Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Ungovernable – a blast from the past from December 2012

I’ve said before that I became an American by reading Heinlein books.  This is true at least to an extent, though I’d be at a loss to explain the process to you.  I mean, if you knew how to do that, book by book, chipping away, so someone starts out wondering what’s wrong with all those Americans who don’t like taxes (don’t they know taxes are civilization?  And have always existed) and ends up thinking getting a Don’t Tread On Me tattoo is a brilliant idea, even while immersed in a socialist, communism-admiring system, we’d have no problems.  We’d just use “the process.”

Mind, you, it is likely that the er… Heinleinizing (totally a word.  Don’t worry your pretty head) of my opinions came from watching socialism up close and personal.  Heinlein had help.  But all the same, and even so, by the time I came to the States as an exchange student I had been, so to put it, primed to react to the US as “home.”

Even so, things about the US surprised me – things that Americans thought were completely logical.  For instance, the fact that classes are – objectively – a zoo.  No, we’re not talking about a war-zone type school.  Stow High School had good teachers, by and large, enthusiastic about teaching and their subjects.

I’m just talking about classroom behavior.  People just TALKED.  In Portugal, once the teacher entered, absolute silence reigned, unless he asked a question.  More conducive to learning?  Sure.  Maybe.  But in the US it just didn’t happen.  There wasn’t that built in respect for the “master” who got up front and spoke, and therefore all must fall silent.

There were other things – a distinct lack of respect based solely on someone’s age and position (respect for real accomplishments was granted, of course.) – a wicked sense of humor that showed up in signs on hallways and doors of classes, the fact that people could talk back or joke with teachers.

But possibly the most surprising thing in the US was … how people interacted.  You could have ornaments and decorated trees in your front yard and no one stole them.  This made my jaw drop, particularly since my host family’s house didn’t even have a nominal fence.  (This  might be gone in certain areas.  At least someone stole both a cement giraffe and – months later – a cheap composite fountain from our front yard.)

And when something went wrong, say a massive snowfall, people grabbed shovels and went to the street, to shovel not just their driveway, but as much of the sidewalk as they could, and to make their area as functional as possible, before official rescue/help arrived.

This would be unheard of most other places in the world.

This image/these ideas gelled for me as I read P.J. O’Rourke’s comment about a restaurant somewhere – the Soviet Union – and said “An American would grab a bottle of windex and solve most of the problem.”  Or something like that.

Every time I go back to Portugal, now, I find myself thinking about that type of thing or wanting to do that type of thing about ten times a day.  Most of the time I don’t, because there’s a crab bucket thing over there, you know, the crabs pull the others down, i.e. if I – say – grabbed a bottle of cleaner to save a sanitation problem, I’d get asked “Who do you think you are?”   And my parents live there.  (If they didn’t, and didn’t have to live with the consequences of my actions, I’d probably do it anyway.)

Yeah, Americans talk back, and make classrooms noisy, and can sometimes be counterproductive.  On the other hand, Americans, faced with a gadawful mess don’t look around and wait for “the proper person” to fix it.  They roll up their sleeves and each of them goes “Well, I’ll do this.”

It’s hard to explain how different that makes us.  To most Americans it seems logical behavior (it is) and I only get the difference because I remember being brand new here and how ALIEN it was.  And I remember living in Portugal without the constant “oh, for heavens’ sake, just do it” moments I have when I go back now.  (I should possibly point out that most Europeans find most middle aged American women bossy, interfering and a bit terrifying.)

Yes, I know some of you are going to tell me that spirit is now lost.

It’s not.  It is, of course, in certain areas – but certain areas always had issues – and for certain people.  And it is more muted than it used to be.

Part of the thing with Europe is the worship of the “experts.”  “We’ll take it to the expert” or “We’ll have the expert do it.”  There is now some do it yourself (and my mom was always one of nature’s do-it-yourselvers.  I think given time to acculture, and if she’d come here early enough mom would have made a great American) but it’s nothing like in the US and it would never have started without the US.

They’ve – by which I mean the cultural establishment – tried to bring the same here.  I’ve railed here before about how cozies were – in effect – blacklisted by the publishing establishment because “amateurs can’t be better than the professionals.”  And how my books couldn’t have funny policemen because “Policemen are professionals and must be respected.”  And I’ve talked about how shocked I was when a bunch of high school kids came to beat me on my blog because I’d criticized their teacher (I actually hadn’t.  I’d criticized the curriculum which is is not teacher set, but they lacked the semantic ability to distinguish these) and how dare I?  She’s a TEACHER.  I’m supposed to respect her.  (She also was considerably less educated than I, much younger and I have reason to believe she sent the kids over to harass me – the harassment stopped when I threatened to scan in some of her (outrageous) grading handiwork and post it. – which leaves me in doubt of her moral character.)

While these things annoy me and shock me, as does anyone preventing my questioning him by saying “I’m the expert” – it is still new here.

The people on top are trying to do it, but I wonder how much of it will stick.

No, listen.  We’re still… Us.  Still likely to roll up our sleeves and do it.

Look at blogs.  Sure, there are blogs abroad.  I hear Portugal is one of the most connected countries in the world.  But are there newsblogs?  Big enough to rival, say instapundit?  Drudge? (There might be something like DU or the others – because, well, they’re funded and organized by organizations.  But, you know, I have problems enough without tampering with my blood pressure.)

Oh, please.  News have to be reported by experts.  It’s not the individual’s job.  And besides, why undertake that mass of work if no one will pay you?

There are tons of interesting recipe blogs, etc, but I have yet to find something with the scope that Americans cheerfully undertake.

The same could be said for ebooks and indie publishing.  They have access to the same facilities we do (though more regulations in the way) but do you see a flood of books in foreign languages appearing?  Some, sure (there are displaced and unaware Americans everywhere, in the sense that being American is to an extent a place in the heart) there are some.  But nothing like you’d expect.

This is to an extent why  – to quote Bill Whittle – the future comes from America.  We are willing to go ahead and try it, and see how it plays.

The spirit is still there.  Diminished, perhaps, but still much stronger than in the rest of the world.

And this is why I say we also don’t know what the result of what the people on the top – publishing, politics, news, etc – are doing to us.  We know how it works in other countries, but I don’t think they realize how different we are.

When people’s lives are made impossible, they find ways to live.  This was true, even in Portugal in the seventies, with a  flourishing black market and most regulations ignored.  How much more true will it be here, at the first signs of true pinching?

And then there’s the fact that in the rest of the world, if things get unbearable, you can always go to America.  But we don’t have an America to go to.  Which will only make us more determined to “ignore the order, buck the directive, roll up our sleeves and do for ourselves.”

This is why statists of any stripe so often throw their hands up and call us ungovernable.  Not that this gives them the idea they shouldn’t try.  No.  Instead, they try to devise more cunning ways of governing us.  You have them to give credit for dreaming the impossible dream.  It’s the one proof we have that the sons of beetles are Americans.

So…  after sixty years of creeping statism, they’ve now “captured the flag” – they have actually got all of the important systems sewn up: news, entertainment, education, government.

They think – can you blame them? – that they won.

I won’t say they can’t hurt us.  They can.  The mechanisms they’ve seized hold of are important and they are – natch – misusing them.

I’m not saying that this will be easy.  It won’t.  Our economy is likely to be an incredible shambles, and I’ve said before I think we’ll lose at least one city.

But, listen, the problem with these sons of… Babel is that they might be American, but they’re not American ENOUGH.  If they were, they’d understand “ungovernable” and this willingness for each of us to go it alone (often for common benefit, but on own recognizance, nonetheless) is not a bug.  It’s a feature.  And that it’s baked in the cake of a people who came here to escape the top-down spirit of other places.  Some of the black sheep (or as one friend of mine calls it, the plaid sheep) attitude is genetic, hereditary, inborn.  And enough of us have it.

Push harder and we escape harder, through crevices they don’t even know are there.  Forbid us from making a living, and we’ll find a way to go around you.  Make it impossible to defend ourselves, and I shudder to think what some of my friends and neighbors will come up with.  Make the economy impossible, and we’ll create another one you can’t reach.  Make regulations too binding and we’ll either ignore them or – more likely – creatively subvert them.

They captured the flag, and they think they captured the nation.  It’s the type of mistake that the bureaucratic mind makes.

Poor rats.  Try not to laugh at them too hard, as you go about the business of undermining them.

We have them surrounded.

