Of all the traps a culture can fall into, the fact that Americans tend to fall into Noblesse Oblige traps says very good things about us. It also doesn’t make the trap any less dangerous.

Noblesse Oblige, aka “nobility obligates” was a way that the excesses of a hierarchical society was kept in check.  While the peasants were obligated to obey the nobleman, the nobleman was obligated to look after them/not put extreme demands on them/behave in certain paternalistic ways. (One of these days I need to do a post on paternalistic versus patriarchal. remind me.)

It is what is notably lacking from ideologically driven totalitarianisms and hierarchies, probably because their basis being atheistic they don’t seem the humans they have power over as being worth anything or commanding any duty from them.  This is why in places like Cuba, Venezuela or China, the officials of the “democratic” government give themselves airs as long-suffering public servants while treating the people under their power worse than any of us would treat a stray animal (let alone a pet.)

In the US — where the citizen is king! — we have evolved a form of noblesse oblige best described as “Them who can, do what they can for those who can’t.”

It is part of our cohesive response to disasters.  The neighbors who can/are less hit will go out of their way to help others.  It is also why that guy who tried to write a book about how the poor stayed poor forever found that moving to a new city with his girlfriend and $5, he had trouble STAYING poor.

The problem is that it’s exploitable.  To a great extent the homeless invading our big cities and camping on our sidewalks are a perversion of this.  Yes, the mayors of those city are lefties, but they’re still actuated by a feeling they should “help the needy” and of course buying into the narrative that capitalism inherently creates a lot of needy, and therefore they have to mitigate it.

I don’t need to tell you how that gets weaponized against the common citizen of these cities, who find themselves confronted with unimaginable inconvenience or even danger around the corner, without warning.

I should probably point out it’s also getting weaponized against the governors and mayors. They might be too stupid to notice it, but mostly instead of thinking “look at the terrible results of capitalism” people are starting to suspect their local government is against them and FOR indigent drug addicted and aggressive grifters. (And they aren’t wrong.)  A lot of the anger boiling over in our society is from being inconvenienced by the “elites” ideas of noblesse oblige.

But the noblesse oblige that affects the common individual in America is the foundation of worse traps.

Most of the idiotic compliance with ridiculous Winnie the Flu rules and restrictions hooked directly into Noblesse Oblige.  For instance, the brilliant idea that you should wear masks to show you care even though we pretty much know they are completely ineffective and quite deleterious for a vast swath of people.

The idea that our kids should be forced to perform “volunteer” labor to graduate school, to “teach them to care for others.” The idea that you can always do a little more/sacrifice a little more for “those worse off” (Who often aren’t.)

When Noblesse Oblige turns into toxic altruism, it can take society apart.

Much of the “Green” mania is part of the noblesse oblige trap.  They’re trying to convince us that if we just do these little things — most of them counterproductive, like, say recycling, which uses more resources and causes more issues than just using stuff — we’ll make it better for everyone.

In a bigger sense, they’re trying to make it so that we commit polite suicide so that “others live better.”

It can result in truly horrible racism, too. A great part of the left’s being convinced, say, that meritocracy is white supremacy comes from the fact that, being white, (and racist) they assume that they’re more competent than any other race, and therefore following “merit” causes white people to rise to the top.

When this spreads into society wide rules and our education, it results in minorities being indoctrinated with helplessness, and white people subconsciously absorbing the racism of low expectations (of others.)

All of this is completely crazy and distorting.

Noblesse Oblige is a great sentiment for your circle of friends and among people you know.  Sure, if you can do. For your friends, for your family, for those you know are in true need.

But if you start extending that to strangers, you can commit some absolutely horrible injustices.

For instance, if you try to be kind to addicted/aggressive homeless, you end up being unkind to those who have to walk or live in the same area. You destroy real estate value.

In the same way, if you ditch meritocracy you’re going to hurt the most capable to favor the less capable, and you’ll also end up hurting society because the less capable also don’t run things in a way that is best.

Noblesse Oblige should have limits. And you should always make sure you’re not hurting others with it.

Yes, if you can DO but don’t do too much. Respect others’ ability and their noblesse oblige.

Don’t fall into the trap.

