Category: Uncategorized

Omicron, Ontario and Lying With Statistics by Francis Turner

Note: You are strongly recommended to go and look at the source data at the page below

So there’s a graph going around social media that is more or less a classic example of how to lie with statistics. The graph is this one (or close relatives) as publicized by Alex Berenson, a journalist who has been increasingly skeptical of vaccine effectiveness

If you look at it uncritically it shows a huge spike in cases amongst those vaccinated against the wuflu while those unvaccinated are staying more or less constant. So you look at it and think that the current omicron variant is more infectious for the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.

However there’s some critical information that’s being missed. That is that the number of fully vaccinated is over 80% of the population while the unvaccinated consist of about 14% which means there are 5-6 times as many vaccinated as unvaccinated.

So if the wuflu were equally bad for both you’d expect roughly 5x as many whereas actually you have (at the peak) between and 3x and 4x. When you go to the website and click on the rater per 100k button you get the above graph.

And there’s plenty to comment on with that graph. Specifically it shows that the current (omicron) variant is not particularly bothered by the wuflu vaccines when it comes to infecting people. This is potentially bad and certainly suggests that optimistic people like me a year ago were overly optimistic in our reading of the trial results for the various wuflu vaccines. Bluntly the last few months have shown that protection against infection wanes rapidly and/or is very specific to earlier mutations of the wuflu and is far less effective against newer ones. Hence the frantic “get a booster”, “get another booster” messaging from the people who want to keep everyone scared

It also certainly suggests that, as should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain, the idea that the world would eradicated the wuflu was completely misguided.

So if you want to be skeptical of vaccine mandates you have quite enough evidence from that second graph and you aren’t in fact being misleading. In fact what it shows is that the wonderful new mRNA vaccines are no better than the traditional flu vaccines. You get some months of protection then the virus mutates and all that protection dissipates. Only unlike flu vaccines the mRNA ones have plenty of nasty side-effects.

But wait, there’s more and it’s more complicated. From the same Ontario site there’s this

Looking at that and you see that vaccination still seems to help against severe infection. Although 14% of the population are unvaccinated they make up ~55% of the not seriously hospitalized and about 66% of the ICU patients.

But wait… there’s (even) more.

When you do the sums about the population of Ontario (14.8 million) and the number of hospitalized (total 331) you realize that the wuflu is no more dangerous than the regular flu and way less so if you’ve had your wuflu jab.

So if the anti-vax people want to get their point across without using misleading statistics they would just take the graphs of cases and hospitalizations and put them against the population of Ontario. Or they’d just use the aarph per 100.000 produced by the Ontario health people and point out that even amongst the unvaccinated the rate of cases is 25/100,000 or 0.025%, hospitalizations are about 10% of cases and deaths (elsewhere, can’t see the Ontario numbers) are under 10% of hospitalizations (or <1% of cases).

They could also usefully look at the UK numbers and see that while cases are at record highs, hospitalizations and deaths are less than 10% of what they were at the last peak, a year ago.

And that of course ignores the number or people worldwide who have died from the current scary omicron strain (as opposed to with it), which appears to be roughly the number of people shot by Alec Baldwin (plus or minus one). 

Sometimes the day goes sideways SO badly that it’s 5 pm before you realize that, dear Lord, it’s 5 pm. And I forgot to put a post up.

On the good side, I painted husband’s office on the ONLY day he’s likely to be out of it until April. So that part is good. On the other hand have about a million things to do by 9 am tomorrow. On yet the better side, yes the house is falling into place, but suddenly a confluence of “we have help today” means an entire day disappears.

Sorry.

Good morning horde. Do you know what time it is? It is time to disappoint the snobs. It is time to grin in their smug faces. It is time to hoist middle fingers at their scolding. And it is definitely time to pffft pffft pfffft right in der Fuhrer’s face!

Now more than ever. Every day with gusto and twice on Sunday for good luck.

And if you’re scratching your head right now and going “It’s nine and a bit on a Monday morning, what in heaven’s name has wound Sarah up?” worry not. You’re about to be told.

Back when I was a sprout, knee high to a dictionary, for reasons known only to my psychiatrist, I took a Swedish language class. The teacher was a dual citizen, child of a couple consisting of a Swedish woman and a Portuguese man, had lived in Sweden part time for most of her adult life, and explained the culture as well as teaching language.

I no longer remember what the word was — I haven’t used Swedish in 38 years, okay? I can listen to it and pick up a word here and there, but I have no more clue what they’re saying than before I took it — but one of the words she taught us meant “enough” or “just enough” and it was apparently the highest compliment you could give a person. “You’re just enough. Your house is just enough. Your clothes are just enough. Why, you’re practically modestly adequate.”

I didn’t have giggle fits in class. I waited until I was politely out. But then I did have giggle fits. Look, I do understand that the Scandinavian countries are not the most fertile places on Earth (in either sense) and that for most of history having just enough was great and amazing. At one time an acquaintance was venting about how he’d like to have more kids but he and his wife couldn’t afford them due to extortionate taxes. When I pointed out that was the cost of socialism, he said something like “Well, it’s better than famine and cannibalism. There was cannibalism driven by famine in my grandparents time.”

Honestly, I don’t know enough of the history of Sweden to know if that’s true. I have a vague memory they were more prosperous (and way more innovative) before socialism’s death grip on their economy. Also judging by how many people of Scandinavian descent there are in the US, having kids didn’t seem that difficult back then.

Mostly I was sad that he saw nothing between famine and socialism, that the free market and the idea of striving had been so completely expunged from his mind. He was not a stupid man, so this spoke to me of a culture in distress.

I also know for an absolute fact that the scourge of the coastlines of Europe didn’t leave their homelands to go aviking because they were enamored of “just enough” and were looking for a bare sufficiency. Judging by the hordes people still find buried various places, they were looking in fact for lavish profusion.

So, socialism, not culture.