There is a technique in writing that, possibly because I had to do everything wrong before I learned to do it right, took me a long time to understand.

I only understood it when reading it in a mystery.  The detective points out that she believed the murderer’s excuse because the murderer had said something about having a bad headache that exactly mimicked the detective’s own bad headaches.

Suddenly I understood.  If you want people to believe the most outrageous things, you have to tell them something that is true and that they know is true.  This is why the crazier philosophies that sell themselves to humans sell themselves by telling them something that the people know is true.

Communists used to be really good at this. They told people what everyone knew to be true.  The Noblemen had it better.  And they’d (by and large) had done nothing to deserve it.  Or they told them what people wanted to be true: your failure is not your fault, the rich are holding you down.  Or a million other such things.  And then on top of that they slid the nutcakes: because you can’t trust any other human you can trust the government (which is, of course, composed of angels.)  Or if you make the state big enough, it will eventually disappear.  (Wait, what?) Or even if you just take other people’s things, you’ll be happy (because no one can take them from you, right?)  And of course, a lot of other crazy cakes stuff, including but not limited to that value is created by labor and that things are worth the labor put into them.

No one would believe any of those things undiluted.  But they believe them when they’re packaged among homey truths that everyone knows to be true.

In the same way, those people who have puzzled about the rise of Hitler and thought it was all because of that evil patriotism thing can stop puzzling.  Yeah, Hitler had a lot of fricking crazy ideas the most normal of which might have been the hollow earth.  HOWEVER he packaged it under “Germany was handed a raw deal in WWI” which was true.  Whether it was the aggressor or not (it was, but what led there might have happened a million of other ways) it got a raw deal when it came to war’s end and reparations. World War I has been called the war where both sides lost, and to an extent that is right.  But only Germany got an outsize punishment.  And the German people knew this, so it was easy to slide all the crazy ideas behind the one thing none of the sane people were saying “We were done wrong by.”  Note, btw the sane people weren’t saying this because they were afraid of inflaming the German’s people desire for vengeance, and therefore starting the war anew.

Keep that in mind.

There are any number of crazy ideas you can pack behind a sufficiently powerful true one.  Truth is good that way.  It is so blinding in matching what people see with their own eyes, that it’s impossible not to respond and not to believe all the crazy stuff that goes along with it.

Truth is all the more powerful, when everyone with power and authority has been denying it, and then one person dares tell the truth.  Suddenly, the guy on the street who is tired of being told that they are wrong, and that they should believe what they’re told and not what they see with their lying eyes, has someone tell them that what they see is true.  And that means that the guy (or gal) on the street anywhere.

The problem is that the age of mass communications, as long as you coordinated the lie between news, entertainment and art/literature, you could convince people of the most outrageous things.  Or at least convince all the “educated” and better off people.  Mind you, some of those people might still believe their lying eyes, but they won’t/wouldn’t say anything.  Because to say anything meant the loss of a social circle and the loss of respectability.

That Heinlein said and I can say as well that anything I ever participated in/was involved in/witnessed that was also reported in Time was misreported to the point that there was no resemblance between it and reality might only be anedacta but when you consider the breadth of experience comprised, it’s also pretty telling.

Enter the internet.  Enter social media.  Enter blogs.  Enter disintermediated news.

Would we ever have known about the events on New Years in Cologne without the new media?  I doubt it.  Even now, that the same events happened in other cities of Northern Europe is only SLOWLY trickling out.

But it is trickling out.  It’s coming out before the eyes of the world.  And it can’t be stopped.  People were there, and people are talking.

The reactions of not only those in power, but the opinion makers, meanwhile, are completely insane.

One of Germany’s bureaucrats admitted that yes, this was caused by a bunch of unassimilated Arab males, that it was obviously coordinated, but then went on to sneer that it was all somehow the fault of “right wingers.”

What he’s doing makes sense in his world, just like the roll left of magazines and newspapers used to make sense.  You do what you have to do to attain the next level of the ladder.  And if he came out in public and said there seemed to be a coordinated “rape Jihad” going on without also saying that “racism” or the “right wing” were worse he’d not have a career left.  Or at least, not in the short term.

It is rather telling that Germany turned the water cannons and gas on their own nationals protesting rape that they couldn’t be bothered to turn on the people actually doing the rape.

And there is no way to keep the news quiet.  There is no way to allow for that uniformity of narrative that — in that past — made the craziest stuff stick.

And the problem is that the German minister was right on both counts.  First of all, yep, this obviously was organized across several countries.  (The alternative is to assume that whenever sufficient Muslim males are together, at any given time, on a city street, massive rape ensues. And yes, I’ve heard stories, but sorry, not on this scale.) And yes, this obviously will create an opening for the right wing.  Here’s the problem, the establishment is misidentifying the right wing or at least the right wing that will cause trouble.

The right wing that will be trouble are not those saying that this is a rape Jihad, that some of the Muslims admitted are trouble, that more effort needs to be made to stop the criminal elements (and send them back, if needed) and to make people who came in understand if they want to stay in Germany they have to assimilate.  Despite the cries of the establishment, one of the greatest proponents of assimilation in Germany is Turkish in origin and is one of the people that the sane persons listen to.

No, the problem is THE OTHER right wing, who aren’t actually often “right” in anything but nationalism.

These are the people who, like Hitler, will come in when the sane opposition has been silenced with water cannons and tear gas and tell you a little bit of truth and use that to build their absolutely crazy cakes, outlandish theories on.

We’re seeing this in the United States with Trump.  Maybe Trump will turn out (somehow) to be a pragmatic ruler, but make no mistake, he will be a RULER, not a leader, because he has no concept of limits or of individual rights.  His concept is of socialism, only more national.  But people here are so tired of being told that the United States is the worst thing ever, when they see it isn’t, that they are willing to accept even an outright socialist, if he’ll just assure them they’re not going crazy and they’re not evil for loving their country.

He doesn’t try to get them to believe completely insane and observable lies like that fighting “climate change” is a rebuke to terrorists, or that what we really need to protect ourselves against terrorists is to disarm law abiding citizens.  And so Trump, though a lot of his ideas are completely insane, benefits from using truth.  At least a little bit of truth.  And it’s likely he’ll get elected on the strength of it.

I’ve made my peace with this.  By tamping down on everyone sane who tried to point out they were out of control, the left has created Trump.  And if they think he’ll deal fairly with them, they haven’t taken the measure of the man.  They will not only lose control, but their favorite weapons of control, of calling someone “racist and sexist” and all the other stuff that silenced the reasonable people?  That’s done away with. And Trump really only cares about one thing, and that’s Trump, so if being racist or sexist suits him, he’ll do just that. Hold on to your hats, boys and girls, it’s going to be a wild ride.

As for Europe…  Europe is further down the road of big lies than we are, and though they’re not as active in social media, they’re getting there.  And the lies they’ve been told are so humongous that it amounts to their elites being at war with their people.

If they’re lucky — very very lucky — there will be one big convulsion, and then things will right themselves, more or less.

The chances of this diminish the longer it takes, the greater the outrage builds, and the more the backlash potential grows.

If the backlash is only against their elites, it won’t be so bad.  But I’m afraid when the backlash comes it will be opposite day.  All the things the elites have tried to sell them on will turn on their head.  There will be real sexism and the real racism will swallow up even thoroughly assimilated writers of Turkish origin.

And the rivers of Europe will once more run red with blood.

All for lack of understanding the power of truth, or even what truth is.  It is said Queen Marie Antoinette played the farmer in her little Triannon.  She would pretend to look after animals, only there was never any of the icky aspects of farm life. Just growing flowers, and petting cute little animals.

At least in Marie Antoinette’s defense, looking after a little farm wasn’t her job.  Her job was to look good, smile, and make people adore her, things she did pretty well until the pamphleteers and propagandists decided to create a horrible image of her.

But our elites, alas, those misguided would be aristos, are bad at their actual job.  They are fourth generation progressives, you see, and were taught to see everything in terms of Hegelian dialectic, a system that works perfectly well inside itself, but always fails in terms of the real world.

Our aristos couldn’t find the truth with two hands and a seeing eye dog.  They are playing at being “leaders of men” and “opinion makers’ without realizing that their own little Trianons are increasingly more divorced from reality.

Truth and reality can’t be kept at bay forever.

And what can’t go on won’t.

