I completely forgot to queue a post last night before I knocked off for my day of rest.

I am breaking my no-internet day-of-rest (actually I’m painting the bathroom, but you know, it’s not writing or house cleaning) thing to let you know I’m okay.  I’ll combine promo posts next week.

Meanwhile housekeeping for long-term readers:

We’ve decided we’ll bring back the old paypal for those who want to subscribe (no levels, you guys do what you want.  Life is so strange right now, I can’t really promise anything, and I never fulfilled the old — more on that anon.) And keep the new one for those who prefer to donate when you love something or whatever.  What say you guys?  They’ll be labelled “Support the blog” and “tip jar” or something of the sort.

Opinions?

I intend to do patreon, but um… they’ve behaved weird recently.  So not existing yet.  I can also provide an address for anyone who wants to donate by check (I even understand, but…)

On the “I never fulfilled the promises” — you guys know what my life has been these last 5 years — I no longer seem to be dying, but when I talk to any of you in person you always say “I actually don’t want the swag.”

So, we’re going to do this: if you really want the swag at your level, or some of the swag at your level, email me at the goldport address, and I’ll do my best to fulfill it this month.

Other things: the grant fanfic will return sometime later this month.  I’m writing it to the end, so I can post bigger chunks.  Rogue Magic will return to Saturdays before the end of the year and I will finish it, though I can’t promise a specific date.  (I need to go back to the beginning and make it all fit (a problem of writing in installments) so I can finish.

I’m doing a massive overall and new covers of all the older books.

I’m hoping to finish de-um… not quite de-politicizing but it will stand for it the Magical British Empire trilogy to put up soon.

And  unless it’s another week of headaches because of California fires, I should send Alien Curse to the betas this week, which leaves me time to finish A Well Inlaid Death, which has been waiting so long (Dyce Dare book.)

And now I’ll return to my non-internet weekend.  See you this evening.

During one of the tightest and most uncertain periods of our life — not the worst, which was when older son was born, Dan lost his job and there was nothing around that even resembled what he used to do but not very far off — we were talking to an old friend who had invited us to dinner, and we were talking about a lot of our circle caught in the same vise-grip.

“I’m not worried about you two,” our friend said.  “You’re the luckiest people I know.  You’ll fall on your feet.”

This made us stare because the joke in the house is that if we didn’t have bad luck we wouldn’t have any luck at all.  Note the reference above to the worst period in our married life.  Can you imagine a worst time to be unemployed than when you give birth, in a complicated emergency caesarean?  Or to be worried about money than when you are ill and have a brand new baby?

Me either. But there it is.  Our life tends to work like that.  Later, when I was writing, it was guaranteed that if Dan lost his job my series would also be terminated and everyone would close their doors to me.

I didn’t argue.  You can’t argue people out of this sort of perception.  But it was almost as flabbergasting as meeting a high school friend and being told that in high school she’d been jealous of me because I always had a boy on the string.  I attended an all-girls school. And though I developed early, the stuff inside the head came very, very late.  I didn’t even know enough boys to have on the string.  I had an unavailing platonic pash for one of my brother’s friends between 14 and 18 and wrote him over 200 sonnets.  If he’d asked me out on a date I’d probably have panicked and run.  I lived 90% inside my head with occasional peeks outside to make sure the coast was clear.

I went on my first dates at 17 — and ran — and had my first kiss at 18.

Ten years after I figured out what she meant.  There was a boys school across the street and boys called out and sometimes followed us to the train station.  Looking back, there were some persistent shadows.  It’s entirely possible that one or two just as socially awkward boys followed me and made what my mom called “ill killed lamb” eyes at me.  I’d not have noticed.  It wasn’t within the realm of possibilities for me, yet.  But if my old friend was more sexually aware and dying for those pathetic glances, she might have envied me.

OTOH it’s possible she imagined it.  Considering I dressed in my brother’s old sweaters (with leather elbows), scruffy jeans and work boots, she probably imagined it.

In the same way it took me a while to figure out why someone would consider Dan and I the luckiest people we knew.

And then I realized when we hit a rough patch we panic.  We do the equivalent of “fight like a cornered cat” but with job searches, money making ventures and taking on random work that might pay (and sometimes opens other avenues of success.)  You see, we’re both very security oriented, and even if there’s still money in the bank, or if there’s a payout from former job, or whatever, we want “security for a year.”

So at the slightest bobble, we go nuts.  The times Dan has been unemployed (usually because something awful happened to the company or the entire industry) he sends out ten to fifteen resumes a week, ranging from bullseye appropriate to “reach above” to “things I could do till I find a job.”

2003 was the closest I’ve come to being completely unemployed. Lots of people were, then in my field. Because that’s when the fallout from 9/11 hit.  And loony as it seems to look at the — then, I’m sure it’s worse now — worst quarter in publishing industry hitting thousands of authors at once and think “it’s the writers’ fault” the publishing system really had no other way to assign blame for failure.  By the numbers, the book failed, you fired the writer.

To an extent they had a point too, because back then the ordering to the net system meant all those names were dead forever more.

Which is not to say that it was just or made any sense.  It was just the way it was.  Which is why trad pub is now failing… by the numbers.

Anyway, Dan was unemployed too, as his traveling job had not endured the strangeness of post 9-11 flight cancelling and delaying (it was weird for about a year.)  Which wasn’t a big sadness, as we’d calculated we could live on half his salary and it would be worth it, because well… we both hated being apart, and the kids hated it even more.

And of course we’d just moved and were paying on two mortgages while I got the old house ready for sale.  (So this time we didn’t buy before we sold and I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. We still had to move because you can’t sell a house with four cats in it, and the year renting was just wasted money. Never mind. If we’re allowed — none of them was intended except one in 34 years — we’ll reduce it to a cat, maybe two, and take them out with us when the house shows, if we need to sell this one.) Of course we were.

The writers mailing lists I belonged to were full of threats of suicide, sobs over lost long-running series, general despair.  Someone was very upset her agent expected her to write a completely different proposal.

Dan was sending out resumes, asking everyone we knew (he stopped short of buttonholing strangers in the street, but not by much) if they’d heard of a job. He was looking for short term pay-by-the project work to make do meanwhile.

And I was doing the equivalent. I contacted a book packager I knew and asked he send me anything remotely related to what I could do.  I contacted my friends who edited anthologies and asked for slots.  And I buckled down and wrote 17 proposals (detailed out line for first book, first three chapters, five or six short outlines for subsequent books.  About 100 pages give or take) for 17 different series, in three different genres.

It all came back together — of course it did — so I sold 15 of the series over the next 3 years (the shelved ones were for stupid reasons.  Apparently I was so panicked I proposed a Merlin murder mystery series.  I have read Arthurian stuff, but talk about your rabid fans.  It would take me 3 years to research so they wouldn’t hate me, and frankly I’m not that rabid a fan  The other was for Leonardo da Vinci mysteries, which at that time got returned with “these aren’t the da Vinci Code” which obviously they weren’t.  I’ll write them sometime.  Yes, there’s someone else writing those.  I haven’t read them, on purpose, because I intend to finish mine.  But I’m sure mine will be sufficiently different.  Different is not a thing I have a problem with.) Meanwhile I got enough short story invites that year I made 5 thousand dollars. And I wrote a book for hire, and ghost wrote two books.  While these didn’t pay crazy money, they kept roof over head.  And the series I sold kept me making a middle class income for the next 5 years.

And Dan found a job from a bizarre concatenation of circumstances.  And because he asked.

