Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I’m still mired in book, and part of it frustrates me, because it SHOULD have been done a week ago.  Heck, two weeks ago.  The problem is for this phase, particularly for this book — the going over the book and seeing it as a whole and balancing the parts — I need to concentrate on it, and concentrating has been a little in short supply recently.

Most of it is stupid cr*p.  I’m still waiting to book the medical stuff, but I also have to get hold of the neuro and I haven’t … well… I haven’t braved myself to talk to an office.  You’d think a big ass (literally) woman like me would be fine talking to an office, right?  Not just a medical office, but any office?

I would, but I have an accent and I’m mid-range deaf.  I’m okay talking to people I know really well, because they will say “No, Sarah, I didn’t ask you about your pirouettes — do you have pirouettes? — I asked if you’d do my cover in exchange for edits.”  But even then most of them text, because talking to me on the phone or in a noisy place (a hotel lobby, my kitchen with seven appliances running, my car on a windy day) is like going insane, just a little.  I don’t hear what you asked, I answer a completely different question.  ‘iz fun.  I mean, I’m used to it.  But the insidious part of mid-range hearing loss is that you don’t often realize you didn’t hear the question.  Your brain rearranges the syllables you did hear into something coherent.  This is how talking to an editor in a crowded restaurant I heard her say “I just bought a great YA novel” and I answered “You must tell me the title, I have an 11 year old and a 9 year old who love reading.”  What she’d actually said was “I just bought a British hard SF novel.”  Yes, her look told me I’d got it wrong, and I made a joke out of it, but I had no idea I hadn’t heard what she said before.

Well, on the phone you don’t get the weird look, and this is a doctor’s office.  The thing is one of you told me — and I’ve since checked with medical professionals — that the white matter abnormalities were probably part of having been hypothyroidal very long.  Or rather, one of you mentioned it, not knowing I’d been hypothyroidal for over a decade (probably started twenty years ago, and proceeded by degrees.  If it can be caused — the autoimmune kind — by a massive illness, which I seem to remember somewhere I read, then it started when I almost died of inter-cellular pneumonia 22 years go.  I kind of remember signs, but hey, fatigue and not being in your right mind is normal when you have toddlers.  And that’s part of the problem — or not, if it had progressed fast, I’d have gone insane — the symptoms worsened so gradually they didn’t become obvious until the last five years or really really bad till the last three.  Hypothyroidal dementia is a good description because the last three years sort of felt like that.  Facts and memories just vanished into a hole.  Weirdly, this is what white matter abnormalities are: tiny holes.)  It never occurred me to tell the neuro that, though he took a very thorough history, and I have the meds in my chart.  I think he assumed it was caught and treated early.  But apparently if not, these white matter abnormalities are fairly normal.

Here’s the thing: if I call the office they’ll become convinced I have egg whites in the brain, or think I do.  So I’ve been putting it off.  I wish you could just text doctors.  (Add to it that his personnel is a little odd like most busy offices.)  Putting things of that sort off is really hard work and prevents you concentrating on the things you want to.

But there’s been other stuff, and I’m not going to go into it here.  There is no point.  You guys either know what’s been going on or care nothing about it, and those few who don’t and know should go and read Amanda’s and my posts this week at Mad Genius Club.  No, we don’t name names, because we’re giving the guilty party a break (though more and more I wonder why) but the sequence is laid out and fairly clear.

However, there are a few things you should know, as my readers.

The first of them is that I’ve been getting angry this week as I never have before.  Yes, anger can be caused by thyroid meds.  Or at least escalated, but the thing is I’ve been at this level prescription for a while, and anyway this is not that type of anger.  It is not what my friend who has the issue calls “getting angry at nothing.”

It is rather getting angry at things that anyone else would get angry about, but which I haven’t, for years.

My modus operandi has been to let things run, until something is SO fricking giant I have to deal with it.  I thought I’d acquired an easy going personality in my mid thirties or thereabouts, somehow.

The actual fact is that as years went by, I was more and more tired and chronically depressed.  It took a spectacular blow up to get me in the fray, fists bunched.  If you consider the culture I come from, that should have been your first clue.

Now… It’s not that I’m more angry:it’s that I’m more awake.  I’m paying more attention, doing more, saying more.  I feel more.  Happy and sad and tender, and competent, and yes, angry, when anger is warranted.

The problem is that I’ve laid down a pattern of “I can get away with this” among people who only know me online, and not well enough to see I’m more “here” now.  So people think they can away with all sorts of crazy-ass things, and I will just ignore it, because I don’t have the energy to deal with it.

Which is what originated the blow up.  Someone thought he could just get away with sneaking the cheese he’d been told he couldn’t have.  There was another one yesterday, because someone presumed to interrupt my writing to tell me what I should or should not care about, and how I should do things.

I try not to blow up at people doing that, particularly men, because I try very hard not to fall in the feminist nonsense of “he’s lecturing me because I’m a woman.”  But in this case it’s not.  In this case, it’s the ramping up of crazy I saw when Brad was doing SP3, and the backbiting crazy sh*t I’ve seen about how Kate did SP4.  So, I’m going to lay some facts on you.  No, I don’t care if you like them or not.  No, I’m not being dictatorial.  I’m a libertarian.  That means I do what I want with my own, and this is my own.  You don’t like what I’m doing with my own?  Get your own.  Your life, your problem.  You won’t catch me saying how you should live it or how you should solve it.

I’ve, in fact, for years refused to tell newby writers how they should break in, how they should write, or what they should think about their writing.  I normally don’t even tell them when I see them doing really stupid crap.  Unless apparently they make me really mad and I have the energy to react.  (And then I’m, basically just looking for a place to stick the shiv.)

So I’m going to give you the facts, take them or leave them.  I don’t frankly see anyone on this blog getting worked up enough to be very upset about them, but I want this out there, just in case one of y’all takes crazy powder one morning.

• I’m running Sad Puppies 5.  This is not up for discussion.  No, I’m not too sick or busy to do it, I know when I am too sick or busy which is why I deferred two years.
• I’m doing it my way. This is, at this point, a tradition.  I didn’t agree with everything Brad did, and I wasn’t too fond of some things in Kate’s plan (which turned out to work, but hey) BUT it was their turn and their direction. The only way individualists like us can have some sort of passing on of the leadership is to step back and say “I’ll support you, even if I think your idea is not right.”  The group, such as it is, comes from mutual trust and friendship and believing others are adults.
• No, you cannot claim you’re leading Sad Puppies 5, even if you think your idea is teh awesome and you think you’re a Sad Puppy Leader.  The initial group was Larry, Brad, myself, Kate and Amanda.  I’m doing it this year, Amanda next year.  Because we’ve stayed in touch our ideas have sort of evolved together, and my friends are in accordance with where I’m taking this, if not with the details.  This is the only thing you can do with the movement at this point.  We feel since it was our idea, we can’t allow it out in the wild where it can become — unwittingly or not, and in most cases I’ve seen it would be not — a false flag operation.
• But you want to lead Sad Puppies.  You think what I’m doing is all wrong, and you want it to be a good old fashioned fight, like SP2, with Larry in charge.  You want to show the old fandom they’re no longer in control.
  Great.  You shine right on, you crazy diamond, but not as leader of SP 5.  Too bad, so sad.  You can even call it something puppy.  It seems to be a tradition now.  Perhaps you like the sound of Deplorable Puppies or Perfect Puppies appeals to you.  Go for it.  You start it.  Given that some people just want a good fight, this seems like a great idea and you’ll probably get a following.  But not under our movement, not under our flag.  We’ve been maligned enough in the national press, we don’t want just anyone claiming to be us and tarnishing everything we’ve done and tried to do, okay?  Deal with it.  You can’t have it.  This is not changing.  Should I collapse and die tomorrow, Amanda will pick up the flag and do the thing.  Or Kate will have another go. (I hope not, as she’s finally writing again.)  You want it?  You can’t have it.  Too bad, so sad.  And yes, I’m going to come down like a ton of bricks on ANYONE saying they’re collecting a “list” for “the sad puppies recommendations for the Hugos.”
  Don’t like this?  Well, if I say “Excuse me, you realize the impression you’re giving?” Apologize and change it.  Remember, I have more energy.  You have no idea how mad the Latin chick can get.  Don’t push.
• A brief history of Sad Puppies: Sad Puppies changed in goal and attitude with each leader, or even the first two years with Larry.
  SP1 was just Larry having fun.  SP2, after he got a bizarre reaction to SP1, was Larry trying to prove that, despite denials, the Hugos had become a trophy of a clique.  He proved that, on the “Get off our lawn” alone.
  Brad… Brad is the knight sans peur et sans reproche.  You can’t help liking him, even as you go “Oh, my friend, you’re gonna get hurt.”  He thought he could prove that if you just presented a list collected in the open and truly without political color line, fandom would go “Oh, you’re just fans like us.  You just have a different orientation than lit-crit.  Sure, come on in.  Here’s a place at the table.”  I think his disillusionment started with people being bullied until they dropped out.  Then there was the national media campaign to paint us as something we definitely were not.  And somehow, people with power to call in favors and get almost the same article published places like Entertainment weekly also screamed they were the underdog and discriminated against.
  What a long, strange trip, culminating in wooden assholes.
  What that, and the fricking rigging of the rules so the vote counters get to throw out whatever they want to proved the Hugos were dead to me.  I’d have moved away from the award.  But I was ill and moving, and Kate got it.  And Kate is a battler, and thought she’d try ONE MORE TIME, really open, really clear what she was doing, everything aboveboard.  Yeah, some people on the other side woke up, but not enough.  There were still the usual attacks.  Heck, there were attacks when I announced what I’m doing at Mad Genius Club, a few months back.  How my plan could get anyone’s dander up is beyond me.  And I mean dander up in a “She’s threatening us” kind of way.  I really don’t get it, but the crazy people on the other side started a drumbeat about how horrible I am, and people in the other Puppy movement got offended because I was “ignoring” them.
• This brings us to what I’m doing:
  I’m not attempting to prepare a list for the Hugos.  Seriously? You want to do that?  After the award has been dragged through the mud?  You want to give them money to throw a splendid party with AND tell just so stories about how you’re a huge monster they fended off?  In the words of my people: F*ck that.  Ain’t happening.  Not on my watch.  I didn’t send in supporting membership last year, and I will not do it this year.  As such, I cannot tell anyone to spend their hard earned cash.  Buy a few books instead.
  But they why am I doing this, and what am I doing?
  I’m bringing this movement in for a landing and making it permanent.  This ties in with Human Wave, too.
  The gatekeepers have given push to a kind of book, sometimes under the guise of a “popular award.” That’s fine.  It’s how they make money.  However because the gatekeepers favor the lit-crit set (there are reasons for this) it leaves those of us who think reading should be a ludic activity out in the cold.
  Also, in post-gatekeeper landscape, a lot of us want to find places to discover great books to read.  Being found is particularly hard for indies.
  I’m taking the idea Kate had and automate it.  There will be a site (might be next week as the book isn’t done) that will have a place to enter book, date of publication (I’m not restricting it to last year’s or this year’s) what awards you think it’s eligible for and why you liked it.  The program will kick up the top ten every month.
  But what about pranksters?  What if it is all Chuck Tingle books.  Glad you asked.  Four people will have the keys to the site, who can not only fix that, but also ban the user/s who did it.  Yeah, the site will have registration (though you can use whichever name) and yeah, in our own house we will stop vandals.
  But what if the books are all leftist?  Glad you asked.  We don’t give a damn.  If these are books enough people enjoyed it, they go up on the list. (I am right now binge reading an obviously very progressive mystery author.  But since it only comes in when she mentions someone’s politics, and she’s otherwise a great writer, I’m still reading.)  At any rate, if the books aren’t good and this is just a coordinated campaign, it won’t work.  My followers are not exactly dumb bunnies.  They can read the blurb and figure out if this is just the same push as from gatekeepers.
  What if I hate all the books that rise to the top?  Then we’re probably related.  Half the time I hear people raving about a book, I go “Oh, you did?  I didn’t get past the first chapter.”  Which probably explains my stunning success at popular fiction.  But you know, no matter how much this favors “majority opinion” you’ll also get the occasional quirky find (you always do) that will link you to an author you’d never otherwise find.  Which is why it’s worth to check, and it won’t require much of you.
• What can you do? Well, you can check the lists and buy the books you like.  You can also, if the site is up and you like it, make it popular.
  Yes, there are other recommendation sites.  Those were some people who got awfully offended with this.  Look, I’m in the field and I didn’t know of them.  And you’d be shocked how I hear of just about everything relevant from people around me.
  Am I saying they’re failures?  That we can do better?
  No, I’m saying that you need all kinds, and all slants.  I know why I didn’t hear of those, they’re not the sort of thing my friends go to.  And my site won’t be the kind of thing that other people go to.  That’s fine.  In the age of gatekeeping, there was the Locus list.  There were others too, though not as important.  Now?  Let there be lists for every taste.
  Does using the Sad Puppy name make ours more important?  NO.  It just makes it ours, because we’ve been in this from the beginning, and we’re broadening and embedding the movement into a permanent force now.
• But isn’t Sad Puppies about awards?  How can you DO this to us?
  Ah. No.  Sad Puppies was about restoring integrity and fan power to the field.  The Hugos is just where we started.
  Now that the Dragons will probably eclipse the Hugos, we’re opening this to “these are the books people like best.  Read them and, if you like them, vote for them for awards.” On the site, there will be a page with awards and their requirements.  If you think the book qualifies for an award, check it out and put it on your recommend.  And if you’re starting a new award, send it to me (ONCE THE SITE IS UP, FOR THE LOVE OF HEAVEN NOT NOW) and I’ll put it on the page, and also if the author needs to submit the book or not.  There will also probably be a permanent page, which I’ll add to with lists of award winners, when I’m notified of results.
• But what about the fight?  Aren’t you going to fight?
  Reclaiming science fiction for ludic purposes is not a fight.  Or rather it is, but not a fight against specific people.  Even if a clique is holding an award captive, they’re a tiny part of the whole.  The fight is to reclaim the culture, and to get over the new literary theory idea that novels have to be “socially relevant.”  It was a bad idea when it took over in the twenties, it’s a bad idea now, and it’s destroying reading for enjoyment, which is bad for everyone who works in words.  Also, possibly, for our polity, but that’s a post for another time.
• “But I want you and him to fight.  I’m going to send you tweets where people at TOR call you a poopy head.  I’m going to send you posts from the blogger that shall not be mentioned and tell you his plan is much better.  I’m going to tell you the latest File 666 slander.  You must care.  It’s vitally important.”
  And if you do that, particularly in PM, late at night, when I just went to facebook to announce I’ll be at a con next weekend, before I forget to let anyone know, I’m going to curse at you, your friends and your allies.  And I’m going to stomp around the house wishing I had the power to reach through the computer and strangle you. And then I’m going to ignore you and go my merry way.
  I’m not your monkey.  This movement is not to amuse you.  It’s a long-term movement in the cultural war.  I don’t have time nor, despite my improved energy, patience to get involved in little petty squabbles.  Tons of people are going to hate what I do, people on my side, people who think they’re on my side, and people who think I’m trying to lead a wave of unwashed into their hallowed precincts.  Don’t care.  I’m a libertarian.  I want to be left alone, but I also don’t care what people do or by and large say about me.  Oh, sure, there are things that will get me pissed off, like when the bright turnip thought she’d found traces of racism in my blog or pretended to, to score a hit.
• Which brings me to things that will piss me off: stop doing sh*t like claim I’m too sick to do this, or attributing the fact I just chewed your skanky behind up and down the street to my being ill or going crazy.
  I’m not going crazy.  My brain issues are in a place and of a type that MIGHT minimally affect my vision and MAYBE cause irregularities in my heartbeat.  (MAYBE.)  They don’t affect my thinking.  In fact, the longer I am on hypothyroidal meds, the more my memory (the only part that was affected) is coming back, and is now almost normal, except I’m 54, not 30 some anymore.  There is no other effect.  Unless you’re my husband, and afraid I’ll pass out in the shower because my heart went wonky, my physical condition is none of your concern.  Yes, I might need brain surgery in the future.  The white matter thing might or might not recover.  BUT none of it affects my emotions.
  To the extent my emotions are affected, it is because I have more energy, and also because I’m not used to having more energy, so I’ve lost the habit of controlling myself.  It hasn’t been needed for 20 years.
  OTOH I saw Brad and Kate, who are MUCH nicer than I am, have this sort of rage too.  It goes with the job.
  But insinuating someone isn’t functioning properly because you think the Sad Puppies crown would look mighty nice on your pinhead is slimy, despicable, and WILL get me mad.  Mad as in furious, not crazy.  And now that I have more energy, who knows where my mad will lead me.  Don’t try it on. (Also, Sad Puppies doesn’t have a crown.  It’s more of a beanie hat.)The other caveat, if you need one, is that it’s a really bad idea to poke the Sarah in this phase of book finishing and when my deadline is somewhere behind me and I don’t want another book delayed, please G-d, no.
  I always grow fangs and claws at this phase of the writing (No, ask younger son.  “You threw a dictionary at my head for asking you a question.  I was three.” In my defense, I have lousy aim.  He was in no danger.  But it served to send him scurrying down to daddy and leave me alone to write.) But now I have more energy for using those fangs and claws.  Don’t do it.  It’s not worth your life.  Also, this entire year is booked end to end.  You probably can tell what place of the book I’m in by this blog.  But in any case, it might never be safe.  And it is NEVER safe, let me assure you, to try to “Let you and him fight.”  That is a good way to get your head ripped off your shoulders and get beaten to death with it.  (Never mind, go with it.)And that’s all.  I have a book to finish.  I promise not to throw dictionaries.  Most of you are very nice people anyway.  I just thought you should know where I’m at and what is going on with both the book and SP5.  Oh, yeah, and I’m not going mad maaaaaaaad, except that if this keeps getting repeated, I’ll go mad in the sense of furious.