Oh So Special – Amanda Green

Everywhere you look these days, it seems like you will find someone who feels they are entitled to whatever they want simply because of who they happen to be. This isn’t anything new. There have always been people like that. Today, however, it seems like that attitude is becoming the norm and not the exception. Worse, this sense of entitlement extends not to just economic goals or even social standing, the main form a sense of entitlement used to take. Now we have the attitude of “you can’t do that because it makes me feel bad” or “you can’t do that because I don’t want you to.” We have children going through public school who don’t have to face the consequences of their decisions not to study. We have an entire generation that has been raised to think it is special, only to discover that the world isn’t one of equality or, gasp, one that believes that they are as special as they have been told for the last 18 years.

The prime example of this attitude is the farce of a defense that was somehow accepted by District Court Judge Jean Boyd (who thankfully did not run for re-election). Affluenza. Sounds pretty awful doesn’t it? Poor little Ethan Couch, convicted of killing four and injuring many more in a drunk driving crash, didn’t know what he was doing. Not because he had a blood alcohol content more than twice the legal limit at the time of the accident. No, poor little Ethan didn’t know better because he had been raised too rich and without any discipline. You see, his parents never put any consequences on him for his actions. So, according to the defense no one believed would be taken seriously by the court, he shouldn’t be held truly accountable for his actions in killing and injuring so many people that dark night almost three years ago.

I blogged about poor little Ethan – yes, the snark meter runs high when I say that – this past New Year’s Eve. Here is the timeline for what happened regarding Ethan.

• 19, 2013 – Couch is found in a pickup with a beer and a bottle of vodka. The result of this is a citation for minor in possession of alcohol.
• June 15, 2013 — Couch first steals alcohol from a local convenience store. Then the accident that killed four and injured nine occurs. His blood alcohol content measured at more than three times the legal limit.
• 10, 2013 — Couch is sentenced to 10 years probation, in-house treatment.
• 19, 2014 — Couch begins his in-house treatment at taxpayer expense.
• 14, 2014 — his father is arrested for impersonating a police officer. (Another indication that his parents have more than a few issues of their own?)
• 2, 2015 — the Youtube video goes viral.
• 11, 2015 — arrest warrant issued after authorities learn Couch failed to report as ordered to his probation officer and after finding the home he shared with his mother empty.
• 18, 2015 — U. S. Marshals join the search for Couch and his mother.
• 28, 2015 — Couch and his mother arrested in Puerto Vallarta.

A week later, his mother, Tonya Couch, was returned to the United States. Ethan, however, has been transferred to a holding facility in Mexico City where he is fighting his extradition. The legal authorities are almost unanimous that this is only delaying the inevitable and adding to the frustration of the authorities in Texas who have had more than enough of poor little Ethan and his refusal to take responsibility for his actions.

Yes, refuses. This is no longer the 16 year old who stood before the judge and was determined that he had had such a poor upbringing by his parents that he couldn’t be held truly responsible for his actions. This is an 18 year old man who knew that he faced a possible violation of his probation because of a Youtube video that surfaced and apparently showed him taking part at a party beer pong game. This is an 18 year old who made the decision to skip his upcoming meeting with his probation officer where, presumably, he would have been tested for alcohol and possibly drugs. This is an 18 year old who made the decision to leave not only the state but the country with his mother in an effort to avoid prosecution. This is an 18 year old who did so even though the most he could have received as a probation violation was 120 days, if I remember correctly, behind bars because the case is still resting in the juvenile courts.

Justice will come for Ethan Couch and probably much sooner than he would prefer. But he is only part of this story. His mother, Tonya, is the star and she is a prime example of the attitude I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Her attitude of “I can do whatever I want” is what led to the problems her son finds himself in and now she is continuing to play the same game. It is going to be interesting today to see what sort of arguments her attorney puts forth in an effort to get her $1 million bail reduced.

As I write this, Tonya Couch sits in a Tarrant County jail cell awaiting her bond reduction trial. On Friday, she made a brief appearance in court where no plea was made because her attorney had been held up in traffic. Sorry, but really? Anyway, true to form, Tonya apparently complained about not being able to get enough sleep in her cell because it was too bright, etc. Sheriff Dee Anderson’s response was indicative of what many people feel. He told her she was in jail, not at a vacation resort. That byplay, according to her attorney, was inappropriate. Riiight.

So today Tonya appears before a judge to argue that the bail is unreasonably high. She is charged with a third degree felony, basically with hindering the apprehension and prosecution of another. The standard bail for such a charge is $25,000 or less. So her attorney wants the bail reduced to $15,000. If granted, all Tonya would have to post is $1,500 and then she could walk out of the county jail.

Am I the only one who believes she would then walk down the street, never to be seen again – at least not until she was once more found and arrested?

But, Amanda, surely they took her passport away from her.

Nope. She claims that somehow in transit from Mexico to Los Angeles to Fort Worth it was lost.

But, Amanda, her attorney has assured everyone that Tonya would abide by any restriction the court would put on her.

Sorry, don’t buy it. This is the woman who knew her son had to regularly report to the probation office to meet the terms of his probation. This is the woman who sold the house she and her son were living in and then allegedly threw a going away party for the two of them. This is the woman who withdrew $30,000 prior to leaving the United States. This is the woman who called Ethan’s father and her now ex-husband to say he would never see her or Ethan again. This is the woman who paid an approximately $2,000 bar tab her son managed to run up a club in Mexico (said tab was for booze and lap dances and said bar is one favored by El Chapo. So it was probably a good thing for Ethan that she had all that cash on hand.)

So pardon me if I don’t have any faith in Tonya Couch living up to any provisions the court might place on her if she manages to bail out of jail, no matter what the bail amount.

But, Amanda, the court will have her wear a monitor so the probation office always knows where she is.

Again, riiiiight. The same sort of monitor that others before her have managed to get out of.

Perhaps it is finally time for someone to put their foot down and make sure Tonya, and through her Ethan, learn that there are consequences to their actions. This wasn’t some accidental crossing over the border where they were picked up by the Mexican police for having weapons in their possession. Although, there has been a report that a handgun was found in their hotel room after their arrest. If true, that could cause some problems for poor little Ethan since Mommy Dearest isn’t available for the Mexican authorities to make an example of.

Tonya Couch has shown a complete disregard of the law. Whether she agreed with it or not, running with her son was not the way to deal with the situation. She and her husband had managed to find themselves a convincing shyster once. Hence the affluenza defense no one thought would ever be taken seriously. Clearly, Judge Boyd was moved by the argument that being rich and raised without rules can make you unable to know that getting behind the wheel of a car could lead to bad things happening. Why else give Ethan only a 10 year probation when, in an earlier and remarkably similar case, she sentenced another 16 year old 20 years in prison? There is no doubt Tonya Couch knows how to manipulate the system and, when she steps into the courtroom today, she plans to do so once again.

I have a word of warning for her. Should she manage to get her bail reduced to an amount she can afford to post it, slipping away from the jurisdiction might not be as easy as she thinks. Even if she manages to get rid of the electronic monitoring device, I have a feeling members of the law enforcement agencies locally will be more than glad to sit on her, even if it is on their off time. What she and her son have done is spit in all their faces. Worse, not once has there been a showing of remorse on her part or, more importantly, on Ethan’s for what happened that dark night in 2013.

As for the judge hearing the case today, I don’t envy him. it has been some time since there has been such an emotionally charged case in Tarrant County. Following the law is a must but there will also have to be some common sense applied as well. That is the nice thing about bond hearings. The judge has a framework of recommended bonds to be guided by but he can also look at things like the financial health of the accused, the likelihood of the accused remaining in the jurisdiction, the danger the accused presents to the public-at-large and, if you want to be honest about it, the danger the accused faces if released.

I have no doubt that when the case is called later today, there will be people in the gallery looking on that Tonya should fall on her knees before and beg forgiveness from, not only for what she did but for what her son has done. She won’t. Remorse and responsibility don’t appear to be in her lexicon. Perhaps it is time someone made sure she learns the meaning of the words. Today can and should be the first step in doing so.

BETTER PROMO THAN NEVER – Free-range Oyster

Hail, well-met, and how y’all doin’? Today brings us a new batch of new books for your entertainment and edification. We even have a scholarly work for a change, raising the tone above the pulpy schlock we usually get around here (he says affectionately). So go, check out some new books from our lovely commenters and lurkers. Read, enjoy, leave reviews, spread the word.

