Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I’m too lazy to go look for the book to give you the exact quote, but I know somewhere Heinlein says something about how rich men go bankrupt without missing a single meal, while poor men fall a little short on cash and go hungry.

(Update: All praise to Wayne Blackburn who found the quote:  “People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.” — Robert A. Heinlein.)

I don’t know if the sentiment is original to him.  Somehow I doubt it, since it has that feeling of received wisdom.

It was new to me when I first read it, and counterintuitive.  Years later I found this was true.  Which is where we, to begin with, have to adjust our definition of “rich.”

I’ve never (yet, give me elbow room) been rich, but even so, when we found ourselves without income, with a brand new baby who cost us 20k (because we were on COBRA and he was an emergency caesarean), and with a mortgage and rent to pay (we had to move an hour and a half away to find work.  I didn’t drive at the time and we only had one working car, anyway.  So, you see, I couldn’t stay home all day with an infant and no transport.  And besides, Dan was working sixteen to eighteen hour days, which meant the three hours driving were really dangerous.) we came close to missing a meal, and our eating standards became rather low (rice.  Also, more rice.  Also, seasonal vegetables) but we never missed a meal.

That is because rice and vegetables (and beans. We ate a lot of beans) are rather cheap.  They are cheap because our lifestyle is high enough – i.e. we’re rich enough – that things like that are cheap.  (Partly this is the revolutions in agriculture, but it is also the sheer wealth in society.)  Yeah, being broke meant we paid a heck of a lot bigger percentage of our income for food, and the food was mostly starches.  But we weren’t hungry.

I’m not saying there is no hunger in America, though I can tell you there isn’t as much hunger as they claim, since most of those surveys ask things like “Did you eat all you wanted to eat.”  To that even my kids would answer “no.”  Mostly because they can’t or they’d balloon.

What I’m saying is that there is no famine in America.  Kids might miss a meal now and then, but unless some adult is willfully misspending money, they don’t go hungry as such.

Not compared to the rest of the world.

(Which brings up a related subject.  Guys we need to stop putting this kind of bs out there.  The international press picks it up and people believe it.  If I had a dime for each foreign poster in a blog who “knows” people are starving on the streets all over America, I could buy and sell the city I live in.  Because they hear all the p*ssing and moaning from over here and translate it to their own terms.  This includes “how badly off would we have to be before we admit it before foreigners?” These people aren’t – most of them – agents provocateurs.  They really believe we must be like the worst parts of Biafra during the famine.  And then we wonder why they buy the siren song of socialism.  Well, if the free market has people dying of starvation in the streets, do you wonder?)

Or to put it another way – I once heard my late paternal aunt, on being asked if she was going to come back to Portugal now Venezuela was getting bad (this was before Chavez, just some minor upheaval.)  She said “I’d rather have the bad over there than the good here.”

I also didn’t understand that, until I came here.  Even now in the economic mess we’re in, we have more consumer choice and (relative to what we make) lower prices than in Portugal when it’s doing well.

Beyond that, when I got married, my parents had clawed their way up to an upper middle class lifestyle there.  As a broke newlywed here, I had luxuries they didn’t have.  Stuff like, hot water is cheap in comparison (and so is electricity) and there were cheap diners that would serve me breakfast at midnight if I dang well pleased to eat at that time.  And we had a dishwasher and a microwave.

Someone once said that there is a 2 level difference between lifestyle here and in Europe.  I.e. if you’re living a lower middle class life here, you’re upper middle class in Europe.  This is probably true, at least for some parts of Europe (which in itself has huge variations) and parts of the US (I’m fairly sure it’s different if you live in the middle of nowhere West Virginia or in Washington DC.)

But leaving aside all that hair splitting – I’ve only had a cup of tea so far, so getting lost in the weeds is a way of life – the saying holds true.  It’s much easier to go through a collapse if you’re rich than if you’re poor.

This was brought on by a visit to the zoo this weekend and by remembering an article about how the zoo in Shangai has put orange dogs with manes in the cage, instead of lions.  Apparently the clever deception was discovered when the “lion” barked.

I mentioned it as a joke to my son and he said “But China isn’t as broke as we are, and we still have lions.”

Let’s leave aside whether the command economy that reports on itself can give us an accurate idea of their “brokenness” or not.  (It can’t.)  My answer was that saying about the rich man and the poor man and explaining it works for nations too.

This is why I tell you guys not to be getting ready to go hunt squirrels with your teeth, or even sharpening flint knives.  It would take a major – major – series of nuclear hits to reduce SOME parts of the country to that level.  Or even to the level of Victorian technology.

We are the rich man.  We have a lot of accumulated wealth.  For instance, I enjoy dressmaking, and bought a series of patterns this weekend.  (Shut up.  It might even happen.) BUT I bought them for special dresses (I have a great hankering to dress retro) that are hard to find or expensive.  For my normal jeans and t-shirts, I just buy them at the thrift store.  If I am careful, I actually buy them new, but I think the most I ever paid for a pair of jeans is $7.  Because the society has so much surplus, I can buy it that cheap.  The surplus won’t disappear over night.

And there will always, barring a huge, huge, implosion caused by a larger attack than we can imagine, be money for zoos and museum and symphonies.  Oh, there might not be money for me and mine to go (though because we’re bookish and stodgy sorts and tend to visit the same places a lot, we’ve found yearly memberships a good entertainment buy.  Look at it this way, the zoo membership is the equivalent of the whole family going to a movie twice.  And that’s before popcorn and drinks.  So we go to movies once every two years, but we do have three memberships to places we go often.  Except the aquarium because it’s frankly extremely expensive. So we haven’t gone in five years.)  But there will be enough people to keep the places going, if not expanding.

China might not be falling as hard or as fast as we are (maybe it’s not falling at all.  Maybe I’m just suspicious.)   BUT a much smaller upheaval can lead to their curtailing their (as a society) high end entertainments, because they simply don’t have the capital that we have built up over almost a century.

In the same way, in countries that are certainly failing and have been failing much longer, the shocks will be much stronger.  I noticed the last time I went to Portugal that the facades in downtown Porto had nets strung beneath them to catch falling tile and masonry.  These are mostly privately-owned buildings, the owners can’t pay maintenance (we could talk here of the fact they’re mostly rental buildings and the place is rent controlled, because all the bad ideas of America go to Europe and STAY) and the city is trying to prevent tourists being brained.  There are flourishing public works, at the same time, but we won’t go into that either.  I lived through various forms of recession there, and I’d never seen those nets or the need for them.  So, it’s clearly not boom times, and it’s not something we can imagine, even though we’re in deep economic trouble.

But even Portugal is “rich” in the same sense that my family and I were reach while broke and paying two sets of living space.  We were broke, but we were buoyed by a richer milieu and years of accumulated patrimony.  (In our case, Dan’s education, which allowed him to find a job, and my willingness to cook from scratch and run up baby clothes on the machine from fabric bought in thrift stores.)

Portugal has ways of surviving.  It has people who know how to survive hard times.  And it can – though I don’t think it does much – default to producing most of what it needs at a level (not the level they live at now, but that’s something else.  However, we were talking about the stupidity of the question “did you visit farmland” when we come back from Portugal.  No.  And Yes would be the answer.  Because you’d need to be in the heart of Lisbon and nightclubbing day and night not to wander off into someone’s market garden in the backyard.  And even then you might not be safe.  Some of the highrises (not in Lisbon) people use the garage space to keep goats.)

No, the people who go to unimaginable poverty at the slightest shake of the world economy are countries like Egypt who have specialized to live ONLY off a luxury industry – tourism – which gets cut when other countries tighten their belts.  And where people are so poor that bread is a major expense, so that when Western Eco Winnies want to appease the great goddess Gaia by burning food in their car tank, and the international price of bread goes up, places like Egypt starve.

The funny – if you have a bitter kind of sense of humor – thing about that is that our Marxists, who are “for the poor” here and abroad (in abstract, of course.  In reality the poor tend to be bitter clingers, holding on to their guns and their religion and the bien pensant would rather die a thousand deaths than break bread with such) are the ones bringing untold misery to the world poor.

They’ve been very badly taught and they think by making themselves poor the rest of the world will be rich.  So they’re setting fire to the richest economy (and largest consumer economy) in the world, and think that somehow, magically, the wealth will show up in the poor countries.  This is a superstition on the level of believing that if you sacrifice your baby, the gods will send you a lot more and healthier.  In other words, it’s nonsense.  But no one educated into primitive beliefs can see their lack of logic, even when it bites them in the nose (or the pocket.)

And let’s face it, our elites are very insular.  They don’t even know working people HERE, much less abroad.  Part of the reason they think France is so wonderful is that they visit it on vacation, and see the nicest parts of it, and believe the rest is exactly the same, because they need to believe some place is the land of perpetual vacation – or in other words, the isles of the blessed and Summer Land.