  I don’t want that.  As entertaining as I’m sure it is to watch, I have a book to write.

*I’ve been sitting on this post for a while.  I didn’t put it up before because it’s basically an excuse for Kate to get very entertainingly insulting.  But today, if I weren’t up to my eyeballs in book, I’d been writing “Freebleeding left or how 4chan Pwned John McCain and the MSM”.  They’ve left reality with pee pee gate, a scandal only those who believed in binder gate could get bent out of shape about… or more importantly care about.  So this is a great day for Kate to do her yelling at the big babies on the left.  I’ll be back when I’ve finished the book.  PROBABLY tomorrow.-SAH*

You Won – by Kate Paulk

… the World Championship Dummy Spit, that is.

For those not familiar with Australian vernacular, a “dummy” is a baby’s pacifier. “Spitting the dummy” refers to throwing the kind of tantrum where said pacifier exits the baby’s mouth at speed, usually achieving an impressive arc before coming to ground somewhere hard to reach. Chances of the parents convincing the baby to put the thing in its mouth after it’s been located and cleaned are… minimal.

Winning the World Championship Dummy Spit is a rather Australian way to say “You can quit the tantrum now. The adults don’t care.”

Seriously, I don’t care how disappointed you are. I don’t care if you think the President-Elect is Literally Hitler (he’s not. The last person who was shot himself in a bunker over seventy years ago) and is going to herd you all into extermination camps (he’s not. Even the most useless of you are capable of spending money, and he’s a savvy enough businessman to know a good business needs people to buy what it sells). I don’t care if you think I’m the biggest ___ist ever to walk the planet (I’m not. At least, not since I lost weight).

Life is not fair. It will not always do what you want. To go all Australian on you, shut yer gobs and rattle yer dags because you drongos are going to help clean up the fucking balls up you’ve created even though collectively you might be about as much use as a two-bob watch. Maybe. It’s a fucking tough world out there and Mother Nature’s a stone bitch. I’m from the land of everything trying to kill you: I know this shit.

You’ve wasted years using every lurk and perk you and your slimy pollies could dig up, and you think you can sit back and whinge while the rest of us work our arses off then enjoy the bennies? You’ve got yours and Buckley’s mate: it ain’t happening. Quit trying to beat your best dummy spit, and pitch in or bugger off.

You galahs claim to be for a fair go, but a fair go’s the last thing you want because deep down you know bloody well you haven’t got a leg to stand on. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be chucking a wobbly like this: you’d be in with the rest of us to help clean up.

Oh, right. You think a bit of hard yakka’s gonna make you kark it.

(Translation: Close your mouth and start working. You idiots will have to help clean up your mess no matter how useless you are. The world is a tough place.

You’ve wasted most of your life exploiting whatever advantages your fellow-travelers and politicians could give you, and now you think you can complain while others work; then you think you can make use of any good things that others produce. You have no chance of that happening. Stop throwing tantrums and either help or leave everyone else alone.

You fools claim to be all about equal opportunity but you know very well that you aren’t capable of anything if there aren’t any barriers to other people achieving. If you really wanted equal opportunity, you wouldn’t be throwing tantrums, you’d be helping clean up the mess.

Oh. Right. You think hard work will kill you).

Those who are interested might like to search for “epic dummy spit” – there are some interesting tantrums thrown by supposed adults there.

*Reading this, some of you will go “I note the collapse didn’t happen.”  And that’s true.  We’re in the early stages of the collapse.  Doctors are leaving and retiring.  Part of the issue with my thyroid and other things is that for two years now, I’m lucky to see a Nurse Practitioner.  And no, they don’t have the same training. There are things I know more than they do about simply because I grew up around doctors.

There is a lot of ruin in a nation, particularly this nation, because we’re good at doing, at making do, and at inventing new ways to do things around the crazy regulations.

But we still can’t afford socialism.  No one can.  Venezuela has far more natural wealth than we do (remember I know, I have family there) and even they couldn’t afford socialism.

We might have got a respite — maybe — I’m still “cautiously optimistic” on the coming administration with the emphasis on “cautious.”  But in the end if we don’t fight back, if we don’t fight for the minds of the young, they and us are lost, and there will be no more liberty, only a nation like others, where we subsist at the whim of those who rule us.

Don’t let government by the people perish from this Earth.  The responsibility is yours.*

Sweet Liberty – a blast from the past post from November 2014

Let’s suppose you were born with an inheritance, something that accrues to you by virtue of being born and being human.

It’s something you can spend, but not directly, like a lot of cash.  But you can trade for it.  Let’s say it is a beautiful, rare, exquisitely cut diamond.  You can wear it, but it’s not quite suited for display.  It’s just something you’ve always had, more precious than anything else you have except life.  And if you keep it, lifelong, your kids will be given equal ones when they’re born, and then your grandkids too.

How would you go about safeguarding such a jewel?

Would you keep it always under your control, where you are the only one who has a say on whether it’s kept or taken away?  Or would you trust politicians – politicians who btw are telling you they can keep your jewel for you by taking other people’s jewel away and trading it to keep yours safe – to safeguard that jewel by putting yourself, your life and everything you own in their power?

I’m very afraid for a number of people the answer is the second.  And that the answer is the second for even one person scares me beyond reason.

I was watching Bill Whittles’s excellent video Cannibals, which details our fiscal and cultural troubles.  I wanted to leave a comment (ended up not doing it because youtube drives me nuts on registering to do so) so I looked at the comments.

Comment after comment, with names like “proudfree American” said things like “I voted for Obama because I don’t want to have to bear a rapist’s child.  My body is mine and no one else can make decisions about it.”

(A friend pointed out these are pathetic comments both in search of approval of like minded people, and sticking one in the eye of what they imagine to be the opposition. Let that stand for a moment.  I’ll come back to it in the end.)

Abortion is, of course, one of those complex things.  It is not a natural right.  It can’t be a natural right because a human woman in a state of nature who tries to abort will more often than not end up offing herself along with the child.  You could say infanticide is a natural right, as it has been practiced by most civilizations throughout the ages, less so in Judeo Christian lands, but impossible to stamp out just like murder is impossible to stamp out.  Of course it violates another person’s natural right to life, but in the case of infants that is always iffy as “natural” as they require someone else to defend them.  So, it is a very complex thing, not from a moral but from a NATURAL point of view.

Let’s leave aside for a moment that no one in this election – not even Todd Akin – ever said a woman BY LAW should bear a rapist’s child.  What Akin (who is an idiot for the way he expressed himself and for walking into the matter at all) and the other guy said was based on their own moral judgment, involving “if it happened to someone I love.”  Let’s leave aside, also, that my answer would be rather similar to theirs, and it’s more germane, since I CAN get pregnant.  (In theory.  Well, it happened once naturally.)  “If I got pregnant by rape, it’s impossible to know what I would do, but it would be hard to get over the fact that the child DIDN’T commit the rape, and that what causes a man to become a rapist is not necessarily genetic otherwise every man and woman born would be a rapist, because we’re all descended from rapists several times over.  Though I can’t say for sure what my state of mind would be, there’s a good chance I’d decide the moral thing is to keep the child.  Because I like children, because it would still be mine, and because it’s not the child’s fault.”

That is not important.  It’s also not important that while Mitt Romney made noises about abortion, the MOST he could do – and he wouldn’t, any more than he would abolish the department of education.  That’s not how DC works – is sent the matter back to the states.  And he NEVER said anything about outlawing abortion in cases of rape or incest.

Let’s instead assume that it is right and just, always, for a woman to abort a rapist’s child.  This right to “not carry a rapist’s child in MY body” is not only NOT a natural right – it is one that depends on an advanced enough technology, a functioning economy, and no one being able to regulate what kind of medicine is practiced upon you.

