*I”m going to be on later today, when I get home and my computer.  Considering this weekend, it’s possible I should NEVER vacation EVER again.

Sad news — besides France — RIP Matthew Benjamin Landry 1975-2015 — Matt was one of those fans who became a friend online and off line. I’m very glad I got to meet him in the flesh two years ago. He’s now gone beyond pain and beyond suffering, and for him it will be just a few moments before we meet again, but we will miss him.*

The Importance of Socks – Cedar Sanderson

And by socks, I mean the bits that are likely to get wet if you keep putting your mind down there in the gutter. Socks! Not sex! Although that’s important too, but it’s not what I was talking about.

I was thinking about this today as I dealt with a sock malfunction. I’d run out of clean socks… ok. Not out of socks. Out of my favorite socks, which meant I had to get into the second-string socks. And those socks, rather than holding my feet in a warm hug inside my boots, slipped down and left my heels freezing and clammy. It was a minor inconvenience – I had time in my day to go home and change my socks, but it got me thinking.

I’ve been in situations, a long time ago and far away, where warm dry socks were essential. Maybe not life or death, but certainly close. Hypothermia is not your friend, and I’ve been far enough into it often enough to know how fast it can happen. And that wet feet at the wrong time is a very bad thing. It’s not that I’m wedded to my socks. In the summer I run around happily in my bare feet. So maybe I overreact when my feet are cold and uncomfortable.

Or maybe not. These things are warnings for a reason. Like so much else in our lives, a thing that makes us a little uncomfortable and shift unconsciously from foot to foot… might be nothing. Or it could be a little precursor to a big problem. The trick is learning how to tell what is a real danger – being out in the woods a day’s hike from home, with no dry socks, below-55 deg F weather, rain… shivers. Brrrr…. And to learn what isn’t a real danger: half-off socks on campus ten minutes from home and a hot shower to warm all of you up.

Part of learning the difference is common sense. It’s clear that a tiny thing like, say, the statue of a guy in his underpants is not a threat. I mean, if I drove past it in the night I might do a double-take, or if I walked by it in the morning mist and it suddenly appeared it might make me jump. The first time. But it’s no harm. It’s not going to lurch into motion and grab me suddenly. It is, in short, socks that won’t stay up. Now, a real man in a real dark alley when I’m a young woman who’s been out clubbing and drunk too much? That’s a real threat. That is wet socks and no cover far from home and my own fault for not having packed an extra pair of socks and not put myself into that kind of danger with no backup.

Socks are a little thing. Learning how to tell what’s a big thing? That’s important. And it seems to be a skill that too many young people just aren’t learning. Perhaps because their parents never let them go camping in the wilderness, or at least not if it were going to rain. What kids need to learn is how to pack. They need to learn how to check the weather forecast. And maybe they need a parent who’s willing to give them socks for Christmas.

I give my kids socks for most Christmases. Usually, fuzzy fluffy slipper-type socks. The girls love those really fuzzy ones, the little man likes the kinds with superhero motifs on them. Of course, they get more than socks, but… But my dad, for several years running when I was a single parent, took it on himself to stuff my stocking at Christmas. I hung one for myself because the kids insisted, and I usually threw a couple of handfuls of candy in it while I was filling theirs. Dad would come in after I was through, and put socks in it for me. I loved those socks. Merino wool, warm, soft… every time I pulled them on it was like a hug from Dad. And it was one less thing I had to worry about in a worrisome time – I had warm feet.

When we’re under a lot of stress, those socks sliding down our feet can be the last straw. And it can be the little sort of thing that makes all the difference. The lifting of the last straw on the camel might be warm feet, or a full belly when your husband makes you eat an egg before you leave for that math exam, or the unexpected gift of a hand-drawn mother’s day card… without those pick-me-ups, the straw finally breaks the beast of burden to its knees, and getting up is harder than carrying on.

Most of us will go through a point where those socks, and warm feet, make the difference. I don’t know that Dad knew what he was really doing, with the socks in my stocking. I think he just wanted to give me something I couldn’t afford to indulge in myself at the time. But I’d like him to know they meant a lot. You know you’re not a kid anymore when you look forward to socks at Christmas… Who in your life is cold, and what’s a little thing you can do to warm them up? You never know what will help, and it’s not always the big things that you feel you can’t possibly do.

I know I get frustrated about the big things. But there are things in life that you just can’t fix. Oh, sure, when the front door isn’t latching properly and you can shim it up. Or when the child has fallen and scraped their knee and you can hug them, clean their wound, and send them back to playing. When there are no clean socks and you can do the laundry.

But the big things… when a loved one is ill. Or you’re in a situation where all you can do is wait for a resolution. Those, you can’t just fix. You can only ameliorate the pain of the time by doing the little things. Like making sure there are clean, warm socks. Or a casserole. Or walking the dog, or… the little things that can lift that last straw from the camel’s back.

I need to go do some laundry. Or I could steal a pair of my husband’s socks. I know he’d happily give me the last pair in his drawer – because he loves me, and that’s what you do when you love someone, you make sure the little things are right. But I won’t take his last socks. For one thing, I still do have socks. They are just ah, colorful and mostly thigh-high socks. Socks are a sign of the vast differences between men and women. I have my favorite wool socks, trouser socks, performing socks, footy socks… but him? See, like many men, my husband likes to have all his socks one color, one style, and then he never has to worry about that one sock that does go missing in the laundry.