Now, a few housekeeping notes. First, I am not Sarah Hoyt. The emails for the promo post do not go to her; queries for her appended to a promo submission are unlikely to reach her, since I generally assemble these posts at an ungodly hour Friday night and haven’t the brainspace for anything more. Second, all I need for a promo submission is a link to the listing online. I get everything I need there. If you want a different blurb than what’s on Amazon (or wherever), go ahead and include that. If you want to send me large stacks of unmarked, non-sequential bills, that can be arranged, but is not required. Lastly, some of you have contacted me about editing services. I would love to, and you’re welcome to get in line if you insist, but I’m already a year overdue with one of my favorite clients because I cannot seem to keep that many balls in the air. I love having a regular paycheck, but the workload is significant, and I’ve failed at squeezing in editing time. Mea maxima culpa. Here endeth the housekeeping. Now, all of you go read books! As always, future promo entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

Available boiled, fried, and occasionally stewing

Elizabeth Bruner

Copper Visions

Injured in a mining accident, Sophie was given a new life with mechanical arms. When she’s caught up in a plot that requires her new arms, or the technology behind them, she enlists the help of a mechanical friend. When the skeletons in his closet come out to dance, they realize they have more enemies than they first thought.

Their first mission is to escape those who would take them apart to see how they work.

M. S. O’Brien

Commentary on the Apocalypse (Translated): Part 2 – Four Horses and the Lamb

More of Beatus of Liebana’s massive commentary on the Book of Revelation! Part 2 covers the interpretation of Chapters 4-7, along with a little bit of Chapter 8, as John sees the Lamb unseal six out of seven seals. Beatus also examines the meaning of various signs of the Apocalypse, the meaning of the number six, the six ages of the world, possible calculations of the date of the world’s ending, and why it’s not a good idea to trust such calculations. Includes an appendix translating various mentions of Beatus by his contemporaries, extensive footnoting and bibliography of Beatus’ sources, and a big index of his Bible citations.

Martin Wilsey

The Broken Cage

Solstice 31 Saga Book 2

The deep space survey ship Ventura entered orbit and was immediately destroyed. Commander James Worthington and his crew were flying escort when the savage attack hit.

With his ship heavily damaged and half of his crew dead Worthington finds refuge on the dark side of this planet’s moon.

Plagued with threats from all around he finds his old friend Barcus and tries to bring the remaining survivors together as a team before time runs out.

C.J. Carella

Decisively Engaged

Warp Marine Corps Book 1

They picked a fight with the wrong species.

A NATION AT WAR: The United Stars of America. Born in the conflagration of unprovoked alien attack, the newest entrant to galactic politics took the few crumbs of hypertech gifted to it and ran with them, soon expanding over dozens of star systems and establishing a wide trade network, protected by its powerful Navy and the dreaded Warp Marines.

A FIGHT TO THE DEATH: A single Marine platoon, tasked with protecting an embassy on a hostile alien planet. An embassy – and the human enclave around it – that soon finds itself surrounded by armed mobs. Can the Marines and a ragtag band of civilian and Navy personnel survive long enough to be rescued?

WARNING: Contains violence, strong language and adult content

SPECIAL HOLIDAY SALE: Decisively Engaged will be on sale until January 10, after which its price will go up to $3.99

Aztecs Next Door? Freedom and Neighbors

Alma Boykin

What are the limits of certain rights? If we take the Declaration of Independence at face value, and accept that certain rights are granted by the fact of our existence as humans, including “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” how do we square government limitations on practices that are also protected?

I use the example of Aztecs next door when I talk in class about reasonable limits on certain rights, notably the First Amendment. Setting aside the original definition of established churches, can a government limit or prohibit certain worship practices? If so, why? Or why not?

A bit of back ground on Aztec religion is probably in order, because knowing their cosmology explains some of the practices that their neighbors and the Spanish found to be a bit distasteful, either because of the problem of scale or for other reasons. The call for blood sacrifice is common to all Aztec creation stories, and even Quetzalcoatl offers his own blood, although he does not demand that others’ die for him. The story below is one example:

According to the Aztec creation stories, when the time came for a fifth sun to come into existence, none of the gods wanted to take the part. Becoming the sun involved, among other things, throwing yourself into a fire. When a volunteer was not forthcoming, the gods picked one of their number, Nanahuatl, a deity afflicted with (among other things) a skin disease, and insisted that he take the job. He agreed rather reluctantly, and after undergoing self-torture to purify himself, jumped into the fire, descended to the Land of the Dead and then became the sun. And then he stopped, hovering over the edge of the world and refusing to budge. When the gods told him to move, he refused, having become a lot more powerful than they were. They begged him, to which he replied that he would only do his part if they allowed themselves to be sacrificed and their hearts cut out. They refused and then threatened him, but he destroyed the Morning Star, the spirit sent against him. At this the other spirits gave up and allowed themselves to be sacrificed. Because the gods gave their blood for the lives of all creatures, according to the Aztecs, it was the least humans could do to repay the gift by offering blood and lives to keep the sun fed.

The Aztecs’ other gods also required human lives, as did the gods of the Maya, Toltec, and Inca (on a smaller scale). So too the gods of the Pawnee and other North American groups, but what set the Central American deities apart was the scale of the required sacrifices. We used to think that the Spanish exaggerated when they talked about thousands of people being offered to the gods at a single festival. It turns out that they were correct. And Aztec nobles (and others) made daily blood offerings via techniques I won’t mention here. You can look them up on your own. Suffice it to say that the Aztecs’ neighbors had very good reasons to want to be rid of the Aztec hegemony, and high taxes were not the only cause.

So, what does this have to do with modern government restrictions on rights? What would you do if a group moved into town, got permits for a step-pyramid (or sacred well) and started sacrificing humans to Tlaloc or Tezcatlipoca? They keep the skull rack indoors, and the priest does not wear the flayed skin outside the walls of the holy precinct, but still . . . You would call the police to report a murder. But what if the group is the First Reconstituted Aztec Church (Reformed), duly registered with the IRS et al as a religious group, and they swear that if they do not sacrifice people, the sun will not rise in the morning. And all their “victims” have been willing (or so the chief priests claim, and they have signed hold-harmless forms and legal released stating so.) Your town or city would probably whip up a new law saying that human sacrifice, for any reason, is illegal within municipal limits, and the county would do likewise.

Can that be done? Or does human sacrifice come under the clause of murder (or manslaughter)? What if the victim is willing, supposedly?

Replace human with animal and you have a legal quandary faced by the residents of Hialeah, FL some years back, in a case that ended up at the Supreme Court. A croup of Santeria practitioners, the Church of Lukumi Babaly Aye, wanted to build a new worship facility, school, and museum. Because Santeria requires animal sacrifice, the neighbors of the proposed worship and cultural complex balked, and the City of Hialeah drew up a new ordinance, augmenting extant rules against animal sacrifice that had allowed certain exemptions for kosher and halal slaughter. The new law was so worded that it obviously was an attempt to block the Santeria practitioners. They in turn sued on grounds of infringement of religion and the case went the the Supreme Court (Church of the Lukumi-Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah 508 U.S. 520 (1993).)

To quote http://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/exercise-religious-practices-rule-law:

(Kennedy, J.) Justice Kennedy concluded that the local laws violated the Free Exercise Clause because they were designed to persecute or oppress a religion or its practices.

The Free Exercise Clause provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” “The Free Exercise Clause commits government itself to religious tolerance, and upon even slight suspicion that proposals for state intervention stem from animosity to religion or distrust of it practices, all officials must pause to remember their own high duty to the Constitution and to the rights it secures.” Accordingly, “legislators may not devise mechanisms, overt or disguised to persecute or oppress a religion or its practice.” Under the constitution, a law that is not neutral, but targets a specific action, and that does not apply generally to all people, but targets a specific group, must be justified by a compelling governmental interest and narrowly tailored to advance that interest.

The Court held that the purpose of the laws was to suppress the Santeria religion. The only conduct subject to the ordinances was animal sacrifice, the central element of the Santeria worship services, and they were therefore not neutral. The Court also held that the ordinances were not of general applicability but selectively targeted to conduct motivated by religious belief. [End of Quote]

Having waded through that, you are probably nodding a little in agreement with the Court, even if you find animal sacrifice distasteful, unnecessary, primitive, or cruel. Interestingly, Justice Souter, although in agreement with the majority, pointed out that the Court skipped over the possibility of a law that was broadly applicable and just happened by accident to interfere with worship: which is the case of our (hypothetical) First Reconstituted Aztec Church (Reformed).