They’ve never examined the truth of the saying that when America sneezes the world catches pneumonia, nor figured out how our “wealth” is actually the engine of innovation and wealth for the world.  (And it is.  Trust me.  I experienced the crisis of the 70s abroad.)

In the same way, they’ve been told that global warming is a horrible danger to the poor of the world, and they can’t think through and realize that burning food to propitiate Gaia is much, much worse for the poor.  Because “poor” for our elites is living out in the country and spinning your own goats.  They imagine “poor” as Marie Antoinette imagined farm life.  They have this little trianon of poverty abroad in their heads (which is why they also believe that the poor have some special wisdom, but only, of course, if they’re far away and quaintly tanned.  They know the poor here live in trailer parks and go to church, and they find both equally déclassé.  Poor abroad are for our elites, kind of like animals in the play farm of the queen.  They never get old or do anything unsightly.)

So, while trying to improve the lot of the poor abroad – those quaint, tanned poor with the wisdom – they are actually bringing the four horsemen of the apocalypse to bear on vast regions, because war and famine and pestilence and death follow even the slightest fluctuation of food prices.

But here?  Here we won’t miss a meal.  Not most places in the US.  We might eat rather lower on the tree.  (Given our nutritional requirements, I’ve been stockpiling dried eggs) but we won’t see food riots.  Other countries…

The time to get scared is if famine – real famine, not rioting because you want a wide screen tv – hits Europe.  Then it’s the time to sharpen your squirrel hunting skills.

Can it get there?  Sure it can.  I think it would take massive war, though.

BUT until then, learn stuff.  We’re likely to fall a wrung or two in our security and wealth and comfort.  The stuff you should be learning is how to repair things.  How to keep things going.  (Great Courses now offers courses in this stuff.)  Think Cuba and how all the people who can keep old automobiles going aren’t missing any meals. Learn to do house repairs yourself, as much as possible (I already have, because finding a handyman is an exercise in futility.)  Even learning to cut and fit clothing won’t kill you.  I mean, thrift stores will also run bare, if we get in real trouble.

But most of all study how to build under, how to take technology to the next level and bypass the clueless elites.

Because we must right this ship.  We must do it as quickly and painlessly as possible.  We owe it to the starving multitudes of the world.

The US needs to take some cough syrup – so that the poor countries of the world don’t die of pneumonia.

This might surprise you.  It sort of surprised me, because it must be months now since I woke up later than eight.  Seven thirty is considered luxurious around here.  No, I don’t know how this happened.  I used to be a late night person.  Then the kids went to school and I found I couldn’t function in the morning unless I’d had an hour to myself first to read my newspapers (we used to take three.)  So I started getting up at six thirty to have tea and read papers.  Then I found I couldn’t get much done after the kids got home (there was all the de-programming to do, and real teaching to do) so I started getting up at four thirty to five thirty and going to be at nine.

Since the kids have started to go by themselves, without winding up — i.e. getting up on time, bathing themselves and grabbing breakfast (the last is always doubtful, so I do get up early if I can and slip an omelet in front of them on their way through the kitchen, because they often have classes till mid afternoon and food at campus is crazy expensive or from vending machines and bad for them.) my schedule has slipped back some.  I usually get up between six and seven.

I normally don’t go past six thirty unless I’m ill or truly exhausted, neither of which apply — to my knowledge at least.  Yesterday to celebrate a minor family landmark we took three hours off and went to the zoo, but only walked about two miles there, and at a very leisurely pace.  I did my normal laundry carrying, up two flights of stairs, but nothing massive (I brought two baskets up and down, not twenty) and the same for the other housework.  It is something you learn, again, when you have small kids, to carry stuff and fetch stuff, and clean as you go, because you might not have time to clean.  The kids are grown now, but I still do it — a trip for a cup of coffee to the kitchen translates into unloading the dishwasher or wiping down the stove, or running the mop on the floor while the coffee brews.  (BTW this was one of the mysteries of life to me when I was very young “how does mom remember everything that needs to be done?  How come we always have food, meals are on time and the house always mostly clean?”  It was more of a mystery after she left me in charge of the house when I was 12.  It was just my brother and I, but the week about killed me.  Laundry accumulated, food was late or overdone through waiting, I forgot to put out the bread bag in the morning, so the baker left no rolls — just on and on.  And I was on vacation, while mom had a job.  So I was astonished at her efficiency.  Now I know the reason: training and practice, like for almost everything else.)

Anyway, yesterday was nothing special.  I spent the day in utterly boring but necessary work, formatting and prettifying my reverted works, among other things to replace the Shakespeare books that are up, now I have Atlantis to make them work right and I’ve redone the covers (there is a typo on one of the covers.  The program I was working with made it hard to read small type, and I was copying reviews, and there it went.  Also, I know how to do covers better now — yes, it was only three months (I think)  Shut up.)   Also trying to put stuff in other services, and reading a lot of rules and things.  I need to and wanted to write, but yesterday continued the “catching up with cr*p” meme until three thirty when we went off to the zoo.  Then I came back to more work and had a mini conference with some friends on pm FB on stuff we want and need to do to “take back the culture.”  (There’s a lot of us doing uncoordinated stuff — it has occurred to us maybe we should coordinate.  NOT Jornolist style.  For one, none of us will trade in his conscience for a mess of influence — for another… you know, herding cats and all that. But it occurs to us making others aware of what each is doing, letting the others know what themes we’ll be hitting, and, yes, warning each other of free-lance opportunities might be a good thing. So, we had a micro discussion on this, and will continue it sporadically for months, probably, and maybe something will even result.  Cats.  Herding.  Remember?)

Anyway, normal day, right.  I’m still late on my columns for PJM, I’ve still not put the books up.  Oh, and the eternal laundry needs to be done.

So why did I wake up just short of nine am?

I don’t know and you don’t either.  But it’s already weird — a balloon went by so close to our house we could see people in the basket.

Oh, on going to the zoo… It’s like this.  If I had one perfect day I could re-live for eternity as “heaven” it would be the labor day when Marsh was three.  We found the money to go to Denver for two nights with the boys, with the general idea of “mom doesn’t have to cook or clean and gets to read” but we found the natural history museum (we KNEW it was there, we just hadn’t gone there, yet) and the amusement park at Lakeside, and the boys had a blast, and we ended up having dinner at midnight at the only restaurant we found open (this was so far back we hadn’t found Pete’s kitchen.)  And the kids enjoyed themselves SO much.  Then Marshall fell asleep against me on the way to the hotel, all sticky and heavy like kids get when they’re tired.

And the other thing is — maybe I’m wrong.  I hope to All I’m wrong — but I feel like we’re living through the last few days of the perfect summer.  Like England enjoyed before WWI.

I hope I’m wrong, or maybe it’s just personal.  If I’m wrong, it won’t hurt you to take a couple of days out now and then, and enjoy what and whom you love.  And if I’m not wrong, then store up memories to strengthen you through the dark ahead.

Also, as my sleeping late seems to indicate, perhaps it’s possible to labor too hard.  (Never thought of it.  I subscribe to the Heinlein theory of work: I do it because I like it.  So…)  That is if I’m not getting sick again, and I hope I’m not.

So cease from your labors today and go out and have some fun.

It started with the guinea pigs.  We got two guinea pigs, both female, for Marshall’s 4th birthday.  We kept them in the enclosed back porch, in a little glass aquarium.  (The book on cavy care said that cages were dangerous because they could catch their little feet and lose toes.  I’ve since decided it was wrong and that’s why the little ones died prematurely.  Even with best cleaning in the world, it wasn’t ventilated.  But our story is from before that….)

When spring came, apparently female guinea pigs thoughts lightly turned to thoughts of whoopee.  At least I presume that the guinea pigs woke up and lo, realized they were alone and there were no cute boy cavies around.  So, they did what came naturally.

This means we woke up late in the night with a sound like weeeeek, weeeek, week – reminiscent of the psycho shower scene.

Understandably alarmed, we rushed downstairs to see if by chance the guinea pigs had installed a mini-shower in the aquarium, because you never know, and were knifing each other.

No.  Both girls were standing in the middle of the aquarium (the lid was netting) giving full throat vent to what I presume were mating cries and sounded like a particularly annoying car alarm.

We tried to calm them down and when that failed, we went back upstairs and slept with our pillows over our head.

We thought that was all.

The problem, you see, is that they kept doing this for a month.  And the year being rather warm, we had the windows open.

We did not know the danger we were courting.

A month or so later, Petronius the Arbiter the Old Firm’s (we call the old set of cats the Old Firm) Resident Evil TM who was always inside/out because no walls could contain him (you only think I’m joking.  If he’d not been surgically incapable, he’d have sired every kitten in a forty mile radius.  As was, we had to keep a certificate of neutering because of owners of females who came to our door demanding we take half the kittens.) got in a fight with something bigger than him and had to be brought inside for healing.