*Some perspective for 2020- SAH*

Shattered – A Blast From The Past From October 2015

Many years ago, in a library sale, I came across a booklet of … well, science fiction scenarios.  From the context — not being absolutely stupid — I could get that it had been commissioned before the election in 80, and had probably been distributed for free by the Democratic party.  I am afraid to look it up, first because it’s the sort of quest that could take me something like three years (and be lots of fun, but no work would happen) and second because I’d hate to see which ones of my colleagues lent themselves to that rather preposterous effort.  Fortunately I lost the book in one of our many, many moves since then, so I don’t have to know.

Now, when I bought it, I was thirty, just about, but younger than that in craft, as I hadn’t started seriously thinking about world building and scenarios of world building till 22 or so, and I wasn’t yet… fully immersed in American culture.  For instance, how preposterous the scenarios were didn’t hit me at all.  (Yes, I used to be an innocent.  I actually thought anthologies about the coming Ice Age or about how we needed to disarm had no ulterior motives.  Probably self defense.  It allowed me to enjoy some art and literature, while, if I’d been fully conscious of its intent, I’d have thrown it across the room.  More on that later.)

So I read it and re-read it, admiring the extrapolation and trying to figure out how to do this in my own writing.  (Rest easy, I know better now.)

They really were preposterous scenarios. For instance the one where Reagan had gone elected went (Natch) into this scenario of endless war and of American soldiers sent home in sealed caskets which, if the grieving mothers dared open them showed corpses killed by a weapon beyond our comprehension.  (Which makes perfect sense, because you know, the USSR was so much more advan– Oh, wait, no, it was complete and unadulterated BS.)

Some of the scenarios I liked.  At this time I had virtually no political sophistication, and though I’d started reading Reason had no clue what “libertarianism” was.  And yet, instinctively I liked the scenario that I THINK was called “The center cannot hold.”

I think, so help me Bog, I was supposed to recoil from it.  Partly because it also started with Reagan’ s election.  But then DC and all the great cities get nuked, and the US devolves to a regional-centered organization.  First, this scenario was about as likely as feathers on a horse — because there was no invasion from outside following on the destruction of our centers of political organization — and second I think the picture the author was striving for was something out of mad max, or something.  Instead, what I saw was small, decentralized, and less regulation.  I saw thriving small centers of civilization.  I saw more individual freedom.  I ignored the rest.

Again, this scenario (All of them, really) was completely impractical, not to say impossible.  There is no way — no way at all — that kind of destruction would have led to regionally centered anything.  Yeah, I know a lot of dreams on the right and left start that way, but right now, the way we are, it’s more likely that widespread famine and invasion, and the other horsemen of the apocalypse would follow.

So it is funny that these days, looking at this great fractured polity of ours I keep thinking “The Center Cannot Hold” and it evokes both Yeats great mythical poem, and the scenario above, which means I end up dissolving in giggle fits at the unlikelihood of the scenario and missing the … ominous thoughts that the line should provoke.

And there are omens enough in the line.  And for a long time, I’ve been listening to that poem at the back of my mind as I read the news or think over some recent event.

Because if there is something that describes our current days it is exactly “The center cannot hold.”  And yea, anyone who trolls twitter can agree that

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

And yet, just like the future scenario that was supposed to scare me spitless and make me not vote for Reagan (I didn’t, of course.  I was only an exchange student.  I did, however, work for his campaign) I look at this shattering and I listen to the ominous lines rolling in the back of my mind, and then I start grinning.

I’m not a nihilist.  I don’t smile at the end of the world.

But what is very important to remember is that his is not the end of the world.  It’s the end of a world.  (And if any of you ever read Ray Bradbury’s Almost The End of the World, that was closer to what is happening  in terms of major movements, than any apocalyptic scenarios.  Oh, not in WHAT happened, but in the metaphor of it.) However, behind that dying world, around it, beneath it, over it, unsuspected, unseen by the glitterati and the gatekeepers, another world is being born.

Okay, so our major cities didn’t get hit, thanks be to all divinities, since I think the result would be chaos and destruction.   Also, because I have friends in almost every large US city.

But the center is losing its grip anyway.  Mostly in culture.  But that culture is starting to influence politics, which is why there is this appearance of total chaos and the establishment (both sides) aren’t having it all their own ways.  Granted, the left still gets more compliance than the right.  It’s the nature of the beast and also part of how the culture fractured.

Which bring us to why we do have this impression everything is fracturing, and the “center cannot hold.”