In fact a lot of what we mistake for “decadence” and losing the will to live for a culture, is just the iron boot of communism, or the spiky heel of socialism (more subtle but just as deadly) pinning them down till they expire. Because those take the overculture first, they act as conquerors taking over, and the conquered culture acquires all the pathologies of the vanquished: the men become ineffective, the women become whores, and there are very few children born.

Anyway, when it comes to socialists and their idea that the peasants should worship the concept of “just enough” (while the rulers servants of the people can have as many lavish dachas as they want and shop at the party stores for whatever they need. And if the dachas look like pokey suburban American houses, and whatever they want just means they get some protein, hey, at least they’ll have more than you, peasant.) there isn’t anything that infuriates them quite as much as Americans being Americans.

Wind up an European and he’ll break out of his smug superiority about decades of socialism, and foam and froth at the mouth about how tacky Americans are: too large, too loud, eat too much and own too many things.

If you want them to come close to striking you, smile sweetly and say, “Yes, it’s all true. Thank you.”

Because you see, they know that deep inside they too want to be lavish. They’ve been taught, primed and indoctrinated to think the only color is grey, and the best you can do is have “just enough” but inside them is the ancestry of Charlemagne and yes the Viking raiders screaming to get out. They don’t dare voice it, because then they’d be as bad as “those Americans” who are “So crass” but they want it all, and they can’t stand that you won’t be bullied into giving it up, as they have.

In fact, my fellow countrymen, having crisscrossed Europe a few times, I have to tell you Heinlein was right. They ain’t got nothing — except some very old, very expensive buildings, certainly nothing in the way of creature comforts — that we don’t have bigger and better in Podunka, Illinois.

In fact, one on one, in a head to head comparison, and if we pick someone not addicted to drugs, our poor live way better than the European middle class, in terms of what they do and have in everyday life.

Regardless of the screams and cries about “hunger in America” (Most of it, as you know, based on flawed surveys and insanity) we have a plague of wild geese in every public park. In countries where there’s real hunger, geese don’t honk around being tasty and made of meat while people wring their hands and wonder how to stop them pooping everywhere. In those countries, any goose incautious enough to come near a hungry human doesn’t honk. He sizzles.

And most of our poor eat more protein, have better snacks, more comfortable clothes, sleep in better beds, and just generally live better than the European middle class. They mostly have cars, and can afford to drive around (“President” Bifflé — you might not want to look that up. Then again, you might want to. I’m not your mother — and his Junta would like to stop that) they have houses of whatever description that are warm in winter and cool in summer, and they are just generally in better shape than their European counterparts, before you get to the rest of the world.

In fact, some years ago, a sociologist said in an article, in passing, that the way to calculate lifestyle in America vs. Europe, you had to assume Americans lived “two levels up” from their counterparts in Europe. So the poor live like the middle-middle class and the middle-middle class live like the rich. This stuck with me long after I forgot his name and what the actual article was about, because it scanned as true.

Which brings us to the Bifflé Junta — yes, it really is a very rude word. The French are way better at that than us. The verb, btw is Biffler. And I still say you shouldn’t look it up — who are, as you know — but they might not, though I think these idiots do — are Marxists.

Being Marxists means they’re brain damaged about the economy. Because Marx had rats in his head and never understood how the economy actually worked, which is why he considered intermediary sellers “waste” and never fully understood things like “distribution.” (The two are related.)

Part of how they have rats in their heads, is that they can’t understand how wealth can be created. To them there is just a finite pie, forever. They will come up with excuses — climate change; the hunger in Africa; the heartbreak of Psoriasis — but really what they mean is “I’m uncomfortable that people can just have unlimited abundance. (And at the back of it, I think, is the fear that people will enjoy themselves more than the socialists do. They’re a rather joyless bunch, and therefore envious of what they don’t know how to have.)

But being sure that the pie just needs to be infinitely redistributed, they’re convinced other places in the world are poor because the US has so much. So they’re trying to bring us down several pegs.

Hence the “you have to lower your expectations” and banning fracking, because they want our gas to cost the same in Europe, and the perpetual environmental scolds and self-panickers running in circles and telling us we must lower our impact on the Earth, while leaving India and China to pollute their merry way.

And then this weekend — I told you we’d get to what set me off — it seemed like every time I logged into my main computer (I haven’t taken the time to customize those browsers, yet.) I got another stupid article telling us how to stop being American, for our own good.

My favorites (BY FAR) are the one saying America will suffer more from Omicron than anywhere else, because it’s less “dangerous to the individual” but more “dangerous to the community.” They tried hard to square that circle but his makes no sense whatsoever. It’s about how it doesn’t kill many people, but if we just SPREAD it, being SELFISH it will cause the heartbreak of psoria– Okay, I”m making that. It will cause missed work, and people being miserable from the common cold. And therefore it’s time to give up our individualism, and think of the community.

Do you guys know how hard it is to touch-type with stiff middle fingers? It ain’t easy.

Anyway, the other one was about how we, like other countries, need to stop giving Christmas gifts to adults.

The whole thing seems to be that the writer is awful bad about picking gifts, and it’s wasted money, and therefore we shouldn’t do it.

I have in fact talked about how giving gifts is often wasted money, which is why socialism fails. (You can’t know what other people want.)

But that’s neither here nor there. I often fail at giving gifts to my nearest and dearest at the prescribed occasions, but that’s mostly because I give them “gifts” whenever I notice they need something or want something. And I love surprising them with just what they need, but better quality than they’d buy for themselves. In the same way, I love buying gifts occasionally even for casual acquaintances, or making them something I know they’d like. (It hasn’t happened for years, a combination of money (the other house was really expensive. And yes, we really need to sell it) and time/energy. But it used to happen fairly often and I hope it will again.)

The ideal gift is frivolous, extravagant, and something the person loves but would never buy for themselves. I’ve been the recipient of several of those, sometimes from you guys, even.