The sick room was the powder room in the attic, next to my office, where he was – as he always did when he was sick – behaving as though he were a poor, decrepit and inoffensive cat.  I’d like to point out that whenever he got in one of his epic fights (he fought a car at least once.  No, don’t ask.  I’m not sure he didn’t win, either) the vet  would cooperate with this act by shaking his head and saying that poor Pete was probably not long for this world.  And three days later, Pete was outside again, talking up the girls and running every tom off the neighborhood. (His skin was held together with scar tissue, and his vocabulary was ¾ cursing and ¼ spitting.  He was full of guile and malice … and he let Robert drag him around by his tail, and sleep with his head on him as though Pete were a pillow.  I like to imagine it’s because Robert had a heart so pure the cat forebore to strike.  Don’t ask me what I think in my darker hours.)

So, anyway, here he is in this tiny room in the attic, and we had to go out to run errands for the afternoon, so I told Dan I’d just go check on Pete.

I go up the stairs to the attic, and I hear this awful choke-gasp, choke-gasp.  I will right here and now confess my reaction to suffering comes in two modes.  Either I go hyper cool or I lose my head.  This time, I lost my head.  I didn’t finish going upstairs, and instead came down screaming and crying and going “Dan, Pete is having a heart attack or something.”  (Note that I hadn’t even opened the door to the powder room – in retrospect a good thing.)

Dan comes running up – true story, he once left a meeting and risked being sacked because Pete had got stung by a bee (he was deathly allergic) and we only had a car.  So Dan came home and grabbed Pete and we took him for a shot.  As Dan is on his way back to work, I get a phone call because from his reaction they thought Pete was our son – opens the door…

Instead of ailing, Pete has cornered… a squirrel.  The horrible sounds are the squirrel spitting defiance and Pete.  Pete is so startled by this – bears didn’t spit defiance at Pete – that he’s not leaping for the kill.  Dan is stunned too… which means the squirrel runs out between Dan’s legs and to the little office across the way, where Dan did our financial stuff.  We close the door, so Pete doesn’t chase the squirrel over the receipts and stand there not knowing what to do.

Here I should add this is Manitou Springs, which means that squirrels are potential carriers of the black plague.  We call animal control who says “Manitou?  You’ve got to be kidding me. Squirrels have the black plague.  Don’t touch him.”

Which is all very well supposing we wanted to play ambush with a squirrel in the office for the rest of his natural life.  Also, you know, Pete is going to catch him sooner or later and I understand the IRS is notoriously averse to blood-soaked tax returns, even from writers (Possibly particularly from writers.  That whole, can’t get blood from a turnip thing.)

Meanwhile the squirrel has made it into my office and his hiding in a bookcase behind a row of books.  We call animal control again.  I don’t think we threatened to take the animal control officer and make him eat the squirrel, but that was the gist of it.  So he tells us… to open the door wherever the squirrel is, and make a path to the exit where he can’t veer elsewhere.

Now, this was a Victorian.  We were in the attic.  Down a flight of stairs was the bedroom floor, where all doors closed off from a long hallway.  Then there was another long flight of stairs, leading to the front door.  To the right was the living room doorway which had no door.  To the left was the library which had a door, and down the hallway, opposite the front door was the kitchen and the back porch, both open.

So I get cardboard boxes and boards and put them in front of every possible exit….

And we open the door and try to scare the squirrel down.  (We should have loosed the Pete.)

Squirrel comes out of my office, goes into the bills office.  He finds the one hole in Dan’s antique desk, and ensconces himself in the drawer – where he sits screaming defiance at us.

I did what any sane writer would do – I went nuts.  (The definition of a sane writer is, he/she is just below going nuclear at any time.)  I ran to the phone and started madly dialing private animal control people.

One of them finally agreed to come over d*mn the black plague.

So he comes in and he looks like an older Indiana Jones.  We have cardboard blockages still up, on the off chance he can chase the squirrel down the stairs.  He looks at us like we’re nuts (Indiana Jones and the temple of cardboard) and tells us that “Nah, I’m going to gas him.”

By this time our adorable moppets, then aged eight and four, are aware of the squirrel in the attic TM and think of him as a sort of additional pet.

Indiana Animal Controller assure the boys he’s not going to kill the squirrel.  He’s just going to put him to sleep.  I wonder if this is true, but at the point I don’t care.

The squirrel keeps telling us to come at him, all together or in single file, but he won’t get out of the drawer – the coward.

So, the animal control guy brings in a gas canister, and starts pumping gas into the drawer.  The chattering increases.

After half an hour he looks concerned.  “I risk killing him if I give any more gas” he says.  At this point I’m concerned enough that I – the woman who steps carefully over beetles on the sidewalk – said “I don’t care.”

So he pumps more gas in there.  The chattering continues. Indiana Jones in the Temple of Squirrel looks scared by this supernatural resistance to gas.  “I’ve never in fourteen years…”

So he stops pumping gas and I’m afraid that he’s going to leave and leave us stuck with super squirrel.  I should have remembered we were in the west.  “Ah, no,” he said.  “I’m going to lasso him.”

I don’t think I looked doubtful, but I probably did.  The squirrel is still yelling.

Indiana Animal Control puts on thick leather gloves, gets a little rope lasso.  Opens the drawer a little.  I’m thinking “yeah, right.”

Super squirrel is not stupid.  He doesn’t make for the opening.  So, Indiana reaches in…  The squirrel surges out, and with his third hand (do you have a better explanation) the animal control guy lassoes him, and grabs him.  The squirrel is biting him and going nuts but Indiana has leather gloves.  He dumps the squirrel in an animal carrier.

“We’re going to move him,” he says.  “To x neighborhood.  Plenty of squirrels there.”

The kids ask to say goodbye to the squirrel and are allowed to look through the bars at the prisoner who is still chattering defiance.  No word on whether he was holding up a little fist and chattering “I will be back.”

So…  Five years later we move to… the same neighborhood.  I have no proof that the old squirrel who used to dance on the fence and taunt our cats – battered, beaten, one eye missing – was the same one that had come in and – clearly – tried to rescue our guinea pigs from durance vile.

And I will not mention that sometimes I see squirrels acting oddly military on the garage roof.  I could be wrong.  Maybe there is no Rodent Liberation Front.

Or I could be right.  And they could be watching me.

UPDATE: Different Post — a Chapter of Elf Blood — At MG C

*I would like to point out I did NOT write this.  It showed up in my mailbox with pictures and the attribution I put in the title and the following email text: Among Snowden’s documents as captured by British Intelligence from Glenn Greenwald’s Main Squeeze “Miranda”.  I have no clue who sent it, though OF COURSE I have suspicions. (I am looking at YOU.) I find this message bewildering to say the least, but I’m not the one to pass up a guest post.  However it worries me a little… are you guys getting crazier than I? You know that’s not allowed, right?*

TOP SECRET //GCHQ/NSA/DGSE JOINT  SHAPESHIFTER TASK FORCE.…DECLASSIFICATION DATE 01AUG43

SURVEILLANCE FIELD NOTES // 30JUN13 THROUGH 30JUL13

SUPERVISING FIELD AGENT J. CAESAR

IN ACCORDANCE WITH GCHQ/NSA/DGSE JOINT SHAPESHIFTER TASK FORCE ORDER 12-003623 DATED 12NOV12, SURVEIL TEAM DELTA MOVED TO COLORADO DENVER METRO AREA ON 29JUN13 TO INVESTIGATE INTEL PROVIDED BY AGENT [REDACTED] REGARDING POSSIBLE LOCATION OF RUMORED “THE GEORGE”.

ON 06JUL13, LOCATED TWO LOCATIONS OF POSSIBLE SUSPECT DINER ON COLFAX AVENUE WHICH MATCHED DESCRIPTION OF RUMORED SHAPESHIFTER LOCATION AS DISCLOSED IN INTERROGATION OF CAPTURED [REDACTED] – SEE INTERROGATION NOTES FILE ID “THE GEORGE  FOLDER 12-00071223”. SEE PHOTOS MARKED “SURVEILLANCE PHOTO 1”, AND “SURVEILLANCE PHOTO 2” IN ATTACHED DATA ANNEX.

LOCAL UNCLASSIFIED SOURCES [DENVER POST ARTICLE DATED 05MAY12] ASSERTS THAT SUBJECT LOCATIONS ARE OWNED BY “PETE CONTOS” – ALLEGEDLY CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF OWNERSHIP OF NEIGHBORING “SATIRE LOUNGE” BAR, AS WELL AS LATER PURCHASED “PETE’S KITCHEN”, “PETE’S UNIVERSITY CAFÉ”, “PETE’S GREEKTOWN CAFÉ” (SEE PHOTO MARKED “SURVEILLANCE PHOTO 3”). SURVEILLANCE STRONGLY SUGGESTS THAT THESE LOCATIONS – PREFERENTIALLY “PETE’S KITCHEN” – ARE IN FACT THE RUMORED LOCATION “THE GEORGE”.  SECONDARY LOCATION “PETE’S GREEKTOWN CAFÉ” INCLUDED FOR COMPLETENESS OF REPORT BUT TRAFFIC ANALYSIS CONCLUDES ONLY 17% CHANCE THAT THE LATTER LOCATION IS “THE GEORGE” VERSUS 71% RELIABILITY THAT THE FORMER “PETE’S KITCHEN” WOULD MATCH THE AGGREGATE INTELLIGENCE.