There is an English proverb “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”  Same thing.  Updated “you buy your CDs, you buy whatever music you want.”  However, if the government is giving you free music, then you will listen to whatever they want you to listen to.  And it can change.

So, let’s suppose that for these young women the most important thing in the world, truly is that if they should get pregnant  from rape – unless you extend rape to “changed my mind afterwards” a small enough chance – they should be allowed to abort the child.

Very well.

To secure this non-natural (because it requires functioning high tech) right they voted for the man who promised them this AND contraceptives for free.  I.e. they voted for someone who said he’d pay for what these women consider a need, so that the women can “control their own bodies.”  Further, to secure this, this man – this party – is trying to make people against whose conscience it is to pay for such things… pay for them.  That is, they are willfully violating what is a natural right of other people: the right to not pay/endorse things that violate their conscience.

And these women think giving this group of people the right to pay for/decide what is done to them gives the women control of their own bodies.

It never occurs to them apparently that those who give them contraceptives/free abortions today can also deny them tomorrow.  Or that the fiscal mess Bill Whittle is talking about in the video means a diminishing level of wealth and therefore of tech.

What I mean is even if the government isn’t lying to you – and frankly, after Benghazi how can ANYONE believe these people won’t lie to you and with a straight face – their policies are almost guaranteed to make doctors flee the country in droves, or go into retirement.  They are also guaranteed to add a layer of bureaucracy that will delay everything.

The end result might be that you did in fact get raped – I understand in countries where law breaks down completely this is a risk women run from eight to eighty – and you got pregnant.  (Or you had a night of sex with your boyfriend and didn’t take precautions, so you’re being “punished with a baby.”) You have a right to your free abortion.  Great.

Only the nearest hospital is chock a block with more urgent cases and the nurse practitioner who could have done it is full up for six months.  In six months it will be a high-risk abortion, and gee, we just don’t have the equipment.  Maybe if you go to Mexico?  I hear they can do these same day, for ten thousand dollars.

Think this is unlikely?  This is almost guaranteed.

Other nightmare scenarios include the government running out of contraceptives.  (No?  When something is free, people get it.  And when it’s free there’s no incentive for companies to research better stuff OR to make it cheaper or more abundant.)  I once heard an – hilarious, because it wasn’t me, and because these people had escaped – interesting story by a group of Russians, at the end of the USSR, discussing how this group of ten men shared a condom which they washed after sex and which, btw, the one of them who worked in a rubber plant patched more than once.  If you think that can’t happen here, you have missed the fiscal mess we’re in to which we’re adding an unimaginable amount of debt for an “entitlement” that can’t be secured without enslaving doctors and other health professionals to serve at the pleasure of the government.

So, suppose you run out of contraceptives and your ONLY contraception is abortion.  But the birth rate is going through the floor and our lords and masters become aware they won’t have enough of a next generation to bear the massive burden of debt.  Think they won’t forbid abortion?  Or they can’t decide you’re from a non-favored group and they don’t want you reproducing at all, so they mandate that you be sterilized and your existing children killed.  Think it won’t happen?  It’s happening in China.  Google “dying rooms” China and children, and I hope you have a strong stomach.

You think it won’t happen here?

Why do you think that?  Show your work.  Is your body any more sacred than other people’s convictions?  Why?  Why should a government that has the power of life and death over you, a government that can literally decide that you’re too expensive to keep alive and send you home with palliative care (no?  It happens practically everywhere the state runs medicine.  Maybe everywhere.  Reporting on these things is iffy) NOT make you bear a child because it suits the state’s needs?

You were born with this special, priceless jewel: Liberty.

You can keep it – that includes covering the costs of it, both monetary and in informed citizenry – and get to decide what to do with it, and in which circumstances to apply it.  OR you can entrust it to people who lie and whose very nature is predicated on having power over you.

Whether the liberty is freedom of religion, of assembly, the right to bear arms – no matter what those rights are, entrusting them to the government is a bad idea.  All the more so when those “rights” require a complex, functioning civilization to be effective.  (For instance, I would not vote for a government that promised me free weapons, because I know how bureaucracies work and in the end I’d have the right to a chipped bit of flint.)

No, you do not have a right to your own body.  No one does.  You can’t say “I won’t bear this child” any more than you can say “I won’t die from this cancer.”  Both of them involve a complex civilization and other people’s skill and knowledge to avoid.  And neither can be granted to you by a tyrannical government who HAS to control other people’s work, intelligence and freedom of thought to grant you this.

You do have a right to your own mind, and that so many people have chosen to give up their natural right to inform themselves and make informed decisions makes me seethe.

My friend was right, on the people who commented on that video being special snow flakes in search of social approval.  Of course why they think that idiotic statement makes them sound “correct” is why we must speak out.  For too long we’ve let the idiots own the air waves and the soundbites, because we didn’t want to rock the boat.  And what we’ve created is sort of a state religion, in which young people repeat platitudes that don’t make sense, in the sure certainty of social approval.

It’s time to start taking back their minds.  And then maybe they’ll understand how to keep control of their bodies.  And maybe they’ll understand the meaning of liberty.

You can’t enslave a free man.
Only person can do that to a man is himself.
No, sir—you can’t enslave a free man.
The most you can do is kill him.  Free Men by Robert A. Heinlein

No, I’m not going to talk about the department.  Yes, I remember how panties in bunch people got because they thought “Homeland”had Nazi connotations.

Of course we’re talking about people who think the seal of the speaker of the house is a Nazi symbol, at least when the speaker is a Republican, and who try to explain away that they didn’t jump all over little Nancy Of The Gavel Walk because “the way Paul Ryan draws it it’s flatter and it looks more Nazi.”  You heard it here first. Only art teachers know Nazis. Considering how many of those idiots were my esteemed colleagues, our field must be in way more trouble than I thought.  If that wasn’t the classic “roll over and die” maneuver, I don’t know what was.

Leaving aside all that nonsense, there really isn’t a better way to express the concept, or at least not one my only-one-cup-of tea brain can figure out.  (I’m trying to change to tea because coffee for me — no matter what my boss at insty thinks! — requires sweetener and I’m trying to cut down on sweetener because it still gets insulin response.)  At any rate for the Germans it was Fatherland, which is closer to the word Patria I grew up with.

When I was eight years old, I knew when I grew up I was going to be a writer and live in Denver.  So far so good, though it took twenty years to make it the 100 miles from the Springs.

I was having breakfast this morning, looking out the sunroom windows as the city lights in the distance flickered off, and the sun painted the sky a delicate pink, and an overwhelming sense of being home came over me.

In my young days I liked traveling.  I’m getting settled in my old age, and part of the reason the last two years were so difficult is that I like my comforts.  I like my breakfast routine: feed the cats, boil the eggs, and usually make the coffee.  We’ll see how tea works.  Even when I drank mostly tea I tended to drink coffee in the final push of a book, when I was working sixteen hour days.

Okay — I’m obviously more scattered with tea — back to the subject.

I loved the village when I was little.  Not just “I love living here” — in fact I often didn’t — but I loved the smell in the air, the quality of the light on certain days.  I loved the smell of the vineyards when they ripened.  I loved fireflies in summer evenings.  I loved the rhythm of the seasons.  And some how it was all tied up with grandma and my dad.  Of course I loved them and they loved the place passionately.  (Weirdly, my brother, who was less attached, never left because he can’t bear to.)

I’ve talked before about the time I spent after I moved to the US, missing Portugal: the village, my regular haunts in Porto, the markets, knowing where to find things.

When I go back all that is gone.  The village has become a dormitory community for Porto, thanks to the highway and widespread car ownership.  The funny thing is that they still call it rural.  Let’s put it this way, though there are still some fields under cultivation, the prevalent high rises and malls make it about as rural as downtown Colorado Springs and less rural than Aurora — I remember shopping for apartments with Robert before he started medschool, and we’d take a wrong turn and suddenly there were fields and cows — or in American terms, not rural at all.  They’ve paved over the pond where bamboo grew, and where dad used to walk me to watch fireflies and make flutes.  They’ve paved over where we fed the ants.  The woods are reduced to tiny squares. And masses of “Strangers” came in, so it’s rare to see a face I recognize.  Most of the people who moved in don’t even realize I exist.  They think my mom, like her sister in law, had only one son.

I’m not complaining.  It’s not my right to complain.  I lived there a shorter time than I’ve now lived in Colorado, and that’s a fraction of the time I’ve been in the US.  No.  I daresay even the stack a prol apartments are better places to live than the low, conjoined little houses most people lived in.  Apartments have toilets.  And running hot and cold water.

And I’m not complaining that Porto has become a touristic Mecca, which, considering it has the general climate and look of London I’m sure is for the history and the monuments, or perhaps because now people are painting the houses in primary colors (never when I was little) and Northern Europeans think it’s a poor-man’s Caribbean. Though I’d hazard it’s mostly the wine.

My kids loved Porto, and they’d have hated it as it was when I loved it: grimy, gritty, workaday, with nothing for tourists, the sort of place that — but for a lack of diners — would have made a great setting for a noir movie. (It still rains more of less all the time, except at the height of summer, a dispiriting, weepy drizzle.)

And if you read the paragraph above you’ll find I loved it.  I loved it  because, coming from the village, it meant freedom.  No one watched your every movement in Porto.  Oh, sure, crazy men might follow you on the street calling you names, but at least you didn’t have the village gossips concoct fantastic tales about your secret love affair just because you felt like wearing a more daring shade of lipstick. It also meant books.  It meant at least four bookstores, within easy distance of the train station, and later a lot more, as I discovered the alfarrabios, the used book stores.  Used bookstores doesn’t describe it, or not precisely.  There is a difference between used bookstores in the US — stores in the US in general — and alfarrabios, which were often the two bottom floors of a family home, so there was no urgency in making every inch pay.  So books came in, got put somewhere, generations changed.  They never even bothered changing the prices.  Some of my early in-English reading happened because I found a nook at the back of an alfarrabio (from the fact that rag is farrapo, I wonder if the word is arab for rag cellar, and the book thing just accrued to the profession as books came in) where they had early twentieth century, leather bound English language books.  I read all of H. G. Wells that way. (And most of  Twain.  And Dickens, though I don’t remember Dickens because I never liked him.  And other writers I don’t remember.  I wonder what English-speaking lost soul sold them to the store in the first place) And now I wonder what the heck happened to those books, as I suspect they were first editions.  I suspect I lent them out and lost them.

And speaking of feelings of home and nostalgia, I still get mushy at the memory of that nook, which even at early twentieth century prices took me years to explore and buy out.  I’d go in and sit on the floor, and look through the books to decide what to buy.  The ceiling was too low for me to stand up, but at the end of the little nook there was a grime-encrusted dormer window, which filtered the light in all yellow and hazy.

Oh, and Portugal had Chinese restaurants, and museums, and movie theaters, things I still like in a cityy.  No, not sure why, it’s just who I am.

Most of the alfarrabios have closed, possibly because real estate is at a premium in the far more prosperous cities, and these bookstores were like the ones Pratchett describes, where the owner wears carpet sleepers and reacts to your trying to buy his book like you’re kidnapping his child.

I still have some of those feelings of “home” for specific places in Portugal — it just so happens those places don’t exist anymore, nor the people who made those places special — absent the charming idea that heaven stores all the dearest places of the heart, I’ll never see them again.

How did this extend to “homeland” To patriotism?

I tried.  I tried really hard.  I even managed to convince my sister in law, who of course, hadn’t known me from childhood.

Look, if you had stacked places “Portugal or Spain?” even now I’d say Portugal, only because Spain is that horrible mix of the familiar and the “what the heck?” and even if Portugal has become more so, the past 30 years, it’s not that bad.

But there was never a song in my heart when I referred to myself as “Portuguese”: the best way I can explain it is to say it was like my birth name.  I hated being called by my birth name, and my closest friends had a dozen nicknames for me.  It wasn’t so much that I hated the name.  It’s an okay name and fine for everyone else, but it didn’t “fit”.  I felt like I was impersonating someone of that name, and there was an automatic cringe-and-duck which I don’t feel the slightest need to do when anyone calls me now.

The same way, referring to myself as Portuguese was wrong.  I found out in my teens, when I started visiting friends for long periods of time, that my family REALLY wasn’t that Portuguese.  Not noticeably.  Or at least not normal Portuguese.  Dad loves the country, but it’s an intellectual love.  He loves the history of the country.  He can and does describe medieval battles vividly and poetically when we visit the sites (including to my sons, as I’m struggling to translate that fast.)  He does know the kings and queens of the past, as though he’d been their elementary school friend.  And dad loves the village.  Because he was there for the transformation, he doesn’t realize, I think, how little of the village I knew is left.  Or if he does, by the time I was born it had so changed from his village, that it doesn’t matter.  He talks of the place where he and his friends played a prank, and in his eyes — like a man long-married seeing his wife as she was when he met her — it’s the same place.