Outside of S. M. Sterling and other writers’ imaginations, I really do not think that anyone wants to bring back Aztec traditional worship, even those who call out for the “return” of “Aztlan” to the Indigenous Peoples of the Southwest. In part, I suspect they would suffer unfortunate accidents that their neighbors never happened to see or hear despite taking place in the middle of a block party. I also suspect, uncharitable person that I am, that the would-be neoAztec leaders have zero desire to endure the daily self torture and mutilation required by their desired positions.

But it raises an interesting question. Animal sacrifice is allowed under the First Amendment, because to forbid it interferes with the free exercise of worship. What about human sacrifice?

Despite strident denials there are large numbers of people who are Marxists without knowing they are Marxists.  In fact, it is because they’ve never read Marx or studied economics that they’re not aware of how much of their world-view is Marxist.  Well, that and because the Marxists took advantage of mass-media, mass-education and mass-entertainment to pound into their heads a uniform Marxist message that became what “Everybody knows.”

Yes, I imagine for some of them it is shocking to find themselves called Marxist when they’re just signaling they’re educated and have all the right thoughts by repeating everything their teachers told them was the “right” (left) way to think.  But let’s not forget the number of them who (not here, of course) also defend “Marxist” everything from economics to literary analysis as the best thing evah.  (And call us ignorant because we don’t like ideologies that killed a hundred million people, even though their professors ASSURED them that it’s never really been tried.)

However, as annoying as they are, they are not nearly as deluded as the children of Rousseau who have never read Rousseau and might not even know he existed.

But every possible portion of the media-industrial complex has blared at them a combined sense that Nature is always better and that one should go back to the simple ol’ days.  (BTW it’s amazing how many of these people are vileprogs, who keep telling us we can’t go back to taking the bill of rights seriously becaus e”times have changed”.)

I’ll forgive those of you who are devotees of camping.  I do sort of understand that most of you grew up with indoor bathrooms, warm water on demand, refrigerators, and enjoy camping as a break from modern life, simpler but not too scary.  So, rest easy.  I won’t even blame that on Rousseau.

No, what I want to blame on Rousseau or at least his misguided grandchildren, are the mother and daughter who sat next to us on Tuesday while we waiting for a table for burgers.  You see, I was writing late, and we needed food, and I didn’t feel like having leftover turkey.

Unfortunately, apparently, everyone had a rush to Red Robin at the same time.  (Okay, possibly it was the local buy one get one free special.  What can I say?  We’re cheap.)

So we were sitting there, and there’s a family with elementary schoolers right next to me, and the little girl is babbling about a project she did for school and how she wrote about the downside of technology.  Stuff like how people now just spend time talking on their cellphones, instead of connecting to each other.  And how they only talk to each other through the computer, instead of going out.

I excused this.  (I know, I know, how magnanimous of me.)  She was maybe 10, and you know, that’s the stuff they teach them in school (which is the point.)

BUT…. but then her mother chimed in.  She started talking about how much better life was without the internet.  How people wrote letters and visited family.

This was the point at which I decided I had a terrible need to go to the door and look at the snow outside.  Because it wasn’t this woman’s fault.  It’s what she heard starting when she was her daughter’s age or less.

I even understand it.  I understand the “nostalgia for simpler times”, something that has affected the super-wealthy forever.  And our society IS super wealthy.

So, in defense of the internet:

Yeah, we no longer write letters.  I’m cool with that.  Why should I hanker for the long lines at the post office.  Not to mention that when I wrote letters, I wrote super-long letters and it cost me a lot of money.

Nowadays I keep in touch with several friends via email, and via phone texting, too. I keep in touch with them regardless of where they are, and they get my messages instantly.

Then there is instant messenger, various forms of, which allow me to have very close friends who live halfway across the world.  And then there are ebooks, blogs, the ability to reach the reading public without having to go through the gatekeepers of the industrial-news-entertainment complex.

I remember when just talking to other writers was a difficult thing, particularly writers at my level, when I started getting published.

Beyond all that, and regardless of what one thinks of just-in-time technologies and others, and beyond the world of communication online, the internet, internet shopping and internet ordering has made it possible to cater to individual necessities, not just the average.

Take my older son.  Depending on how the shoes are shaped, he wears either 15 EEE or 17 EEE.  His feet grew to that size at 13.  The city we lived in didn’t have any stores which carried that size, or at least not regularly.  So finding shoes for him meant a trip to Denver and even then it was uncertain.

Now?  Well, I order from Amazon, because it’s convenient. But failing that I could order from a hundred places on line.  The thing is, people are making these shoes, and we are buying them.  Oh, and they’re cheaper than they were in the “good old days.”

And in defense of modern days, if I must make one:

Rousseau might have thought we’d have been happier naked and eating whatever grew naturally around us, but I can tell you, even though we were relatively well off for the village, life was not exactly fun in unheated houses, where electricity was sporadic, and where everything you do in life took a lot of work.

Most people lived worse off than us and lived on the edge of survival.

I like living in a house that’s heated, where I turn on the switch and the light comes on, where I have a working refrigerator, hot and cold water and (this is very important) plumbing so we don’t have to use a guzzunder and the house doesn’t smell.

Other things I like, in random order and not limited: aspirin, anti histamines, antibiotics, comfortable shoes, comfortable clothes, an embarrassing choice of entertainment from books to movies to music.  I can go 100 miles whenever we feel like it AND we don’t have to take the whole day to do it.  Oh, yeah, and if we need to go across the world, we take a plane, instead of a steam ship that takes weeks.

We can fly through the air, we live healthy lives a very long time, longer than our ancestors dreamed of, and we live lives even kings couldn’t dream of 100 years ago.  The world is our oyster.  And possibly our clam and our mussel too.

But all the children of Rousseau can say is that “Things were better before.”  I.e. in the days they never experienced; in the days when they would be either dead or servants, according to predominant likelihood.

So, let’s burn Rousseau in effigy and enjoy what we have.

Heroes Are Made, Not Born – Christopher Nuttall

Every so often, I come across an argument that, to borrow a line from Samuel Johnston, is ‘not worth the dignity of a rational response.’ Such arguments tend to be full of strawman arguments, pre-emptive accusations of Bad Thinking or Wrong Fun and generally are not worth the effort of countering their claims. And yet, the sheer prevalence of wrong-headed arguments demands an answer, if only to counter the strawman arguments and stereotypes that are otherwise used to taint people whose only crime is disagreeing with the elites.

One such article, in the New Statesman, had the depressing title of ‘What to do when you’re not the hero anymore.’ To summarise, the author believes there is a backlash against characters who are anything, but straight white males. That the mere prospect of a Black!Hermione Granger is enough to make fans outraged. (I haven’t heard many complaints.) That Rey is disliked by some aspects of the Star Wars fandom because she’s a woman. That forcing white men to identify with heroes who are not straight white males is regarded as an offence against the natural order.

It was depressingly easy to cut through the crap and see the flaw in the author’s arguments.

Following this logic, I must not like Will Smith. And yet, Men In Black and Men In Black III are among my favourite movies. When I watched Independence Day as a teenager, I wanted to be the jet fighter pilot; not the computer geek, or the president, or the slimy government official, or the UFO nut. And I must absolutely dislike Ben Sisko, even though he’s actually perhaps the most well-rounded captain in Star Trek. Mickey Smith wasn’t called the bravest human in Doctor Who for nothing, you know. Must I detest him?

While I’m at it, I shouldn’t enjoy reading Honour Harrington, which features a female starship captain.

But I do. Ergo, the author’s logic is flawed. And, in choosing to ascribe the worst possible motivations to the detractors, she undermines her own argument.

There are two aspects that should be considered. The first is that adapting source material is always a challenge. One has to please the fans, fans who will already have an impression of a character from the books. (And, in Hermione’s case, she was clearly depicted as white on the covers of Harry Potter 3 and 7.) JK Rowling supported the very white Emma Watson to play Hermione in the movies. It seems a little odd, to say the least, to change the character’s colour now.

Strange as it may seem, fans invest themselves in their fandoms. Fans come up with mental impressions of their characters that match what they’re told in the books – and, also, what they see in the movies. They find it hard to understand, therefore, why a character changes race and wonder, given the general tone of our PC era, if the actor was chosen for PC reasons as she doesn’t fit their mental impression of Hermione.