ARTICLE INCLUDES INFORMATION REGARDING THE “PETE CONTOS” ALIAS BACKSTORY, INCLUDING IMMIGRATION FROM TRIPOLI, GREECE IN 1955.  PHOTOS OF “PETE CONTOS” ARE INCLUDED IN ADDITION TO TESTIMONIALS OF “PETE CONTOS” COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT FROM LOCAL POLITICAL FIGURES.

IT IS UNCLEAR TO THIS INVESTIGATING TEAM HOW THE SUBJECT SHAPESHIFTER INDIVIDUALS PLACED THESE OBVIOUS FORGED ARTICLES INTO LOCAL PRESS ACCOUNTS TO OBSCURE THE TRUE OWNERSHIP OF THESE LOCATIONS. FURTHER INVESTIGATION WARRANTED TO UNCOVER ANY OTHER DEEP COVER SHAPESHIFTER AGENT(S).

DURING THE PERIOD OF THIS REPORT, SURVEILLANCE ASSETS WERE DEPLOYED AT THE SUBJECT LOCATIONS. SURVEILLANCE TEAM DETAILED REPORTS ARE FILED SEPARATELY IN THE ATTACHED FIELD NOTES ANNEX.  TO SUMMARIZE THOSE REPORTS: AGENTS OBSERVED A WOMAN WITH ONE SUSPICIOUS MALE AGED HER CONTEMPORARY AND TWO SUSPICIOUS MALES OF AGES APPROX 18 & 20 ARRIVE IN LOCATION IN A LATE MODEL HMMV LIMO CONVERSION.  THESE INDIVIDUALS MATCH THE DESCRIPTIONS OF PERSONS LABELED “HOYTS HUNS” IN COMMUNICATIONS INTERCEPTS.  SURVEILLANCE TEAMS REPORT, HOWEVER, THAT NO SHAPESHIFTER INDIVIDUALS WERE POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED. THE BACK PARKING LOT OF BOTH LOCATIONS WERE SURREPTITIOUSLY SEARCHED DURING 5 CONSECUTIVE EVENINGS, AND 4 CONSECUTIVE MORNINGS, AND NO SHAPESHIFTER INDIVIDUALS WERE OBSERVED. NO SIGNS OF ANY ALLIGATOR WERE NOTED BY ANY SURVEILLANCE TEAM.

NOTE HOWEVER THAT DURING OPERATIONS ON 25JUL13, ONE SURVEILLANCE TEAM OF TWO DISAPPEARED.  COMMUNICATIONS MONITORS RECORDED A BRIEF GARBLED TRANSMISSION FROM TEAM RADIO WHICH IS TRANSCRIBED BELOW:

“VOICE 1: WHAT’S THAT OVER THE CAR?  NO, FROM THE ALLEY.
VOICE 2:WINGS?  WHAT HAS WINGS LIKE THAT …”

RECOMMENDATION TO JOINT TASK FORCE IS TO CONTINUE SURVEILLANCE OF THESE LOCATIONS IN DENVER METRO AREA AND TO AUTHORIZE ISSUANCE OF INTERCEPTOR BODY ARMOR TO ALL FIELD TEAMS.

For previous chapters, click here

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s half done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  I hope to finish MY edits and cut and add this weekend — I almost made it last weekend —  at which point it will take another two weeks at the editor).  Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format when it’s done.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. *

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Ginevra Mythborn:

I could see the magic in the Earl’s pocket and I could see it was unstable.  I didn’t know what it was meant to do when it exploded, but it hardly mattered.  In a room crammed with high magic users, what that bomb would do was kill us all, or at least make us unable to use magic for the rest of our natural lives.  But since the physical effects of its explosion would pull the building down on our heads, it would kill us either way.

I jumped, a spell half-formed in my mind, and communicating itself to my fingers, something that could not possibly be done by these people, but which my power lent itself to.  I was almost sure, anyway, that this was a spell of my people’s.

Putting my hand over it told me otherwise.  It wasn’t a spell of my people’s.

I knew it, confusedly, at the back of my head, even as I tried to removed it through the honorable Jonathan’s coat fabric, failed, and plunged my hand into the pocket, grabbed the thing again.  I kept the damper spell on it as I ran towards the door, past the guards.

All this time I’d been trying to get out, and past those guards, and now here I was.  I didn’t think that my captors had even thought to follow me.

Out in the cool air, in the plaza outside, sweat stinging my eyes, I thought only where to throw it.  There were houses in every direction in London, and I didn’t want to pull the building down over some sleeping family.  And then there were magic users all over too.

I threw it the only way I could think of, towards the fountain with the lion in the middle of the plaza.  It was actually a monument to Richard the Lionheart and showed him in both his human and his lion form.

The bomb, which now revealed itself to be a small square of black glass hardly bigger than my palm, fell just short of the fountain.  Okay, the chance of its being defused if it fell in water were low, but at least there had been a chance. Now there was none.  It fell outside the stone parapet.

And since I’d removed the dampening effect from it, it blew.  It blew with incredible force, and explosion of light and sound, and I stood there, and would, I guess, have been stoned to death by fragments of statue.

It seemed like I stood there an hour, and the bits of statue were coming at me at an almost imperceptible pace, except that the Honorable Jonathan bore me to ground and covered me with his body, as he shouted, loudly, “To the ground men, are you daft?”

I knew it was the Earl from the shout.  I’d know that voice anywhere, as I’d heard it that horrible night, among the invasion of demons.

He lay atop of me. He was warm and heavy and smelled strongly of gin.  He was taking his weight on his elbows.  He whispered in my ear, “Miss Ginevra Elfborne.  So good to meet you again.”

I wanted to plant a knee where it would hurt him.  Which was stupid, since I seemed to think fondly of him.  Actually, maybe it wasn’t stupid at all.  I despised myself for thinking fondly of him.  There had been so many men, and so many saner ones.

But his light, teasing tone made me want to hurt him.  I thought he didn’t care at all.  And then he whispered, “I’ve been looking for you all over, and I thought I’d go distracted.”

And I stopped feeling like I’d like to hurt him and sighed.  “I had—“  I started.   Pebbles and stones and bits of statue were pelting on him.  I could hear them fall on him and around us.  A tinkle of glass announced the breaking of a window on this building somewhere.  “I had things to do.  I had…”

“Yes,” he said.  “I think you did.”  The rain of fragments was slowing down.  “Now, I think it’s safe.  Get ready to run.”

Suddenly he was off me, and grabbing my hand, and pulling me up in a fluid movement, and then he was running, fast, away from the office of the witchfinder, and towards an alley.  And then down that alley, like a man who knows his way, and down another alley, and up another, and then up a flight of rickety stairs that smelled like urine and vomit, and into a salon.

I had barely had time to register that the salon was dingy, decorated in the fashion of twenty years ago, and that the woman – at least I think it was a woman.  At least it was wearing a dress – in the middle of it was enormous and frog-like, before Jonathan gasped out.  “Higgins.  We need a room.  Fast.”

The… almost surely woman, nodded.  “I guess you do, Jon.  First room on the right is free.”

The first room on the right was a bedroom, which didn’t shock me, of course, but it was clean and looked comfortable, which did.  There was a high bed, with curtains, and a large sofa, and a small table with glasses and a bottle, and it all smelled clean.

Jonathan saw me looking at the bed and said, “Never mind that.  I brought you here because it’s a highly illegal brothel for magical creatures.  Never mind.  If you hear strange sounds, ignore them.  What I mean is, it’s shielded against magic.  Now, it is my impression you were a prisoner of Seraphim’s, and also that you were the one who set the hooks of the rogue magic into my world.

“I would very much like to hear your explanation of why.”

Chapter of Rogue Magic later today.  Meanwhile, will you kindly put anything you want promoted in comments?  I’ll do a round up Sunday or so.

And don’t forget to send your book promos to book.plug.friday@gmail.com.  Also, anything to do with working for writers, like editing, copy editing, type setting, etc.  We’ll do a round up of those next week, if we have enough.

Sorry, but my hair is starting to bother me, so I have to go get it cut and shaped.

I’m not a happy warrior.  Some people are.  My friend Larry Correia, for instance.  I’m relentless and non-stop, but I’d much rather avoid conflict altogether.