This is a scenario not one of those big brains came up with.  Not a big stain on them, mind, since even after the computer revolution was well under way, even as Amazon was starting to take the pillars out from under the pillars of the publishing push model (the model according to which you could only find in the bookstore shelves, not what you might want to read but the books that the publishers had thought worth it to “push” onto the distributors.), most of the people whose job it was to foretell the future were saying that Amazon was maybe like one large brick and mortar shop, and it would make no difference.

As for ebooks, we got the whole thing about how books are a tactile and scent experience.  (Yes, I know some of you agree, but for the love of teardrops, I can’t see it.) And how ebooks would never displace “Real books” (listen, sonny, the scroll is here to stay and the printing press is a fad.  Shut up and copy.)

Blogs?  Some unwashed people in their pajamas. Not like those newspapers with layers and layers of fact checkers.  You know, the newspapers who were wrong so many times they’re bleeding money faster than they can plug it.  The newspapers no one under fifty really subscribes to anymore.  THOSE newspapers.

And the TV stations… Yes, yes, Dan Rather.  Fake but accurate.  Or something.

And then there’s the universities.  Oh, they’re holding on.  But the competition is coming up fast.  And I think they’re the next industry to truly get overwhelmed by catastrophic change.

Now, before we start dancing around the witch with the farmhouse planted on her snout, let’s be clear: none of these systems are dead yet.  It is a mistake to underestimate the enemy, particularly the wounded enemy.

There are still people — I know some of them — for whom the mainstream media is still the main means of information.  These are smart, thoughtful people, but they believe the weirdest things.  And that same media can do as much damage by ignoring stories as by beating the drum wrongly.  Benghazi, for instance.  It should be a shock and a horror, particularly the way that government officials lied to us and said it was all about a video.  But the media has refused to report on it.

And if you’re looking at that stuff, at the power still left in the mainstream institutions, you might get desperate.  You might think it’s all lost.

Except that the reason you feel that way is… that things are getting better.

Yes, I know that’s paradoxical.  But here’s the thing — cast your mind back to the time before we had internet — there were rumbles that, say, during Clinton’s time, the militias weren’t the big bad problem he painted it as, and there are more holes in the stories of incidents during that administration than there are — to paraphrase Heinlein — bastards in an European royal line.

BUT the point is you couldn’t know.  There wasn’t a web.  There wasn’t reporting first person what was happening.

In those days, the barrage would have held and we STILL WOULD THINK that Benghazi was the result of a bad video on youtube (only there wouldn’t be youtube.)  We would have no idea — as weird as this is — that there was anything wrong with Fast and Furious.  We’d just think that guns were being sold from the US down there.

In fact, you could say the reason their cunning plans keep misfiring is that they still control the media and therefore think they control everything.

Like publishers with the “paper books are coming back” fetish, most of the rest of the gatekeepers everywhere from publishing, to education, to politics are stuck in that place where they control all the means of communication, all the media, all the education and of course all government.  Because politics comes from culture.

They are so focused on the traditional way they don’t see that things have changed.

And so they miss one important thing.  We no longer feel alone.  We’re as disorganized as cats.  We’re as fractured as shattered glass, but we know we’re not alone.  And we know that the facade they have built — probably not as a big conspiracy; probably just because they all want to advance the “progressive” future-that’s-supposed-to-be so badly — is broken.

And that’s enough.  It’s enough for us to start talking about alternate solutions, to start building alternate structures, to network, to create, to keep our jobs even when we speak out.

Look, it only looks like everything is falling apart because the false consensus has been broken.  But at the same time that break is what allows us to build under, to build around, to build over.

One thing we know is that the structures they’ve taken over are no longer in contact with reality at any level.  Yeah, things look scary out there, and I’m not going to lie to you, they are scary, particularly on the international level.

Because the so called consensus was unchecked by dissenting voices, it has spun well away from reality.

But the new tech has given us a means of correcting that.  It might be almost too late.  And unless we have a miracle, there’s going to be the devil to pay for this.

Still, the correction is already in progress.  Their way is passing.  Our way is just starting out.

Funny how believers in dialectical systems didn’t see that coming.

Work.  Create.  Build under, build around, build over.  It’s all going to come apart more before some sort of sense can be made of this mess.  But the sense that’s coming, the ah spirit of the age embodied in its technology is moving away from big organizations and towards the individual.

