you can’t make them FEEL it.  You can give them some idea, with stories and history, but you can’t take them there, not really.

This is the tragedy of history and why we so often repeat our mistakes as a species, fast or slow.

The glory?  We survive.  More or less functionally, humans survive.  And honestly, Heinlein was right.  With some disgusting intervals at certain times or places, the future has been better than the past.

So go to the future.  It’s better there.  And help build it the way you want.  Oh, and survive.  Never give up, never surrender.

It’s all you can do.

Yes, I now, this is a weird post to be writing the week I won the Dragon.  But other than that win — and it’s not QUITE real yet — it was a profoundly sh*tty weekend.  We were away to write, and I got semi-ill (long story) and couldn’t sleep and therefore didn’t write much.  I did jog the novel out of a flat spot, but honestly, 5k words all weekend sucks. And I’m not even sure what I wrote is useable.  I just know it’s a path out of the place I was in that wasn’t working.  Even if I end up re-writing it.

Meanwhile the wave of weird breakages, both electronic and mechanical continues.  Which is weird by itself.

It’s not the first time in our lives things don’t work as we planned.  Of course it isn’t.

All of traditional publishing is an exercise in things going not as planned.  I fact, there was no relation between how much work I put into something and how it did.  Well, that might be all of publishing.  I have several indie friends who tell me that the books that sell best are not the ones they thought would/worked most at/like best.  It was just more so in trad, because no matter how much heart and soul you put into a book, if it doesn’t get enough of a print run/isn’t available/doesn’t get to the shelf (and that’s not even JUST publisher malfeasance.  The entire system of distribution had a lot of fail points.) And there’s nothing an author can do.

We’ve had other weekends before too, where we were supposed to JUST write, but that didn’t happen, or almost didn’t happen, including but not limited to when an old friend was taken to the hospital and tried to die during one of those. (When not on phone for news, we mostly slept, that one.)

In fact, we’ve found there are some hotels so deeply associated with family holidays and fun that I can’t work while at them.  All I want to do is go to the zoo, go for walks, and generally goof off.

There is ONE hotel in the Denver area (so far) which is JUST for writing weekends and so has a higher success rate. But even that isn’t infallible

And then there are all the other plans.  I swear we gave up on staycations, because if we plan a week at home, going out to eat and not doing anything we don’t want to it never fails that we have a disaster or three that forces us to do mostly unpleasant things for a week.

And yet, we still plan.  We have to. If we didn’t plan, I’d never get anything done.

This year has been a year of plans: short range, long range and incidental blowing apart in our faces.

Which makes the year very difficult.

But since the world insists on not playing along with what I want and not behaving the way I like, there’s nothing I can do but dust myself off, pick myself up, and try again.

And sometimes, yes, the unplanned is good, like the Dragon (and before that the Prometheus for Darkship Thieves.)

So pardon me for this very late and weird post, while I dust mysel foff and get back to work.

It’s too early in the morning.

What winning the dragon did was effectively short circuit the last day of away-writing.   Also we went wild and crazy and had a whole scoop of ice cream.  Carbs these days have an effect similar to a hangover for me.

So I’m not going to write a blog post until I’m home which should be early afternoon.

Ya’ll can wait that long, right?

Good.

See you on the flip side.

UPDATE: We’re home safe, much later than we thought.  So, post tomorrow?

For this announcement:  Kevin J. Anderson and myself won the Dragon Award for Alternate History 2018.

For