And anyway, seriously, what business is it of these killjoys?

They don’t want to give gifts. Don’t. But assume your full aspect as the Grinch and say “I didn’t feel like it. And I have a heart like a shriveled raisin.” Don’t lecture me about how it’s best for me and everyone else, too. I will give whatever gifts I want, and if I ever win the lottery, I’m going to buy big honking tacky gold necklaces for all my friends, with pendants in the shape of pooping geese, so we upset all the delicate, lilac scented feelings of the bien pensant.

Americans, they will find, are not good at taking direction and indoctrination.

I am not going to be convinced “Just enough” is a great compliment. Yes, sure, I am downsizing, because we’re done raising the kids. But it’s more like we’re compact-sizing and upgrading. Instead of three cheap/used/from thrift store coffee makers, we’ll have a single one, but good, and with a warranty. Instead f three thin quilts from thrift store, we’ll have a big, fluffy, warm blanket. And we’re so rich, so lavish that you can actually find all that, in good shape, in thrift stores, and it’s only a little more expensive.

In America, we know what we need to live lavish, unapologetic lives. And I want it all. And just to piss off Europeans and their ideas of tastefulness, I want it in big checkers, purple and red. Because.

Because I’m an American. I’m going to giggle at their lectures, and giggle even harder at their rage.

I’m not going to be brow beaten by publications no one reads anymore into feeling guilty for our prosperity.

I’m going to be loud, proud and lavish.

And I’m going to Pffft, Pfffft, Pffffft right in der Fuhrer’s face.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Murder by the Light of the Fireworks (Fall of the Alliance Book 3)

A Novella length Mystery set in the Fall of the Alliance series.

As the Alliance weakens, life goes on as usual for an unimportant backwater world.

A New Year, ushered in with parties and fireworks . . . and the death of a young woman.
Detective Inspector Rodolph Smirnov finds himself in a tangle of families, feuds and friendships.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: Huntress on the Rocks

A young military intelligence agent. Hunting a murderous drug dealer across a floating city on a water world light-years from Earth – with only his name, and a vague description of what he might look like. Will she finally find her quarry and bring him to justice, or will cases of mistaken identity mean she’ll simply end up

A Huntress on the Rocks

(A Delaney Wolff Fox story)

FROM JIM BEARD: The Nine Nations Book One: The Sliding World

The End of the World is Nigh…

The denizens of the Nine Nations live their lives between a rock and a hard place, between impassable mountains and un-crossable deserts, and between the lifeless Greylands and the unavoidable Edge. In fact, mere existence across the land is always on the edge-until a series of seemingly natural disasters sends a signal that the end of the world may be even closer than anyone ever imagined.

Now, two men ride out from the ancient Nation of Complin, each with his own quest for answers and solutions to the impending doom of their land, and though they are accompanied by capable companions with missions of their own, they are all riding into a storm that will alter them beyond recognition. At the end of the world, transformation may be the only path to saving their souls.

Pulp writer Jim Beard makes his first foray into fantasy with book one of The Nine Nations Duology, a story that both welcomes lovers of epic fantasy tales, yet also challenges them with fresh, new concepts for the genre. The Sliding World invites you to peer into the abyss, let go of your fears, and take a leap of faith.

FROM KENT HOPPER: Fractured Planes

For seventy years, mankind cowered among the stars they once ruled.
No one knows how it happened, but space itself was shattered.
Horrors now stalk the Void, and the desperate remnants of humanity fight in the ashes of their once great Empire.
Or, at least, that’s what everyone keeps telling Steven. Steven is an Artificer, an engineer living comfortably in the military autocracy of Dweomerdeep. He learns the stories are more than real when he is kidnapped and forcibly enlisted in a dark-ops mission to retrieve a set of experimental electronics that have gone missing.
Events continue to spiral beyond his control as he is given a choice:
is this the right life for him?
And, even if it is, can he get out alive?

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: Life and Polonia

The life story of the greatest leader of a fictional country. Satire and humor.

B-side: Non-fiction I wrote during the seven weeks of writing the first draft of this novel. Whatever I thought about whatever was going on at the time.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: Christmas at Blackheath

Agnes Rawlins would never dream of showing a melancholy face to her brother’s guests. She may be a spinster, and treated little better than any common housekeeper, but she is responsible for bringing Christmas cheer into the dark and rambling Blackheath Manor, and she does not shirk her duty, even when she has little reason to celebrate.

William Marlowe, Viscount Claridge, has reluctantly accepted an invitation to spend the Christmas season at Blackheath. It’s not his first choice- how anyone could wish to spend time in the gloomy manor house is beyond him- but when he meets the kind and gentle lady of the house, he finds that Christmas at Blackheath might not be so bad after all.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: grouchy

Every society and system tells itself lies. Some of it is because it’s inherently impossible for humans to perceive truth. It probably would require us to think in twenty dimensions and smell colors, or something.

I mean, I’m probably not the only one who ten years later looks back on some situation and goes “Oh, dear Lord, so that’s why–“

Then there’s the lies you tell yourself. In my case there is this certainty that if I think hard enough I can overcome anything. Which means I keep coming up against my body’s hard and ever shifting limits. Right now it’s vision. Note to self: it’s really hard to do a thing properly, when you can’t see. Lots of things actually. You’d think I’d have figured out when I have to hold on to the railings and climb and descend stairs very slowly it’s my eyes. At least I’ve only fallen once. Last time this happened it took three falls on stairs, one of them severe for me to get the point. Besides, my body knows my eyes have ALWAYS been fine.

Then multiply that by x number of people, and pass it through administrative levels.

Societies tell themselves lies because individuals in the chain tell themselves lies that get passed on; they tell themselves lies because those lies are convenient; they tell themselves lies because they conform to an image of themselves.

Then add the coercive power of a government capable of collecting and evaluating information and punishing or rewarding based on that information, and the lies exponentially magnify, inflate, and do like the flat cats in The Rolling Stones, till the fill every available space including the air we breathe.