I have a theory about those missing socks. We need to develop some kind of meta-tracker capable of piercing the quantum membrane, because you know those socks have found the parallel universe gate. All we have to do is track them through, and voila! We’ll have a way of getting there, too! So hold a warm, dryer-toasted sock in your hand, close your eyes, and walk forward, holding it out…

I kid! I kid! Socks are great, and important, and all, but they are hardly the answer to the mysteries of the universes!

Reflections of a Golden Age

by Christopher M. Chupik

Recently there has been some controversy in our community about whether or not the classics of the genre have value. I’m not going to fisk that article, as others have already done so. I’m also not going to call for the genre to return to the Golden Age, though I’m certain that the commenters on a certain blog which has fifty Hugo nominations will almost certainly spin this post as such. What I’m going to do is talk about my own experiences.

It’s said the Golden Age of SF is twelve and this was true for me. When everybody else was discovering the Hardy Boys, I was leaving them far behind as I journeyed with the mysterious Mr. Bass to the Mushroom Planet. Soon I accompanied David Innes and Abner Perry in their iron mole as it broke through the crust of Pellucidar, the prehistoric world at the Earth’s core. I went to Caspak, the land that time forgot, and later was transported to Barsoom with John Carter, the greatest swordsman on two worlds.

And no, I have no idea how nobody ever noticed I was reading paperbacks with nekkid chicks painted by Frank Frazetta and Michael Whelan on the covers. I was lucky. If a kid got caught with those today he would be marched to the principal’s office, possibly suspended and forced to undergo extensive therapy.

With junior high, I discovered Doc Savage (my school library fortunately had a pair of the Bantam doubles, The Headless Men/Devils of the Deep and Secret in the Sky/Cold Death). I read Ray Bradbury’s short stories and spent my reading periods and lunch breaks and discovered a bittersweet Mars which became as real in my mind as that of Burroughs, no matter what the Viking probes had discovered.

A collection of H P Lovecraft (The Outsider and Other Stories) opened my mind to a whole new non-Euclidian realm of cosmic horror. And then I found out about Robert E. Howard suddenly I had a whole new world of adventure open up for me, from the prehistoric empires of Kull and Conan to the Elizabethan exploits of Solomon Kane. A summer visit to my uncle gave me a chance to read both 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island in the span of a few weeks. When I went to my public library, I would use their brand new computer terminals to search for decades-old books, not always finding them, but always looking.

In high school, my library had a selection of nonfiction books about SF — from the ’70s. So I got to learn what the SF field was like 20 years earlier. Such a different time: old guard vs. new, gender roles, political slapfights, accusations of fascism and sexism . . . Er, okay, maybe it’s not that different after all. Point is, I learned a lot. My list of authors grew and my horizons expanded to the edge of the universe.

I read Larry Niven and marveled at the wonders of the Ringworld. I learned the Laws of Robotics and pondered psychohistory. I read Orwell and discovered that some animals are more equal than others. Heinlein I unfortunately skipped, due to the fact that I made the mistake of believing in his “fascist” reputation mentioned in those books I had read. Because of that, I didn’t read him until adulthood, which I regret immensely now. You know, that could be a whole other post . . .

And now? My high-tech Kobo e-reader has a copy of Edmond Hamilton’s The Star Kings on it. Does it matter that I was reading this novel with a device more sophisticated than any of the computers contained within? Of course not.

One of the complaints made was that the younger generation can’t relate to “futures” where men still wear hats and they can make intelligent positronic robots but not personal computers. I say you’re not giving the younger generation enough credit. When I was reading Bradbury and Asimov, I was very aware that I was reading of future’s past. It doesn’t matter that Orwell’s 1984 is behind us (or is it?) any more than it matters that the Mars that Burroughs and Bradbury wrote about has no more foundation in reality than Middle-Earth.

It didn’t matter to me because I could see the things that hadn’t changed. Ultimately, the human experience remains consistent across the ages. Sure, superficial things like slang and fashions change with the decades (Think our modern SF won’t look hokey and dated to people mid-century? Think again.) But people still fall in and out of love. There is conflict and injustice. The universe is full of terrors and wonders yet to be discovered. It doesn’t matter if the characters are flying to a swampy Venus in rocketships or taking a starship through a wormhole to Gliese 581.

What matters is this: Is the plot good? Are the characters interesting? Is there a sense of wonder? Were you gripped? Do you want to read it again? These remain true, if you’re reading in 1915, 1955 or 2015.

The Golden Age is whenever you find it.

*This is Sarah:  Sorry this is late.  My fail proof system to get posts up… failed, so I had to hack it this morning.  I’m also not doing anything about Paris until Tuesday at least, though my main thing is “if people say they want to kill you, believe them” which would seem really obvious but our enlightened leaders routinely fail to get.  I got the news in dollops two hours into my vacation, on texts from older son.  I’m still a little in shock.  More when I get back home.*

Why We Must Fight.

By Tom Knighton

Just how screwed up is the United States? Well, based on some of what I see out and about these days, pretty screwed up. You see, the things that make this country great, things like free speech? A lot of very loud people seem to be offended by the concept of freedom. It’s pretty pathetic.

By now, I suspect many of you have seen the video from Yale University where a student is shouting down someone who is essentially defending the First Amendment. The screeching student tries to make some argument about Yale being her “home”.

I watched the video as intently as I could. I couldn’t get too intent because my laptop wouldn’t survive being forced to do a Frisbee impression, but I did the best I could. While watching it, I developed a theory about why there was this bizarre effort to describe a college as “home”.

You see, I believe it’s about rationalization.