So, we fell on our feet, sure.  But what you didn’t see was the made scrambling up the cliff face on our bleeding fingernails.  It’s who we are, it’s what we do, partly because we hate insecurity, and it’s worse  as was then, when you’re responsible for small children, and partly because we don’t expect any luck.  So we go out and bombard everything possible in attempts to shake some money loose.  We really should print cards for those occasions that say “we also walk dogs.”

I found out recently one of the ghost written books (for an author who was critically ill and willing to pay for someone to fulfill her contracts) which I didn’t even know the final title of because it was written through three layers of secrecy, made someone else’s career taking her from mid list to bestseller.  She’s been going on in that series ever since.  No, I can’t say more, because it would be opening myself to lawsuits.  I only know because I bought the book from audible and then stood transfixed, in the kitchen I’d been meaning to clean going “oh.”

When I found this out, my friends thought I was very upset, but I wasn’t.  It’s actually a relief to know something I wrote had that kind of result for someone else.  It means I haven’t had that kind of event for other reasons than my writing: possibly the politics thing, possibly because I’ve been too ill to push consciously, possibly because I’m really bad at kissing butt at publishing offices, but mostly I think luck.

Not that my “luck” as people will think is anything to sneeze at, with over 100 short stories published, and 34 books I can admit to in a 20 year career (since I sold first book, not since it came out, which was 2001.)  Most careers in my field last 3 books and five years.

But it wasn’t luck.  It was mad scrambling on sometimes bleeding fingernails.  I don’t know how much of the ill health of the last 20 years has been the result of scramble and stress.  I know the last three years have been the result of stress causing multiple auto-immune attacks.  It seems like (knocks on head) I’m in the process of resolving that.

Oh, yeah, and I did all this while slowly turning more and more hypothyroidal, for 23 years, which reached disabling levels 10 years ago, and should not have allowed me to write at all.  (It really affected my memory.  I kept having to turn back to remember my characters’ names.)

For those who haven’t experienced that wonderful condition, besides making you gain weight and making it impossible to lose, the condition also gives you what’s known as “brain fog.”  It increased until the last three years before it was treated (three years ago.  So, six years total. And honestly until my dose was adjusted this year, to some extent, just not as bad.)  It’s like being unable to wake up.  Until I got treated, I was up to three pots of coffee a day, just to get something done.  (I’m back to a cup, sometimes half a cup, because I forget the cup half-full.)  Oh, and yes, I was being tested, sometimes twice a year because the “hypothyroidal mask” (sort of a moon face, with your eyebrows receding towards the center) and the pallor were a give away but the problem is they only measured how much thyroid precursors I produced, not what I was doing with them. My autoimmune attacks the precursor for t3 and turns it into reverse t3.  (This isn’t exactly right, but I don’t have the right words and it rhymes.)

Technically I wrote all my books while half awake.  And honestly I shouldn’t have been able to write them at all.  But what else was I going to do?

From the outside this looks like “luck” and yes, there are people who were sidelined in 2003 and who think I stayed on with some “trick.”

Sure, there was a trick.  I panicked and scrambled.  It’s a highly reproducible trick for anyone.

I’m not telling you guys this to ask for pity for mah victimhood.  Dan and I have been married and real adults for 34 years.  Sure there have been periods of mad scramble, but over all it’s been great.  I could have done without 20 years of diminishing capacity, but no one asked me, and I got very lucky to find a doctor who could figure out what was wrong and adjust my thyroid before I died.  One of those true pieces of good fortune.

I could wish the career had gone better, but that’s fairly irrelevant now, that there’s indie.  I’ve been moping and lamenting that this should hit when I’m in my fifties, not my twenties, but I made the mistake of saying this in an older friend’s hearing and she put it in perspective with “Try seventy.”  And she’s right.  Besides, with the thyroid adjusted, I’m getting back all the crazy energy I had at twenty.  (The intensive exercise and diet also seems to help.)

So, in a way, I’m at the beginning of the story, with all of it yet to write.  And the kids are ALMOST off our hands too (look, long training for complex professions, okay?) So in a year or so, I should have more time and, for lack of a better term, mind space.  Always barring illness and death of course, which in our fifties, must be taken into account.  But my ancestresses lived to their mid eighties with no or crap medical care, and again diet and exercise are helping.  So let’s hope I have another thirty years, because I have SO MUCH to do.  And thirty years, honestly, is a career.  And hey, when son worked at hospital (in his gap year) he saw a ton of people over a hundred.  If I WORK at the health, I might get LUCKY and be one of those and have forty or fifty years left to write and build.  Who knows?

What this post was in name of was to show the mad scramble behind “falling on your feet.”

It seems to be true that looking from the outside we assume everyone else is “lucky.”  Because, remember the commercial from the seventies?  They don’t let us (either on purpose or through chance) see them sweat.

The problem is that people don’t see you sweat.  Perhaps those people who never had to struggle for anything are more prone to imagining that others have it really easy, and therefore they melt at the first blow of misfortune and assume they’re not “meant” to succeed.  (I’ve seen it with a lot of colleagues and a few friends.)

And then there’s whole multitudes that our media and school system have convinced they are mistreated, whether that makes any sense or not.  The notions of “white privilege” or “male privilege”, the notion of invisible racism or sexism, the notion that somehow people you don’t know and who don’t know you are conspiring against your success. There must be a vast number of these people who buy into this crap, because no one NO ONE who has experienced the real thing and/or not been indoctrinated to ther eyebrows would believe the notion that we live in either a patriarchy or a white supremacy.  Anyone who thinks so has been wrapped in cotton and fed garbage.

Tons of people try to attribute my reverses to “foreign born” and “has accent.”  And, hell, maybe it’s true, but so what?  You push on and try harder.  What else are you going to do?  Only infants and crazy people think the whole world can change to suit them, instead of their trying another route to success.

Everyone has reverses and trying times.  The only people who don’t know that have been molly coddled and spoiled from birth.  And even for them, luck eventually runs out.

The difference is in how you face them.  Oh, sure, it would probably be best if I approached mine in the serene confidence I’ll overcome.  But that’s not me, so I approach them crazily, with fear and horror and scrambling.  But I work to get out of it.

Believing everyone but you lives golden lives produces poison and envy, which corrodes the soul and disfigures the personality, turning you into the sort of person who can’t succeed.

Don’t do it.  Instead, try clambering up, on bleeding fingernails.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t advance for a while.  Just don’t stop trying, and don’t blame anyone else for your troubles.

Yes, sometimes it’s bad luck.  So what?  Others have their trials and many still manage.

Just ignore set backs and work harder.  And then you too can always land on your feet.

Here’s to the End of the Revolution by Amanda S. Green

We’ve come to the end of Our Revolution, Bernie Sander’s self-aggrandizing, masturbatory ode to himself and to socialism. Thank goodness. I’m not sure I could have handled much more without walling my Kindle or drinking myself into a coma. It’s not that what he says is wrong, or stupid, or full of shit. It is all of that. But there is a danger to Bernie Hillary Clinton never presented, one we’re seeing taking hold in of our younger generation. Fortunately, many of them are like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but there are others who aren’t terminally afflicted with foot-in-mouth disease. That danger is exactly what Sanders wants to foment and nurture and it is a rot at the very root of our republic.

I could spend the next six weeks tearing the rest of the book apart. I don’t think any of us really want that. Sanders spends much of the book repeating the same old saw. The United States could be great if we’d just follow Grandpa Marx’s rules. But, like all good socialists, he never tells us how we’re to pay for his grand programs, nor does he lead by example. It’s all a lot of “do as I say and not as I do,” especially when you start reading between the very broad lines.