But my family doesn’t behave like other Portuguese families, and I can’t even tell you why.  The day to day is different.  At Liberty con, I complained of my shoes pinching and an author of Portuguese ancestry said her grandmother would have told her it was a punishment for the sin of vanity.

My family lacked that all pervasive Catholicism, that view of “you deserve punishment for looking good” and the most my family would have said would be “didn’t they have the shoes in your size?” (Which was a common problem, when I was young.)  My family didn’t eat the same foods, or have the same manners, or… It was almost like I’d been raised in a foreign enclave in the middle of Portuguese society.  Those early forays into visiting friends made me feel even more alien than I normally did.  All the more so because I couldn’t betray ignorance of customs or behavior, and had to pick up and play along as best I could.  After all, I was a native.  (Since I’m as good at picking up on hints as most of you, you picture the disaster.)

Much as I loved the history dad told, I always felt like a  little alien.  Then I took to English history.  At some point, on this blog, someone berated me for not writing more books based on Portuguese history.  There’s tons of reasons for that, including that the audience would not have any resonance with Portuguese history, so it would take a lot more work to make it meaningful.  I intend to borrow some things — most of them royal life episodes — for a space opera series, eventually, but that’s because I can give them their own background and meaning then. What he was missing was that beyond all that, I do love English History and started learning it at an early age, and reading it for fun.

There will always be a vaguely anglophile part of me.

In my teens I fell in love with America.  It was an intellectual love.  I loved the principles and the ideas of the founding.  I loved that America comes as close to a classless society as humans ever have.

Note this was long before my mind decided I was going to live in Denver and be a writer, and I knew about as much about Denver as I did about being a writer: really, nothing but I’d seen on TV and you know how accurate that is.  And no, to this day still I can’t answer you “why Denver?”

Most Portuguese — I was explaining this yesterday to a friend, trying to get across why Deportugal is an unlikely thing, and why Portugal will cling to the shards of the US as long as they can — love Portugal on the “home” level.  They love the landscapes, the customs,  the language, those traditions I never fully shared.  They are however at best ambivalent on the “homeland” the more abstract level.  They will get crazy in love with Portugal when supporting it in a soccer match, for instance, and that’s about the only time you’ll see anyone flying the flag.  My mom was shocked when she visited (in July) that almost every home flew the American flag.  In Portugal there are various jokes made about the flag, and the national hymn.  Part of this is that they were changed so often in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Part of it is that patriotism is not only not pushed in the schools, but is considered vaguely shameful  (yes, they’re trying to do the same here.)  The twentieth century international socialists diagnosed “nationalism” as the cause of Nazi atrocities because they couldn’t face that SOCIALISM was the actual problem  (it can kill you fast, it can kill you slow, it can kill you hard or it can kill you softly, but in the end socialism, like its communist cousin, will kill you. It’s just it’s slow in most places, and people don’t notice.)  So patriotism was treated as a bad thing.  Even though most Portuguese loved living in Portugal day to day, they had no intellectual affection for the notion of the country.  It’s a bad way to live.  The EU relieved this psychic tension by giving most of them the chance to immigrate without immigrating.  They were now allowed to consider themselves “citizens of Europe” while still loving their little corner of it fiercely.

I understand it, because my love for the US started with only the intellectual level.  Oh, it was strong.  I think I kissed the gentleman who first looked at my green card and said “welcome home.”  I’m sure I hugged him.  I remember his shocked face.  And I always kiss the ground when returning from abroad, a ceremony I taught my kids, because ritual is important.

But for years, the slant of the light was wrong.  The feel of the air was wrong.  The morning sounds were wrong.

I don’t know when that changed.  After I left the Carolinas for sure.  And yeah, part of it is that the rocky terrain and the sparse pines look more like the area around the village when I was little, though the village was (you might have got that feeling) way more moist than the high desert.  And way less mountainous..

But casual poking around at my ancestry revealed people from so many different places (the North of Portugal was  a sort of dumping ground for English ne’er do wells and troublemakers — before England had colonies for that purpose — and the napoleonic wars left enough French and English blood strewn about to considerably confuse things. That’s without counting imports from the PORTUGUESE colonies.) that I really don’t see a link between land and blood, or between “my ancestors lived in this kind of climate, it’s the right climate for me.”  In fact, all of Portugal was characterized by the Germans as “mud people” since Portuguese genetics were a mess (Why, thank you.  Hybrid vigor, sonny! Also, all people are a mix from  Ur of the Chaldeans onward, mostly due to “humans will sleep with anything.”  Apparently even hominids, given recent findings. If you think otherwise, your knowledge of history is funny.  Also deficient.  [And no, the DNA tests aren’t very exact.  They’re, as older son, the one who knows human biology puts it “mostly bogus.” He could probably explain why to you.  He’s explained it to me, but my eyes glazed over.)

No, I’ve found that loving where you live is more a matter of habituation and perhaps of individual taste.  I loved Denver the first time I saw it.  It survived even the winters (and I hate cold.)  Why?  I don’t know.  Why do you love certain kinds of features and not others?  Unless you were raised in a very insular place it’s not “Because they’re like the faces I know.” There is more to it.  I loved redheads before I knew they existed.  that is, the first one I met rendered me speechless and I followed the poor guy around like a lost puppy, which considering I was twelve and he mid-twenties must have been a great annoyance.  My kids’ tastes in girls are almost opposite. Why do they like what they do? Who knows?

In the same way I liked Denver on sight.  I liked the light and the air, the noises of the city.  I like Colfax before it was safe.  I liked the way the city sprawls, more horizontal than vertical, and the open feel of it.  Who knows why?

I can tell you why I love America: the principles of the founding, the constitution, our struggle to bring into being something that has never existed before — a society where all are equal before the law.  (I’m not mad crazy about the push-pull when one side insists on equality of outcome, but humans aren’t perfect and I suspect it’s inevitable.)

I can’t tell you why I love my corner of it.  I just know I do.  Having breakfast in the sun room early morning, with the park and the trees to my right, and the lights of Denver slowly fading in front of me, eclipsed by the rising sun, is a feeling of … being home.

I’ve always loved the “land” part, the principles, and even the boisterous can-do of the nation, the way we don’t take no (or sometimes even yes) for an answer.  I loved it before I came here.

I’ve loved Colorado since I first saw it, which is the reason we haven’t moved even as Californians moved in and messed up our polity.

In this house, I feel like I have the best of Colorado, and the two unite into a feeling of “just right.”

It’s good to be home.  This home, in particular, but the state and the country too.  It’s good to love my homeland, and to feel absolutely no compunction to cotton to people who think that patriotism is a bad word.

I raise my cup of tea to my homeland, and hope the disease of international socialism that invaded the weakened mechanisms of Western Civilization post WWI can be flushed from the system, before it destroys us all.

Let’s work to make it so.

Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, a young mother looks past the kid learning game on the computer.  “I’m sorry, Princess.  I just need to– just a minute.”  She pulls the tiny chubby hands away from the keyboard and looks intently at the image.  “Oh, this is not good right now.  I can’t deal with it right now.”

********
In North Carolina, an accountant looks at the blog comments and calls out to his beloved spouse, “Dear, is Foxfier trying to pick a fight with me, or is this a code?”

CACS rushes to the computer and looks at it.  She gets a pad.  “I see, let me check a couple of anime references…”  Half an hour later, she hands RES the notepad.  He blanches.  “I see.  Well. There’s only one thing for it.  Wayne Blackburn must be told.

**********

Wayne thinks long and hard, and then writes a seemingly innocuous email to Bobtheregistered.

*********

Bob the registered gets off Baen’s bar and sighs.  “This won’t end well,” he says to himself as he sends a message off to Emily Nelson.  Who reads it, discusses it with Steve and says “So, what do we do? We can’t send Nemo.  I refuse to risk him.”

“I know, but I think I can write some code that delivers the message.  Let me see, who would it be safe to send to?  Do you think Herbn will get it?

********

A day later, Herbn pauses in the middle of reading a kindle book.  No, this paragraph definitely doesn’t belong.  How did it get there?  Is it time to let 60 guilders know?

*******

Three days later, Shadowdancer opens a jar of vegemite, and finds a folded paper inside a carefully sealed bit of plastic.  She opens it and reads the message from 60 guilders.

She calls Dorothy Grant on a carefully secured line.

*******

“I see,” Dorothy says.  “Pass word onto Dave Freer, I’ll rally Alma Boykin.”

**********

Meanwhile Orvan Ox, on his delivery route notes that a certain house has a flag displaying three daisies hanging from its front porch.  It would be normal in Spring, but in January, really?
He gets on the phone and calls roommate “Call Amanda Green,” Ox says.  “Tell her to pass on the word and get ready  It’s a real one.”

********

In a small house in TX, Amanda Green opens the trapdoor on the floor and gets out the equipment that’s been waiting this day. She makes a comment on Suburbanshee’s blog and hopes Banshee gets it.  Did she get that word play about St. Catherine’s birthday jsut right, that banshee will get “Wheel in the sky?”

********

Joel gets the message from Banshee’s encoded email and starts plotting access to a tall roof.  The problem is carrying the weapon through New York City.  Everyone is so suspicious these days.  Maybe he can disguise it as a flowerpot?  Oh, yeah, and he has to get a message to Kate.
After long thought, he sends her a postcard showing the Empire State Building, with a single sentence “The butterfly sings.”  That should do it.

******

In Pennsylvania Kate Paulk is getting the secret equipment assembled in the outbuilding.  “Bugger if they get away with this.”  Almost casually, she dials David Pascoe and tells him “The kilt is purple.  I repeat, the kilt is purple.”

******

David Pascoe rescues a crucial piece of the weapon from the baby girl and glares at it.  He has to assemble it before the toddler finds another use for the parts.

********

Drak Bibliophile sighs, then starts removing his books from the bookshelves.  Why had he thought it would be a good idea to put it behind the shelves?

*********

‘Nother  Mike in Japan, is trying to remember where he hid his equipment.  Oh, yes.  He’d put it in the classroom, disguised as a student project.

*******

Around the world, Cyn Bagley, Alpheus, William Stoddard, Francis Turner,  Mary Catelli, Eamon,  C. Taylor, Uncle Lar, Caitlin, Dr. Mauser  and TXR and many, many others set up their weapons, and look at the messages they received, make sure they have the right coordinates and struggle to program them in.

*****

Deep in her secret laboratory, Sabrina Chase checks the calculations.  “D*MN it,” she says and sends a hurried correction through the grape vine.  Stephanie Osborn receives the correction and adds solar activity effects.  Then corrects the corrections.

******

At Pete’s Kitchen, having a seemingly innocent dinner with the Denver contingent, Sarah asks Kortnee “Did anyone tell Chris Chupik?”

*******

In the frozen wastelan…. we mean civilized parts of Canada, Chris gets a phone call from Captain Comic.  He’d earlier failed to get a message sent by moose, because there are no moose in his neighborhood.  Really, what do you people think Canada is, eh? And some people thought that Bieber was disproportionate aggression.  Ah! I’m glad we send you Bieber. Yes, I am that heartless. He thinks all this, but aloud he says,”What?  Again?  ALL of us?  Are you sure?”

“Sarah said the carp fly at midnight. She used that phrase at instapundit last night, too.”

“Yeah, yeah, right code.  Oh, damn, I planned to write tonight.”  As he gets off the phone he thinks, “I bet no one has told Kirsi.  I’d better call Finland.  Us great white North people have to stick together.

***********

Five hours later, as the alien ship approaches the Earth, it is hit by coordinated rays from the secret weapons long ago distributed, secretly, to the seemingly normal readers of an unassuming little blog.

*****

A few minutes ago:

Sarah struggles to her blog.  These emergencies really need to stop being so tight.  You’d think the galactic alarms would get tripped before yet another invader is less than a month from attacking the Earth.  Coordinating a defense all over the world is not easy.

But hey, the Huns did it again.  She makes coffee by touch, because her eyes refuse to open until the second cup.

Better put up a seemingly silly post on the blog, to let everyone know the danger is past.

No one will suspect such a far-fetched thing is real.  It’d be like suspecting us of having gone back to change history after that horrible election.  No one would ever believe any of this drivel.

Good work, everyone.

So, I’ve been reading less because I REALLY need to do the final push on Darkship Revenge, a) before something else goes wrong with my body b) so that my publisher doesn’t kill me.

But I’ve still been reading, because, well, one needs to go to the bathroom, and read something (even if just a couple of pages) before going to sleep.

Mostly I’m reading from KULL both because until I turn books in we’re semi broke (not broke/broke, but being careful) and because, well, I am not paying close attention to the books.  Not right now.

Because books are from KULL, it is easy to start reading and then put it down without thought, and move on to another one.