This is not because I don’t have the courage of my convictions, but because I feel sorry for most people on the other side, whether what we’re talking about is writing, technological change (in writing and education and myriad other things) or politics.

I can see being them, with very little change in circumstances.

Take writing, for instance.  Until Kris Rusch opened the door of the jail cell I was where they were, but more so… Or perhaps less.  I’m not even sure where the fact that my income had been a good supplement but never enough to make a living puts me in relation to people who had been receiving lavish advances and living from them, as most of the inner circle of what remains of SF have.  Yes, I have friends caught in that position (most of the people concerned in the SFWA kerfuffle are aquaintances, sometimes friendly, but not friends) where the writing income dropped precipitously.  But my friends are resourceful, smart people and are getting into other avenues and widening the feed on their streams of income.  I.e. instead of being scared, they’re active and busy.

But until Kris Rusch opened the jail cell I was sitting here thinking “Well, hell.  If no one but small presses will take me” (look, it was an agent-induced perception.  Let it go.) “And all the presses are slashing advances in half… I might as well quit now.”  Three years ago, I actually told my husband I thought I was going to quit and spend six months familiarizing myself with translation.

I want to emphasize that what I’m doing with indie is still not paying more than about a novel and not from Baen, (about half a novel from Baen) and that once I’m done with covers, editing, etc for the stuff I’m bringing out, it will be gone (mostly because I’m buying 1k of ISBNs and maybe 2k if I put stuff up fast.)  So it’s not like I have guarantees that it will be an income, if my stuff from Baen stops selling and I have to go it on my own.  (Right now, strictly indie, not advance purchase for the novels on installments or donations to the blog, it covers about “a normal electricity bill in summer.” That’s it.  Granted this is the slump of summer, and I’m hoping as I get more up it will cover heating in winter.  It’s a stage indie income goes through.  That’s where we are.

I’m used to no guarantees.  Look, at 22 I took up my roots, everything I knew and everything I was – and you truly can’t get this unless you are a girl raised in a Latin country – and came across the ocean to live with a man my parents didn’t approve of, among people they’d never met.  Furthermore, I gave up the security of my degree, which I’d taken precisely because it guaranteed me employment.  (Having seen my brother and older cousins finish STEM degrees and cool their heels for six to ten years before someone who knew someone got them their first break, I decided I’d take a degree which – failing the high road of translation for and/or the diplomatic service [which oddly, I had a very good chance of getting/was being groomed for had I stayed] or a teaching post at college [which I was tactically offered, should I stay] – offered guaranteed employment as a highschool teacher, with three months off in summer, and two sets of two weeks vacation and a middle-class salary.  (Now teachers have other requirements in Portugal, but not at the time.)  Here my degree meant nothing, and finding a job as a translator is like finding a job as a writer: someone has to give you a break, and you have to fight each step up.  If I’d stuck with translation – and I want to point out even when I came here that’s ALL I expected.  I never expected writing to be more than a hobby until my love pointed out that if that’s what I wanted I should go for it, and he’d support me while I tried – I’d probably be making more than I am (I can/could do scientific translation from four languages and that’s OBSCENELY well paid.  Free lance, twenty one years ago, it paid $70 a page, and numbers counted towards “page” even though often the page was mostly numbers I just copied over.)  On the other hand I’d be about where I am, career wise: solid, but nowhere near the top of the pile.

Anyway, I abandoned all guarantees, all expectations, all my visions of the future once.

It’s sort of like being in an accident.  It’s terrifying the first time, less so the second, and I have friends who routinely get cut out of cars and don’t seem to care.  (I don’t advise getting to that state.)

It’s a very different mind set than most people – and frankly one I’d never have navigated had I not already been divided by being brought up in Heinlein books and therefore not have fit in in Portugal.  Most people like a predictable future and the rewards of that which they worked toward.

Writers, right now, at all levels, are being denied that certainty.  Hence the rip and scratch.  The Titanic has sunk, there are insufficient boats and we (they – I am blissfully floating away on a raft made of whiskey crates.  Crazy but effective) are fighting for a spot atop the grand piano with the certainty that if you get too many people on it, it will sink.

That is all you need to know about the psychodrama between Sci Fi writers.  I haven’t been around that long but I’m given to understand the field is PARTICULARLY prone to it, having had major seismic rifts over WWII and Vietnam as well as every change along the way.  I know at cons I met people who hadn’t talked to each other for years over something one of them had said thirty years ago.

If it were only that, it could be let go, but this is happening in every group, every fandom, every casual association I belong to.  People go off on weird tangents and then start ripping up at each other.

And then there’s politics.  I don’t know if anyone actually believes the course we’re on, economically, socially, internationally, is sustainable.  I don’t believe it, but then I’m a little more clued in about history and economics than others (though many on this blog leave me in the dust, since my research tends to be in terms of “How do I fake someone living in this era” which doesn’t exactly lend itself to macro-movements.)  It’s truly astounding how many people think the closed-pie Marxism they were taught in school is economics, and who will therefore bow their heads and accept being poorer so “others can be richer” – and how long it will take them to get that they were lied to is a guess.

I suspect however there’s a lot more awareness than people would admit to, otherwise we wouldn’t go from zero to shouted swearwords in ten seconds, when you’re just expounding facts, or even your opinion (like my I Am Spartacus post, which seems to have got needles under a lot of people’s nails.)

I think at some level, almost every one of us is aware that we’re carrying on a party on top very thin ice, and we’re all listening for the crack.

The difference is, some of us have hope for the future, hope of a contact with reality that will bring us into a more aligned state with it (almost anything is.)  Something that will stop the crazy “but I want a pony because France has a pony and France says his pony never poops, so you don’t need to worry about that.”

But they… they see the system they want, the system for which many of them have given their whole lives in work and devotion, crumble and reveal itself as a farce and a form of feudalism.  They might say they don’t believe it, but the bankruptcies, the cracks in Europe are registering.  Otherwise they wouldn’t shout so loudly, and they wouldn’t go from zero to screaming obscenities.

Mind you, most of us here – and elsewhere – are aware that we’re going to eat a lot of dirt on the way to rebuilding the American Republic.  But we think that’s possible, if not probable.  It’s something to work toward.

On the other hand, if you’re a collectivist, and you believe in the entire world singing Kumbaya, the last dozen years have administered a series of shocks to the system.  There have to be doubts and questions deep in your heart, which makes you shout all the louder.

A friend of mine told me that before the 2004 election “the louder they shout the less secure they are.”  Only this isn’t an electoral context.  This is life.  And at some level they know it.

So, where does that leave me?

It leaves me where I am.  I hate arguing.  I hate arguing with people I like in other respects.

But the hour is late and the journey perilous.  I can’t in conscience stay quiet while we print the country into financial oblivion.  I can’t remain quiet when we practically invite enemies to strike us.  I can’t remain quiet while our liberties are torn apart.

In my ideal world, I’m living in a Victorian by the sea.  (In Colorado? You say.  Shut up wretches, this is my ideal world, okay?) and I have this little tower where I write, and no matter if my villains or heroes are male or female, straight or gay, white or purple with yellow pokadots, no one comes to call me names.  In my ideal world, this blog is about what the squirrels did in the night, and recipes, and how to clean your house, and my cute, cute cats.

… This is not my ideal world.  In all the rifts going on around us, I respect (and sometimes love) people on the other side.  I can see how they got there.  They either can’t or they ignore this.  They project ignoble motives onto me and mine.  And they pursue a fantasist course towards a paradise that can’t exist.

The past has shown a tendency for people in that unenviable position to amass a pile of corpses of those who oppose them, before the would-be-paradise collapses.

I will not go quietly into that good night, and so I talk.

I talk though I’d much rather stay quiet and not engage in conflict.  I talk, though it will cost me friends.

It’s not easy.  At heart all I want to do is write stories.  This will never be a full-fledged politics blog, because that’s all I really want to do.

But we’re put into a time and a place.  And sometimes it’s necessary to talk – even when it gets us called names by people who should know better.  Even when it’s unpleasant.

Perhaps after it all settles, I can sit around writing stories and ignoring the world.  Perhaps this will go by without a horrible implosion.

Perhaps.  Let’s hope so.

But right here, right now, and though it pains me to say so, sometimes I have to talk.  Night is falling and every position is thrown into stark relief, and the ice beneath us is cracking loudly.

Perhaps if we stop dancing and make for the banks fast, something will be saved.  And perhaps there is a convenient whiskey crate some can row ashore.

But continuing dancing would be betrayal.  Of me, of you, and even of those who think the dance can go on forever.

Should someone else be doing it?  Undoubtedly.  I’m just a bum writer who only wants to write.  But somehow I find myself here, and I have this small and defective megaphone.

And we must each use what we can to light the idea of a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — regardless of race, credo or gender.  Against the night that falls.

I come not to debate the case of going to war in Syria but to rant about “liberal” – in the rather corrupt form the term is applied to right now –might as well call them defrocked communists – ideas of when force is needed and how opposite (not to say suicidal) they are to history and historical necessity.