Sometimes collective lies, and the system they create grow from some new capability we’re super impressed with.

In the Elizabethan age they were super-impressed with clock work stuff. So the universe was supposed to be clock work. And I guess human beings were clock work too. And this genesis of the modern state killed as many people per-capita as Stalin would manage. (Given a much smaller starting population.) Or as an historian once put it “The Tudors killed vast multitudes of people, some too young to crawl to the executioners block.” (Fact check: slightly exaggerated but mostly true.))

Because the problem is, of course, that humans aren’t clock work.

However larger state apparatuses (apparatenuse? Apparati? Apparapopotamus?) require you to think they are if not clockwork, at least widgets. Units of production and consumption infinitely changeable and inter-changeable. In fact, while that is true if you pull out to extreme abstraction (Abstraction on the level of “there’s only two plots”) it bears no relation to reality. And even on extreme abstraction it throws curve balls.

For instance, you can go “Well, if 100k people live here they’ll need roads this size.” But then throw in two years of lockdowns, and telecommuting, and apparently? people’s counterintuitive need to still get out of the house no matter what, and suddenly what you have is 24/7 traffic congestion. No, I still don’t understand that, and I doubt it could be predicted.

Anyway, in the 20th century — exploding in the middle of — we’d developed bureaucracy and record keeping to the point that people started imagining the state was omnipotent and government knew best.

And because the same people who controlled the government had influence over the media, either direct or indirect, (Trust me, FDR could be very direct) the lie grew legs and went galumphing around in everyone’s brain.

When I was a kid there was the same feeling about government that there is about the Catholic church in some conspiracy books: It’s immense, and it knows everything about everyone. And we don’t have — insert magical tech — only because it’s hiding it, and doesn’t want us to have it.

In fact, the idea of government was very much like a god, in the sense that Roman gods were gods. We didn’t think it was good, but we gave it all sorts of very strange powers.

And when we in other countries stopped believing that about our own country, we still believed it about the US government, the CIA, the FBI, etc. etc.

I remember sitting with my host brother in the family room late one night (I was 18 and he was 16) discussing the kind of philosophical stuff kids that age discuss and one of us (It’s been so long I don’t remember which) finally going “And at any minute, the CIA will knock on the door and ask why we’re talking about this?” (I don’t remember what this was. Could be aliens really existing or the famous one gallon per hundred miles carburetor.)

Of course, none of that is real. In fact, the more we’re finding out — now information isn’t restricted to the media — about how our information systems and government really work, it’s more like a Laurel and Hardy comedy, if Laurel and Hardy were vicious and hated the country they are supposed to serve.

But in our heads the myth of the great government that knows everything still bangs on. It probably has existed since before we were humans and some band somewhere had a great (compared to others) leader, and then after he died, they kept talking about him, and how great he was. Probably where Greek and Roman style gods evolved from.

In fact, at the very back there’s probably the idea of the parents, like we experienced when we were infants. “WOW, they know when I need food and when I’m wet and–”

This leads a lot of people who have realized our government sucks and wants us dead to idolize communism. Partly because of communist PR and the idea that somehow automagically it knows what everyone wants (This comes from not thinking in detail. HOW would they know? Even we don’t know what we want half the time.)

I was reading a book written in the seventies, recently, and the author who grew up in some Western country talked about this vitamin/mineral/whatever pill that his mom was taking, which would increase human life by another half, and in fact the Soviet Union was making all their citizens take it.

I almost walled the book, which was on some technical thing and had nothing to do with supplements, because…. seriously?

First, the USSR came up with this discovery? Given that they could be super-ruthless about human experimentation, I could see them figuring out some stuff through horrible methods, but how would they have tried it out and known how much it extended life, since at the time the USSR hadn’t been extant the span of an entire human life in normal circumstances.

Second, supposing some scientist had figured this and the USSR shot him in the back of the head and stole it: HOW would they make enough for their whole population? They never managed it with anything else, up to and including food.

Third, supposing this amazing supplement existed, why would you have to MAKE people take it? If there were a pill proven to give me another fifty years of healthy life to live and write in, I’d take it. Wouldn’t you? I don’t want to live forever, but living a bit longer and having more time to work wouldn’t hurt. (And this makes me wonder if that’s why the left is so puzzled about people refusing the vaccines, because they also haven’t thought about the details. Like you know “Completely new method that never worked before” and “bodies that aren’t widgets.”)

However, an otherwise smart and educated man believed that nonsense.

This basic trust in government knowing what is best for each person and also needing to use force to make people do this one great thing that will save us all.

The problem with that, as we’re seeing, is that the more you put power in the hands of an individual (the end state of hyper-powerful bureaucracy) the more you’re prey to that person’s delusions. Like millions of people died or lived in fear because Fauci thought AIDS was airborne, and could be mitigated with masks, and– It’s fairly obvious Fauci got bit by an airborne virus somewhere in infancy, and so has this one solution to any problem that comes along. And since he’s given unchecked power, we all have to live in his hell.

Fortunately the myth of the all-powerful government seems to be getting chipped away, if not utterly crumbling yet. (It needs to crumble, honestly.) Of course the idea of the perfect chieftain will remain to pollute society and how we think. (If nothing else, the idea of a transcendent G-d allows us to overcome all of those, because every human is flawed. Which is why the most successful societies in history in terms of feeding everyone have that, and things go sour fast in “Atheistic societies.”)

It won’t crumble fast enough, and it’s going to be tricky navigating around so it doesn’t fall into something worse.

But the lie of the 20th century was exceptionally lethal, and it’s good to see it lose power.

And it’s good to be aware of it, and chip away at it in our own heads as well. Government isn’t magical. Communism isn’t magical.

There’s no magic at all, except us poor individual slobs doing the best we can.

As often as we fall short, it’s not as bad as when governments fall short by the numbers, collectively and with force.