I’ve done a post on MGC on Wednesday about stopping points.  This post is about how I didn’t stop, even though the book’s worldbuilding makes as much sense as American Rednecks drinking gin and pounding hapless paleontologists.

But I do have morning after regrets, and a sort of nauseous feeling I did something awful.

This post is to explain both the mistakes, and why the book seduced me.  If we’re going to break the stranglehold of the left, it is important to know how to keep people who disagree with us (or in this case who think this is from another universe) reading.

As a side note, this book is not self published, but put out through an Amazon imprint, which just shows you the new forms quickly get like the last.

So, first the sin count and why they’re sins:

The South is so exotic, it’s another planet covers most of these sins.  This pisses me off, as I’m fairly sure most Southerners are still human (my friends excepted.  They’re SUPER HUMAN) and also having lived in the South, yep, there are differences, but again, the basic rules of life end up being the same.

1- The entire book hinges on four generations of a family being put in a madhouse and killed there.  The most recent one escapes.

This is present day, and she’s supposed to be involuntarily committed to a mad house and disappear.

Oh, hum.  Yeah, sure thing, Bob.  Beyond impossible now.  But let’s get back to that, “involuntarily committed for generations, then killed there” and no one ever got curious, and the family is still political and really big.  Uh uh.  It’s also implied the family is (of course) conservative.  Apparently these people haven’t met our press.

Anyway, there is an explanation for this.  It’s stupid.  Moving right along.

(On a side note, I ran across this while reading a book on — of all things — Porto.  There was some home for upper class emotionally disturbed women that operated in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  I’m okay with the idea parents and husbands used this to get rid of inconvenient women (not kill them, but put them away) SOMETIMES.  I’m even okay with the idea that things we consider pretty normal were insanity in those days, like, you know, consistently talking back.

It’s the assumption that it was ALWAYS used to get rid of rebels and perfectly sane women that gets under my skin.

[Let’s unpack this, shall we: So women never get unstable, or are a danger to themselves and others?

So, you’re saying that in a more rigid society, being completely outrageous shouldn’t get you put away?  You’ve never lived in a traditional society if you don’t get that achieving outrageous behavior means something has already gone seriously wrong.  Well behaved women might not make history, but crazy-behaving women and men simply don’t survive in REALLY traditional societies.  Look to the middle east if you have doubts.

Also, there were the same type of limits on men as on women. SURE different limits.  But men could get put away just as easily by acting outside society’s norms.

This is probably the subject for another post, but in our anything-goes society it’s hard to picture that one already needs to be wrong in the head to let one’s freak flag fly.  And yet, it’s true.

I’m not saying it’s right, I’m saying it happens in different cultures — I’m also not sure that our “no madhouse, let homeless people widdle on themselves and talk to invisible people on street corners” is more compassionate, but that’s something else — and that the stupid assumption that a madhouse for women or a woman sent to any madhouse is just “brave feminists being oppressed” is idiotic and provincial.  Mrs. Lincoln might have been a “brave feminist” — she wasn’t — but you can’t avoid realizing, if you read primary sources, that she was nuttier than a fruitcake. Possibly for one of the many reasons that made madness among women more common in the past: lack of hormonal therapy, frequent miscarriages, frequent emotional shocks with children’s deaths and in general a far HARDER life than our feminist flowers can even imagine, much less endure.]

Beyond all that, again, two/three generations in a row dying in a madhouse, in a political (particularly a conservative) family, the press would be all over that like flies on sh*t.)

2- The plot only hangs together, to the extent it does, because all the police in Alabama are in the pocket of the kkk.  Yep, still.  Because “in Alabama these things never go away” or some such bullshit.

Let me put it right here, right now, that yep, the KKK had a lot of power in some places, 20s and 30s.  The elementary school my kids attended (In Colorado) has a cornerstone stating the building was donated by the KKK.  When I attended my older son’s college graduation, the dean read a letter about how when the KKK controlled state government, they tried to get the college to kick out “all Jews and Catholics” and when that didn’t work they cut funding to the college.  The letter he read was the dean’s response, and it amounted to “Dear KKK influenced state government, these are my middle fingers.”  Only it was much more polite and beautiful than that, because the dean wasn’t me.

So I know the KKK was, historically, a force to be reckoned with.  Historically.  Right now they are a dying and tiny movement, no matter how much the left keeps trying to resurrect them.  (They were a leftist movement anyway.)  The idea they have that kind of influence in Alabama amounts to thinking the south is a place like in that story of rednecks drinking gin and beating on paleontologists because… no reason.

This is the South as seen from NYC.

3- Continuing with the South as seen from NYC: a not inconsequential part of the plot hinges on some girl having climbed a water tower naked (in the thirties) claiming her brother was sleeping with her and she was pregnant.  When she threw herself down, she only broke an ankle (let it go) and was confined to the madhouse, where they kept the baby after she was born because… cheese.

Okay a) It is NOT normal, in the South, even in isolated communities for brothers and sisters to sleep together.  That’s a calumny put about by pseudo cosmopolitan idiots.  b) I think it’s based on the fact that in isolated communities cousin marriage is tolerated, whatever the law says, because, isolated.  Some idiot made a joke about incest, and the pseudo cosmopolitan idiots swallowed it hook line and sinker and have been propagating it forever.  c) it happens.  It happens in all human tribes from isolated mountain communities to the pseudo-cosmopolitan-enclaves.  It just happens.  RARELY.  d) when it does happen, the traditional communities are much better at dealing with it than the big cities.  (Terry Pratchett whose environment in childhood seemed to be much like mine had it right about the “rough music”.) Yeah, in a big city, in relatively affluent circles, I could see finding a way to put the girl and the baby away and never talk about this again, while the brother went on to probably do it again.  In a traditional community?  Oh, hell no.  Everyone knows everyone else’s business and trust this woman who grew in such a community (and one arguably more patriarchal than anywhere in America) something very bad would have happened to that brother, while the girl would have been allowed to forget or pretend that it had just been a traveling salesman.  Or more likely someone would have taken the baby to raise (usually a distant relative) and it wouldn’t have been mentioned again how that baby was conceived.  But that guy, if he didn’t get away and stay away?  He’d have suffered a mysterious accident, or committed suicide by beating himself to death with a half brick.

You see, traditional communities are already relatively inbred by force of circumstances.  They can’t afford to let this kind of thing happen.  No, they are not geneticists, but they have the traditions of generations.  And whatever feminists think, it’s usually the guy who pays in this case.  (And in most cases of this sort, it is the guy who should.  Though, yeah, there are exceptions and we know some historical ones, where it was mutual consent)

4- We are in the head of an unreliable narrator, a woman just out of treatment for drug addiction, who keeps stealing pills and putting them in her purse (although she doesn’t take them) but we’re supposed to believe her version of the story in a murder mystery.  Sure, it can be done, but in this case given the other problems of the book, I’m still working out how all this could be her insanity.

5- Women in the south so crazy!  This is another of the “sins against flyover country”.  While I’ll admit that the South like Portugal has a tradition of “romantic crazy” in which very smart or misunderstood geniuses are supposed to be a little nuts, it’s still too much to expect us to treat as perfectly normal that the main character sees things.

6- Her brother alternates between sounding like a more or less reasonable, occasionally unpleasant politician and trying to kill her.  0 to murder in ten seconds.  And we’re supposed to buy this character, and that he functions well enough to be in politics.  Also, that during an active political campaign, NO ONE WOULD BE TRACKING HIM WITH CAMERAS.

7- Oh, yeah, even though she identifies at least the family of the most recent murdered girl as being Catholic, the book keeps talking about how she was a snake handler with a crazy evangelical sect.  Even though a Latin Catholic prayer has been passed down through generations of the family, one of the boys is in the KKK — in fact, the author seems QUITE unaware that the KKK targeted Catholics as much as black people — and in the whole, I’m forced to assume this person thinks that the Catholic church and one of the snake-handling evangelical churches are one and the same.  This is at best really bad editing and at worst completely delusional ignorance by someone so far from religious belief as not to realize there are SECTS and different branches of Christianity.

Proceeding from those kicks to reality, there are about a dozen minor ones.  And yet, I read the book.

So, why did I read it?

1-It starts with an intriguing title.  This book is called Burying the Honeysuckle Girls.  I was going to download and read at least a sample, given that title.
Let’s dissect it, shall we: Burying: perfect for a mystery cue.  Honeysuckle — brings with it a sensory load of sense and taste. Girls — signals women in peril, which is a subset of thrillers.  Honeysuckle-girls together projects an ethereal fragrant image.

It’s a seductive title.

Compare that to a mystery title for a mystery and did download but read only a few pages, because the language is clunky, and the name of the detective distracting:

The Heiress of Linn Hagh, the second book in the Detective Lavender series.  The title is completely non-alluring and not descriptive.  Heiress does not signal murder mystery. Linn Hagh is a bad-sounding combination.  And detective Lavender sounds like it should either be a gay mystery or a Chinese mystery.

I am not disparaging that last.  While the story threw me out, it apparently appeals to many people, as it sells well and has excellent reviews. (Good for them) but even one hint of bad world building in the first page and I’d put the book back, since it doesn’t seduce me, and the title promises nothing special.

2- The first person voice is convincing and lyrical.  We’re in the head of a woman recovering from addiction and just released from a half way house, and she feels “real”.  The character is there, present, and even when she does crazy shit like steal pills, you want to believe her, and you sympathize with her.

3- The stupidity comes on slowly.  In the first chapter her family seems fairly normal.  The strangeness between the Catholic church and the snake handling evangelical church is not evident till almost the last chapter.

4- In the first few chapters the family dynamics make sense and are heart-wrenching: the father dying of Alzheimers, the sister in law who wants to believe the girl is recovered from her issues, the brother who gives her the benefit of the doubt, and all along, the woman who is unreliable and somewhat unstable.

As part of this they turn on her too fast and somewhat unconvincingly, but I kept reading because, well, she had an history, maybe they had a reason, etc. (Turns out no, the entire family behaves like they’re bipolar, all through the book.)

We don’t find out till the middle of the book that the misfit-love-interest is working for her brother.  BTW from that point on he’s not fully convincing, and her getting together to him in the end is oh, um.

3- Though the plot conclusion is not satisfactory, the clues laid out, etc, are intriguing.  You only realize the idea of all these murders isn’t believable AFTER you’re done reading.  So, fast-moving, intriguing narration and intriguing clues will keep you reading, because you think there will be a pay off.

4- While there is obviously feminist stupidity in this book, the writer herself might not realize it’s there.  It’s deep laid beliefs in things like women could just be put in a madhouse and no one would ask questions.  Or murders in a little town aren’t talked about. Or these men FROM OUTSIDE THE FAMILY who kept marrying the girls in the family, all connived in their murders and never protested I guess because all men naturally want to murder all women.  BUT IT WAS NEVER STATED UPFRONT, it was buried in the text, and thus it never came up and smacked you in the face while you were reading.  It only did so afterwards. By the time you realize how preposterous it is, you’re done reading the book.

So, in conclusion, if you’re selling a world view, it’s probably best if you’re going to sell a point of view, if it’s so deeply laid-in that you don’t know it’s there.  However, if you don’t have that, at least try to hide it in the plot and the playing out of the story.  Hint, to you it will feel like you’re not putting any message in at all, because these are the things you believe.

A good or at least fast paced story will hide a multitude of errors, and a lot of sins and keep the reader reading.

However if you want THIS reader to read your next one, and not to have morning-after regrets, doing a modicum of research helps.

Yes, I know, comedians, other books, and all the right people have assured you that the South is like this.  However, it helps to actually go and look and talk to the locals, or read biographies of people who grew up there and who aren’t trying to ingratiate themselves with the glitterati.  And if you grew up there (I honestly didn’t read the author’s bio) it helps if you get out of your circle of Yankee transplants and would-be sophisticates and talk to people you think are beneath you.  No, really.

Also on the “southern women so crazy”, I put up with the visions because I NORMALLY read fantasy, so I’m willing to take a bit of weirdness in my books.  BUT the author never explained why the voice character sees red ravens and streaks of gold.  I guess all Southern women are crazy or mystical or stuff.  (Maybe all women.  Maybe they psychically talk to plants.  Who knows.)  Which doesn’t help with morning-after regrets.

You guys know I never do a harsh review and name the book.  This is not a harsh review.  This is how despite defects (and they’re massive) the book kept me reading.  And it has the reviews and ranking to prove it kept a lot of people reading.

Go you and do likewise. Seduce the reader, even if she knows better.  Only you, do enough research, and make the plot tight enough to make sure she doesn’t regret it in the morning.

Crime, Spite, and Everyone’s Plight – by E. Marshall Hoyt

The world is full of sick individuals.

A lot, actually. I just forget, sometimes.