When you consider a particular space that you have no authority over as your “home”, then you can justify lashing out against anyone who dares to disagree with you. It allows one’s mind to justify anything you do, because you’re defending your own turf.

Defending turf is a timeless custom among humans. When Ogg and Ugg threw down over who the cave belonged to, they were battling over turf. Most wars throughout history, up until recently anyways, were about turf.

The idea of turf being sacred is almost encoded in our DNA.

So, when the screeching student prattles on about “home”, it’s about defining her turf. Oh, she shares it with others of her tribe, but that’s not an issue. Her tribe has her back on such things. It’s the defining characteristic of their tribe.

Unfortunately for them, they fail to notice that another characteristic of their tribe is to abuse the English language badly enough that it probably needs a shelter.

Yale University, or any other college for that matter, is not now nor will ever be “home” for students. It’s a school. Yes, they live there for their time at school, but it’s not home. The entire business model for colleges is based around students staying there for a few years and then kicking them down the road so they can play adult.

It’s not home. It’s a place to become educated.

That’s irrelevant to the tribe, however. They have decided it’s home, and any disagreement is an invasion into their home. Just as any of us would do with a home invader, they seek to stamp out the life of the intruder. For people like our screeching student, that invader is freedom of speech.

I believe that this is what has lead to the idea of “safe spaces” we have all come to know and mock. Rather than confront ideas with their own ideas, they seek to push away the unpleasantness. They don’t want to be challenged, so they hide away in their own caves and hope the evil “other” goes away.

Don’t believe me? Then please, tell me why there was a problem with the World Fantasy Awards having a bust of H.P. Lovecraft?

Was Lovecraft a racist? Looks like. Much like most other people from that day and age did. However, rather than just have the conversation about the backward thinking of his day, the effort has been to purge him. Couple that with at least one notable author arguing that aspiring writers don’t really need to read the classics, and you see an effort that would effectively remove H.P. Lovecraft from the collective memories of fans.

Now, realistically, this isn’t some grand conspiracy to remove Lovecraft. What it is are independent efforts that have a cumulative effect that amounts to the same thing.

It’s not just in our little corner of the world either.

Look at the University of Missouri. Yes, I understand there are some very real problems there. I’m sure that there might be some legitimate grievances in there somewhere. The problem is, we don’t care. Any ability to give a flying flip ended the moment a bunch of privileged white college kids started pushing an Asian student around for the crime of exercising his First Amendment rights as a member of the press (he was on a freelance assignment with ESPN).

Even more ridiculous was that one of the ringleaders was a staff member with a background in communications who held a courtesy appointment with the journalism school. Rather than recognize individual rights, she looked to defend the “safe space” at any and all costs. Tim Tai, the photographer that was assaulted—and yes, he was assaulted—was told to “respect the students”. Even his status as a student was irrelevant to the Snowflake Brigade. After all, it was home and his rights didn’t matter.

Recently, a buddy of mine on Facebook posted an opinion. Nothing unusual for social media, right? Well, a friend of his passed word that a third party wanted my buddy’s friend to un-friend him. Why? So this Special Snowflake wouldn’t have to see my friend’s opinion in her feed.

Sunshine, that’s what the “hide post” feature is for.   If it’s bad enough, then the “block” feature works well too.

For better or worse, there is a generation of people who think their feelings are all that should matter. They’re not open for discussion, they’re not open for debate, and they’re not open for much of anything other than complete and total agreement.

They’re the people who rules-lawyer the crap out of things and try and get people thrown in Facebook jail at the slightest provocation. You use their name? BLAM! Reported and a 12 hour ban. You said something to them on Twitter? BLAM! Now you get your account shut down.

Not everyone on the left falls into this category. Thankfully, there are some on the left who are just as disgusted by this behavior as we are. In part, they have enough sense to know that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Of course, it’s so good that many of us are starting to play by their rules too.

For a while, right-leaning authors tended to let any comment come through on their blogs with the exception of spam and trolls while many left-leaning authors moderated the snot out of their comments. However, more and more of us aren’t willing to allow the hate to flow toward our blogs while the other side fails to reciprocate.

Now, some of us simply allow comments we happen to like. I do it on my own blog, after all.

We’re setting up our own “safe spaces” of sort, thanks to secret groups on Facebook. However, those similarities are about where it ends.

You see, we don’t want liberal thought purged from our world. OK, that’s not really true, but the difference is how we want it gone.

Leftist ideologues tend to want everyone who disagrees with them silenced or, even better, forced to agree with them through indoctrination programs. Disagreeing is a sin, and you will not only will sin no more, you will think in such a way as to never think sinfully. Don’t believe me? What about the baker who refused to bake a cake for a same sex wedding? He not only has to make cakes for same sex weddings, but he was forced to undergo “sensitivity training”. He couldn’t be permitted to think something unapproved.

Ah, yes. Orwell would be proud.

Honestly, is it any surprise that many of us are withdrawing from the more general society? Of course some of us are.

Whether we should or not would be an interesting topic for debate, but I ask you to not judge those who have withdrawn from the field too harshly. The wars can be brutal, and some just can’t fight any longer. To be an effective warrior, it takes a lot of time. There’s a lot of reading, a lot of watching, and a lot of understanding required. Some people just don’t have it in them any longer.

However, those who can still fight need to do so. Otherwise, the “safe spaces” will grow and grow. Screeching students will multiply exponentially. Before we know it, they will silence us. By force.

Imagine a world where a tasteless choice in a Halloween costume is deemed criminal? Imagine if you could lose your job for your Native American costume, or whatever else you opt to wear. For Halloween.