And that must be our consolation and our hope.

When you wake up int he morning and the eye of sauron isn’t moving.

Wait, I’m not telling it right. This is the eye of sauron:

Okay, Dan calls them death stars, but since there are two and in this house they reside in a bathroom closet, a friend nicknamed them the eyes of Sauron.

Anyway, the left one wasn’t moving. which meant I’d forgotten to empty the poop drawer, which must be done once a week. (I think it had been almost two.)

The problem of getting the cats used to a self-cleaning box (I had to, because I tend to forget things when writing) is that you can’t let it get dirty or they get bad.

So I emptied the drawer — they have two, but they use the left one almost exclusively — then the other drawer, then stumbled downstairs to put the bag in the trash…. which was not in the garage.

Which is when I remembered that today is trash day and that since it was full, Dan had put it on the curb last night.

Picture me in my pink fuzzy bunny slippers, and the nightgown (I could have come back for the robe, but didn’t feel like it at that point) which is perfectly modest, but IS a nightgown, stumbling around the curving driveway to the trash, grumbling and cussing in seven languages. To make things worse it was Quite brisk this morning.

I knew right then and there how the day was going to be. and I was craving doughnuts and feeling a wee-bit insane.

BUT–

Yeah, that’s exactly the way the day has been. This is the first time I’ve been near the keyboard all day.

It’s mostly good things, in terms of getting the final things done in this house so we can unpack. (The other one is still in limbo, as we’ll HAVE to have things done, but how and when we don’t know.) but I’ve been been running ahead of the crisis all day.

I didn’t forget you, though. And now I got to sit down, this is your update.

Real post tomorrow.

Have I mentioned recently how much and with what kind of purple passion I hate the stupid aphorism that “Hard times make tough men; tough men make good times” etc, ad vomitous nauseum?

Oh, sure, it’s consoling, isn’t it? You look at the current generation and you go “oh, well, now they’ll have hard times and my grandkids will be tough men, with hair on your chest.”

Atchually, there’s a good chance your grandkids (or great grandkids depending on your age) and mine too will be none existent. And there’s a reason for that. And no, it’s not because they “had it too easy.”

Look, for the last 500 years or so, absent wars and other external f*ck ups mostly of a governmental choice, it’s been an ideal fail mode for parents to go “Those darn kids just had it too easy” no matter in which way young disappoint the old.

Heck, go far enough and Romans are going on about the decadence being caused by youth having it too easy, not like their noble ancestors subsisting in caves on acorns.

It was tommy rot then and it is tommy rot now. What caused the Roman decadence was not prosperity but a combination of loss of purpose and a bizarre addiction to slavery and welfare.

As the stupid mouse habitat experiment actually showed (and the debunkings seem to have disappeared from within “easy search” online) is that loss of social role causes all the problems we associate with oh, overpopulation, moral decadence, too much abundance, or whatever it is you feel like railing against today. (I feel like railing against stupid, facile sayings the right embraces because they give the moralists warm fuzzies.)

Let’s begin by saying I agree with Heinlein, that you can ruin your kids by making their life too easy. I tried really hard not to. I think I succeeded, in so far as necessity is the mother of invention, and the boys invented all sorts of things, because I wouldn’t buy them. (Mostly because I was subsisting from writing, and not that well off.) I might have fallen in the other failure mode of this, insofar as older son told me he has to talk himself out of stupid projects because “I can make expensive thing so much more cheaply. Only I don’t have the time.” Which, btw, gentle readers is my failure mode, since my parents raised me on spit and scrapings which is all they could afford.

But there are many, many failure modes of child raising. There are many many success modes, since the intersection of kid and parent is always unique.

Let’s also agree that “suffering” by itself does bog standard nothing. Unless you think that Japan came out of WWII saner, and more able to compete. (Hint, it didn’t.) Or that all the republics that suffered horrible deprivation under communists are now healthy and filled with self actualized citizens (hint, they aren’t. Poland is a little less f*cked up than the rest.)

So this whole bullshit of hard times? Yeah, hard times will create mostly wimps who lean on government for support. And if you think I’m wrong explain why FDR engineered the great depression, leading to the LARGEST expansion of government ever.

Which brings us to what our kids are suffering from, why they’re growing up really slowly (even mine track about 10 years younger than I was at their age) and why all of us know any numbers of failures to launch: I’ll give you another Heinlein example: if you take a puppy and beat him randomly, for no clear purpose.

Okay, you’re saying most people don’t beat their kids. No. I know. But you know what, there are worse things than physical beatings.

As someone who grew up with both, I’d rather have the quick swat on the behind (or even the extensive spanking) than the slow burn recrimination over days. Particularly if it was — as it so often was — for either an accident (Dropping and breaking something happened with amazing regularity, a combination of clumsiness and undiagnosed astigmatism) or for something I didn’t know was wrong/hadn’t understood was not supposed to be done, like you know, never having been given the rules of common social intercourse, and then being punished because I don’t know them.

Now let me shed some light on how the current generation was raised: Oh, not by their parents. In fact, a vast number of the current generation had only “Quality time” with their parents, which might amount to a few hours a week. And in those hours eating and homework had to be accomplished.

Look, I raised kids between 20 and 30 years ago. I’m sure it’s worse now.

Messages the school gave my kids:

-Humans are ruining the Earth and will destroy it if it goes on.

-You’re in 9th grade now, you should sign this pledge that you’ll never have kids, because we’re overpopulated.

-Because every industry is polluting, you should not expect to have as good a life as your parents or grandparents. Dream small.

-You’re the brightest, best, smartest, and we expect you to change the world just by existing.

-The best way of changing the world is realizing how privileged you are and working for the underprivileged.

-Everyone who has more than they strictly need, has stolen it.

-The other sex that you’re naturally attracted to hates you and wants to destroy you/exploit you.