So what does the book boil down to?

And do we really want to know?

The answer to the last question is “yes”. Well, to be honest, it comes down to a qualified “yes”. We might not want to know but we need to know. We need to know so we can counter his plans and the plans of those coming along after him.

Sanders, and this should be of no surprise to anyone, sees what he accomplished during his campaign for president as a “revolution”. It is one he wants to see continue. At least he doesn’t hide his goals. “The fight to defeat the greed of the billionaire class must continue.” (OR, p 445)

Now, that goal shouldn’t surprise any of us. The fact he actually vocalizes it might, but he’s been saying much the same thing for years. However, keep this goal in mind as we look at some of his other goals. Note also that it is only the evil “billionaire class” that must be attacked. Like so many other good socialists, he wants to protect his millionaire status. After all, he can’t be expected to share his wealth with the less fortunate.

“Demand that the media focuses on the real issues facing our nation and the world, not just political gossip.” (OR, p. 446) Pardon me while I laugh hysterically. First, he doesn’t define what those “real issues” are. I guess he expects us to assume they’re what he tells us they are. You see, we can’t be left on our own to decide what’s important or critical and what’s not. Second, he seems to ignore how his own campaign often looked at—and referred to—“political gossip”.

“This nation treats our children shamefully. We must focus on the needs of the young, especially the many who are disadvantaged.” (OR, p. 446) Now, there’s nothing wrong with this. We do need to focus on making sure the following generations are capable of thinking and doing, of continuing to build this nation and keeping it free. However, that’s not exactly what Bernie is talking about. All he mentions in this instance is educating our kids and making sure there are more educators and child-care workers.

What he doesn’t discuss is how the government already ties the hands of so many of our educators to the point they aren’t free to educate. In all too many school districts across the nation, teachers don’t have the freedom to adapt lessons or lesson plans based on a student’s needs or abilities. He doesn’t talk about the indoctrination happening in our schools today, an indoctrination that, if we’re honest, goes against another of his so-called goals. But more on that later.

“With so many Americans uninsured and underinsured, we need hundreds of thousands of new doctors, dentists, nurses, and other medical personnel. We should not be lagging behind many other countries in life expectancy, especially for lower-income Americans.” (OR, p. 446)

Ooo-kay, where to start? Let’s start with the obvious. Hundreds of thousands? Where is he getting his numbers from? More importantly, how are we supposed to pay for all these folks to get their training? Oooh, I know! The government is going to pay for it. Except, like all good Democrats and Socialists, Bernie never tells us where the government gets its money. Guess what – and I know you guys know this, but it is amazing how many don’t—that money comes from us. It comes out of your pocket and mine.

Next?

According to Bernie, we need a “radical change” to our criminal justice system. You see, our primary goal should be crime prevention and that requires “a whole new level of cooperation with educators, social workers, and employers.” (OR, p. 446)

Hmm, do you see anything wrong or missing with that statement? Where are the parents in this so-called radical change? Where is allowing judges and juries to assess sentences that will deter others from doing crime? Maybe I’m just a crotchety old bitch, but if you want to prevent crime, you need to do more than pat little Johnnie on the head and tell him not to do it again and then giving him what he wants. He needs to know there are consequences and those consequences will be applied.

And, before you get excited, he does bring in climate change. Be honest, you knew he would. Is there a liberal around who doesn’t love climate change, or whatever the name du jour for it is? All we need, according to Bernie, is “scientists and engineers who will develop clean and inexpensive forms of energy and transportation.” (OR, p. 446) Oh, and we aren’t to let the evil fossil fuel industry stop these ventures.

Of course, he doesn’t talk about the cost to develop and implement these new technologies. He doesn’t talk about the ecological impact that will have on the Earth. Nor does he talk about how he wants all this to be under the thumb of the government and not private industry. As with his argument that we need to be take better care of our kids, he doesn’t give us the rest of the equation—the impact of deploying socialistic policies on a nation. He can’t because then he would be defeating his own arguments.

“We need businesspeople who create and sell new and innovative products and services, and who treat their employees with respect and dignity, while protecting the environment.” (OR, p. 446) This is one of those statements like asking “do you still beat your wife?”. It basically says there are no businesses or businesspeople who currently create new and innovative goods and services. It also says these same businesses and businesspeople don’t treat their employees with respect and dignity. This sort of indoctrination is already undermining a number of offices around the country. “Dignity and respect” are being interpreted to mean an employer doesn’t treat you right if they hold you to a standard of conduct or production you don’t agree with. It’s all about the feelz and not about responsibility.

Screw you, Bernie.

Guess what he sees as the “great crisis” facing our nation? It “is the limitation of our imaginations. It is falling victim to an incredibly powerful establishment—economic, political, and media—that tells us every day, in a million different ways, that real change is unthinkable and impossible.” While I agree with him about mainstream media telling us that what we, the figurative unwashed and unrepentantly libertarian or conservative, want is impossible, isn’t he telling us the same thing? Isn’t he telling us that what we believe in is impossible and bad for the country. Isn’t he telling us we MUST move “forward”? Of course, he is. It is another instance of do as I say, not as I do. (OR, p. 448)

“We can overcome the insatiable greed that now exists and create an economy that ends poverty and provides a decent standard of living for all.” (OR, p. 448) There are so many things wrong with this statement, I’m not sure where to begin. First, like Trekonomics and its platform that the Federation was populated with folks willing to work in the mines when it was their time to do so, Bernie seems to think innovation will come about simply out of the goodness of our hearts. Yeah, nope. Yes, that is a motivation but how many of us are willing to invest years of hard work, not to mention money, and know we won’t reap the benefits of our efforts?

As for ending poverty, it goes beyond providing a “decent standard of living for all”. To begin with, who is going to pay for that decent standard of living? We’re already seeing in places like San Francisco and Seattle what happens when you raise the minimum wage to some artificial standard of living point. Businesses have to recover the loss of income from such increased expenditures. They do it in one of several ways: they increase the cost to their customers, they decrease hours their employees work, they fire employees or they close their doors. None of that helps the economy, not in the long run.

Bernie says one thing I can and do fully endorse, although he probably wouldn’t thank me for it.

We will not be able to accomplish those goals if we look at democracy as a spectator sport, assuming others will do it for us. They won’t. The future is in your hands. Let’s get to work. OR, p. 448)

He’s right. We can’t sit back and watch what happens, trusting others to do what we want done. Not when it comes to the political future of our country. We can’t trust the other side to sit back and trust their goals will be accomplished without them taking part. Believe me, after the 2016 election, the Democrats are pulling out all the stops to try to retake Congress in the mid-term elections. We’ve got a front row seat to their attempts to discredit Trump (not all that hard to do), using a complicit media. If we want this country to have a chance, we have to take action, we have to take part in the political process on the local, state and national levels.

I know some of you believe it is already too late. It may be. [Bullsh*t.  It wasn’t too late for Poland.  And in our history, going back to England, there was liberty recovered in the face of much greater losses of liberty. Defeatism is an excuse to sit on your ass and moan- SAH]

But I’m not ready to give up. Are you? [Hell, no. These are the death throes of communism.  They look scary, because death throes of movements always do.  But in the end we win, they lose- SAH]

(Help Amanda drink enough to keep snarking.  We’ll collect for her liver transplant later. Hit her Pourboir jar now! – SAH)

There is nothing so bad for you, and your prospects as being convinced you are owed everything.