Today is one of those days: by pure chance and slight boredom, I checked out the trending tab on facebook. It’s the most unreliable course of information, prioritizing the sexuality of a fictional character over a man getting robbed.

Of course, since it is supposedly based on user posting and involvement, maybe it’s the still the fault of the mainstream media and its rigid effect on the common person’s perspective. In either case, even when they do pop up a news story, facebook adds their own snippet of what the trending word is about, and many a time this has been clearly bias. Descriptions of Trump, for instance, are commonly bombastic and vile, and usually defensive of whatever asshat of the week thinks that being related to Trump is reason enough to attack or verbally assault a person.

It’s stupid, but, it’s also to be expected from facebook “reporting” at this point. Needless to say, I thought I couldn’t be any more surprised by anything that’s considered a trending matter.

It turns out I was wrong.

I saw the name Montel Williams trending. Now, more importantly, considering I don’t know who on Earth this man is, the description of “Montel Williams lashes out at accused Facebook Live torturers” certainly caught my eye, along with a snippet telling me that Mr. Williams is a TV personality and Navy vet. Certainly 3 things immediately came to mind: One, who’s stupid enough to not only post video but livestream video of their crime? Two, what in the actual fuck is wrong with people that they thought this was okay? Three, what’s the catch?

Here’s the thing, maybe I’m a bit jaded, but not only is “news” dominated by click-bait titles and misleading perspectives, but often times it has a habit of aiming its sights on the wrong target, or even worse making light of a single tree while missing a whole forest of information. What I found out, however, is about twenty levels more fucked up than I could have thought.

I’ll give you a breakdown- 4 teens, one of which was connected to the victim by the unfortunate circumstance of being his classmate, all kidnapped and tortured the victim and live streamed it. By torture, I mean torture. Cut at his scalp, put lit cigarettes to his skin, kicked and beat and verbally abused him to top it off. He was found shambling around outside near where he was beat, was taken to hospital, where the police then caught wind of the video. Now, what I mind interesting is that every article that popped up focused on one particular thing- The fact that the victim, atop everything else, was special needs.

Don’t get me wrong, that does indeed make it worse. In the grand scheme of victimization, being literally disabled and having a crime perpetrated against you is actually awful in every sense. It doesn’t go into what his disability is, but I can safely say, given the circumstance, that doesn’t even matter. He could be deaf in one ear for all I care and this is still an awful crime (Edit: it appears he suffers from mental health issues, which could be what we all deal with- depression, or something far worse). But- and it took following a single user’s post that lead to an article that linked it- I finally found out what Montel Williams had to say.

It was pretty on the nose, starting with “Life in Prison. No Parole,” and everything in it was justified. What caught my eye was the fact that his second sentence started with “Whether this is a hate crime is a distraction and irrelevant” and later contained “It’s bigger than racism (saying F*ck white people is racist by definition).” Needless to say I liked the cut of his jib but, wait a minute- what does this crime have to do with races at all?

Ah, that.

It took a little more digging, but let me fill in the missing pieces: The four perpetrators were black, and during the beating (As can be seen in the not-so-lovely video) yelled “Fuck Trump! Fuck white people!” at the victim while delivering some thankfully non-fatal beating to him.

Again, don’t get wrong, the victim being special needs is fairly news-worthy, and it’s still awful, but- and I hate to politicize this event in any manner I really do- but why was the fact that this is very clearly a hate crime not relevant?  Why does facebook and roughly 90% of all articles not find this to be important information? It must be reiterated, I agree with Mr. Williams, this is far worse than is worth the efforts to concentrate on it being a hate crime, it’s horrendous and the color of anyone’s skin is almost irrelevant when something this grueling goes down.

But, I’m still keenly aware that if the races were switched, and the criminals were saying “Fuck Obama!” instead of “Fuck Trump!” not only would CNN suddenly find more than 2 minutes to cover it, but every news station would have it be their morning story, with an hour long segment to discuss it. People would be not only saying it’s most certainly a hate crime, but at least 25 college thesis papers would be written off the incident, to further their hypothesis on the growing and worsened racism of America, and how it’s as bad as when blacks were still slaves. There would screaming and grating of teeth, and you’d hear about it for weeks.

But instead, we have people like CNN’s Don Lemon, who has literally said “I don’t think its evil” in response to the incident, instead blaming “bad home training”? What in the actual fuck? No, don’t lie, if the roles were reversed that would be far from the first thought in your mind Mr. Lemon. But because it’s a crime committed by black teens, you for some reason think they need to be made the victims in this situation, their actions the fault of their raising. That itself is no surprise it’s hardly the first on-white violence I’ve seen where some CNN pundit has declared it’s basically “Not *that* bad”.

Still, this sort of shit isn’t acceptable, because we saw this right after the election- riots, protests and city self-destruction all over an election. Not even any action taken as president, but over an election. I said it then and I’ll say it again, but I don’t recall any actions taken that are close to that back in 2008 following Obama’s election. Trust me, we would have heard about it, the media would have grabbed it up like it was a suitcase full of unmarked bills and started raving crazy about crazy right wingers. Yet, I noticed a deafening silence from the media during the post-election riots, and certainly no concentration on the multiple hate crimes that took place. I certainly saw a lot of defenses for these actions but very little actual reporting.

To some extent, it’s kind of simple how we got here. I’ve seen it develop, in the way the “news” reports events, to the way events are reacted to. Over the course of the Obama administration, demonization of white criminals perpetrating on-black-violence is common, wherein black violence has been ignored or immediately defended by the administration. It’s a whole situation, of course, the current culture brought on by hundreds of events leading up to today. But evil crimes should be simple. There shouldn’t a question that they’re wrong. There should be no defense, no forgiveness and no explanation great enough to make up for the actions of the perpetrator(s).Yet here we are.

Here we are in a deeply divided nation. As much as many liberals would like to say it is, this division is not because of the election of Trump, not because he won when they didn’t expect it, creating lines between people. It’s not because anything any Trump supporter has ever said, the most vile of which has been attacked by all people, regardless of politics. Simply, despite the god-like image they attempt to project upon the man, this sort of insanity is very simply because of the Obama administration. Entire forms of humor and friendships dwindled away at over time, the first question asked about any crime or any actions of someone with darker skin being shifted to “Was it because of the white people?” slowly but surely. The sort of books and movies that get promoted, the way you’re supposed to talk, the safe spaces you’re supposed to have because of those feminine feelings that society has clearly deprived you of expressing. Everything in the culture is different than it was in 2008- and it’s no surprise. 8 years changes a lot. Yet, I can say with certainty almost all these changes to the culture have made deeper lines between people, based on their race, gender and even sexual preference. Not even because of repeated, massive and nation-wide attacks against any particular group- other than perhaps verbal, but no one was killed from being insulted too much- but because people have been encouraged to identify themselves differently.

No longer is Joe a hardworking roofer with an odd obsession with Seinfeld, he’s a white, middle class, straight male. No longer is Alice an exotic babe with brains and looks to boot, she’s a discriminated against Mexican immigrant who doesn’t subscribe to the misogynistic views of society, and is in a sexual relationship with Jack. Jack once was a quirky theater major but is now an advocate of how evil white people are- while reflecting the sun off his ghost-like skin- and is currently in the middle of transition to the 5^th gender of Twatwaffle, which uses cat pronouns.

This societal division, encouraged and nurtured by the current (And thankfully out the door) administration has divided people into their groups, and made way for the sort of culture that lead to the deep divides we experience today. Liberals surely noticed these divides, they just chose to claim “It’s because Obama is black, isn’t it?” to every criticism of him, worsening these problems but failing to see it’s not the unexplainable (And non-existent) racism of the right but in fact their own prejudices.

This crime against a disabled man is awful. But, I also believe it’s because our society made way for the conditions where these teens thought it was okay. They live streamed it, were proud of it, and thought it was justified because for 8 years of their lives they’ve been convinced that by virtue of their skin color, they are always in the right. They likely believe that racism can only be achieved by white people, sexism by males and bigotry by conservatives. They thought this was fine because in some ways, society has told them they’re invincible and exempt from criticism, all because of their skin color. They thought there would be no repercussions because they have their community, their teachers, their news channels, and even their president ready to defend them at a moment’s notice. Even now, their race is not important to any news station, the incident not interesting enough for most mainstream sources, and the crime not of the right “colors” to encourage a statement by Obama.

As I said, I do believe that is crime is evil, regardless of the people involved or what they are. But I think it’s important to notice what people think is important about the crime, and how the obvious motive of race is not worth a even a footnote. I think it’s important to know this because crimes like this can still happen, because the motive that drove these criminals, is the same motive that drives millions in their daily actions, and it’s probably only a matter of time until someone else takes it too far.

I hear that, despite all this, the teens were indeed charged with hate crimes and additional felony charges, and I guarantee they thought that they could never be charged of a hate crime. I hope these years in prison teach them a few things about the world, and what it’s really like past the coddling they’re received. Additionally, my thoughts go out the victim, hopefully he recovers not only physically but mentally from this incident, and he has my support in light of this truly evil act.

When I was little, periodically, a scream echoed over the village.  I don’t think I could give a description of that scream that would make you hear it, but I think it might be the sort that gave rise to legends of banshees.  It was a high, piercing lament, without words, an ullulation that carried for miles, so primal that it always sounded more or less the same, without one being able to distinguish who made it: young or old, man or woman.

I was over ten when I found out those cries were heralds of sudden, unexpected death.  The scream — usually a series of them — came out when a little boy was dragged over from the washing river and laid dead in front of his mother; when a woman fell and hit her head and expired in front of her husband; when a husband got run over and his wife saw his bloodied body.

It never happened when the death had been a long time coming, and rarely when the dead person was elderly.  No.  It was usually the sound one made when shock and grief, mingled, tore out all pretense of civilization, all disguise, all “what will they think.”

I confess it was normally a woman’s thing, or assumed to be, though twice at least mom told me it had been a father, a husband making it.

Like Miss Marple, I’m very glad I got to live in a village, a place where there wasn’t much point pretending about fundamental things, and where one could see human nature for what it was: human.

The other side of this was that we didn’t have movies.  Sure we had books.  And we had rules (usually in books of rules) on how men behaved and how women behaved.  And we tried.  But we didn’t have filmed lies constantly before us, creating a vision of “normal”.

Think about it.  In movies, a woman gets bad news and she cries (usually in a dignified way.)  The man will hold on, looking stoic, and then after people leave will sweep everything from his desk and throw a chair around.

That one is so bad, that I’ve taken to downgrading any manuscripts that come across my desk when I’m judging a contest, in which someone sweeps everything off his desk in anger because his dog died, or he just got jilted.

I don’t even think the movies have managed to teach any man to react that way.  I’ve never seen a man do that, angry at a sudden death.  (Unless he caused it, or unless he’s angry at whomever caused it.)

My dad — my family in general, because we had a position, one micron above the rest of the village — didn’t cry in public.  I don’t know if we’d have keened the sudden death knell because, thank heavens, in my time there there were no such.

I don’t remember seeing my dad cry, but I suspect he did, when he was alone.  I know for a fact he never swept things off a desk in lieu of anger.

People who have been raised in a society of restrained emotions, where people only show emotions in movies, and that’s highly choreographed and according to cliche, not reality, don’t know that there isn’t such a thing as “a male reaction” and “a female reaction” much less one rigidly enforced by “society” a society they imagine goes back through time, to primitive days.

There are dignified and undignified ways to behave, and in a society like the one I grew up in — highly patriarchal, yes — the male was the pillar of support of the family, and was expected to act strong.  The same way, its being a class-divided society, it was thought vulgar for people of some education, like my family, to display emotion in public.  I remember how hard it was when my grandfather died, to walk down main street, knowing all eyes were on me, and to keep my face impassive.

I will say there’s  a lot to be said for that, for keeping your demeanor even, for taking the blow and acting like a pillar of strength when others are depending on you.  I’ll even say there’s something to be said for men to behave that way.  For many — evolutionary — reasons families with fathers (and we’ve found that it’s better if families have a father in them) still look to them for strength for everyone.  And if you’re a woman and the head of the family, studying the responses advised for males traditionally is not a bad idea, either.  The reason the strong silent stereotype evolved is the “strong” part.  When tragedy hits, people like to believe — even though at heart sane ones know we’re all people — that there is someone strong enough not to succumb, someone they can lean on.

That’s why throughout history, in most of the world mankind evolved entire court protocols, so that people didn’t see that the royals, the people they depended on to keep society together, could break and cry like mere mortals.

But it is important to remember that’s the protocol.  Royals, if you read their biographies, are still human, and any number of them have unleashed the death knell.

Men and women are still human, too.  They are different.  My son, whose undergrad degree is in human biology, informs me that the different hormones shape our growth from the womb outward.  Our brains are different, our muscle-skeletal structure is different, and yep, our emotional response is different.