There are people who actively dream of that power.

So, as a result, we must fight. Even if we have to get louder than the screeching students, we must fight. The future is worth it.

We had a house closing this morning.  The new owners of our former home seem quite nice (and very young) and I hope they enjoy the house very much.  In a way they seem perfect for it as we never were.

And now you guys know why my head hasn’t been on, while we tried to do all the last things for closing under new Federal regulations which add… layers… of stuff.

Anyway.  It’s done and we’re out of here for a long writing weekend.  (And I don’t want to hear from Sabrina Chase what she actually thinks we’ll be doing.)  When I come back (there will be guest posts the other days) I’ll answer goldport email, deal with patron issues and donations, and generally be back on business.  I should also have Darkship Revenge done or near done, so you betas can get ready to beta.

Meanwhile, it’s my first vacation in 2 years.  (Yeah, JUST writing is a vacation around here.)  So wish me luck, and you guys try not to tear stuff down while I’m gone, okay?

So I’m in the second night of sleeping very, very, badly — there are reasons for this, which don’t make a lot of sense, and which I won’t get into until a couple of weeks from now — and with one more on the horizon.

Then I woke up this morning to crazy infighting among my friends, one of those situations where you just want to sit down and cry.

And THEN I heard the news that one of the Huns, a young man, is terminal. There is this utter inability to do anything, couple with the wish to do everything.

It’s been a bad week anyway, since the 9th was the anniversary of our friend Alan’s death.  Yes, I know we are born to die, but lately this has been too much with us.  And when those taken are the best and brightest and still young, your mind breaks a little.

I’ve been sitting here, staring at the screen and wondering what to write about, and nothing is coming.

I think I”m going upstairs to iron clothes to the tune of MHI audiobook.  I hope you guys forgive me.

If it all goes well, this weekend I have some guest posts for you, and then will resume blogging on Tuesday, hopefully a little saner.

*Sorry, sorry, sorry.  It’s still a little busy and insane out here, and today I woke up to snow on the ground, which wasn’t nearly as bad as waking up several times in the night to howling wind.*

Being Human – a Blast from the Past from March 2012

While I agree with Charlie that we don’t want the human wave to be a prescriptive movement, one that cuts at the edges and where people can keep adding more injunctions and shall nots till, as in the present, you’re only allowed to write one type of book that echoes every other kind of book out there, because there’s only one opinion and one story line.

OTOH, while we’re not going to kick you out of The Human Wave for eating crackers in bed – or for writing a book where everyone dies at the end.  Or… – if you’re throwing your lot in with us and advertising yourself as one of us, then you should know that people will expect a certain feel.  And that feel almost certainly won’t be the slough of despond.  It almost certainly won’t be a feeling of disgust for human frailty and human imperfection and a worship of a quasi-mechanical perfection that doesn’t exist in humanity till all humans are dead.  It almost certainly won’t be a feeling of “we’re all doomed and why bother?”

We’re not going to tell you can’t do that, because frankly it’s up to you.  If you think that’s what most people want to read and what’s been censored by the gatekeepers (you might consider upping your meds) and think it belongs with a ragtag group trying to return the fun to science fiction, by all means, have at it.  But don’t be surprised if people attracted to the rest of our stuff aren’t attracted to yours.

This is because while the “human wave” is hard to qualify – all of us coming from many traditions, from fantasy to science fiction and from romantic fantasy to literary – we know it when we see it.  More importantly, the readers know it when they see it.

I’ve been reading everyone’s posts on this over the week, trying to firm it up in my mind, and it seems to me the important part of the “human wave” is the “human.”  And that’s perhaps where our greatest contrast to the New Wave is.  The New Wave viewed human flaws, human defects and human frailty as things to be mocked and condemned.  No, they didn’t explicitly say so, but it came through in most of their stories.  They viewed humans as flawed and therefore to be destroyed.  This was, I think, a reaction to the previous generation’s view of humanity as infinitely perfectible.  (Which wasn’t much better, since it was at the heart of all the totalitarian theories of the twentieth century.)

But viewing humanity’s frailty and error as irredeemable, and humanity, therefore, as an evil to be eradicated is not better.  In its ultimate manifestation it gives us people who hate themselves for being human.  The prescription, state wise, is the same too – they want a strong state to make of them what they can’t make of themselves.  They forget of course that the state is composed of humans.

Forgive me for using an analogy that is not accurate, insofar as humanity probably isn’t one giant organism.  But if humanity were a giant organism, the early twentieth (and in parts the later nineteenth) century would be the part where it graduated from elementary school.  It now knows enough to understand most of the world around it, and it feels confident that it can conquer its bad habits and its defects and grow up to be perfect.
Then comes middle school.  I sometimes say that Europe is dying from the wounds of WWI.  To be honestly, the reaction that was WWII only complicated matters.  If humanity were indeed a sole organism, this is the time at which it sits in its room cutting itself.  And sooner or later, as time passes, it realizes it’s never going to be perfect.

Those of you who have raised kids know instinctively what comes next: the cynicism, the self hatred.  In a particularly neurotic teen, which I think we’ve proven humanity is, it leads to trying to commit suicide.  There will also be attempts to return to childhood, which is where I think we get the rejection of science and the wish by many to lose enough population to return to an agrarian land-bound economy.  In their minds this is always an idyllic time, just like childhood is idyllic in the mind of the teen.