I repeat because it might seem the strangest thing ever.  There is nothing worse for you, your work, your willingness to toil at education or getting proficient at your profession, your general character and your happiness in life as feeling you are owed a living or honors or whatever it is, by a world that has “done you wrong.”

Which is why the cult of victimhood gets on my nerves.

Perhaps it is that we’re so immersed in storytelling and most of it is very bad.  It’s easiest to get sympathy for a character at least in the beginning of a book if he’s “oppressed” or tortured, particularly if he seems gormless.

And bad story telling begets bad storytelling.  I became aware oh, ten years ago that my younger mentees had no idea how to create an engaging character.  They just made him terribly victimized, and then, suddenly he was worth of getting everything and the universe on a platter.

Maybe it’s the result of almost universal kindergarten and at the back of their minds they imprinted on the image of the teacher making “everything fair.”

It’s lousy — horrible — story telling in the measure that it’s bad art.  Good art imitates life (and sometimes life, art.) Bad art violates it and imposes upon it not only a pattern that is grotesquely wrong, but one that makes people act in ways that will damage them/internalize ideas that will damage them.

To the extent art comes from and exists for humans, that is the very definition of bad art.

Its bad effects are not in dispute, as we see them around us every day.

People who believe they are owed a living or great positions because they or someone like them were victimized once are not people who look at their own attempts and go “Oh, maybe I need to correct this.”  They’re not even people who are able to account for the unfathomable works of chance in the chaotic system of humanity.

They are instead people who know — know — that they should be given everything they ever dreamed of, and if you don’t hand it over right away you’re an evil oppressor.

Those who succeed in getting these positions or even money handed to them are pathetic people, who often suspect that, since they have it relatively easy, other people MUST have it easier.  They are privileged ivy league graduates with a vague soupçon of a tan who claim that Holocaust survivors have “White Privilege.”  Because surely, if it was that easy to them others must have it easier.

Their standard is the pouting weasel, their standard bearer is Michelle Obama, who handed a royal ride to the top of the pile and money for nothing and her fame for free always looked dissatisfied and annoyed, her mouth puckered with the feeling that somebody somewhere was having a better/easier time than her, and that they were therefore oppressing her. She couldn’t have got the best, because she wasn’t happy.

And that’s the ones who succeed.  Then you have the failures which are vast, a horde, a multitude and of every corner of the Earth and every possible color.  They feel they or someone like them was once oppressed or suffered something terrible.  Therefore the world owes them fulfillment and consolation.  They will do nothing, and eternally mewl about their wrongs.  They wrap themselves in a blanket of self righteousness, in the certainty they suffered and therefore they must be worthy, and demand that you hand everything into their unprepared hands.  And when that doesn’t happen, they start envying everyone around them, and become even more whiny.

A friend of mine was talking about how the hidden prince meme was a very old one, and people are attracted to it.  And it’s true.  But something always present in the “fated boy” or hidden prince meme is that he must prove himself.

In the best works, he undergoes the most strenuous tests, before the sky opens, and the crown drifts down on his head.

Yes, in most modern works, particularly YA (no, not really Harry Potter, in which the defect as far as there was one was front loading the victim aspect which other people might think was just more sanctified victim stuff, but he still had to endure tribulations, and fight for what was fated.) there is a tendency to do the victim/victim/victim — tada, king thing.

But that’s not what’s imprinted in most human back brains.  Because stories made by people before this crazy idea set in knew it was crazy and destructive.  As in, you don’t, actually, build leaders and people of character by picking people who let themselves be abused and handing them power and glory.

Sure, some victims become heroes.  But see the “become.”  As with everyone else, it involves an inner transformation, a willingness to work towards something.  Along the way they stop being victims, or forget their victimization, because there’s more important things to do.  There always are more important things to do.

When I was little I used to listen to the parable of the talents and it made no sense to me.  As an adult, I’ve known too many people who buried their talent in a hole, because they were scared and they were OWED success and they resented having any responsibility at all.

I have known to many people who lost their lives while trying to save them.  As in saving in a keep-fresh container, for some great destiny, some miraculous, wondrous moment when they get everything they would have got if it weren’t for the “oppressors.”

Our school pushes this too, on minorities and women.  They’re owed something, because they were historically discriminated against.  Ignoring “historically” doesn’t refer to anyone alive.

This primes people to see every slight as lese-majeste, every accidental slip as a micro aggression.  There are males, and yep white males who suffer from the same, for personal reasons, but INCULCATING it wholesale into groups is an act of unparalleled evil in our educational system.

If you’re busy being oppressed you don’t work, you don’t improve, you don’t learn.  You just wait, until you’ve “suffered” enough and the sky opens up.  And you imagine more suffering than is really occurring, and you become bitter that no one is rewarding it.

We have a significant percentage of the nation living like that, poisoned by this insanity.  No, not as many as were inducted into it, because most people at some point take a look around and at themselves, and get over it to a greater or lesser degree.

But the arts and academia, not to mention the news are full of people poisoned by the envy and malice this bizarre idea fosters.

I don’t know the solution. Except to make good art to counter the bad, and to fight the culture war as hard as we can.

Lest we end up fighting a real war or let the nation perish at the hands of unsatisfied, delusional ego maniacs.

*NOT our due and there are some excellent books in our category, but if you guys read Uncharted by Kevin and I and feel thus inclined, remember to vote for it in the dragons, under alternate history-SAH*

*Sorry, particularly to Stephanie, for being so late with this.  The morning went slightly sideways is all.  Nothing bad, just got distracted. – SAH*

Kiss Your Ash Goodbye: The Yellowstone Supervolcano, Part III, A Vulcanology Primer – By Stephanie Osborn

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

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

Images in this article are public domain unless otherwise noted.

The Yellowstone Hotspot and Structure

NOTE: I am aware that there is current research claiming that the subducted Farallon Plate is the source of the Yellowstone melt, as well as its long-lived behavior and track. However, based on what I know, I am skeptical.

For now, in the absence of more definitive results, and given the fact that the ancient plate is now pretty much crammed almost as far under the eastern North American plate as it can get and still be under it, and given detailed information on a mantle plume of some substantial size, it is my considered opinion that more than likely, the Farallon Plate had only marginal, if any, effects on Yellowstone. That said, it may possibly be at least part of the reason why said mantle plume is anything but vertical. (I do discuss all this in a bit more detail in the ebook.)

I also note that the current accepted model is “mantle hotspot,” with plenty of data to support it. If that should change, I will add an update.

Overview

The Yellowstone supervolcano is a very long-lived system. Unlike most more ordinary volcanoes, which are supplied with magma via such relatively shallow means as tectonic plate subduction and subsequent melting, Yellowstone is apparently produced by a large and powerful mantle plume; the reason for the plume is unknown. As the melt in the plume rises, it pushes on the overlying crust, “puddling” in a weakness in the overlying rock, forming a magma chamber. This pressure first forms a bulge (a “dome”), then the crust of the bulge begins to crack (surface cracks). If these cracks deepen enough to reach the magma chamber, an eruption can occur. They are also responsible for the hydrothermal features seen in the national park.

The Plume

The mantle plume goes down at least 600mi (~966km), but recent seismic evidence discovered by researchers at the University of Texas indicates it may go as far down as the outer core/mantle boundary, some 1,800mi (~2,900km) down. The plume apparently angles sharply south-southwest from the megacaldera, and the base of the plume can be found under the California/Mexico border. It is very roughly cylindrical; early estimates indicated it was some 215-300mi (346-483km) in diameter, but more recent estimates say it is at least 400mi (644km) wide. It is 2,050mi (3,300km) long, and up to 1,500ºF (816ºC) at the base, near the core.