No, it’s not what I wanted to talk about today – note how late I am in posting – but it is what I can talk about today.

I think it was in the run up to the war in Iraq — when I belonged to an international fandom group and had to enlighten people getting their news canned-by-Europeans how useless and counterproductive it was for Bush to go to the UN hat in hand – that I first fully realized the craziness of the leftist case for war.

Okay, I should have got it with Clinton’s Balkan adventures (mea culpa mea maxima culpa) but I was actually distracted by the fact that Clinton was trying to do handwavium to keep us from noticing the intern under his desk.  (Spare me the “private” and the “impinging on his sex life” – a) if he’s being paid from my taxes, he has no private, certainly not in the people’s office.  B) If he were working for any company or corporation, he’d not only have been fired for abuse of power, he’d also have probably gone to jail if they could cram it under “undue influence” and call it rape.  Yes, I know that successful men have always bedded hotties who work for them.  But since Clinton and his ilk are the ones who made it a capital crime: Live by the PC, die by the PC, I say.)

I might even have got it before, if I’d lived in the US earlier, or studied US history.  I didn’t.  One of my friends swears that we went into Vietnam because Kennedy wanted to design uniforms.  (I think there were probably other reasons.  Heinlein quoted treaties.)  And of course I know adventurism abroad is a thing of democrat administrations (no, seriously.)

But I only realized the full on dysfunction when they started opposing the Iraq war before it started – and the Afghanistan campaign too – because we HAD been attacked.  That is, we were going to war to defend our interests.  Apparently this is bad, bad, bad, in the vile prog mind.

Why is it bad?  I don’t know.  I assume it’s uncouth, like defending your own race, your own species, or chewing with your mouth open.

I hang out with enough of them to have this idea they don’t have principles or reasons, they have good manners – things you say and do to “fit in” with your peer group.  And these are things they started learning very early from their parents, their teachers and other figures of authority and they never once thought about them.

Because if they thought about them, they would realize that while there is virtue in not attacking other groups sight unseen, there is no virtue in letting the group you belong to be attacked just because.  Of course there is no virtue in my defending any group (except maybe the Chinese) considering the salad in my DNA.  (Have I mentioned Asian guys are hot?  What? Deal.)

No, I confess I never heard a pre-school teacher say “we don’t have the right to defend our group, our nation or ourselves” – but I think it’s an extension from “you can’t defend yourself, because then you’re being as bad as the other guy.”  That they do say.  They say it all the time along with “Violence never solved anything.”  I found out older son was reading Starship Troopers when in a conference, in front of me, he growled back “Tell it to the city fathers of Carthage.”  (So proud.)

But I think that’s it.  It’s this internalized good manner stuff.  (And those on the right, stop preening.  You don’t use it against foreign aggressors, but you use it in internal political fights.  I’ve heard more than one of you reply, in response to an even mildly satirical and exaggerated take down of the left “we can’t lower ourselves to their level.”  PFUI.  Playing by the Marquess de Queensberry rules just gets your *ss handed to you.)

And that’s what I realized in the run up to the Iraq (and Afghanistan) war.  It’s apparently the thing of uncouth barbarians to actually defend ourselves and our country (no?  Iraq might not have been directly involved in 9/11 but in a region where half of it is inspiration and bravado, they were definite enablers.)

Now, we’re seeing the reverse of this coin, foreshadowed by Clinton’s Balkan adventurism.  War is good and just when we have absolutely no interests of our own to defend.  Hence, Libya.  Hence us actually collaborating with Al Quaeda groups.  Hence our not avenging the clear casus belli that was the murder of our ambassador. (A colleague of mine, in pre-history, in Techniques of Translation, when finding casus belli in the middle of an English document translated it as “the case for bells” – ask not for whom the bell tolls.)

And now we’ll go into Syria for the same ill-defined reasons.  And probably cack it because this president has the mierdas touch.  Everything he touches turns to sh*t.

The problem here is that the left claims to be against war, but they love some of the aspects of war.  Remember the whole kindergarten thing?  Yep.  The aspects they love about war come straight out of there.

They love the uniforms, and having everyone do the same at the same time.  They think of war as a sort of synchronized dance.  And, you know, war causes support for the president to surge at home, and there’s national unity which they love.  (Except they hated it after nine eleven, and a week in they were complaining about all the flags. They also missed that those are the circumstances under which fervor arises spontaneously.  When we’ve been attacked.  When our president is trying to do good abroad and appear manly? Not so much.)

They long for that imaginary time in WWII when the nation as one sacrificed and worked for victory.  If they could they would have a war with rationing “so we’re all equal.”  They have the bizarre idea that it was that unity, (and not the fact that most of the world except us was rubble afterwards)  that caused the boom afterwards.

Again, war is sort of a synchronized dance crossed with the do-goodism of a particularly blinkered boy-scout troop.

So, is there anything we can do?

No.  We’re going to war.  That’s that.  And it’s going to be run with crazy ROE and it’s going to be bad for everything, from our standing abroad to our interests in the world.  Because that’s what’s considered an acceptable war by the vile progs.

So what can we do?  We can teach our children well.  I know it’s not being done in the schools, but our household at least reads and discusses history books, and has for years.  (Starting at levels the kids could digest when very young.)

Note to the kids – and this might involve subsiding your own training – that nations are not moral entities.  Nations are entities of self interest.  Yeah, okay, the communists dressed the self interest as “liberating” other people.  So did Napoleon.  But in the end, they invaded other countries, not to overthrow oppressors but because communism in the world stage is like the ancient empires.  The only way it can survive is by stealing.  It fails to produce even enough to keep people in meager rations.  So, like Napoleon, dealing with a devastated France, they make war to survive.  The ideology just prettifies it.

I’m not saying the US hasn’t been moral abroad.  We can all debate WWI till we’re blue in the face, and yes, it’s quite possible that FDR entered WWII so as to eliminate a rival for world domination – but it’s hard to deny that at least intervention in WWII was benign. The aftermath, including keeping the communists in power and supplied with wheat is something else again.  BUT that was one good thing.  And there have been other good interventions, yes, including the ones to support allies.

However, the vile progs love to beat up on the fact that we also do things for self interest – like keep dictators in power – as though it were a sin for a nation to look after its own interests.

It’s time to drum back that it isn’t.  It’s only a sin if you believe in “the brotherhood of man” something communists (and French revolutionaries) preached as they filled mass graves.  A nation is not a moral entity but a grouping for survival.  The purpose of war is to ensure that the group survives.

A group that forgets this, doesn’t.

And our children will need to know this basic truth, because what is going on right now will make their survival and the survival of their children difficult enough.  They’ll have to wake up.

Let the wakening start now.

Teach your children well.

War is not synchronized dancing.  War is dirty, horror-filled and painful to innocents.  It should be.  And it should be engaged in only when your survival as a nation is at stake (though that often involves going in ahead of the enemy at your door.)  And then it should be engaged in with full force, with gusto and with no holds barred.

So it doesn’t have to happen again.  Or not with the same people.  And so you live, to fight another day.

UPDATE: Different post over at Mad Genius Club.

So, this morning I woke up to a spam email that had a title “Pee like a horse.”  Robert who was standing behind me, looking in my medieval history bookcase (yes, he’s taking a STEM degree.  NO, I don’t know what he wanted with medieval history.  I don’t ask these questions, I just go to his room every month or so and bring back the stuff he forgot to return.  Yes, this was in my office, and no, there is no privacy – so if you send me a video of naked cats skating, one of the kids or Dan are likely to see it.)  Anyway, where were we?  Oh, yes, he looked over my shoulder at the screen at “Pee like a horse” and said “What?  On all fours in a field? I suppose I could do that, but I don’t think there are any fields around college.”

To which I said, “Ijit.  It’s a prostate health add, which means I’m now on some list as an old male.”

I think I’ve talked about the multiple people I am here before, right?  I get adds to increase what I don’t have, to increase what I have [but if they were more than DD – it’s hard as is finding 36 DD, most DDs are forty and above, unless you go really expensive – I’d need a brace for my back], to kill foot fungus (this might be somewhat justified as I try EVERY sort of anti-itch product on the market, because of eczema, of course), to refinance my mortgage, to vacation in exotic places, to look after babies, to choose an old age home etc.

The guys tease me because none of them gets as varied a spam load as I do.  And it’s become a joke in the house to see what ads are on the sidebar of my facebook because, mostly I think depending on whom I’ve been pming on FB, it can be anything from bedpans to diapers, from vanity presses to courses to become a Social Worker.

I think part of this is the inability to pin down what I am based on what I look for or what I read.