Many of the establishment stories (not New Wave, but an outgrowth of it) frankly read like a long-sustained teenage scream-out.  Or worse, like lying in bed going “moaaaaan.  Everything is bad and I can’t fix it.”

The Human Wave is, I think and hope, where we grow up.  Individual humans can do it, I hope species can, and I’m sure that literary movements can.

This is where we come to terms with the fact that we’re flawed, yes, but we’re all we have to work with, and there is a basic sanity in loving yourself.  You try to improve, yes, but you expect neither perfection nor utter failure.  Being human is a project not a destination.  Being human is a daily effort, not something you’re born.

You’re born a tailless ape with impulses and needs like any other animal, and a brain big enough to aspire to more.  Human is what happens when you integrate those, when you don’t condemn the animal but you also don’t let it have its sway.  It’s a struggle you face every day, unafraid, and when you fall down you pick yourself up and try again.

If the human wave works out, it will neither have the (fun but often superficial) characters of the golden age, who often seemed to never sweat, nor the evil anti-humanity of what is now considered “deep.”

Yes, humanity has flaws.  Yes, it will always have flaws.  But those flaws contain some of our deepest qualities.

There is a Jewish story about Moses, which I told each of my children in turn when it became obvious they were falling in despair because they’d realized they’d never be perfect.

During those forty years in the desert, one of the chiefs of the tribes whom the Israelites were approaching was a great believer in the study of physiognomy.  This is the belief you can tell a person’s character by their facial traits.  Hearing of this great multitude advancing towards him, he sent his court artist to spy covertly and make a portrait of their leader, so he knew what to expect.

When the physiognomist looked at the portrait, he told the chief.  “We’d best meet him at the edge of our land and surrender.  This man is an adulterer, a murderer, a thief.  He will destroy us.”

So, quaking, the chief met the Israelites at the border of his lands.  On speaking to Moses and hearing they were just passing through and had no intention to pillage or kill on their way, he invited Moses to the banquet, where he found that Moses was not in fact a monster.  So he told Moses the story and said, “I’m going to have my physiognomist put to death because he’s useless.”

But Moses said, “No.  Stay your hand.  He is right.  I am naturally all those things.  I’ve just chosen not to use my natural traits that way.  It is knowing those flaws in myself that gives me the ability to help others behave better and to spot those who can’t.  And it is struggling to make myself better that gives me the strength to keep my people together on our journey.”

Whether you accept the historicity of Moses or not, you can probably see the truth of that.  Someone who was perfect, sweetness and light, and never had experienced a bad impulse in his life, would not be able to keep a fractious people together on a perilous and grueling journey.

I knew this truth about myself by fourth grade.  I knew I was naturally envious, so it was easier to study and be the best than to live with the envy of the person who had the best grades.  I knew I was naturally aggressive, but I didn’t like the results of just pounding people at random, so I channeled it into looking after the weak and the timid and worked it out by beating the occasional bully who’d pushed too far.

That balance between knowing yourself what you are and choosing to be better or to channel it in ways that don’t disgust you and don’t destroy those around you is being human.

It is the fact that we live in muck that makes us aspire to the stars.  It is our own internal weakness that makes us struggle to be strong for those we love.  It is knowing our own craven, irresolute nature that gives us the strength to say we’ll be better than that when it’s needed.

And that is, I hope, what the Human Wave will bring to science fiction and literature in general.

Not a pollyannaish utopia, not heroes that work like clockwork, not a shiny future where everything is splendid – mind you, we won’t tell you you’re not Human Wave if you do that, but you might find that stories with no conflict don’t sell well.  Not a despondent wallowing in the filthiest parts of our human condition – again, we won’t tell you that you’re not Human Wave if you do that, but our readers WILL know.

No, Human Wave aspires to write and read humans as they are: with the flaws and the warts that make our achievements – both scientific and moral – more astonishing.

Get out of your parents’ basement.  Stop contemplating suicide.  Stop raging at how everyone is stupid.  Yes, a large amount of people are, and you too are, but there is kindness and joy and love out there, why are you ignoring it?  It’s as real as the rest of it.

Go forth and read and write and be human.

Real virtue is hard.  I was thinking about this as I was thinking the other day that I’m quite possibly the worst-practitioner-of-my-professed-religion-ever.

You’d not think that from the outside because I try to fit in with the obvious observances, and do the right thing… most of the time.  Look, it’s not hypocrisy, it’s my way of keeping myself close to the straight and narrow.

But there’s a whole host of little things that slip by: times I’m unkind, times I don’t consider others and certainly times I’m lazy or fail to do what I should be doing right then.

Real virtue is hard because most of it is internal.  It’s refraining from doing the things that the natural creature wants to do. It’s doing things you really don’t want to do.  It’s staying up an hour later to finish that overdue project, it’s getting up in the night because your spouse/kid is throwing up in the bathroom, it’s doing dishes before bed so your spouse doesn’t need to worry about them, it’s making a cup of hot cocoa for your kid when it’s snowy out and you know he/she is going to come trudging through the door, wet and cold.

BUT that’s not the hardest part.  The hardest part is putting yourself out for strangers or even people you don’t like very much.  Going out to help your contentious neighbor dig his car out of snow, even though you work from home, and don’t need to. Lending money to a bad-at-planning friend even though you know you won’t be paid back, because they need it more than you, even though it leaves you tight.  Or stopping on a cold night to help some person pick up packages they just dropped.

There are other — little — things that are easier, though still work you don’t need to do, like taking back the carts some right berk left in parking spaces in the grocery store.