The Magma Chambers

There are a couple of different reconstructions from seismic & other data that indicate the possible shape & size of the magma chamber. More, seismic tomography indicates there are TWO, a shallow and a deep chamber, with the deep chamber likely directly linked to the mantle plume.

The deep magma chamber, connected to the upper mantle plume.

Note state lines and park/caldera outlines on top and bottom of cube, for scale.

Credit: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091214075225.htm

According to the USGS, “The shallower magma storage region is about 90km (56mi) long, [and] extends from 5-17km (3-10.5mi) depth.”

In turn, and from the same source, “The deeper magma storage region extends from 20-50km (12-31mi) depth, contains about 2% melt, and is about 4.5 times larger than the shallow magma body.”

If we assume — based on those measurements — average values for length, width, and height, such that the smaller chamber is a rough prolate ellipsoid of approximate dimension 7.5×7.5x56mi (12x12x90km), then it has a rough volume of ~13,000cu. mi. (~54,000km3). This then gives a volume for the deeper chamber of 58,500cu. mi. (~244,000km3).

However, as it turns out, generally speaking, magma chambers don’t induce eruption until they have surpassed the 50%-full mark. And that’s a whole heck of a lot of magma, AND we’re only at 2%. On general principles, I think we’re good.

The Geysers/Hydrothermal Features

The geysers, hot springs, mud pots, fumaroles, and the like are fed by ancient rain- and meltwaters — the local ground water, in essence, except it is often coming from depth — that seep through the network of cracks and fractures in the rock. They are heated by the chambers and gradually rise, eventually forcing their way to the surface to form geysers and all the other hydrothermal features common to Yellowstone and other such similar volcanic landscapes.

Riverside Geyser. Credit: National Park Service.

A fumarole (steam vent) field in Yellowstone, where dangerously superheated steam emerges in the geyser basins. Credit: National Park Service /Jim Peaco

WARNING: most of the hydrothermal features in Yellowstone, and other active megacalderas, are DANGEROUSLY HOT. Not infrequently, these are superheated waters, meaning their temperatures may well be above the boiling temperature of water; this is especially true for geysers and fumaroles, but many — most — hot springs are also near boiling. More, at least at Yellowstone, they also are prone to being highly acidic. It is NOT AN EXAGGERATION in the least to say that entering one of these features means an instant, horrible death; it has happened many times. Worse, sometimes bodies are not recovered, simply because the water has become strongly acidic thanks to the sulfuric gases dissolved in it; the corpses simply dissolve. When the bodies are recovered, they are often in very poor condition. DO NOT EVEN THINK OF TRYING to use one as your personal hot tub, and DO NOT LEAVE THE TRAILS/WALKWAYS, because the high mineral content can form what LOOKS like solid ground, but is really a skim of mineral deposits floating on the water’s surface.

Is There Any Danger of Eruption?

Yes, because this is an active volcanic feature; there has been some uplift in areas of the park, especially under the lake, but given the nature of the feature, and the high levels of seismic activity that occur there normally, that isn’t necessarily anything to worry about. The “uplift” feature on the lake floor seems to be part of an underwater field of hydrothermal vents, fissures and faults, not unlike those found on ocean floors, so it is likely that the uplift is a result of gases and expanding hot water underneath. Certainly a good deal of the seismic activity in and around the caldera has to do with this same hydrothermal activity; this expansion, when the water is in the natural cracks of a rock stratum, will force the cracks wider until the stone eventually breaks. This fracture does create small quakes.

So-called “quake swarms” in the region are NOT in the correct area to indicate magma on the move. They also don’t have the “long-period harmonic” vibrational component to indicate flowing magma. More, detailed geophysical studies show no evidence of either magma chamber inflating.

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

I was reading a book years ago about the medieval concepts of the after life, and came across the idea that you won’t be released from purgatory (at ease, the middle ages were by and large Catholic, of course) till the last ripple of your actions has worked itself out in the world.

The concept is terrifying, even for normal human beings.  That kid you raised well or badly raised another kid who perhaps got to be a king or a mass murderer or you know Karl Marx, and where do the ripples stop?  How long till they stop working themselves through in the world.

Now imagine if you are in a position of power of any kind, be it as a bureaucrat or a ruler.  That permit you refused because the paper wasn’t filled just so, the father lost his job because he couldn’t make it to work.  The children– you get the point.

Or take writers.  Heinlein was a great influence on me when I was young and looking for guidance, but I’m sure he wouldn’t want to claim responsibility one way or another for how I turned out.

The concept is also morally wrong, at least to an extent.  No one can be responsible for how their third or fourth order actions affect others because we simply can’t see it or imagine it, much less calculate it.

Unless, of course, your action was evil to begin with, so oh, hum, don’t be evil.

BUT the concept is fascinating.

Because we tend to think of ourselves, isolated in our own sphere, or as one of you told me about his/her blog “shouting into the internet like a crazy person.”  And we will look at our hit counters and go “dang.”

Or, as I used to back when, we read but don’t even comment on the blogs, and we live our little isolated lives and affect no one.  And when we vanish we vanish utterly.

But it’s not true.  As forensics says “every contact leaves a trace.”

I met — once — an adult who remembered me because, when he was 4 and in my son’s kindergarten class I took pity on him in the line to go in and wiped his nose and tied his shoe.  (He recognized me by my accent.)  To him at that time, with his family in some turmoil, this was a great act of kindness, apparently.  To me it was mommy-extension duty.

There are people who will write me about my posts, and say I pulled them back from a bad place.  Or people who write to me and say how my books cheered a dying relative.  Or pulled them out of a really depressing place.

During the year from hell (the first, the year after Robert was born) Jerry Pournelle saved my life and my husband’s sanity, because his books were stocked by the local library, and we didn’t have money to buy any books, and his writing was our road to sanity. (Look, they also stocked Piers Anthony, but after the fifth book I just wanted to scream at the puns.)

Sometimes just your being there and smiling at someone might make that person’s day better.  I know it’s happened to me once or twice, when really depressed and a stranger smiled at me or made a funny quip in the store, which was the beginning of the turn around.

Recently, my attempts at walking to lose weight — look, I was walking before, but some of us need special amounts of walking to actually get weight moving off.  This last week I walked 29 miles while controlling what I eat both for low carb and quantity.  I lost three pounds. — have been made more bearable by a woman about my age with whom I cross paths walking the byways of the suburb.  We’ve never talked, but we smile at each other, and that’s like “Oh, thank heavens, I’m not alone.”

Yeah, you can’t know how you affect others, but you can be sure you’re affecting them.

You’re not living alone and for just yourself.  Every contact leaves a trace.

When you’re done being exhilarated and terrified by that idea, calm down.

Just strive to be a decent human being: don’t hurt people, don’t take their stuff, and if you see the opportunity to be kind to someone don’t pass it up.

Yes, there will be times you are less than your best.  You’re human. Not all of your contacts will be positive, but there’s a good possibility most of them will, if you try to make them so.

And your legacy will flourish long after your name is forgotten.

You can’t ask for more.

I’ve been getting concerned messages from friends around the country asking me if our lefty colleagues have completely lost their minds these last two months.

Mind you, these are friends who are immersed in mixed politics circles, sometimes on half of a politically mixed marriage.  So I have no clue why they think I have special insight.  Well, perhaps because I lurk, unnoticed and long-forgotten in a lot of writers’ newsgroups, where someone to the right of Lenin is a rarity.