Let me reverse it for you. Peter Grant, the main character of the Rivers of London series (Ben Aaronovitch), is mixed-race. He’s described, several times, as a very dark man. Now, what if someone were to have him portrayed by David Tennant? It wouldn’t fit! Tennant is a great actor, but he just doesn’t look like anyone’s mental impression of Grant. Is it racist to insist on having Peter played by Will Smith or a slightly aged Noel Clarke?

Of course not. Nor is it racist to raise eyebrows at the casting of characters who don’t fit the established image. It’s merely human nature.

But there is a second point that should also be born in mind – the Mary Sue.

There are, in essence, two different Mary Sue tropes. The first is the self-insert, the story where the author goes to Hogwarts and befriends Harry (or is Harry.) The second is the character who is simply too good to be true.

Let me consider an example from Atlas Shrugged. Francisco d’Anconia is, without a doubt, a Mary Sue, Class II. Francisco is not just good, he’s super-good. Even as a child, he’s literally far more advanced and capable than Dagny, Eddie or James. Rand goes into raptures of prose describing his superhuman attributes, to the point where I wind up feeling sorry for James when he is effortlessly outclassed time and time again.

The problem with Francisco is two-fold. First, he is never seen to struggle, he is never seen to grow into a superhuman adult. Child-Francisco is just as precocious, smug and annoying as Adult-Francisco. Second, Francisco is effortlessly good at everything. He is, quite simply, too good to be true. Atlas Shrugged is not short on Mary Sue-like characters, but Francisco is far and away the worst offender.

Honour Harrington, by contrast, is not a Mary Sue. When we first meet her, she is in her early forties and taking over command of her second starship. We do not see her join the navy and rise in the ranks (at least not at that point), but there are strong reasons to ground her greatness in the real world. She does not test our suspension of disbelief to breaking point, unlike Francisco d’Anconia and his ilk, and she actually grows as a character over the series, while Francisco has literally nowhere to go. Indeed, as David Weber points out in this essay, Honour’s flaws are actually easy to discern if you bother to look.

The issue at hand is not the inclusion of characters who are not straight white males. The issue at hand is if those characters are real people or Mary Sues.

To paraphrase Robert Heinlein, don’t write [non-straight white male] characters, write characters who happen to be [non-straight white male].

If your character is good, you have to justify it. You don’t have to do much – you can tell everyone your character is a Navy SEAL, explaining his fighting skills, without having to go over his training in exhaustive detail – but you do have to do something. And your character needs to be human. They need to make mistakes, even if such mistakes are outside their competence zone (like Honour Harrington).

If your character is to be [non-straight white male], you cannot let that swallow up the plot. Nor can you afford allowing your character to become perfect, simply because they are a [non-straight white male]. One of the reasons Men In Black is such a good movie is because Agent J makes mistakes and learns from them, instead of being absolutely perfect in every way. Oscar Munroe of Pandora’s Star and its sequels is a great gay character because his homosexuality is merely mentioned in passing – it certainly isn’t a plot point.

There are two other problems that writers need to learn to avoid. The first is allowing one’s [non-straight white male] to shine at the expense of a [straight white male]. Movie-Hermione gains, at least in part, because she keeps stealing lines given (by Rowling) to Ron. I have a feeling that the proliferation of Ron The Death Eater fan fiction stories owes a great deal to Movie-Ron, who is (at best) the comic relief and (at worst) a cowardly jerk. One could quite reasonably ask why Movie-Harry is friends with Movie-Ron, when there are good reasons in the books, or why Movie-Hermione would marry him. Book-Ron is perhaps the most human of the trio; Book-Hermione is a person who has very clear and fundamental flaws. And yet Movie-Hermione is lessened by her effortless superiority over Ron (and by having her harder edges smoothed down).

The second is allowing one’s character to become insufferable, the sort of person whose presence is resented even when he’s needed. Francisco d’Anconia certainly fits into this mould, but so does Ia – the heroine of Theirs Not To Reason Why. Her skills do come with an explanation, unlike so many other characters, yet she is very much an insufferable character. She is simply unlikable.

Readers and viewers don’t want characters who look like them, I think. I don’t think there are many readers who care about such details. They want well-rounded characters, characters with their strengths and weaknesses, characters who rise above their flaws to become true heroes. Rico of Starship Troopers, Agent J of Men In Black, Princess Leia, Honour Harrington … they are true heroes, because they are human.

They’re not there because of diversity. They’re there because they’re heroes.

And ascribing the worst possible motives to fans who question a diversity character merely annoys people.

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A few days ago, I was notified that Vile 666 had agreed with me on something, which means I — of course — immediately checked myself to make sure I wasn’t off track.

No, I was still right about the mechanics of collapse not happening in the way it’s shown in the movies, ie. what I refer to fondly as a Mad Max future.  At any rate, and to make me stop doubting myself, they made a disparaging comment about my still having a problem with communism.

When I was told this (I don’t actually have time to waste on these sites, and if I did, I still wouldn’t because I’d rather be writing) it struck me as very funny.  Because, I mean, come on, let’s toll the bell of communist successes, from the Cultural Revolution to the Stalinist purges, from Holodomor to the immiseration of Cuba.

My first thought was Yeah, it sure is weird that I have a problem with such an ideology.  It would be like having a problem with the Aztec religion or the charming Carthaginian practice of baking babies en croute as an offering to the gods.

And then I remembered well meaning leftist/pagan friends who argued violently that the Aztecs had been innocent pacifists and that the Carthaginian’s had been maligned by the Catholic church (this was modified to “the Romans” when I pointed out their slight chronological slippage.

In fact, if you google either the Aztec sacrifices and/or the Carthaginian baby-killing you get varying degrees of apologist.

The Aztec ones because more recent, and I suppose more archeologically undeniable/well known are dressed up as “but they really believed this was needed.”  (Yes, and Charlie Manson really believed he was bringing about a race war that would bring about paradise.  Does this mean he’s innocent?)  The Carthaginian ones are blamed on everyone’s misreporting or the numerous Tophets still unearthed in the Iberian peninsula (I always suspected there was one under the heart of the village, because of regional names that indicate a Carthaginian cultic center.  I probably could point the right spot to archaeologists, though I’d frankly rather not know) and other Carthaginian colonies are either someone else’s problem attributed to the Carthaginians OR on this being a place to dispose of dead babies, but not sacrificed babies.  The archaeology of such sites makes this poppycock, of course, but our fuzzier fellow westerners hold on to this because it allows them to hold on to their idea of the noble savage, that creature who was never guilty of aggression, slavery or murder, unlike we, evil westerners.  (Jean Jacques Rosseau should be burned in effigy every year, for crimes against humanity.)

So if I say something about the horror that was the Aztec religion or the Carthaginian religion, they’ll jump all over me as racist (well, Carthaginians did settle in the North of Africa and probably were as tan as… as I am.)  Because these people in their heads are “little brown people” and therefore innocent of the manyfold sins of humanity, which are, of course, part of white privilege.  Or something.

In the same way I realized they were upset about my reviling of communists because what they are thinking of are not the same communists I’m thinking of.

No, the communists they are defending, the ones that they don’t wish maligned, are the communists they knew at college, which were probably the same communists I knew at college.  (Well, not the same, let’s face it, while I’m no spring chicken, most of these people could spot me ten to twenty years.  But the same model, give or take.)

They are the young men and women who don’t fit in, who continually critique the status quo.  Some of them are actually compassionate, quick to stick up for the underdog.  Some of them engage in extensive charity, or give money to beggars.  Others are more faux-charitable, and yell at you for using the wrong word to refer to the victim of the week, or concoct elaborate narratives to explain how the latest mass murderer is really a victim.

These people were often some variety of “cool” — in my day this involved peasant blouses and elaborate tapestry jackets, the later mostly for the boys — and more often than not from very wealthy backgrounds.

In my day too, they organized protests in solidarity with the people of Mozambique or Angola, the same people at that time being massacred in batch lots by Cuban guerrillas in the pay of the Soviet Union.  But of course, they were supposed to have a revolutionary government and so everything was okay.  In my day — and now — they wore t-shirts with Che Guevara whom they idolized as a sort of communist hippie (even in those days this was unforgivable, but now that the full history of this psychopath is available for anyone to read, including the glee with which he killed students [more on this later] this is frankly inexcusable.)

In their day, too, probably, since the left has ensconced itself in Academia, they met more of these “radical sons” that fit the model laid out by Agatha Christie, in a book whose title evades me just now: he read the Daily Worker and he lectured everyone about the rights of the workers and the coming Communist revolution, but really he was just an upper class Brit and had even secretly married his girlfriend.