I do the later type of thing when I can, the one of being kind to the family most of the time.  (Not always because I’m human and sometimes the body won’t obey no matter how virtuous the mind wants to be.) The virtue in relation to friends, well, I try, but it’s difficult.  It’s difficult because we’re all human and sometimes we don’t know when good turns to enabling, so it’s a judgement call.  And sometimes the “enabling” thing is easy to use as a n excuse, even though it’s probably (we never know for sure) not true.

Being kind to strangers takes the problems of being kind to friends and acquaintances and amplifies them.  I mean, what do you do when there’s that lone little old lady by the side of the road with an obvious broken down car?  Do you stop?  What if her accomplices are in the ditch waiting to jump you?  You might be commanded to be kind to those around you and help those who can’t help themselves, but what do you do when it risks your life?  Are you required to risk your life?  So most of the time you call the police and trust they’ll help the little old lady.  (More on that later.)

And then there’s a whole host of “virtues” and “disciplines” that are internal.  I’m very bad at them, and I believe they matter, because they condition how you see the world, but you don’t see them from the outside.  You don’t see my laziness either, most of the time for reasons of “taking the easy, not the exacting” part, but it’s failing at virtue, nonetheless.

However this is not confession, and I’m not writing this to unburden.

I’m writing this because I was thinking on what it would take to REALLY live my faith and I realized that most of it would be very, very difficult and also nearly invisible to others.

Because we’re human, it’s really hard to do things like never having an uncharitable thought or doing things when you really don’t feel like doing them, or being just kind enough not to enable.

This is why most ancient religions had/have a code of conduct, but also a bunch of actions you can perform, ritually or otherwise to make you feel okay with the divine, without having to go to heroic lengths.

Give gods/saints their pound of butter in the lamp, pray in a certain way, and you feel that you’ve at least studied to the test.  You might not qualify for sainthood or ultimate bliss, but you did what you needed to do, that Himself up there are trying really hard, and it’s not your fault if you fall down sometimes (or often.)

This is also why the older and more mature religions have established ways of atoning and established days for doing so.  Because if you think you’ve “studied to the eternal test” but just in case you missed one of the important tests there is this remedial credit, this way to make yourself clean OR to silence your overactive conscience.

The problem is when you substitute these traditional religions by the pretense of no religion.  Why pretense?  Because most people who claim to have no religion, never the less follow a set of never-examined-or-questioned precepts.

If those precepts are in essence the same as in many traditional religions, you have a lot of my atheist or agnostic friends: be kind to others; help those in need, take care of your own and don’t be a burden on others.  They tend to be — coff.  I know some of you read this — a wee bit more neurotic, as they have no way to make atonement and the unswept dregs of human failure pile up in their back brain.

On the other hand some of us who are religious are also really bad at believing we made full atonement.

But then there are those people who are not religious and who took as their precepts the fuzzier, more insane forms of “virtue.”  Stuff like “Speak for the voiceless.”  I hate that one, because while it’s valid if you’re a religious person or one who watches yourself ALL THE TIME, it’s way to easy to imagine that the voiceless would say JUST what you want them to.  Hence all the nonsense of very very white and privileged people speaking for minorities and then rejecting real minorities who disagree with them.  Or “respect the Earth.”  People like my friend Dave Freer respect the Earth.  They live very close to it, which involves an immense amount of work, and they hunt and use every part of the animal they can, and they don’t pollute more than they can absolutely help.

But people like Al Gore, PREACH respect of the Earth, while living in a mansion larger than some small third world villages, and which certainly takes more energy to heat, and jetting around the world.  They do their “virtue” talk and think that compensates for how they live, I’d guess.

Yesterday, while I was making dinner my husband had some show on where some right prat who fancied himself a comedian was going on and on and on about prisoner rehabilitation.  (Is this the new THING?  I saw it here yesterday, and it’s been cropping up more and more.  I find this very interesting, because I’ve noticed a certain coordination in topics du jour from the over-culture.  Remember when Alaskan cruises were all the thing and every liberal and soft liberal and some non liberals were taking them?  And every magazine was full of stuff about the PRISTINE landscape of Alaska?  All leading up to the rejection of the Alaskan pipeline?  I’ve learned to catch these things in the wind as it were, and be prepared for what liberal cause they’re pushing.  And no, I don’t think they’re a big conspiracy. They’re the result of most people in the media and entertainment being of the same political color and running in the same circles.  In those circumstances it takes very few manipulators in their midst to start this sort of thing, which then runs on its own, until it stops suddenly when no longer useful.  Mind you, the people planting the seeds ARE usually conspirators.  Not so long ago — and probably not now, but who knows? — they took their marching orders from Moscow.)

Younger son finally asked my husband to turn the d*mn thing off, and I realized I was gritting my teeth.  My husband was going along with it for the “funny” and paying no attention to the politics.

I was paying attention, partly, because of the discussion here, and because it was prickling the back of my brain with “is this the new thing?”

But it was annoying the heck out of me, because I’ve heard all this before.  I heard it in Europe.  The poor prisoners, and the horrors they face on coming out, and and and.  At the end of this is a judicial system where a wrist slap is considered harsh.  I don’t have any clue what it is now, but when I came to the States, you could commit murder in Portugal and be out in seven years.  MULTIPLE murders.  And then several busybodies would busy themselves with virtue-signaling by giving you everything they could, things they wouldn’t bother giving/helping poor but honest people with.  And when you failed, as most prisoners do, even with all the help in the world, to integrate back in society, it was society’s fault and more sappy stories were told about you, till they gave you another chance.