I know I’ve told you before that there’s nothing to be scared of in the times we live in.  This country has survived scarier times.  To the extent that we live in a big scary tech transition, one that, when it’s done, will completely change the way we work and live (and it’s just in the beginning, and I won’t see the end of it.  Unless rejuv comes along sooner than I expect and I live a long time.) this has happened before, with the civil war.  We might end up there again too, but I hope not.

To the extent that the … leftist? Government controlled? way of governance was quietly assumed to be the best and the way of the future, we’ve been here before too, and much more so.  In fact with knobs on.

Don’t believe me?  Read Simak.  I’d always assumed he was leftist fringe (and yes, I still like his writing, what of it?) but Jerry Pournelle assured me he has just a middle country, middle class, middle politics man of his time.  And he knew him personally while I didn’t. (Which is probably good.  As with Heinlein, I probably would have made vaguely human noises that couldn’t quite assemble into words, were I ever in his presence.)

I’m using part of my day off (Sunday, with Saturday devoted to other, non-writing tasks that have to be done in this business and which I tend to neglect) to read and the reading I started with were the books of childhood, like, you know, Simak’s.  (I’ve re-read Heinlein every year or every other year since that time, but not Simak.  Partly because my tastes changed.  But for various reasons I’m in a “rebuild” phase of my life and reading Simak is part of understanding where I once was.)  And to me now, in America, and knowing the politics and the people here better, it is amazing to realize how leftist the consensus of “just folks” was once upon a time.

It is not that bad now, partly because people trust less, and therefore trust “learned men” and “government” less.

Oh, tons of factors going into that, from the public fall of the USSR which had been held out to us as “just as good as us, only different” to the fact that people just trust less.  Of course that lack of trust comes from the left’s educational/news/entertainment branch pounding on all branches of society that people used to trust: the family, church, heck, even history and America herself.

They don’t seem to realize that in all but the most sheepish (eh) students, the distrust will splash back to all authority figures, which means the school, the “learned people” and the government.  The fact that those who are even vaguely aware leave school to find that they are in a world completely different from the one they were taught in school doesn’t help.

That people will wake up some years (sometimes 10) after school is a given, save for those who are invested in being left and getting their power and approbation that way, usually the ones in educational/news/entertainment — let’s abbreviate it to agit prop — branch.  My biggest fear is that instead of thinking and figuring out where we really are, they’ll embrace a cartoonish anti-left and think they have the truth.  It’s the easy way.  It also is the wrong way, because the left is more subtle than that in their lies.

Anyway, but either way we are way less statist than people were in the fifties.  Way less into big depersonalized institutions.

So that much is good.

And yet the friends — and occasionally self — getting alarmed have a point.  We are riding a wave of a state of fear, a fear so great and so pervasive that it drives people utterly irrational.

I thought it was crazy enough in the Bush years, when people claimed their speech was chilled, and proclaimed loudly IN CONVENTIONS in front of hundreds of people that they were afraid of speaking publicly because Bush would come for them.

We hadn’t seen nothing yet.  If those were the crazy years, these are the running around with your underwear on your head talking to random weasels years.

Routinely I see people on facebook — people I know and who are somewhat sane (no writer is ever completely sane) and certainly well educated, and who used to be moderate left claim that Trump wants to put … well, everyone really in camps.  Let me see, the list goes: minorities, gays, women foreign born people, leftists.  They’ve been screaming this since he was elected.  They’ve been screaming this — keep in mind — about the first GOP candidate to wave a rainbow flag on stage.  They’ve been screaming this about the one president in recent years to have a Jewish-convert daughter and Jewish grandchildren.  (What’s the difference between Trump and a reform rabbi?  Trump has Jewish grandchildren.)

They said on the day of his election that he was going to be rounding up all these people into camps as soon as he was sworn in.  Two years in, the fear has only got worse.

And the fact that no one has arrested these people, making these kind of statements doesn’t seem to sink in.

I know why.  Humans are a social animal.  Social animals can be stampeded by those they view as leaders, and the left side of the isle, being the compliant, good boys and girls, still trust teachers and news and the few surviving mainstream entertainers.

Who have never let up on the fear.  I have yet to hear them recant one of their crazy rants or admit that if Trump is Hitler, he’s a frigging bad Hitler, cutting down on the very authority he’d need to do the kind of things they expect.

These people, whom the rather conventional people on the left revere keep telling them it’s getting worse and worse.

Fear is one of the ways of stampeding people into acting violently and irrationally.  Every demagogue int he world, from Hitler to Stalin, has done it.  And it is always a crescendo, and always against someone you despise.

The left is being stampeded against us, their fellow Americans.  This is not new, it’s just at a new crescendo.

Having leftist family members, I remember when Bush was trying to get us in a global war by rebuking North Korea.  No, seriously.

But no?  Now it’s insane.  In a country with a soft-left president, who has cut back on regulations and freed up the economy so we FINALLY had a summer of recovery, these people think they’re being “ruled” by “Literally Hitler.”

And their panics are getting crazier.  No, talking back to a press that has also lost its mind is NOT a totalitarian move.  That would be arresting the journalists who print demonstrably biased/false reports.

Yes, the press finds itself with fewer and fewer readers, just like traditional publisher do.  This is the result of there finally being alternatives, and people frankly being tired of the crazy shoved down their throats 24/7.

No, removing someone’s clearance is not silencing him.  It’s preventing him from getting information with which he’s proven unreliable.  And btw it happens quietly all over the land every day and has since the clearance system was inveted.  And no, a guy who was having an affair and being blatantly partisan and open about it during the campaign in one of our agencies is not a hero.  He’s a shitweasel using the left for all he’s worth.

And now the ANTIFA idiots are mumbling about “Killing Nazis.”

Look, if they find the real Nazis in the country (I ran across a pair once.  While house hunting.  OBVIOUSLY gay and obviously Live Action Reich Players.  Weirdest thing ever.  It was 20 years ago, and my mind is still broken) and are willing to go to jail for unprovoked murder, well… it’s not good, but it’s at least understandable-crazy.

Except they treat all of us as Nazis, and call all of us Nazis.  Yes, that’s right, some of us are from the long-feared libertarian branch of the Nazis.  We want only minimal government that leaves people alone.  I guess we’ll have to tell Poland to invade itself.  All those people we want to kill (yes, I know, I know, we don’t, but the left thinks we do) we’ll be reduced to telling them (us, since many of us fall into categories the Nazis tried to exterminate) to pretty please put their heads in the oven.  Which is only a problem if those people are so ridiculously compliant they’ll just do it.  (Does the left think we’re all as compliant as they are?)  Then there’s the problem that most ovens are electric.

Oh, never mind.  There is no rationality to it.

These are the words and acts of panicked people.  People running from a threat that doesn’t exist, but which the demagogues of the left — people the left trusts, heaven alone knows why — keep insisting is growing.  Which causes the herd to run and attack in unreasoning fear.

So, we do live in perilous times.  Every time people can be persuaded to attack those they’ve been told are evil and intend to hurt them is dangerous.  See Germany and one Hitler, Adolf.

Because the left is more gullible, and because they’ve been taught “question authority except us” and because the drumbeat of crazy is louder and more relentless than ever before, they never get to relax and think, and realize if there were going to be camps, or famines, or even slaps on the wrist, we’d have them already.  But they’re too scared to notice.

Which is why it’s essential to let these insane-with-fear people nowhere near the levers of power.  Remember they cheat relentlessly, but if it’s not close, they can’t cheat.

Vote on the day, don’t answer polsters, refuse to vote by mail even if it’s the main thing for your state.  And if you get to the polls and they tell you that you already voted/voted by mail, raise a stink.  Take to the net. Be loud.