Agatha Christie nurtures a certain fondness for this type of character, which comes through in her writing, and I even understand it.  Some of the nicer people I met growing up, some of the people I grew up with were of this mold.  The “communism” was a trendy veneer, to look “intelligent” and to afford the opportunity to critique everything, but at heart they were decent human beings.

They were however adolescent (or just past) human beings.  There is an age at which people naturally are at odds with everything around them, and communism offers a framework for this.

Other philosophies offer a frame work for this.  Mine at the time was rather chaotic and anarchic and later hardened into hard core Libertarianism, which was blown apart by 9/11.

However, of all the prisms that adolescents use to critique their world, Marxism has proven the most persistent pathology and also (that I know) the only one that has managed to fill 100 000 000 graves (a number the Colonel tells me is lowball, and it might very well be.)

Yeah, okay, so the mass deaths aren’t caused by the sort of college Marxists I described.  Except when they are, of course.

What I mean is that a lot of the most horrible things done by communists (and the less horrible but still terrible things done by socialists who kill economies softy and destroy futures in the name of equality) are done by people who started out exactly like those “radical sons” (and daughters) who were communists, but still decent human beings.

The philosophy itself, with its flaws, drives them to either greater radicalization OR…  to the wall.

You see, Marxism’s great flaw is its misunderstanding of economics.

But Sarah, you’ll say, how can economics fill that many mass graves?

Well, see, the great ink stained angry blot (which is how someone described Marx as a human being) understood about as much of economics as my cat understands of rhetoric.  Maybe less.

What he principally understood — in a life spent mooching off wealthy friends — is that he was done wrong! And that in a just world he would command a lot more power and money, but particularly power.

There are many errors in his damned (literally) theory, but the most important of them is that he visualized wealth as a closed pie.

Unfortunately this appeals to a certain instinctive human understanding of wealth, because in the hominid band there were only so many berries, or mammoth haunches and if someone was boggarting the food they were the villain.

If wealth really were a closed pie (nonsense on its face, else, our ancestors in the caves were all far wealthier than us, since there are more of us) then everyone who has more than average is by definition stealing.  And everyone who has less than average is by definition a victim.

And the implication that things are badly arranged appeals to every adolescent, EVER, particularly the wealthy ones who have more time to contemplate how they should have a lot more of whatever the heck other people have and they don’t: power or race cars, women/men or prestige.

The philosophy, in fact, appeals to anyone who is envious of others.  I remember reading a biography of the sainted (ptui) Evita saying that knowing there were rich people in the world made her unhappy.  This is a sentiment you see oft repeated by communists and their soft-sisters, the socialists.  Our very own president said that even if raising taxes decreased the amount collected (which it does, after a point) it was still “the right thing to do.”

Marxism/Communism/Socialism, by its belief in the closed pie, takes envy and removes all stigma from it, conferring upon it the power of a sacrament.

The problem with that is that envy is not just considered a sin by some religions, and is not just “a bad thing, ‘mkay” — envy is poison to the character.  When you make envy “righteous” and “justified” you empower people to completely wash their hands of any of their failings.  It’s not their fault “it’s the system.”  They’re only not rich because “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”  It has nothing to do with their lack of application, talent or effort, no, it’s all “the man is keeping me down.”

Even if you start out sane, that way of thinking will slowly corrode anything worth saving in you.  Just by virtue of sanctifying envy, you’re going to start uplifting the despicable and hating the admirable.

If you want to figure out how slippery that slope is, just ask your “nice” communist friends (or even socialist friends) what they think of Mao, Stalin, Che, the Kims, and watch them make excuses.

Worse, though, is that this sort of philosophy, by its very nature attracts the crazy.  Of those, those who never grow past teen whining are the least threat.  They continue wearing their cool bandannas and complaining against the man, in their academic jobs.  But a certain number of those who present that way simply see that environment as a good one to hide.  And those are the certifiable psychopaths.  We’ll call them the Ches.

These are people who genuinely want power and who often want to kill people.  Because the philosophy enshrines those who are angry, and those who are envious, it leaves people with no defenses before these psychopaths.

Any philosophy that requires no personal sacrifice, no personal work, but just louder denunciations of “the enemy” is going to grow these like brambles.

And when people give power to communists, whom they imagine to be like those communists they knew in college, what they end up with is Che, or Mao, Stalin (no, Lenin wasn’t much better, he just disguised it more and didn’t get to the massive purges.)

Which is why eventually all communist revolutions end up as a sort of fanatic and sanguinary top-down hereditary monarchy, like the Kims in North Korea or the Castros in Cuba.  Unless of course the would be titular is too crazy even to establish an hereditary monarchy in which case you get fascist states like China.

The decent ones among those college “communists”?  The ones who really thought this was for the downtrodden, and who confused the Communist party with the order of St. Francis D’Assissi?

Those usually end up as splatter against whatever wall the Ches are using to satisfy their psychopathic urges.

So yes, I DO have it in for communism.  Yes, I am against Marxism.  Given the amount of poverty, death and desolation the philosophy dreamed up by the crazed scribbler has caused, I don’t see what other position is moral or sane.

I disapprove most heartily of a hundred million untimely deaths.  I disapprove of killing people and taking their stuff.

If you don’t, you should ask yourself why not, and precisely what is wrong with you.

The World on a Dinner Platter – Cedar Sanderson

It always comes back to food. It’s not just my personal pleasure in cooking, eating, and feeding others. It is literally the foundation of the human condition: good food and plenty of it.

I’m currently studying the history of the world, prior to 1500. In the first chapter of the book we were assigned to read, the point is made that humans have been around for a very long time, it took a long time to develop agriculture, but there weren’t many of them pre-agriculture. The crux of the matter is the ability to grow more food than you could hunt, or gather, in a small group. Large groups, which would build societies and cities, simply could not exist on a subsistence diet.

One of my classmates, in a discussion forum, stated that humans were desperate for nutrients and one of the main ways to get food was to graze which made me do a head-desk, and then start thinking. We take abundant food for granted. The child (in college, but still, a child) who seems to think that humans grazed on grass in pre-history has no doubt never missed a meal in their life unless it was by choice. The world we live in offers enough variety, enough abundance, that people can be ‘vegan’ and still survive, although thriving and being healthy are different matters.

The book tells me that women didn’t have as many children before agriculture, and that’s why population was lower. I snort and mutter something impolite under my breath. In reality hunter-gatherers have more in common with herds of animals, and again, it’s about the food. They were reliant on what was growing right there, right then. They had no way of producing a surplus nor of storing same. If they overhunted an area they were forced to move or die. If the tribe’s population grew too large, they starved or succumbed to disease, just like a deer herd or the snowshoe hare population collapses every few years to build slowly back up, limited by the supply of available food.

Humans lived that way for a very long time. Women having less babies? Probably, only it wasn’t through some kind of arcane desire to keep the population down. It was through the lack of food – nursing a child in the modern era is not terribly effective birth control, but in the time of subsistence the woman’s body simply couldn’t handle the dual load of nursing and pregnancy. I became pregnant with two of my children while nursing full time, I can speak to the enormous drain it is even on a well-fed body.

Because it’s fat. I have fat, on me, and in my diet. Fat is something you just don’t see prior to agriculture, and there’s a reason so many cultures revere the plump woman (just look at all the Venus statues from around the world). A fat woman could have babies and she could survive nursing and this meant the family could go on. And while we’re on the makin’ babies topic, here’s something: my history book laments the rise of the patriarchy alongside the rise of civilization after agriculture, constraining women and making them be under the thumb of the male. Well, that’s not patriarchy, that’s food. Men could hunt, and bring in the meat that was desperately needed for survival. Women gathered, but the men were the hunters.

Why didn’t the women hunt? Well, babies. Pregnant, nursing, malnourished…. The women were managing all they could, and the men were taking care of them. Women were better able to survive (yes, I am counting death in childbirth) in that harsh world than men were. Men were a valuable commodity in a time when hunting and protection of the tribe-family against others who wanted the same food they needed to live menaced the women and children. Female infanticide was practiced long before recorded history, evidence shows. Men were more valuable to the hunter-gatherers and it wasn’t even questioned it seems. But my history book complains that it was the rise of civilization post-agriculture that was to blame for the oppression of women and the gender inequality. Prior to ‘society’ it claims men and women were equal.