This (and I’m not going into the reform/rehabilitation/death penalty matter right now, this one is just an instance) is virtue-signaling on the part of the do-gooders.  These people wouldn’t bestir themselves to help a family in need that has never done anything wrong, because everyone agrees those people need help, and why isn’t the state helping them.  But hey will put themselves out to help prisoners say because the very fact they’re “undeserving poor” makes the virtue of helping them greater.  Not just prisoners, mind, there’s also drug users, or abusers of others, or as we’ve seen in our own field, pedophiles.

Sometimes it’s as though the less deserving the object of concern, the greater the virtue signaling of this “compassion.”

Which brings us to the fact most of this “virtue” is not even real.  They’re not helping anyone.  I have a friend who is a pagan prison chaplain.  He puts his money where his mouth is. He puts his time, his attention, and his work in there too.  Weirdly he’s one of those who doesn’t agitate for leniency in general.  It’s also funny, given how different their traditions, how much he sounds like Peter Grant on the subject.

Sure there are people in there who deserve help in building a new life.  They’re ready to change and work for it, and even if they fail, they deserve help in trying to fix themselves/their lives. But they’re few and far between.  Most of them are psychopaths and sociopaths, who are REALLY GOOD at pretending to want to change.

The people who work closely with them and who know them as much as possible can tell the difference and are in the best position for changing their ways if they can be changed.  Right prats who go on about how we should be lenient to everyone do more harm than good and lead to a world where we’re kind to the cruel and thus cruel to the kind.

Which is what is wrong with all this virtue-signaling talk.  Oh, it makes you feel so good to stand up say for a confessed pedophile and tell everyone how nice they are, and send them pictures of your kids (!) but in the end all that you are doing is enabling someone’s dysfunction.

It makes you feel good to speak for the “voiceless” (because Marxist theory tells you that in a capitalist society the poor/minorities are voiceless, and you never considered Marxist theory is the product of college professors who wouldn’t know voiceless if it bit them in the fleshy portion of the back.)   But in the end you’re just joining your voice to a chorus of out-of-touch academics pushing the world in a very bad direction, where envy is a virtue, the individual isn’t respected and society is a horror out of 1984.

Real virtue is hard.  Virtue signaling is easy.  When you no longer have any real standards virtue signaling is all you have left.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, small dragons and octopi, is what we face.  They say and do these things, from twitter storms to rants about the rights of (insert supposed victim class here, the more repulsive the better) in the same way other religions light butter lamps or genuflect to show devotion.

This absolves them from all real effort to help others, particularly since most of them think it’s someone else’s job, and just call the police, or government, to do the charity work they won’t do.

Our society, from entertainment to news to civic teaching (such as there is, which is almost never formally taught) encourages this form of virtue-signaling over real virtue.

We have a lot of work to do to turn it around.  And most of this is small, private, modeling real virtue and calling out fools on virtue-signaling.  None of it is pleasant or easy.  All or it is needed.

Their system if corrupt, impossible and failing.  In the end they lose.  But we only win if we cultivate real virtue and aren’t afraid to call out false one.

Resist the easy feel-good of virtue signaling.  Do what you can to cultivate real virtue.  And teach your children well.

No one said this would be easy.

The Slippery Slope – Amanda Green

I know, I know, this post is late. Blame me, not Sarah. When she asked for a post last night, I had just stumbled home after being away for most of the day and was about to fall face down in bed. So, here I am this morning, trying to get enough coffee into my system to make sense – and to keep reminding myself it isn’t good to throw my laptop through the TV screen because of the idiocy of the media and the double-standard of so many people.

I want to start by saying I have no respect for any man who lifts a hand to a woman simply because he can’t control his temper during an argument or he thinks it is his right to do so because of his maleness. I’ve worked with too many victims of abuse, adults and children, to have any sympathy for the abuser. However, I also have no use for media witch hunts using photos that are alleged to have been “police photos” but that are leaked by TMZ-like organizations without any verification of their authenticity.

In this particular instance, I’m referring to what the media has been doing for the last few days regarding Dallas Cowboys player Greg Hardy. For those not familiar with Hardy, more than a year ago he was arrested, tried and convicted on charges of domestic abuse. He appealed the conviction and it was overturned. Charges were then dismissed when his girlfriend refused to testify against him a second time.

Now, this isn’t a unique case. One of the major hurdles prosecutors have faced for years when trying domestic abuse cases has been the victim deciding not to testify after initially pressing charges. There are a number of reasons why. They range from the victim taking on the blame for what happened to agreeing to a payment from the defendant and being bound by a non-disclosure clause. Then there is also the situation, rare but valid, that the victim really isn’t the victim but has used the accusation to get back at the accused for whatever reason. In these cases, there are either no injuries or injuries that have been self-inflicted.

In Hardy’s case, it is pretty clear that he did hit his girlfriend. How many times, I don’t know and, frankly, I don’t care. He was in the wrong and he should pay for it. He had his day in court. He was convicted and the justice system determined there was an error in his trial and he should be retried. The girlfriend, for whatever reason, said she wouldn’t testify again. So the prosecutors decided not to retry Hardy.

In most situations, that would have been the end of the story. If Hardy were an accountant or writer, we’d never have heard another word about it. But because he is a pro football player, you have media mavens wondering why he was punished no more harshly than Tom Brady was for Inflategate. You have women’s activists saying they will never again cheer for the Cowboys for hiring this horrible person. For more than a week, national news has had story after story about Hardy and how wrong it is for someone like him to be playing pro football.