A friend I have reason to trust told me that men have an underlying fund of anger, the whole time.  (Which makes a man, I think.  Or maybe I read too much politics.)  I don’t think most women do.  (Hey, I’m myself alone.)  I’m told by medical friends that testosterone does give you more violent impulses, but it’s not so much that.  It’s more that it makes your thoughts more direct, clearer, stripped of subtlety and layering.

And right here you know these are not absolutes, because if I could, for five minutes, think in as layered a way as Dave Freer, I’d count myself fortunate.  Hold on to that thought.  It comes back later.

Our different evolutionary histories trained women to be those who watch children, a less violent, less dangerous, more social and certainly more verbal activity than the hunt men engaged in.  Women’s jockeying for position is different too.  It’s a dance of appearance and undermining, of verbal aggression and verbal bond-building.  Men tend to be more direct and immediate, to find their hierarchy with fists.  That is, they were, in the natural state.  Or in elementary before the social engineers took over.  I remember being in elementary, in an all-girls’ school next to an all-boys’ school, looking across the fence at the boys fighting and horsing around and thinking “I wish we did it that way, instead of with false friendship and gossipy knives in the back.”

But the thing is, that though I understood boys and girls were different, I didn’t imagine they were a separate species.  Villages didn’t allow that.  We were all too much in each other’s pockets.  I knew boys cried, I knew women displayed aggression.  Heaven save you if a pack of fishwomen ever come after you, and I mean that.

I knew we were different, but not so different, and usually not so different from birth that it justified a hatred of one of the sexes, or even a notion that if we could just be the other sex, all our problems would be fixed.

I knew, couldn’t avoid knowing, that at the end we were all human, and that the human mold allowed for infinite variation, regardless of what bits you had dangling.

There was no way to avoid knowing that, when my very masculine father, the one who never cried in public, the one who told me to stop lamenting because legionaries didn’t cry, was the nurturer in the family.  It was hard not to realize, pretty early, his horror of having me cry was that my cry hurt him.  And if you were really hurt, he would hug you, impart his strength to you.  If you were sick, he’d come and visit you, and — in my case — fix my covers so only my face showed (at least in winter, in our unheated house.)  He called it making me a little mouse in a hole, which was strangely comforting.

It wasn’t till I was in the US that I realized some people were really confused, not only about what men were and what women were, but how they reacted throughout history.  I heard a friend give a lecture in which she said — with a straight face — that women had had to evolve different mechanisms “because we couldn’t show anger, it wasn’t allowed.  Throughout history, men could go to war or go hunting but women couldn’t show anger.”

I didn’t cackle like an hyena.  There were several things men and women could not do, but those rules were usually not paid much attention to when it came to the fundamentals.  Men can let out the primal scream, and women —  just don’t get between a woman and her children and threaten her children in any way, okay?  Not women who haven’t been trained by movies into thinking all they can do is cry.

But more than that those roles she was mentioning weren’t neolithic roles, or even medieval roles, or the role of anything before an age of such abundance that women of a certain class were shielded from the realities of the world.  Women did fight, even peasant women in the village.  It usually involved a lot of hair pulling and slapping, but sometimes knives came out.  Like all women they were more dangerous than men in a fight, because they fought underhanded, with less show and more deadliness.  (I think men evolved rules of “fair fight” mostly because they had to — you had to keep the trust of the hunting group, after all, or you couldn’t function together.)

And while few women hunted (though it happened) women did get to kill things, as much as men did.  They usually slaughtered animals kept for food.  And neither of them did that as a way to deal with anger.  That’s the “desk sweeping” thing all over again.

It takes a very sheltered woman who learned from movies how men and women react to think that men would go hunting to “disperse anger” (anymore than doing any other violent exercise) or that women were not supposed to disperse anger violently.  (The exercise thing works, btw.  A few times, when very furious, I hand-scrapped and wax the wooden floors of the Victorian we lived in. It gives all those fight or flight hormones somewhere to go.

Medical friends assure me that testosterone makes logic and links between facts easier, but estrogen makes memory easier.

I told my son this made no sense whatsoever. After all, in my family, my brother is the one who memorizes things best, and I am the one who correlates odd facts to come up with something  sometimes brilliant, often odd.  My son said that yeah, but we were people with eidetic memory or close to it and your brain works completely differently in those cases.  He also said that even though hormones influence your thinking, it’s all in the way you use it, so you often see women who have worse memory than men, or men who reason slower.  The only inference about hormones that can be made is for the very same individual.  I.e. if you’re a woman and have testosterone for whatever reason (the reasons are limited) you’ll find that your reasoning improves.  And if you’re a man and take estrogen, it will give you better memory (and here I want to to register that having seen medical students drink from the firehose of information, I’m shocked the male students aren’t mainlining estrogen.)

But that’s the entire point.  Humans are individual. It’s a thing humans do.  And while we can make broad statistical categories, there is no such thing as perfect females and perfect males, or if they do they are a statistical anomaly.  And regardless of what movies show you, women don’t cry and men don’t sweep their desk in anger.

At the base of it, when emotion surprises you, when it’s raw and primal, you both will react the same way.  Same species.  When things are less shocking, you both modulate your answers in ways that have worked for the species for millennia.

So called feminists who think without men the world would be very peaceful and nurturing have never met real women, unfiltered by society and have grown up too comfortable and cozy to know what they, themselves, are capable of.

Pain is pain, anger is anger, grief is grief.

Yes, there are different ways of expressing it, and men tend more towards one (or at least to appearing stoic in public) because it’s their duty, and women tend more towards another (the nurturing thing is part instinct and part training) because it’s their duty.

None of which tells you anything about individuals and their responses, nor about the underlying currents of raw emotion in either sex.

Men and women are not widgets conveniently packed in a can that says “will react this way under pressure.”  They are people.  And people means individual and unique.

And thank heavens for that.

Excerpt from

Division One book 1,

Alpha and Omega – by Stephanie Osborn

* * *

* * *

“I don’t get it,” said Romeo from his seat in the training observation room. “Y’all didn’t put ME through all this testing crap. Creativity testing and obstacle courses and puzzles an’ junk. I know we’re shorthanded an’ all, but…what gives? It’d be way simpler an’ quicker to just put her through the old testing.”

“We’re getting ready to start up a new department,” answered Fox, across the small conference table from Romeo; next to the younger agent sat his new partner, India. “Echo’s already agreed to head it up, while you were laid up with the leg. Good to see you off the crutches, by the way.”

“Damn good to be off ‘em. Still hobblin’ around a little, but that’ll go away eventually; ‘s why I’m keepin’ a cane handy for a while. So tell me about this new department. If you can, yet.”

“I can. It’ll be a kind of combination SWAT team and commando unit. Teams from this department will take the point whenever we have the really dangerous situations—the interstellar terrorists, the galactic invasions, things like that. We think, with her background, she may have what it takes to make it in this department. We sure as hell can’t send her back where she came from. She seems intrigued by the idea, at least. And no family complications to worry about. Single, only child, birth family gone in a car accident.”

“But, Fox, what if she can’t hang?”

“I don’t know yet, Romeo. We’ll cross that bridge—”

“We won’t have to,” interrupted Echo, coming into the testing observation room and moving past the table around which the others were seated, directly to the observing window. “She’ll make it.”

“But how do you know?” asked Romeo. “‘Got a feeling’?”

“Yup. Same one I had about you, junior.”

“WELL, the lady’ll hang, then.” Romeo sat back in his chair, satisfied.

“Damn,” muttered India.

Echo shot her a hard look, then returned his attention to the observation window overlooking the course.

“Have we started yet?”

“No,” Fox answered. “We’re still getting set up. And we were waiting for you.”

“I’m here. Let’s get rolling.”

“Done.” Fox hit a button on an adjacent control console.

Romeo, Echo, and India watched as the observation window, as well as a hooded monitor on the command console, showed several aliens of various types entering the obstacle course. Romeo gasped as he recognized a Betelgeusian giant arachnoid, possessing, by his estimate, a good fourteen-or fifteen-foot leg span—accompanied by several Division One agents sporting flamethrowers, lasers, blasters, and disintegrator rifles, entering the course. Two heavily-armed guards in black armor moved into position at the entrance. Romeo and India noticed then, with a shock, that they were FACING the course, as if the concern was from something inside.

“Hope she’s not afraid of spiders,” Echo remarked offhandedly.

“Hope she’s not afraid of death,” Romeo murmured to India. “Shit.”

* * *

Megan came into the observation room just then. She was wearing black workout leggings and sports-bra top, but the rest of her attire was somewhat odd: menswear-style black lace-up dress shoes, a black tie, a dress leather belt, and a pair of the special goggles-cum-sunglasses strapped to one hip. An unusual device, like a large plastic bangle bracelet, was fastened around her right ankle. Sensors attached to her head and torso connected to a small transmitter pack on her back. Echo met her and led her to the command console.

“All right, Megan,” Fox began, waving a hand at the view in the monitor, which now only depicted a door and two guards, “this is the obstacle course. When you go through that door,” he pointed to the image of the guarded door on the monitor, “you will enter the first of a series of six rooms, each of which has various…impediments…to your progress. Your objective is simply to reach the exit of room six as quickly as possible. The tracking device on your ankle will enable us to monitor your progress. You may make use of anything on your person, as well as anything you find along the course. In addition, you may select from one—and only one—of the items on this side table.”

Megan eyed the monitor display in detail before Fox led her over to the table. On it was an eclectic collection of items: a Phillips-head screwdriver, a small glass bottle, a pair of wire cutters, a coil of rope, a pen knife, a jar of cheese spread, a pocket-sized Winchester & Tesla Mark II death ray, a packet of facial tissues, and a chocolate bar.

Megan was in no rush. She scanned the table carefully, considering, as the four Division One agents watched. She looked herself up and down, fingering the items she already carried. Echo watched as she flipped over the tie and checked to see what was on the label. He smiled inwardly, pleased as he followed her mental processes, realizing he understood how she thought. Finally she reached out, picked up the pen knife, and clipped it to the belt at her waist.

Echo raised an eyebrow in carefully-hidden surprise and looked at Fox, who returned his gaze unemotionally. Romeo and India watched the whole scene in amazement.

“Ready, then?” Fox asked Megan.

“As I’ll ever be.”

“All right. Follow me.”

As Fox led Megan out, Echo turned to the console, put on a headset, and began entering commands. Romeo and India walked up to the observation window, and Echo hit a button. Blast shutters on the window began to close.

“Sorry, kids. Can’t watch this one; you’ll have to go through this yourselves soon enough.”

“Oh, joy,” India muttered.

“You can monitor her progress on this schematic.” Echo hit another sequence of commands, and a panel opened on the wall. It showed the layout of six variously-shaped, interconnected rooms, a number on each room.

“How are you gonna evaluate her if you can’t see what she’s doing?” Romeo asked him, as he and India sat back down at the table, across from the schematic.

“I didn’t say Fox and I couldn’t watch. I’ve been through it. You haven’t. Yet.”

Fox re-entered the room. “She’s ready, Echo.”

“All right, then.” Echo handed Fox another headset, then keyed the microphone switch. “Megan? GO!”

* * *

The door opened, but Megan was in no hurry to charge through it. Any obstacle course that had a funky-looking little weapon like that strange pocket-sized ray gun as one of the equipment options was not one into which she intended to go running headlong. Let alone the armed guards stationed around it. So she eased around the left side of the doorframe, surveying the room from the threshold.

How odd, she thought, as she scanned the room; it looks like an ordinary study: hardwood floors, bookcases lining the walls, cozy fireplace on the far side, with a wing chair and decorative wrought iron side table next to it.

A heavy walnut desk with granite top stood in the center; a lamp and crystal decanter sat on one corner. Waterford crystal, it looks like. An EXPENSIVE study, then.

The door into the next room was in the far wall, to the right of the fireplace.

She stepped forward into the room.

* * *

Romeo and India watched the display as the first block lit up with a big red ‘1.’ Echo and Fox leaned together over the screened closed-circuit monitor.

“She’s in,” Echo observed.

“Aaannd the timers have started,” Fox noted. “Both of ‘em.”

India and Romeo exchanged glances…and thoughts. BOTH of ‘em?

* * *

Megan had taken no more than two steps into the room when she heard a faint, almost inaudible click off to the left. Quickly spinning, she saw bookcase holograms fade away to reveal a blank wall with horizontal slits halfway up. Oh shit, she had just time to think. She dropped flat on the floor as a flurry of projectiles whistled through the space she had occupied fractions of a second before.

Suddenly the fireplace roared, belching a tongue of flame into the room. She rolled to her right, out of its reach, in the barest nick of time. Another projectile barrage opened up. Scanning the room, she swiftly combat-crawled over to and under the desk, where she caught her breath as she analyzed her situation.

* * *

“She actually heard that,” Echo remarked in surprise. “Damn. I knew her ears were pretty sharp, but wow.”