But above all, if it’s not close, they can’t cheat.  Yes, losing will make them even more panicked.  Can’t be helped.

Would you rather they continue screaming about how evil this country is — and hopefully eventually realize no one is keeping them here forcibly! — or that they have the levers of power while panicked and seeing Nazis under their bed everywhere?  Do you want unreasoning people having the power to strip you of you right to property, to liberty, to life?

I don’t.  I daresay we’d survive that too, but it would get mighty rocky on the way to survival. Keep quiet and vote.

So today the internet hamsters ate the word-prompt for the Sunday Challenge.  I am therefore giving you a picture, this time not mine.

It is copyright thanh262k @ pixabay.com and it’s released under creative commons license.

Have at it!

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: Vaguely Familiar (Familiar Tales Book 3).

When stone calls to stone, Familiars and mages must answer.

Lelia Chan’s and Tay’s chance discovery of a fragment of a blood-soaked knife leads them deeper into what it means to be a shadow mage and her Familiar. Meanwhile, Morgana Lorraine heads west, looking for answers (and really good bacon), leaving Officer Jamie Macbeth to deal with the Off Ramp of Doom and his mother-in-law’s ongoing displeasure. But the stone won’t stay quiet.

Could the Off Ramp and the stone be connected? As the stone’s call grows stronger, Lelia and friends race to find an answer to an evil that won’t go quietly.

A short novel. 56,000 words.

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!

Why did Bernie Run? – By Amanda S. Green

Or, why didn’t he run further, faster and straight to the nearest Socialist country where he’d feel right at home?

In my last post, I started covering the “why did Bernie run?” question. He didn’t want a political dynasty taking control of our nation. He oh-so-conveniently forgot about the Kennedys or the Roosevelts. Instead, he focused on making sure another Bush or Clinton didn’t find their way to the Oval Office. While I appreciate not wanting Hillary as President, Bernie left us with Trump, who has done better than I ever expected.

But the potential of a dynasty wasn’t the only reason he ran.

Another reason he decided to throw his hat into the ring were the difference in their basic political positions between himself and Hillary.

Hillary Clinton was a key player in the centrist Democratic establishment, which had, over the years, been forged by her husband, Bill Clinton. In fact, Bill Clinton had been the head of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a conservative Democratic organization funded by big-money interests, which was described by Jesse Jackson as “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” The Clinton approach was to try to merge the interests of Wall Street and corporate America with the needs of the American middle class—an impossible task. (OR, p. 50)

Here’s a little hint. He spends the next few pages attacking not really Hillary but Bill. You know, the same Bill Clinton who often had Sanders’ support while Slick Willy held the Oval Office. He picks an issue, notes how Mr. “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman” was responsible for it and then how Hillary supported it. Where he might have a point with regard to the Clinton’s failed health care reform initiative during Bill’s tenure – after all, Hillary was a driving force behind it – you can’t lay the credit or the blame for the lifting of certain regulations at her feet. Or are we going to start blaming every First Lady for the actions of her (or his) spouse?

Oh, wait, the media is already doing that, at least where certain First Ladies are concerned. But we aren’t the media and we should be able to figure out that they don’t hold all the power in the nation, no matter what we might want to believe. Yes, some have more influence over their spouses than others, but they still don’t wield the presidential pen and they sure don’t control Congress. But I get where Bernie’s coming from. Hillary didn’t have a long legislative history – like he did – to attack. All he could do was attack what happened during her husband’s political career, show how she supported his stances and only later changed her mind on certain issues and then focus on the few years she had been a senator and the Secretary of State.

My disagreements with the Clintons’ centrist approach were based not only on policy, as important as that was, but on politics—how you bring about real change in the country. What kind of party should the Democratic Party be? (OR, p. 51)

This is where I laugh hysterically. He refuses to run as a Democrat when given the Democratic nomination for Senator and has for some several terms now. He calls himself and Independent and not a Democrat. So why is he worried about the Democratic Party?

I know, I know, foolish question. He’s worried about it for political and not policy reasons. He wants to shape the party into his own version of socialism. He can’t do that if it is a centrist party, which it isn’t. So for him to piss and moan about the Clintons’ policies being based on politics and not policy is very much a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Not that Bernie will ever admit it. He does the same thing. If it is politically expedient for him to call himself a Democrat or to run on their ticket he will. Then he will turn around and spit in their faces – as he has already shown.

He goes on, and I’ll paraphrase here, to condemn the Clintons for receiving a great deal of money in contributions and speaking fees from “powerful financial interests and corporate America.” (OR, p 51) He points out how, whether in their political or personal lives, they seem to spend a great deal of time raising money. They’ve done it for so long and have done it so well there are now some who refer to them as “Clinton, Inc”

Well, that’s true. Between the Clinton Foundation and the enormous fees Hillary received for her private talks to various Wall Street firms, a butt-ton of money has been raised by the Clintons. If you remember, Hillary took issue with folks looking at her askance for those speaking fees. In What Happened, saying that if she had been male, no one would have questioned the fees.

Hmm, maybe we should ask Bernie about all his speaking fees? What do you think?

To me, a very basic political principle is that you cannot take on the establishment when you take their money. It is simply not credible to believe that candidates who receive significant amounts of financial support from some of the most powerful special interests in the world would make decisions that would negatively impact the bottom lines of these donors. The only way to bring about real change is to mobilize millions of people at the grassroots level against the establishment, against the big-money interests. (OR, pp 51-52)

Okay, I’ll admit that, on certain levels, I agree with him. However, there have been any number of politicians who have strayed from the interests of their donors. More than that, you can turn his own argument around on him. If it is impossible for a politician to vote against those who gave them significant financial support – and he doesn’t give any support other than philosophical for this – then it would also be impossible for that politician to vote against who give fewer dollars under reformed contribution rules. I guess we just have to do away with all campaign contributions.

I’m kidding.

However, Bernie once again over-simplifies the problem of campaign finance. Not that it surprises me. He knows how to find the argument that best supports his position, no matter how tenuous its roots in reality might be.

His next reason for running was that Hillary too hawkish as a senator and as Secretary of State. She made the mistake, in his mind, of support President Bus in his war on terror. But the more telling about exactly where Bernie stands is this quote, “While very few debate the right of Israel to exist in peace and security, I thought she did not pay enough attention to the suffering of the Palestinian people.” (OR, p. 52)

I’m sorry, but how can you say that with a straight face? To begin with, he says nothing about how the Palestinians were bombing Israel. How they were doing everything they could – and pretty much still are – to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. Instead, he worries about how the Palestinian people suffered. What about how the Israelis suffered? And what were we, as a nation, supposed to do about the Palestinian issue? Again, he makes a condemnation but doesn’t give us what his stance would be or how we would pay for it.

For me, the bottom line was that this country was facing enormous crises: the continued decline of the middle class, a grotesque level of income and wealth inequality, high rates of real unemployment, a disastrous trade policy, an inadequate educational system, and a collapsing infrastructure. On top of all that, we needed bold action to combat climate change and make certain that this planet was healthy and habitable for our children and grandchildren. (OR, pg. 52)

Well, we know what he was worried about. But we don’t know what he was going to do about it or how he was going to pay for it. I guess he was going to plant that magical, mystical socialist money tree. Nah, he was going to do what every good socialist does, reach into your pocket and mine until nothing was left. Then he’d find someone else’s pocket to pilfer.

So why did Bernie run?

For all of the above reasons and more.