In other words, they want to remove the man’s profession because he hit a woman, went through the justice system and, when his case was reversed on appeal, the prosecution chose not to proceed. What he did was horrible and, in my mind, unforgivable. However, he had his day in court and should be allowed to follow his profession and, because of the safeguards the NFL has put into place in recent years, get the counselling and oversight he more than likely needs to help him learn not to do something like that again.

Look, folks, the truth of the matter is, the prosecutors made the decision not to go forward with the case. I’m not familiar with the law in the jurisdiction where the alleged assault took place. But assuming it is similar to that here in Texas, the case could have gone forward even without the cooperation of the victim. It would have been more difficult but it has been done before. The prosecutor could have called the responding officers, the detectives who investigated the case, the medical professionals who examined the victim, the victim’s friends and family – as well as the defendant’s friends and family. The prosecutor could even call the victim, albeit that would be a calculated risk because she would be a hostile witness and you don’t want to beat up on the victim in front of the jury.

All of this is a long winded way of saying that I’m tired of the double-standard. As I said, if Hardy were Joe Blow accountant or Certain Famous Writer, no one would bat an eye. He is the latest whipping boy of the media not so much because of who he is and what he did but because of the organization he works for. Ray Rice knocking his girlfriend/wife out in an elevator and Jerry Sandusky abusing who knows how many of his student athletes helped set the stage for the sort of response we are now seeing.

My question for those calling for Hardy to be drummed out of the NFL is multi-fold. First, why aren’t they going after every other employer who knows an employee has been accused of domestic violence – and why not add sex crimes to that? Second, if you remove a person from his source of income, what do you think is going to happen? Isn’t it better to leave him in a situation where he will be monitored and given counselling and supervision than to cut him off from work and income stream, thereby building his frustration and anger?

Yes, this is a roundabout way of wondering why those same folks who are screaming about all the Greg Hardys in the world aren’t doing the same about folks who openly advocate things like sex with minors or who were known to be abusing kids and yet those around them turned a blind eye. We will get up in arms over an NFL player raising his hand to a woman or kids sexting but those dirty little secrets that are known but ignored by the right thinking sort of folks are even worse. How many lives have been ruined because those folks have been protected because they were the darlings of publishing or any other industry?

Let’s look at the other side of the coin. Dallas is considering joining more than 100 other cities across the country that have removed the question on employment applications asking if the applicant has been convicted of a felony. The rationale behind it is that knowing from the beginning of the application process that someone is a convicted felon makes it too easy to dismiss them as an applicant despite their other qualifications. They have served their time, paid their debt to society and should be on even footing with every other applicant from the beginning. Besides, as city officials say, the question will be asked later in the process and considered if germane to the job being applied for.

Sounds reasonable to me. But I guess that same thinking wouldn’t apply to Hardy because he hasn’t “paid” for his crime. Well guess what, the fact he hasn’t is a direct result of the prosecutor from retrying him. I hate what he allegedly did. Hate it more than you can guess and for reasons only a few of you know. But he deserves the same treatment every other person in that situation gets. As long as he lives up to the contract provisions he has with the Cowboys and the NFL, he should be able to keep his job. We don’t have to like the man or his actions but we are going down a slippery slope when we start demanding people be removed from their profession without a conviction on their record – and he doesn’t have one.

So, the oyster sent me the post but it’s a leetle one.  And you know what, I don’t feel like writing a new one, because … well… I’ll tell you next week.  If you noticed my absence as Instapundit’s late-night-DJ, we were out of the house from 9 am to 11 pm and most of it we were doing violent manual labor.  So.  I barely made it up the stairs before I passed out into a dreamless sleep.

However, I remembered that when I was recovering from surgery I desperately wanted to write stories, but couldn’t summon words, so I made little story-pictures.  I shared them on FB, but I figure I’ll share them with you now.

And then the Oyster promo.  And I promise to be semi-human tomorrow, truly.

Being a creature of magic, he couldn’t follow her out of fairyland.  Years later, Cindy wondered if she’d dreamed it all.  She retraced her way, carefully, to that place with the still-sparkling lost shoe, and found that she’d never really left and happy-ever-after was hers.

Oblivious, little Ethel read from the eldritch manuscript she had found, without knowing she’d just changed the world forever.

And NOW der Ambulatory Molusc’s Promo post!

Alma Boykin

A Cat At Bay

A Cat Among Dragons Book 7

Sometimes, you should look behind you…

Rada Ni Drako’s new commanding officer on Earth wants to run things her way, including running the xenologist around in circles, until one of General Jones’ great ideas leaves Rada’s Gifts scrambled and untrustworthy. Growing suspicions of non-humans within the Global Defense Forces and a quiet retreat that turns into anything but leave Rada considering Drakon IV a haven of peace compared to Earth. But something stalks Rada’s back trail, drawing closer and closer…

All of Rada’s training and all of her allies may not be enough to save a Cat at Bay!

John Van Stry

Reprisal

Portals of Infinity

When William’s oldest enemy attacked his family, Will chased him across several realities, until he finally slew him. However, champions reincarnate.

Fortunately for William, his enemy was damaged years ago and it will be almost a year until he can come back. Unfortunately his enemy is becoming a demigod, and if not stopped soon he may one day become too powerful for William.

William now finds himself in a race against time, needing to track down and destroy his enemy’s hidden temples on Earth, before he reincarnates. And while William’s god is sympathetic to his plight, William must still put his god’s needs before his own desires for vengeance.