“Pulse, one-twenty and steady; blood pressure, 130 over 90,” Fox read off the sensor readouts. “Respiration, twenty-three. High left hemispheric encephalographic activity. Trigger the plasma jet, Echo.”

Romeo and India spun around and stared in dismay at the two calm men. Plasma jet?!

* * *

A faint whine was the only warning Megan got before the plasma cannon behind the right-hand wall opened up. She crouched farther back, under the desk, until its initial salvo was complete. Then, in a momentary lull between projectile bank, flame-throwing fireplace, and plasma cannon, she reached up with her right hand, over the desktop, and grabbed for the decanter she had seen there. Miraculously, it was unbroken, having been below the level of the projectile barrage. She unstoppered it and sniffed the decanter mouth. Brandy. Perfect. She put on the special glasses.

She timed her next move carefully. In the split-second after the projectile weapons fired, while the plasma cannon built to discharge again, she emerged from her cover and flung the stoppered decanter with all the force and accuracy she could muster, straight at the plasma gun, then she turned and pushed with all her might against the back of the desk.

The desk slid across the polished floor just as the crystal decanter crashed into the now-firing cannon…and exploded. The improvised Molotov cocktail melted the circuitry and ignited the fuel tank, sending a geyser of flame out into the center of the room. But the desk was no longer in the center. Instead, it was now overturned, with its substantial polished granite top largely blocking the flame-throwing fireplace.

Megan held her breath, closed her eyes, and crouched in the desk’s opening until the flames from the plasma cannon subsided and the current round of projectile barrage ceased. Then, slightly singed, she scuttled on elbows and knees behind the wing chair. She overturned the marble-and-iron side table, heedless of the useless trinkets which tumbled off it, and caught it up in her left hand, holding it by the wrought iron pedestal. Using the tabletop as a shield, she moved up into a crouch, ducking behind it when the next round of missiles opened up.

“Aahh! Dammit!” A ricochet off the nearby marble mantelpiece winged her right shoulder. But she had reached the exit door. Still shielding herself with the table, she tapped the door handle warily with her right hand; no booby traps. She opened it; stepped sideways to her right…

* * *

Block 2 of the schematic lit up.

“Pulse, one-thirty and rising; BP, 135 over 92; respiration twenty-five. Hemispheric activity high and equally dominant,” Fox called out.

“Staying calm, thinking fast and getting creative. Great. Fox, did we get the fumes vented properly?” Echo asked, glancing over his shoulder at the two younger agents, so very intent on the largely-blank schematic, with a grin. Good idea Fox had, letting them see only a small part of the test. Ups the ante for ‘em, and gives us a chance to see how THEY react to the pressure.

“Yeah, no problem,” Fox responded. “Didn’t want it building to potentially dangerous levels, anyway.”

* * *

Fumes? What kind of fumes? Romeo and India sat staring, unbelieving, at the schematic while listening to the two men. WE’RE gonna have to go through this?

“How’s she doing?” Echo asked.

“If she maintains this pace, she’ll equal the record,” Fox responded.

“Dayum! Who set it?” exclaimed Romeo.

“I did, about six months ago,” Echo remarked, offhanded, his attention never wavering from the lithe figure going through its paces on the monitor.

* * *

This room was a formal dining room, of all things, complete with chandeliers and elegantly-set banquet table. Funny notions they have about obstacle courses, Megan thought. Whatever she had been expecting, so far this wasn’t it.

Megan discarded the side table and moved cautiously into the room, on the lookout for booby traps now. Her nose caught it first: an acrid, pungent odor. Then she saw the wisps of vapor rising from the floor.

“Acid!” she cried out in horror. The flooring was being eaten away underneath her.

Do they really want to kill me? I didn’t think that Echo-guy would’ve…but at least they would be rid of an eyewitness. Damn. Is this all just a set-up, then? An excuse for knocking me off? I am in such trouble…

An adrenalin-propelled standing leap took her to the near end of the banquet tabletop, irrespective of china and crystal, which tumbled this way and that, shattering. The way out, an open archway, was at the opposite end of the long table, but the opening was far out of reach of her ability to jump. The floor was now out of the question; large holes were starting to appear in it, a bubbling fluid underneath. She looked up.

The row of chandeliers ran almost the entire length of the oblong room, and were of the ornate Victorian candelabra style. Jumping up, Megan caught onto the one overhead and swung on it, tugging, testing. Strong enough, but not far enough, she thought, easing back down to the tabletop. If they only hung a little bit lower…

Abruptly, the table dropped out from under her, lowering by a full six inches, as what was left of the floor gave way. Megan lost her footing and fell, smashing china and sliding across the polished wood, over the edge. Digging her fingernails into the wood, she halted herself, her bent knees mere inches from the acid that now pooled around the bottom of the table. She slowly clawed her way back onto the tabletop. At least now I know how deep the acid is…

Suddenly, she whipped off her tie and belt. She threaded the leather belt through its buckle, making a loop, then used the pen knife to enlarge the last belt notch. Replacing the pen knife securely on her hip, where it clipped to the waistband of her leggings next to the glasses case, she quickly threaded the small end of the silk tie through the hole in the belt and knotted it firmly, jerking it hard to test it. Then she ran to the far end of the tabletop. She didn’t know if it would hold, but there was no time to change her mind. The table legs were starting to disintegrate now.

“Hope the farm skills are still with me,” she muttered as she swung the makeshift lasso.

The leather loop caught a prong of the chandelier, and Megan jerked it tight. Backing up as far as her improvised rope would allow, she made a running start, then swung forward.

No time to check the next room, she thought as she swung through the air. I just hope I hit the door opening straight, or this is gonna hurt bad…

“BANZAI!” she yelled as she reached the top of her arc and let go, flying head-first, arms stretched out in front, hands fisted, through the open doorway.

* * *

“Wow. Nice Superman jump,” Echo noted with a grin.

“Yeah, I liked it too,” Fox agreed, nodding.

Romeo and India just stared at the two men in consternation.

* * *

As soon as she was well through the opening, Megan realized she was in a bad way. Landing hard, she rolled, looked up, and blanched. At the far end of the room crouched a giant, hairy, black spider-like creature, with a leg-spread of at least fifteen feet, in a huge cage. To Megan’s horror, the front of the cage began to slide slowly up.

“Spiders. Dammit. I hate spiders. Why did it have to be spiders?” she muttered.

* * *

Alpha and Omega (Division One)

First in an ongoing series about the adventures of Alpha Line available now for preorder on Kindle with a release date of January 10, 2017.

Buy here

Alpha and Omega

© 2017 Stephanie Osborn

ISBN 978-0-9982888-1-9 (print)

ISBN 978-0-9982888-0-2 (ebook)

Cover art © 2017 Darrell Osborn

Fiction

First electronic edition 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher. All trademarks are property of their respective owners.

This is a work of fiction. All concepts, characters and events portrayed in this book are used fictitiously and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

Chromosphere Press

P.O. Box 3412

Huntsville, AL 35810

www.chromospherepress.com

Of all the ways people have come up with to avoid thinking, I like memes the most.  They are so ridiculously easy to fall into.  You see the words, you see the picture and you go “ah ah, that’s so true.” Even when on a minute’s reflection it makes no sense whatsoever.

I think in a way it follows the same pattern that proverbs followed in more ancient cultures.  My dad was a great believer in proverbs and some of the ones he would pull out at all times or no time were old enough I later studied them in Latin.

While proverbs were ways not to have to think or short cuts around thinking, they weren’t, by themselves, pernicious.  When you think “A dollar saved is a dollar earned” it might give you the strength to avoid buying whatever cute thing just caught your eye, by reminding you how hard it was to earn that dollar.  BUT its effect is not bad.  It makes you in fact more likely to succeed in life.  The same with “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.”  It might not do any of those things (False advertising for the win) but in the times when it was coined it kept you from going out drinking with the boys till all hours, which at least avoided your getting sickly broke and acting foolish.  So it was almost the same thing.

Proverbs are in a way, the encoding of societal wisdom into short cuts to lead people into ways that have worked before.

Memes are similar, but you have to remove societal wisdom and put in “the commanding forces of culture and mass media”.

Look, I’ve posted here before how hard it is to acculturate, and even sometimes when you want to fit in to a new culture, it feels like dying.  Humans, by preference, don’t think everything anew.  They bring with them mechanisms of habit and tradition and, well, culture.  Things are supposed to match what you were taught.

And that’s just the problem.  For four generations now, most people were taught Marxist/progressive shibboleths as though they were the revealed truth of the universe. Even teachers who don’t realize that’s what they’re teaching tend to drip through concepts like class struggle and the idea history comes with an arrow pointing at a progressive future, and even the idea of the Government as a benevolent entity that solves all things and fixes all things, from society to science.  Of course most of all the educational-industrial complex sells the idea that it’s wonderful, indispensable, and you should definitely give it way more of your money.

The problem is that when people go out into the world, they keep being forced into situations where this isn’t true, and where their nose is rubbed into the fact that what they were taught is nonsense.  Some (most perhaps) avoid thinking about it or acculturating by becoming bitter and cynical and deciding the world is irredeemable because it doesn’t match their head-picture.  And some fight back with memes.

Memes are perfect for this, because, like proverbs, they have the feeling of revealed truth and therefore stop the discomfort of having to face, you know, real reality which doesn’t match received culture.

Yesterday someone posted a typical one of those.  It was something like “People considering homeschooling should ask themselves if they would cut their own hair.”

A minute’s reflection (and five minutes of pointing and laughing) reveals the falacy in that.  I don’t know about you but the main reason I have never cut my hair is that I can’t see all around my head, and I’m not good at thinking in three dimmensions and reversed, so a mirror won’t do it.  What the heck this has to do with homeschooling YOUR KIDS is beyond me.  You could say “people considering learning by themselves should ask themselves if they would cut their own hair” — it still doesn’t make any sense, but I could see where you could say “you have blind spots, which you won’t investigate because you’re uncomfortable” (like the guy posting this, say.)  It would sort of make sense, even if not really (since most of us have taught ourselves a considerable amount of the specialized knowledge one needs for one’s job, because no school teaches it.  Hint, no, creative writing classes don’t teach you to be a writer.)  Or you could say “If you are considering homeschooling, ask yourself if you would cut your kid’s hair.”

Of course the reason he didn’t do that is obvious.  This particular “stop thinking” meme was about defending credentialism and people who’ve been “trained” to do this or that being superior to simple parents.  But the truth is that every parent has cut his or her kids hair once or twice and many do it all the time.  Take for instance when we were really young and broke and couldn’t afford anything but supercuts.  Some of those trained professionals aren’t as good as an untrained parent.

The same is true for homeschooling, where kids who are homeschooled, unless they are unschooled, where the results are mixed, are consistently better at… well… school things than our school taught kids.  (Yes, I know the canard this is due to parent involvement.  This canard is to try to get parents to volunteer more at schools.  Let me tell you, no, it’s not true.  Yeah, parental involvement like we did it, where we taught the kids at home after school works like homeschooling because DUH we’re teaching the kids, the school isn’t.)  This is because our schools have decided to emphasize “fitting in” “obeying” “playing the game” and “not sticking out” over learning.  In fact, many elementary school teachers will candidly tell you (particularly if your kid is gifted) that their main job is to “level” the kids so they’re all more or less at the same point before they enter middle school.  This explains why they worked so hard at getting both my kids to unlearn reading in first and second grade (didn’t work with the older, almost worked with the younger.)

The meme gets around that, and it is very popular because — even though it takes no time at all to demolish — it stops the pressure to acculturate and makes the person seeing it feel better and like their “truth” trumps reality.

Other memes that are as grating include the one about Jesus being a socialist, because you know, “though shalt take all your money and give to the government who will take some of it and give to the poor, but mostly use it to grow a massive and repressive bureaucracy” said no gospel, ever.

Then there’s the meme about how all whites here are illegal immigrants, a piece of nonsense that doesn’t take in account Neolithic-level civilizations don’t have borders as we understand them, and that if anything the fate of the Amerindian tribes would make us clamp border controls so tight not a mouse would get through.  This meme works on the “ahah, you’re also a poopyhead” system that every idiot learned in elementary.

This also explains why the right isn’t as good at memes.  We’ve not under terrible pressure to acculturate, because reality by and large accords with things like cause and effect, responsibility for your actions, longer time preference, and the broken nature of man.  So we really don’t need pseudo-clever memes that get around thinking and stop us feeling bad.

And it tells you that when you see memes, or an “everybody knows” that was coined after the nineteenth century, you should pause and examine it.  Because it’s been produced by a culture afraid of itself, it’s not likely to be a “useful workaround” but a palliative against acculturating to the real world.

In the end, we must all live in the real world.  (I just work elsewhere.)  Avoiding adapting to it is not a survival strategy.