And the individual?  That we’re fine with.

In the end we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

Making predictions is hard, particularly about the future, but the fourth of July heartened me greatly.  It appears that in most places we the people looked at prohibitions of celebrating and displays of patriotism, giggle-snorted and headed for the fireworks stand.

We didn’t, because we were busy with flooring (the never ending story, though at this point I think we’re halfway through the house.  I’d prefer to hire someone to do the main staircase (as opposed to the one to the basement, which I’ll do, because why not) and the upper hallway, but that’s neither here nor there. But otherwise we probably would have.  We must have been the only ones in our usually quiet neighborhood who didn’t, though, and the bang bang bang went on continuously from sundown for a solid four hours.

Also, from friends across the nation, it was the same everywhere.

My confidence, which had been shaken by the ease with which normal human beings swallowed the media panic campaign and became covid Karens is somewhat restored.

People take time to realize that reports of doom and destruction aren’t real, and Americans are probably the most decent people on Earth.

Oh, I don’t mean in terms of no crass displays or dressing modestly or whatever.  I mean, when the chips are down, unless your neighborhood is truly appalling, when a disaster strikes, we’re all out there, doing what we can.

When a violent wind storm brought down our tree in downtown Colorado Springs, we’d no more emerged from our (shattered, glass) back door, than there were two neighbors there, chainsaws in hand, going “Hey, need help?”

When we rode out Hurricane Hugo in Charlotte, lo these many years ago, we were no more awake and driving to see just how bad it was, than there were volunteer organizations in large parking lots, distributing water, breakfasts, articles of personal hygiene, you name it.

And anyone remember how when power went out in the East a few years ago, people walked home through the streets with no riots or looting?

Americans are DECENT.  If you haven’t lived elsewhere you’ll be going “But that’s just common humanity.”  Well, it ain’t. Nowhere else have I seen that kind of selfless, immediate response to the troubles of your neighbor.

And despite what you heard about how bad it was in New Orleans over Katrina, let’s say the media was as honest about that as the “we’re all going to die!” from Winnie the flu that you still hear today.  They saw the opportunity to bring down a president they didn’t like.  And they’re using the exact same playbook.

They forget that while most of us couldn’t go to New Orleans and poke our nose into the superdome, we do know our neighborhoods aren’t piled high with dead and dying.  They forget some of us can count and do percentages.  They also apparently forgot they couldn’t keep us locked down forever — blame it on their having no clue what making an actual living entails. This also explains why they view their jobs as a pulpit, not a sales stand — which means once you start circulating and talking to other real people, news start spreading of what a non-even this actually was. And how disproportionate the response.

Worst, flush with their success of keeping people locked indoors — okay, that wasn’t the media but their militant arm of elected (at least via fraud) leftist drones — and terrorizing them with coverage better suited to smallpox than an upper respiratory virus that hit mostly the most vulnerable and end-or life, they are now convinced they can repeat the trick at will.

EVEN AFTER they sanctioned the riots that destroyed entire areas of cities, and told us that it was essential for public health for people to be able to loot, set stores on fire and block highways.

Yep, they really think we’re that stupid.

We’re not. What Americans are is peaceable and adaptable.

We’ve endured decades of the left perpetrating massive fraud, rather than break into civil war, because sometimes it’s better to pretend everything is fine than to rebel.  Rebellion has costs.  As long as their fraud didn’t ALWAYS assure them success, except in certain, always-dirty areas like Chicago, we made jokes about it and went on.

This is because admitting how bad it is means taking action.  And taking action means at best tossing our chances up in the air and hoping they come down right. At worst, it means falling into a banana republic status, where the strongest gets the power.

Sigh.

But the left is very, very stupid. It’s a special kind of stupidity. It’s the indoctrinated stupidity of a cult or a fanatical religion.  They’ve been told they’re the future, and the young will vindicate them.  They’ve been told history has an arrow, paradise lies ahead, and if they just follow Marxist precepts future society will enshrine their memory (not to mention look after their every need as they age.)

This belief is so strong they were talking about all the Trump supporters in nursing homes.  Maybe my experience and THAT OF EVERYONE I KNOW is an aberration, but actually that age group has never quit believing the MSM. So, they believe all the fictions about this administration. They are in fact the most reliable democrat voters, and you can’t talk them out of it, because the “respectable news media” has told them how bad orange man is.