It’s not just that I’m a writer.  I mean, I’m sure there are certain types of writers who only look up one thing or another.  I can imagine Agatha Christie with an internet account looking up poisons and the effects of hitting someone on a certain portion of the cranium, and how one recovers from arsenic, say.  I can’t imagine her waking up one morning and feeling that what she really, really, really needed to know was how much one could buy a castle in Scotland for, or alternately what type of wheels went on carts in 14^th century France, or even “What was the police force in Paris in the time of Louis XIII” (Does anyone know?  I haven’t been able to find that, d*mn it, because the one service that seems to have the info is a subscription service for French historians.  I don’t mind that it’s in French.  The only languages I’ve totally lost are German and Swedish, though weirdly Swedish might come back with a little effort. I can still read French fluently – and speak it, given two days to switch to that track – but I can’t – I really can’t spend $600 to see if it even has what I need.  Someday maybe, but today is not that day.)

And she almost for sure wouldn’t lose an entire morning trying to read Space stuff to come up with a plausible FTL.

It’s not just that I write in all those genres.  I think I’d be that way even if I weren’t a writer, because I read in all those genres.  If it hit me right, I’d read it.  And if it raised a question I’d hare up after it.

Call it an insatiable curiosity for the world.  (It’s actually a satiable curiosity, if I had, say, three times the life span and no other job.  Or maybe not, after all more things will be discovered.)

I remember when reading Friday, when the internet was in its mewling and crawling infancy, that I was very jealous of her net search (which is what it amounted to.)  I thought “if I could only have that, I’d be rich.”

Actually now that I have that, it eats my life, because I end up checking up on stray thoughts in the middle of working on something else.  It’s kind of like the kid in the candy shop, right?  And if I don’t use the penguin, nothing coherent will come out.

What is this all about, you say?

I was talking to a colleague this morning, and he said he and Larry (Correia) have been schooled by the left SEVERAL times that there’s no political bias in Science fiction or in fact in publishing.

Pfui.

Perhaps it is because I choose my friends among those who are like me.  When you go haring off in search of this or that stray curious thought, you end up – of course – coming up with STERN opinions on very odd things.

Like, I can go on for hours about panspermia.  (No, seriously, I can.  And no, seriously, you don’t want to start this.  It was the subject of a three month reading spree when I was recovering from pneumonia and couldn’t write.)  Or the Habsburgs.  Or for that matter the inflationary pressures in Portugal in the seventeenth century.

Inevitably, I come across a friend who has read the same thing and formed the contrary opinion.  Sometimes one convinces the other, sometimes we have fun and lengthy battles.  And sometimes – sometimes – I retreat from the field before I start calling names and friend and I put that on box of “no one will be convinced.”  (This is why I stop theological discussions here, when they get to the point you’re just going neener, neener at each other.)

You would think it was absolutely impossible for two close friends to shout that the other is “evil” because of his beliefs on medieval agriculture.  And you’d be wrong.  I’ve had this type of argument (I think that one was with Kate) with every one of my friends, at some point.  Or avoided having that argument (As in, I narrow my eyes at the screen and go “okay, he thinks that.  That’s his right.” And let it be.))

So how is it possible that the majority of fiction has rather improbable uniformity?  You should read Dave Freer’s column on that, where he mentions the villain is always white and male and usually a businessman or religious.

PFUI.

The people who made it from slush/through the ranks to regular publication JUST all happened to have the same opinions.  Wow.  “It just growed that way.”

To believe that you have to believe everyone — even supposedly very creative people — are completely categorizeable, and that you can pick political and other opinions, not ala carte but only from a fixed menu.  And that, my friends, is nonsense at least for free people who aren’t completely insane.

The uniformity is even greater if you look at bestsellers, because when publishing was an oligopsony ( A literary lycanthropic oligopsony — say it three times.) it took buy in from your publishers to get into the top ranks.  Otherwise you ended up in midlist hell… or if you wrote SF you went with Baen… who was held down by the bookstores enmity, but still managed to produce more field bestsellers and more lasting ones than practically anyone else.

Baen is hated because it shows them that there is rigging in the other houses.

So, what do we do about it?  I mean, not everyone writes SF.

Someone posted in comments about a woman who writes mystery for one of the big houses and sighs because she can’t come out as Larry and I did.  (And I bet I know which house it is, too!)

Sister – and I mean that – what are you doing?  That house (either of the two it could be) is dying anyway, and unless you’re way better at faking it than I ever was, you can’t make a long term career there.

But you don’t want to throw away what you have?

Okay, but look – for years now we weren’t allowed to send things in under closed pen names.  Our agents wouldn’t let us.  And why not, if not to monitor who we really were and what we really thought? – but the world is wide open.  You have indie.  Check your contracts.  The most important thing is to make sure your agent hasn’t laid claim to EVERYTHING you write, indie or not.  If he/she has drop them like a boat anchor.

If your publisher has hair of the dog contracts that don’t permit you to publish/write anything outside them, ignore it.  The way you’re going to do it, they’re unlikely to track it, and might drive themselves nuts trying (which is always good.)

Now, pick a pen name.  Pick a press name, or a small press to submit to.  Either register a dba with your state (some states don’t need this.  You just open a dba bank account, so check that first) so you can cash those checks.  OR use the name of your husband or your kid or your sister or something (Obviously someone who lives with you and shares your money is best.)  Of course, if like me you were blessed with a plethora of family names, you don’t even need that.  I can cash checks for Sarah Marques, Sarah de Almeida, and  Sarah Hoyt.  (It also helps my banker knows us.)

Then – and this is the big effort – write a book FOR YOU every time you write one for the big boys.  Come the collapse, you’ll have your own career ready to go.  You can then get out of the closet and announce “Marques de Almeida is a pen name and…”  And you can publish your books as collaborations and put on the cover “Mary Smith, writing as Jane Michaels.”

Think of it as insurance.  Think of it too as mental health help.  Because, if you’ve got an outlet, you’ll both stealth better, and you won’t feel so bad about it.

And think of it as going mini-Galt – avoid giving your best to the liberal establishment.

And then, most of all, think of it as driving the establishment crazy.  They can no longer control who makes it, and the more of us who make it and who don’t agree with them, the more we shatter their self image of “We’re on top because people who think like us are just smartest.”

Yes, I know writing two books a year is a pain and if you’re on the four books a year houses are putting newbies on, writing eight books a year is murder (try six, truly.  It’s doable.)

But the sound of the exploding heads of the dahlings makes it all worth.

This is your job – I won’t say your duty.  You know your duties.  If you can at all, write for you as well as for the sclerotic oligopsony.

(Sorry for scattered post – not only did that email subject throw me off track, but today is a crazy day.  I have a million things to do and only about twelve hours to do them in.  Wish me luck.)

No, weirdly this is not about western fiction.  It is not – also – about SFWA, though it will tangentially touch on what’s going on there.

Yesterday I was pinged by a fan who told me that – having found my Human Wave essay – he finaly stopped felling guilty because most award winning SF/F leaves him unmoved.  “There’s just no there, there.  It’s all politically correct pap, the “happy ending” is always human extinction or defeat, there’s nothing to make the soul sing.”

I got to thinking about this – it’s a bad habit, but what can you do – and what I thought about, specifically, was how the second sf/f book I read was almost for sure a “the soviet union is right and America will just decay and fall further behind” book – from what I remember of it.  I can no longer remember the title.

Mind you, at that age I wasn’t exactly anti-communist, because I didn’t understand communism, but I was already fairly sure the USA was good and the USSR was bad.  (No, this wasn’t a reasoned thought.  That came later.  But I saw movies from both sides, and I knew which side I liked.)  So, why in heavens’ name didn’t that book turn me off sf/f forever?  Particularly since the next one was A Canticle for Leibowitz.  (Okay, I’m sick.  I still love that book.)

And then I realized that though I didn’t like that second book – not as such – it wasn’t bad enough to turn me off, because there was force and hope in it.  It was a stupid hope “in the future we’re all communists” but I could roll my eyes at it and go on.

There wasn’t this dyspeptic and invincible hatred of everything that was human, this scorching thirst for nothing.

And then it occurred to me what is wrong with … not all.  About half the books being published that conform to the “rightly done” ideals of the establishment (a lot don’t, though – we’ll go into that later.) are desperado-written.  They come apart in your mind, because the animating principle is a hatred of humanity or a hatred of life, or a hatred of existence.

There is no vision to hold on to.  All the dangerous visions are gone.  There is no radical “this will fix it.”  It’s more of a rage of “since you destroyed my dream, you can’t have yours either.  I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”  (Think teen girls.)

There was to the New Wave in its heyday a sort of “this is the way things are going to be” that no matter how odd the principles propounded (in most cases a hot mess of experimentalism, sexual transgression, communitarism and noble savage myth) made them work.  They wanted something. They worked towards something.

Now the least offensive of the conventional books are, if not actively hating of mankind, filled with a vision of Man (though mostly woman) carrying on negative virtues: not being sexist, not being racist, not being–  Well, since there’s also a cult of victimhood, they’re usually not very effective, either, but I don’t think that’s intentional.