-The US was only ever rich because it was stolen from Amerindians/result of slavery.

-We’re all going to die in 12, 10 whatever number of years.

-If you’re hit you shouldn’t fight back, because that’s worse.

Should I go on?

My kids were exposed to a steady diet of this effluvium. They were SLIGHTLY luckier than their classmates because I was at home screaming “That’s all bullsh*t.” But even half the other kids that had parents at home, the parents agreed with the school.

Put on top of that that these kids were expected to be responsible and capable BEYOND THEIR NERVOUS SYSTEM. Particularly boys. If you have a boy, and he starts failing in middle school? They expect the kid to be able to plan his life ahead for weeks, and remember to give in homework/do things without being reminded.

Boys are NOT mature enough to do that. Some girls are. Their nervous systems develop faster.

But here’s the thing, the schools do this under the impression that they are “being tough.”

In fact, it’s a lazy teacher thing. They don’t want to remember to remind the kids. So the kids have to be hyper-organized because their teachers aren’t.

And since what they’re being asked to do is in most cases quite literally impossible at that age, they have to ask parents for help. This bakes in the idea that they are uniquely flawed. Because the teachers are asking people to do this, other people do it, but the parents have to help them. So, they’re broken, right. (BTW this is not just with scheduling. We refused to do the homework for our kids, and were known to descend on teachers with developmental psychology texts. Doesn’t mean our kids didn’t internalize the message.)

Do this at the same time you cast doubt on and remove the traditional frameworks that give meaning to life: religion, patriotism, family. Make people feel guilty and stupid if they adhere to it.

What you have are puppies who have been beaten every five minutes for no sane reason, and told and shown over and over that they’re defective. Oh, and those who have any success are evil and exploiters, and probably robbed all they have.

Sure, they’re going to get right out there and go into the world with sword drawn to conquer. Oh, wait, conquering is wrong. And going to space is wrong. And doing anything new is probably a form of privilege.

The surprising thing is not that a vast majority of kids spend their lives finding new ways to declare victimhood. The surprising thing is that some of them are fairly normal and functional, even if even those are too depressed and scared to do much.

Only the psychopaths thrive. Oh, and the Amish, because they don’t attend public schools. And some of the homeschooled kids, of course, though the messages are pervasive in the culture, and reach even them.

So, making their life touch will do absolutely nothing, except cause kids to crawl into a hole and die.

Most of that generation is lost, and it was made so on purpose, by people who taught them poisonous, horrible ideas and made them feel stupid and inept. Because they could.

Standing in front of them screaming “What you need is some hard times” should get you shivved. It won’t because they already feel too guilty for breathing.

They might call you fascist or something, because that’s the only way they were taught to escape mroe pain and punishment: to join with the mob and pile on.

But that’s it.

What can be done? Well, we can get rid of brandon and create a vibrant economy that actually pulls them in and knocks the nonsense out of them by giving them opportunities for success. I have a private belief this is why Trump had to be got rid of. Because he was doing that.

We can give them a framework for success: Why do you think the left hates Peterson? He does that.

Tell them, show them, counter the gospel of despair they were brought up in. We know people abandon nihilist beliefs given a chance, but you have to give them a chance.

Because condemning them and calling them terrible failures isn’t working. And we can’t afford the now going on 2 generations that we’re losing to…. nothing.

Sure, they have material comfort we didn’t have, and more opportunities for distraction than we had (which is good and bad) but take those away without giving them some mental and emotional thing to lean on, and all you have is suicide.

Give them a lifeline. Give them something to believe in. Give them something to fight for.

Go snatch brands from the fire, before it’s too late.

Karen and Brandon got married…. and changed their names by deed poll.

This morning, I picked up the book I’ve been reading and read the first line, about the main character hiring a lawyer named Brandon. And giggled.

At which point it occurred to me what the last two years have done to two — before this — perfectly respectable names: Karen and Brandon.

Now, Karen was starting to be a little old-fashioned. part of the reason for the image of “Karen” is that this is a thirty or forty something woman who is sure that things should be played by the rules that she believes in. I’m very glad this wasn’t applied to my generation, because otherwise it would all be Heather or Dawn. (Amanda seems to be more cross generational. I know a dozen of them, but they extend from their sixties to their twenties, so–)

However Brandon so far as I know is still immensely popular, having been popular since the eighties when a lot of “sound like last names” became suddenly “refined” and “desirable” for kids’ names.

(The even less sane trend of adding “son” to the end of names to make them sound like last names was a ten (?) years ago thing. All those Petersons and Jacksons probably wonder what was wrong with their parents’ heads. Well, I did. And neither of my sons appreciated it when people added son to the end of their names to show willing or something.)

Now if we start discussing crazy names people give to kids we’ll be here all day. Younger son went to school with someone named Aaereek, pronounced Erik. And in fact the “let’s spell it weirdly to show our creativity” was in full bloom when I had my kids.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but when first son was born, I was invited — of all things — to a focus group on names. They paid $50 and at the time we were unemployed, had a new baby born by — very expensive — emergency caesarean and I’d have done far less savory things for money. We needed groceries.

So I went to the focus group. And every one of those persons had given the kid an “original” (read bizarrely spelled) name to show their “creativity” and “originality.” (Why they couldn’t simply show it by painting the nursery an unusual color, I don’t know.) So it came to me, and they asked what I’d named my son, and I said “Robert Anson.” And they asked how I spelled it, and I explained. There was utter silence in the room, and then someone said “Was he named after his grandfather?” I opened my mouth to explain, closed it, then said “Yeah, let’s go with that.” Because, really, I didn’t think I could explain.

But Brandon…. Relatively sane middle of the road name to give your kids two or three years ago. And Karen well, imagine it’s a family name and you’re naming her after mom or grandma….

Little Karen will be made fun of in kindergarten and told to “shut up Karen.” (The only thing that will make it worse is if she has the kind of parents who, against all reason, insist on strapping a mask on her.) And Brandon is going to be greeted with “Let’s go” and giggles.