In reality, it’s all about the food. Only with the surplus of food that came with agriculture, and the animal husbandry it made possible, was civilization able to finally happen after long eons of death through starvation. While the hunter-gatherers had no ‘cushion’ against hard times, in a social setting people had a surplus and could support more people in one place through the creation of agriculture and other innovations. Cities came from towns, and villages, as the populations grew. As societies grew, the complexity of interpersonal relationships also grew. Men and women’s roles changed with each level of ‘class’ that developed, as did the concept of childhood, education, and family. Politics developed, conflicts grew into wars with the attendant need for armies. The concept of taxation came about to support the cities as they grew too large to draw from personal relationships with the farmers who produced the food. Money came into being as easier to handle than exchange of goods, and along with it, writing to record those exchanges.

From the perspective of epidemiology, disease came into its own. First, in the small agricultural hamlets where people lived with their animals, in the form of zoonosis transmitted to humans from other hosts. Later, in epidemics that raged through populations which would have been too diffuse to be affected at this level before cities were a thing. Also, people were no longer moving away from their own wastes. The balance of increasing population pressures against increased population support through agriculture and community is, in hindsight, obviously tilted toward a growing population but that wasn’t always clear in the past. There were times it looked like a close-run between collapse of civilization and a return to subsistence. In the end, the food was the weight on the balance toward success of mankind.

Despite plagues, and wars, though, humans just got bigger and better with the access to food. In fact, I would argue that the predominance of Western Civilization on world history is not due to some weird conspiracy, but to food. Or rather, the kinds and abundances of certain foods. Looking at a map of the rise of what my book calls “First Civilizations” you promptly see that several arose in disparate areas at about the same time (very roughly, but we’re talking in hundreds if not thousands of years here). One combined and arose out of two, and dominated global history. Indo-European civilizations had access to more variety of foodstuffs, and more of it. This led to the freedom of humanity to learn, explore, and express themselves in lasting ways.

More variety of food offers the benefit of not depending on one crop overmuch. We can look into modern history at the potato famine for a facile example (although there were also socio-political things going on there). Areas where only two or three staples grew plentifully were more vulnerable to viroids or other plant diseases, weather, and (don’t hit me!) climate change. Contrary to current urban legend, climate change is indeed a thing, and has been, independent of any human factor, for as long as mankind has been around and longer. It’s just that now we have the hubris to blame those changes on ourselves in some bizarre ritual of self-flagellation.

More plentiful food was a fluke of geographic location, mostly. The Nile River, with its gentle annual floods, was the breadbasket of the West. The Fertile Crescent was also, to a lesser extent, able to support a higher population level than dreamed possible as recent archaeological discoveries have shown. Look up Gobleki Tepe sometime, it is utterly fascinating.

Napoleon said that an army marched on its stomach, which always evoked an odd slug-like mental image to me. But it is equally true that the human condition rose on the belly of the well-fed man. Cities, wealth, power, vast libraries of knowledge, and it’s all because of a good dinner and a big pot of beer to chase it down with.

Yeah, I do have posts from Cedar and (I think) from Amanda waiting, but I woke up late, and so everything went by the way side and as you know I don’t like to put their posts up late.

For those who would worry about the slip ups in posting, the problem has been that for two weeks I’ve had all three guys at home.  An unaccustomed delight, but everything slips sideways and upside down.

Today I’m late because everyone returned to work/school, which included waking up at five am with younger son rummaging in the kitchen, looking for SOMETHING.  D*mned if I know what.  I remember waking up, coming down, and he said “I wanted to make sure I had–”  And then I think I just sleep-walked my way back to bed.

Now note above, I’m telling you a lot about my family.  I don’t mind that.  but believe it or not, I’m also very careful to make sure I never give out information that can lead to tracking us down/stopping us on the street or at a public event, or even coming to see us…

Let me explain that I don’t fear/despise my fans.  In fact, every time I met you lot, from conventions to just accidental bumping into each other, you’re by and large a pleasure.

And then let me explain that I never wanted fame.  I wanted fortune (sigh, don’t we all) but I’m by nature an introvert.  I am one of those few who handle themselves okay in person, but I still don’t LIKE to be out in public.

To finish let me add that while I love my fans, I really hate stalkers.  And before any of you who corresponds with me floods my pm or email saying “have I stalked?” No, you haven’t.  When I say stalkers, I MEAN stalkers.  As in, people who trace me, in real life, who follow me around, who camp in front of my house, and who would get a restraining order if we couldn’t get them to go away by any other means.

I seem to attract those, and did so BEFORE I had enough fans to fill a large room.  This is weird, as it’s been so long since I was young and beautiful that Ray Bradbury’s dictum that the old were never children seems about right to me.  (Even though I’m more middle-middle aged, but whatevs.)

What I say even on my blog is carefully contrived to make sure you don’t actually know where myself and the family are going to go/be at any given time because of those few (VERY FEW, to date about 7 people have been a problem) insane people.  For instance, if we’re going to go up to Denver and to Pete’s, I’m certainly not announcing it here.  If I have do say I’m doing something (i.e. why post is late) I’ll say something else.

Look, sure, if you haunt Pete’s, sooner or later you’ll see a gaggle of Hoyts come in.  In the same way if you haunt the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  Sooner or later, you’ll see two, or three or even all four of us come in.  (In the later case you can recognize us by the semi-permanent rolling argument.)

However, if I’m out with the family it’s family time and not fan time.  It’s a different head space.  So, unless I make arrangements to meet one or the other of you (I must meet the one of you in Aurora next time I’m up there) it’s probably not a good time.  The normal etiquette for that is to approach, introduce yourself, and if the family says “No, come on, sit down” then it’s fine.

I LIKE and even trust most of you.

But I’ve had to deal with insulating various circles of acquaintance.  Until I know you decently enough, you’re not allowed to the inner circle, where you could probably trace me, the kids and the pets without any trouble.  In between that and the polite smile and autograph there’s layers of circles.

(BTW part of the reason I have no pictures of Greebo is that he used to be an outdoor cat, which means he was vulnerable.  Okay, being basically a chainsaw who purrs not that vulnerable, but still.)

I hate the necessity of this, and it makes me vulnerable, in a way, too.  Because what happens is that if anyone reports anything to me, something going on in fandom at large I’m likely to believe that person, particularly if it’s a fellow writer.  (For the idiots making hay of RAH believing MZB about her no good, very bad, craptastic second husband.  I can see this happening more easily than you can imagine.)

Part of this, too, is that people have started treating me like I’m someone special.  This is bizarre to me, as I’m just a chick who writes some stuff.  But the number of people who approach me on bended knee and are careful of what they say about me completely baffles me.

So–

Things you should realize: if I don’t give you my home address it doesn’t mean I think you’re a stalker.  It means that in the past people have naively given my address out to people who turned out to be stalkers.  (I understood, as the idea I HAD stalkers was completely bizarre.  So they gave it out without thinking.  However, I don’t want it to happen again.)

Actually if I don’t give you my home address right now, it might not mean anything more than that I don’t want you to get confused as we’re changing addresses probably within a couple of months.  (House under contract, now, but it’s complicated.)

If I DO brush you off at a convention (rare and unlikely) it’s not because you offended me/I’m too full of myself/whatever.  The only time I brush people off at cons is when I have been on panels through one meal already and am dying to get somewhere and eat something or at least have caffeine.  That, and, if it’s a local con, we’re headed home on a tight schedule.  So, don’t take it badly and approach me again later.

If you happen to recognize us in public and want to talk to us, approach anyway.  We are friendly people.  And if we’re on a family thing and don’t want to be interrupted, we’ll tell you.

If it seems to you I’m skirting the real truth in terms of where we’ll be, etc, on this blog, I probably am, because it’s either one of those family things I don’t want interrupted, or it’s something the guys don’t want to deal with.

When approaching my kids, remember they’re not me.  My career is not their responsibility/duty.  They might or might not wish to talk, but be mindful of where they are and who is with them.  They don’t usually broadcast that their mother is almost famous.

And if it seems to you that in the beginning of an acquaintance I’m very cautious, don’t take it wrongly.  I just don’t want to wake up to someone standing on my front lawn.  I’m not that special, and it’s bizarre, so they must be mentally ill, and that scares me. I learned that the hard way.

But most of all, stop fawning around me (no, seriously.)  I’m just a chick who writes stuff.  And if you do it in person and/or at a con, I’ll throw a small plastic fish at you.  And then you’ll be deep in the carp.