I think it’s because they’re desperadoes.

I spent about an hour this morning looking for the opposite of “apostates.”  Apostates are those who walk away from a religious or political belief, and though they’re often filled with rage, it’s focused rage: focused on what they abandoned and the pretty lies they believed.

They might be unfair.  They might be tiresome.  They might make you boil with suppressed rage if the goat they’re skewering is yours.  But they are usually very bright and strong and well… interesting.

This lot (not just in SFWA but in the world at large) aren’t apostates.  If they were apostates, here wouldn’t be young Hegelian clubs in American high schools. There would be no band of “young communists” in SFF. It would be – it should be – as acceptable to label yourself a communist as to label yourself a Nazi.

No – this lot hasn’t abandoned their religion.  In fact, they cling to it by trying to create reformed versions that “will work this time, really.”

The problem is, except for the very young, who weren’t alive in the late eighties, I don’t think they believe it.  Not really.

You have to put yourself back then, back when people my age and just a little younger grew up.  Even those who weren’t communists, expected communism would win.  It was logical right?  Planned was better than unplanned.  If someone made decisions, there would be less waste.  And look at the big things government had done.  Could individuals have won the long war of the twentieth century?

Then we found out the battlefield is not the same as everyday life, that economy in the industrial age is too complex and chaotic for event he very bright man to control, and that, well, people know their own business best.  (there are indications that the economy was too complex and chaotic to control back in rural societies, too, hence the periodic famines.  It wasn’t just horrible agricultural technique.  Never mind.)

I never bought the vision of the Sov Union was an Earthly paradise of sorts.  I never bought it because frankly it looked too “perfect” as packaged in all those Soviet Life magazines.  It …  I have the sort of personality that goes up to a perfectly painted wall and scratches a little to see what it’s hiding.  And then there was Gulag Archipelago.  It passed hand to hand like Samizdat (I don’t think it was illegal, though at the time it was illegal to listen to the BBC, so who knows? But we knew we’d get failed if we were caught with it) through my class when I was 14.  There were other memoirs of the Soviet Union and for those with ears to hear there were indications not all was polished gold and shining comfort over there.

I suspect it was not the same in the US.  I suspect it was not the same because the left had infiltrated all niches that had power over the mind of the young, and because the right was complacent.  “They’ve seen Paree, what would they want with Stalingrad?”  But there’s always discontent.  There was after all the “broken children of WWII” and after.  The pursuit of “my actualization” didn’t make for raising balanced children.  One thing I noticed in Portugal is that boys from fatherless homes were almost uniformly communist. One actually told me “if this were a communist country they wouldn’t have let my dad leave.”  But I suspect there was also “and the government would have taken care of me.”

And then there were the brightest and the best, often the creative best – no, seriously. It’s very hard for us creative types and for all those (eh, most of my friends) who are very good in the realm of the mind but not in the realm of social interaction to realize that, hey, pure mental agility is NOT the only thing that counts for success in life.

One of the things I keep running across in reading about the French revolution is people like Robespierre going “You know, society would be best if it were run by the brightest of us.”

But being good with words and even with abstract concepts, doesn’t mean you can run the world.  Heck, it doesn’t mean (she looks around her cluttered desk) you can run your office.  And I’m only middling bright.  Eventually younger son will need someone to tie his shoes for him and make sure he doesn’t leave the house wearing a shirt three sizes too small because he swiped it from his father’s closet and doesn’t notice sizes are different because math.  Also, engineering.

Still the very bright know themselves to be superior (they are, in some areas) and to be ill treated (they’re right there too, though they’re essential for creating/improving industrial society, our society runs on iron age models and really can’t tell the difference between “very smart” and “wears underpants on head.” (often because there’s no real difference.))  This might change, but it will change glacially slow.  Not in the lifetimes of my great grand kids.

The best thing to do is to drag the little geniuses into the world and make them understand the virtue of conforming to the extent they can.  (Usually it’s not very far, but it might make the difference between a recluse in a trash-filled room and a respected scientists.)

But again, our society is failing at raising kids.  Particularly very smart kids.  It’s been doing so since the world wars, partly through the “self actualization” movement, and partly because, well… when women join the work force something has to give and by and largely the something has been child rearing.

So there were many brands ready for the burning.  And communism was a dazzling flame that told them they could be in charge, that here was a society that valued intellect, and look how well it worked.  They always knew the world would fare well in their hands.

Most of the intellectual class and many of the teaching class, and other intellectual workers embraced the ideals of communism, even if they didn’t call it by name.  It is my impression that they took things like Gulag Archipelago and said well of course there would be failures, but look – just look – at how we failed every day.  We had poor, sick, unemployed.  We were a bad society.  At least under a planned society, the damage was limited, right?

Then came the fall.  And what a fall it was.  Even though our newspapers refused to report it, even though it wasn’t treated as it would be, everyone knew.  Everyone knew about the shoddy, tawdry, little lives behind the curtain.  Everyone knew of the mean compromises, the double thing, the poverty of mind and body.  Everyone KNEW.

They knew.  They couldn’t avoid knowing.  Umberto Ecco for a time more or less unblinking, referred to them as “defrocked.”

In a way he was right.  They’d embraced the communist future as one embraces religion.  It made their passage through this vale of tears worthwhile, it aggrandized their sufferings, their lack of success.  “I’m poor, but I’m working for the great communist future.”

And then it collapsed.  Behind the golden throne, there was dirty, ash, and the oldest form of dictatorship of mankind: the hereditary monarchy.

They couldn’t stay defrocked long – particularly the older ones.  They had to grab onto something.  They did.  They grabbed onto “socialism” and “political correctness.”

But both of those are sterile credos.  Sweden can be held up as an ideal, but heck they know that it doesn’t translate to a country the size and diversity of ours.  And besides, Sweden is starting to show cracks, and they know that.  They run to Australia and draw quite the wrong conclusions from the Australian recovery, but the cracks are showing there too.  Ten years ago they lectured us endlessly about the EEC, but heck, you know, it never did that well, and if they go on vacation and venture even slightly off the beaten path, they can’t avoid knowing the truth.  It’s shabby.  It’s drab.  It’s the Soviet Union with a softer face.  Communism in installment plans.  And the news from the PIIGS are grim.

Where can they run?  What can they do?

When I was researching the US Civil War (I will still eventually write that book of alien invasion in the civil war, yes – it’s just… time.) I came across desperadoes.  The original ones, before the name came to apply to any western evil-doer.

They were called desperadoes for a reason.  They were desperate. If the book described them accurately, men who fought for the South and came back in utter defeat to find themselves dispossessed, their families gone, and themselves disenfranchised for their lifetime, couldn’t do anything. There was nothing to build.  Nothing to believe in. There was only the certainty their dream had been defeated and they could do NOTHING constructive.

But Ah, they could destroy.  They could pillage, rob, rape, and have fun while doing it.

Desperadoes.

In literature, there are those who cling to the political correctness, the fixing of wrongs that no one alive is responsible for.  Let’s be happy for that.  They’re empty and often silly – and often the wrongs they want to correct are those their ancestors suffered, and so to Mary-Sue comfort themselves in retrospect – but it’s not burning hatred of humanity.

That’s the ones who want all humanity to die, who write – time and again – humanity ultimately defeated by MORE MORAL aliens.  Because if the world isn’t going to be run by their kind, if the communism they dreamed of isn’t going to come, world without end, and bring happiness to all, then they want to see the world burn.

This is bad enough in the arts – frankly, anything that produces Avatar or even the Matrix, where humans are used as an energy source (pfui) is very bad indeed – but it’s worse in government.  We’re now being governed by desperadoes.  They want to take our system apart, not because they have something that works better but because “if I can’t have my system, I’ll break yours.”

This is what’s behind Obamacare.  It’s not some cunning plan.  They can’t avoid knowing (well the peons can, but not the people at the top) that single payer doesn’t work well anywhere and barely works in some areas, and even there is decaying.  They aren’t trying to push us towards anything – except destruction.

They’ll be happy if Obamacare destroys our system, and it’s a bonus for destroying our economy too.  Because they can’t have what they wanted and so we can’t either.  The peons, the people with no education, and even those of us who are educated, but clearly stupid (because we don’t believe as they do) CAN’T be vindicated.  It can’t be.  Our future must be burned, as theirs was.

They’re desperadoes.  And instead of roaming the Western part of the country with two six shooters and rage in their hearts, they have power.

But desperadoes can’t build.  And they can’t win.  They know they can’t win, which is why they’re desperadoes.  It’s all pain and black rage.  And what they’re teaching the kids is bland pap.  It won’t hold.  Not when life goes pear shaped. Not when the destruction they’re trying to bring on occurs.

Build under, build around, create networks, learn specialties.  When it all falls, we can build again.

And we must be ready.