Well, all I can say is it might pass.

I mean before our son could even walk, our fun name for him was “Bobbit.” And then…. Lorena…. well. It’s not as immediate a laugh thing, now. But people still remember it. Fortunately we stopped calling him that immediately.

In the same way right after second son had been born, there was a notorious killer by his name. Fortunately by the time he hit school no one remembered, but all the same. (And he goes by his middle name, anyway.)

You can’t tell, of course. You can’t tell what’s going to become of the name you gave your kids.

I will only say that Karen and Brandon are the two fastest tarnishings of names I’ve ever seen.

But they’re not in bad company. I’d say they should talk to all the girls named Gay, but of course, most of them are over ninety.

All you can do, really, is either give the kids an uber-popular name and hope they hide in the dense pack; give them a solidly traditional name — as I did my kids. Mostly — because if it hasn’t acquired a bad meaning, it probably won’t (Though Gay, you know?) and give them a middle name or two, to let them use if the first name becomes to weird.

When the use of a name, in a book, makes you giggle, it might be too late to rehabilitate it.

And for those on our side, take heart. Both of those names were thoroughly tarnished by us. By the real resistance. And it’s everywhere.

(Though the left’s attempt to make “Karen” someone who DOESN’T want to submit to their crazy diktats was, admittedly, adorable. It was also crazy. They can’t meme, and they also can’t understand things that go memetic.)

In cultural terms, this means we’re winning. There’s more of us than of them. In the cultural war, we’re engaged in mopping up the stragglers.

In their high command, completely isolated from reality, Brandon is shouting orders to ghost artillery.

You’ll probably like it.

Maybe.

In a week or so. But I got sidetracked. And now I’m taking the mathematician for walk.

See you later.

Dumas supposedly said that you shouldn’t rape history unless you mean to conceive a bastard.

I suppose us writers, who periodically (and with gusto) go digging through the past for characters and settings and spoils, must live by that idea that in this case at least the end justifies the means. Yes, we will take horrendous liberties with people, long dead, who if they perceived our outrages might not even understand what the heck we were up to. And we will take liberties with minor events and happenings because it makes a better story.

In other words, we have shovels, we have ink, and we’re not afraid to use both.

For instance, it is said of the Portuguese king Pedro I that when he became king, he had his dead mistress (Some ten years dead) dug up, and married her remains, and then forced the whole court to kiss her hand.

This seems to be under the equivalent of what would today be in the Enquirer, as what actually happened is that he revealed they had been secretly married after his first wife’s death, legitimized their sons, and then proceeded to have her remains moved to a joint royal tomb, in a fine church, where he eventually joined her. The procession for her reburial was said to be very proper and solemn in fact.

But of course I’ve stolen the first lurid version for a zombie story. Because the second wouldn’t be nearly as good.

And yes, I’ve had Shakespeare be a robot, an alien, and a bewildered schoolmaster in the thrall of elves.

Which is no more than he deserved for having done what he did to Richard III, which, even if Richard were guilty (and he almost for sure wasn’t, at least of 90% of the things attributed to him) would have been an injustice.

Yes, I know. Shakespeare — probably — did it under duress, but so did I, as I like to eat and babies needed shoes.

But there must be a modicum of decency and some respect for the past in grave robbing, okay?

When I mentioned I’d read Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time (Never figured out where the heck that title came from, btw) I also mentioned I’m somewhat uncomfortable with what I’ll call Richard III fandom, due to the left’s insane interest in rehabilitating every historical monster. I should have added that in many ways I doubt that Richard III was a monster, mostly due to knowing as much as I do about Henry VII.

I also neglected to say I understand the fascination with Richard III. In fact, the last time I came into that orbit, I spent far more time than I’d wish studying the case, and reading learned opinions on it. For and against.

But at that time, eventually I found a subgenre that can only be called “Author self-insert Richard III erotica.”

I will confess I skimmed like ten of these books by different authors. Skimmed, because frankly the emotion was akin to watching a train wreck, or watching someone take off their skin and dance in their bones.

I was in fact staring, mouth agape, going “I can’t believe people are writing this.”

The backlash of the sick fascination was to run away from the whole intellectual pursuit of who done it in horror.

Because you see, that’s not decency in grave robbing.

Look, I’m not going to say I might not have done the same, when I was very young. I was a weird, geeky young woman, and I fell in love with literary characters, long-dead people and people from my own imaginings. And there is a very strong need to “Comfort” someone who suffered and was greatly maligned. And teens have no sense of proper decorum.

All I can say is if those writing Richard III erotic (or worse, perhaps, no, trust me, self-insert romantic) fanfic are teens, they are extremely accomplished.

So what is indecent about it? Well, this person existed. And he had a certain dignity and power and honor. In ways in fact that we can’t quite understand. Besides, for sure, being very religious and devout in ways we don’t understand.

Making his imagined self behave as a sappy 21st century male is– wrong. Very very wrong.

For one it violates the ‘research’ directive in a way even “the Duchesss took the gig to go grocery shopping” doesn’t.

Look, I grew up in another culture. It was a modern day culture, just …. different. And yet, the way men there treated (and to an extent treat) women was and is so different from modern America that if you were writing a cross cultural romance with respect, you’d at least have to wave at it, and explain why the male hero had become more American in his attitudes.

I don’t care how enlightened a medieval man might have been. He would not have treated a modern woman in a way that would have pleased her. Just no. The realities of the time, and the need for brawn in every day life put more worth on male strength than we can even imagine. And gave them license for more than we’d even understand.

Now you can wave at that and make him “learn better” or just be HIGHLY unusual, but honestly? If going between times, it’s easier to do if you have a wholly imaginary character, and also somehow more “decent.”

I know. You’re staring at me, and wondering what the difference would possibly be. But for me the difference is between using plastic bones as decorations, and actually going and robbing a grave for your Halloween skeleton.