It seems he’d heard talk that folks wanted Elizabeth Warren to run. But she hadn’t said she would. So what was this good little socialist from Vermont to do? He couldn’t let Hillary run and win. No way did he want a Bush in the White House. So he had to bite the proverbial bullet and step forward.

What he doesn’t see, or at least admit, is he was playing the same game Warren was. He’d been asked if he was going to run. He hadn’t said he was considering it. In fact, in an interview I believe I referenced in my previous post (if not, it is at the beginning of the chapter we’ve been discussing), he said he was 99% sure he wouldn’t run. That was after a flat denial that he’d run.

But, you see, in the end, he realized he needed to do something. He needed to take his politics outside of Vermont and Capitol Hill.

Does that make sense? If he has his politics on Capitol Hill, isn’t he already influencing our national political bent? How much of Bernie’s run for President really a desire to spread his ideas as much as ego? Oh, I’m sure that like any good little Socialist, he wanted to spread the word of Marx as far as he could. But what did he accomplish?

We can thank him for that paragon of foot-in-mouth disease Ocasio-Cortez. We can also, in a way, thank him for Hillary’s defeat. Not only was she a horrible candidate who didn’t connect with much of the electorate, but she did not find a way to entice his followers back into the fold. Conservatives and libertarians should thank him for that. Not necessarily because Trump now sits in the Oval Office but because Hillary doesn’t. The problem comes in that his success – and we have to call it that, like it or not – has given socialism (or Democratic-Socialism) a legitimacy it hasn’t had.

The real question is how the Democratic National Committee is going to respond. Are they going to be so frantic to regain the White House and a congressional majority that they throw out the last of their scruples and fully embrace socialism or will they take a giant step back? I know where my money is, and it isn’t on a giant step back.

Next week, I’m going to finish my commentary on the book. There’s a great deal left but much of it is the same ole, same ole. My brain and my liver can only take so much. I’ve got a question for you. What would you like to see me tackle next? It can be more snarking material or something that will let my liver heal. The choice is yours.

Until later!

(Help Amanda drink enough to keep snarking.  We’ll collect for her liver transplant later.
Hit her Pourboir jar now! – SAH)

The State of the Human Wave – Fiction Version

by Alma Boykin

Short version – a lot better than when the idea was, ahem, floated, in 2012. [2012? That’s… a while ago. A geologic epoch in Internet years. Anyway.]

The original post: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/03/21/what-is-human-wave-science-fiction-3/

Sarah followed it up a little later: Human Wave Dreaming in August of that year.

Since then, indie sci-fi and fantasy have blossomed as the walls of publishing crumbled. First, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and the lending system of Kindle Unlimited (KU) opened doors to anyone with a story to tell. Barnes and Noble offered similar for their Nook, and then Rakutan made Kobo available for a global market reach. For print, Smashwords arrived, followed by CreateSpace, then a host of other options. New word processing software like Scrivener appeared, and then inexpensive or free formatting programs such as Caliber and Vellum brought even that task well within the reach of anyone who wanted to learn the program. At the same time, Kobo and Amazon refined their systems to make them easier to use, no longer requiring conversion from .doc before uploading, among other things.

At the same time, more and more readers began buying human-positive books that put story ahead of message. That encouraged the early Human Wave writers to write more, and we/they in turn inspired others to try their hands. Fun fiction became easier to find, better written, and better packaged. Sub-genres declared dead by TradPub reemerged as fans found more and more new books, and older works re-appeared after long periods of neglect. Sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, westerns, they started becoming fun again.

So what is Human Wave? Stories that entertain, make the reader feel better, give the reader hope, let the reader escape to a place where good triumphs over evil, be that evil a demonic manticore or a petty bureaucracy. Human wave stories are not message free. But the message is positive, and comes second to the story. Gee, readers like that! Readers want the hero to win, and get the girl or guy or whatever, after soundly thrashing the bad guy. Good wins, evil loses, and everyone gets a happily-for-the-moment ending (unless you are the bad-guy). There can be dark moments, grim moments, Valleys of Shadow and a Slough of Despond, but the story ends on an upward note. Yes, the mother dies, but her sacrifice ensures that her children survive and bring justice to the Forces of Evil. The hero ends the story with scars and some doubts, but everyone knows he did the right thing and his lovely, faithful lady is there at his side. Think of the end of Brandon Sanderson’s original Mistborn Trilogy.

What’s the opposite of Human Wave? Grey goo. Message fiction. Stories that beat the reader over the head with her unworthiness, the horrible state of the planet, the doomed future of humanity, the evils of free-market economies, the ills of the patriarchy, and that preach first, entertain a distant fourth. Message fiction focuses on message over story. If you can go through the first chapter and find Plucky Heroine, Oppressed Minority, Genius Gay Guy/Gal (or now Brilliant Transperson), Evil Capitalist/Evil Religious Leader with the “good” folks all standing up to the Oppressive Patriarchy or Corrupt Corporation (or Devious Government Agency), then you probably have message fiction. Particularly if a character is there just so the author can check off a box on the list. If you dearly want the Sweet Meteor of Doom to take out everyone in the book, and you have yet to reach the middle of the book, you have grey goo. Laughing in all the wrong places is another sign.

Some writers felt that Human Wave, and people positive stories, needed something more. From that impulse came Superversive science-fiction, John C. Wright’s term for a movement toward specifically noble, Christian, Western-Civ-positive stories with a message. Soon other writers picked up the banner, and some truly fascinating and engaging, as well as thoughtful and thought-provoking, work emerged. Readers loved it. Note that here too, the story always, always comes before the message. Superversive Sci-Fi became a movement all its own, very much Human Wave but different. Is it a bigger tent or smaller? Is Human Wave part of Superversive or vice versa? Does it really matter? Probably not.

So, in 2018, what is the state of the Human Wave? Still growing, still developing, still healthy as best I can tell. Readers have more authors to choose from, and the Dragon Awards show that. A fan-choice award, nominated by people who love a book, podcast, game, or movie, selected by people who love books, games, movies, and so on, the Dragon is managed by DragonCon but not determined by DragonCon. More importantly for some of us, readers vote with dollars, and those dollars seem to be moving more and more away from the TradPub fiction and toward indie, especially Human Wave indie. Readers also love Human Wave TradPub, don’t get me wrong, but TradPub doesn’t always love Human Wave stories. Some imprints have become very well known for focusing on the author’s minority status and the “edginess” of their work, to the point of almost shoving story out the window. The goal for them is not to entertain, but to preach and to use story as a tool for “raising awareness of [insert woe here]” or “eradicating [insert woe here] and saving the world.” Grey goo has not disappeared, which may explain why so many Traditional Publishers find their readership and profits shrinking. Raising e-book prices so high that hardbacks look reasonable in comparison also has a great deal to do with it, but that’s a tale for a different blog.

Do we still need Human Wave books, movies, and the like? Heck yeah! The more the merrier, so long as the story comes first and entertains the reader. As Sarah says, “Build under, build around.” Given the vehement efforts of the grey goo politicians and their supporters to gain political power and ruin everyone’s days, we need people-positive tales more than ever. The collectivists, anti-humans, and others got a fifty-year jump on us. What if Amazon goes the way of Twitter and Facebook? What if Microsoft manages to strangle Gab, if [OK, when] B&N’s Nook ceases to be a financially viable platform for writers? The answer is write more, write better. Remind readers that there’s more to the book world than grey goo. Selling your own books independently is hard, but not impossible the way it once was. Diane Duane and her husband do it and seem to do well. There are others.

Here’s to the past six years’ successes, and here’s to at least a dozen more!