It is losing awareness that people in the past were equally human, and had thoughts and needs and desires, same as we have. And that their culture was vastly different.

And we lose sight of that at our own peril, because it encourages us to live in a sort of idiotic presentism, where we assume that the past was always the same as now, only somehow better.

I am the first to endorse the half-amusing fact that Americans don’t really get — at any level — distinctions of rank, for instance, and for the most part it doesn’t at all bother me. For instance, I’m giggling through a pride and prejudice fanfic where, due to weird set of circumstances the Bennet girls become the wards of Lady Catherine, who asks them to call her Aunt Cat.

But at the same time, it’s important to realize that — outside obvious fanfic — people in the past lived and died for and by the dignity of their rank. And that the real person at the back of the story would have found it worse than death to be …. oh, called Ricky by some random woman on the street, or treated like a helpless toddler. (For one, what the heck. This is a man who was used to medieval warfare from his late teens. And good at it. Not some guy who is going to blanch at the sight of blood.)

As I was writing this, a more obvious bit of nonsense came up in a discord group I belong to. It appears there’s much preening and calling anyone who opposes this “racist” at having cast a black actress as Anne Boleyn. (Frankly, after Anne of a 1000 days, they should have shut down the genre.) Because the only reason you can object to casting people who lived and have portraits of themselves everywhere as a completely different race is because of course, you’re a racist.

It couldn’t be because (now as ever, btw) any number of people get their information about the past from biopics and stories (Which is why Richard III has the reputation he does, because Shakespeare) and therefore any number of guppy-mouthed kids will assume Anne Boleyn was black. I look forward to thesis about how her beheading was racial. And I’m only half joking.

Because of the nonsense movies that have made Mary Queen of Scotts, for instance, Black or Asian, I’ve heard young people tell me that there were always black people in England.

And while they’re not wrong: there were always a half dozen or so in any given medieval country, more often than not exhibited as curiosities, that is not what they mean.

What they mean is that they think the population was about 50/50 (As they believe it is now) and that therefore the portraits, etc. have been “whitewashed” and are evidence of racism.

In fact, I believe that’s 90% of the reason they want statues removed/erased.

It is also why they believe insanity like “white people enslaved black people because racism.” Um…. no. People enslaved each other back and forth. I am in possession of several ballads about presumably my ancestors on both sides of the conflict, of Christians and Moors merrily enslaving each other back and forth across the ever shifting frontier in the peninsula. Most white people of the time hadn’t seen enough black people to be racist against them. They simply inserted themselves as buyers in the network of slave-selling going on across Africa.

So it wasn’t some race war ending in slavery, which these bizarre a-historic movies would make you believe. And no, the kids aren’t being taught better in school. (No one is.)

So, in principle I’m very much against this bizarre and stupid miscasting of people who actually existed. You want to cast black people in fun roles in the past? You can either do it explicitly as in Hamilton, or perhaps write medieval fantasies in which this happens.

But stop raping the past without conceiving bastards anyone wants to look at in the full light of day, and who rampage abroad corrupting people’s ideas of what came before and who they are.

Besides, as a friend put it about this:

There are two rational responses here: 1.) Stick with the historical and fictional characters actual and traditional races. It’s the way it happened/was written. No problem. 2.) Realize that any adaptation is an interpretation and go for the best actors no matter what the race is. Black people can we Abraham Lincoln and white people can play MLK.
Of course we live in the dumbest timeline so we can have neither and a dumb identity war ratchet that won’t be happy until the only characters that will be allowed to be white are Hitler and Satan.

He is absolutely right. The problem is that it never goes the other way. You’ll never see a white person playing MLK or a black person playing Hitler. which tells you there is a particular insanity behind this that is not simply “We’re casting the best actor” but a sort of deranged racial war about as sane and making as much sense as the deranged lusting after the shade of poor Richard the third.

Another friend said:

I’m (impatiently) waiting for Black Stalin.

But he knows he’d die of waiting.

Again, there is, I’m sure, some grandiose posturing and feeling very special from giving black people their due, like there is posturing and feeling very caring from not only rehabilitating Richard III but having him transported to modern times and given all the comforts of a modern life, and an accommodating author/mistress.

Neither of them are right. Richard III is a person who actually lived. And if he was innocent and a decent human being, he would expect to be enjoying the reward of a life well lived, in perpetual light and the company of his creator. You’re allowed to not believe in the after life, but he did. And I hope he found the after life he deserved.

In the same way, people of African ascent have as complicated a history as any other race. Possibly more. Sure, they’ve been enslaved. They’ve also enslaved — among others white people — and many of their sub-groups (which btw, never considered themselves part of a unified anything, much less a race. Not historically) have glorious and dignified histories.

The clash of cultures between Europe and Africa has much to teach us, some of which applies to the current time, because it applies to the perils of a tribal mind set when exposed to a more universal culture with fast communications.

And those of them who have immigrated (or whose descendants are part of western countries because their ancestors immigrated or were dragged there kicking and screaming) have their own history, their own glories and their own triumphs.

It is utterly demeaning — not to say racist. Though, you know, it is racist — to think that the most important thing you can do for black people is allow them/push them to play the part of dead European noblemen. Because THAT at last will confer dignity and pride.

Instead, of you know, either allowing the best actor to play whatever, or leaving historical people to be played by people who SOMEWHAT look like their portraits.

I mean, I would object to Johnny Depp playing Shaka Zulu. And I object to a black woman playing Anne Boleyn. Because both are crazy cakes.

But on top of that making the cross-race-casting go only one way only reinforces the idea that the highest honor you can give black authors is playing white people.

Which is so many levels of insulting, I can’t begin to describe it.

When it comes to robbing graves a certain decency is needed. Sure, you can anatomize the cadaver, but make sure you treat it with some respect and learn something.

Do not give Julius Caesar’s bones to the dog for a toy.