This belief is so strong they’ve forgotten all the reliable lefty organization protesters of the last 20 years have been “five guys with oxygen tanks and wheel chairs standing on a corner.” (Antifa are not that, but Antifa are special. Many of them are paid and actually trained.  The others are…. well, if your parents and/or teachers belonged to the cult and had told you how horrible America is…  You’d be very angry. Also, pretty much useless in normal society. Which makes you angrier.)

Which is to say, they believe that if they just press us a little harder….

They do not understand the American character, which is to be quiet, quiet, quiet and then erupt in sudden, unimaginable violence.

If you’re a praying person, pray they get it. (Says she who just got a newsletter from her church, basically enjoining her to worship the Earth our mother and live communally.  Are they all insane? I knew that mainstream churches had gone insane a while ago, but this is a special form of insanity. I think with worship restricted, all these people are talking to much to themselves and looking at the news WAY too much. I’m not having a crisis of faith. I know what I believe. But I no longer know if I can even with my presence support a church who sends out stuff like that.)

I’d rather we slowly win the cultural war over the next 20 years than are forced to respond violently as they refuse to leave us alone.  Because again, any time the real shooting starts, we’re in for a toss of the dice.

Look, it won’t end up with the left.  Not the left currently represented in the democrat party.  They act as though they believe …  Well, some lefties said that the democrats seem to believe we’re a country like Sweden, only further left, but they’re wrong. The democrats act like they think we’re China or perhaps an African country.  (I wonder if this means the current paymasters of the agitators are Chinese, who understand their own country and their colonies in Africa, but have no clue of the real, deep cultural differences here?)

They can’t read signs like people wearing masks as a beard snood, or under their noses, or dangling from one ear, or not at all.  And they fail to get that the more they keep trying to stampede us the less it works.

And they failed to read the massive civil disobedience written with fire on the 4th of July skies.

They fail to understand that “our flag was still there.”

Despite 40 years at least of heavy indoctrination, no one but the young and gullible (and not ALL of those, no matter what they say in polls) and the severely disturbed and ignorant believe that America is the worst thing ever and must be destroyed.

Most of us, in fact, love our country, our history and our Constitution. Most of us love living here and the opportunities afforded us.  Most of us don’t want to live “in harmony with nature” in 3rd world conditions (Which is actually worse for nature, but never mind.)

We might have issues with this or that historical figure (Woodrow Wilson grrr!) and think events and practices of the past were disgusting, but we’re aware it’s normal of humans to fail. And that even great men (Jefferson) had great faults.

Is the situation good?  Oh, heck no.

But I’d prefer to live in a country in which the people are basically sound, and the elite, media and establishment education are a warm bag of crazy than the other way around.

Because as long as the people are okay, when it all drops in the khaki (as the left keeps pushing for it to) there is a good chance the results will be okay and not, say, a man on a white horse. (Which is the most likely form of dictatorship to come from this.)  Or that form of leftist nationalistic dictatorship that the left keeps telling itself they live under now.  (Thorazine in the drinking water is impractical, but maybe if we target JUST their enclaves?)

There is a chance we come through this okay and STILL America.

Is it guaranteed?  Is anything guaranteed?  Oh, heck no.

And the one thing I can promise you is that it’s only going to get crazier from here on out, including the first two years after the elections, whether they manage to fraud their way in or not.

And no, I don’t mean just violent or bad. I mean it’s going to get crazy.

What we’re watching is if The People’s Temple had controlled all our media, our education, our information and our arts, our mainstream churches even, and were facing the ever crazier oscillations of discomfirmation of their beliefs.

They’ll try to make us drink the koolaid before they do.

Stay frosty.  Stay informed. Stay as well protected as possible. And stay productive.

This type of thing destroys wealth, livelihoods, and lives.  We, the people, we who can build and create and do must stay occupied and engaged.

As I said I am only semi-useful. All I can do is spin words and stories. (Okay and lay floors, but this might be my last go at such type of work. I’m getting too old for this. Spent most of yesterday sleeping.)

I do have an idea for an ebook selling thing…. one that would for now not really compete with Amazon, but COULD step in when that goes insane. (Yes, I know, but some of us can’t afford the luxury of a boycott, given our profession.) If you’re a programmer and pinged me before, ping me again. My email eats/hides things, and finding any message older than a month is very difficult. (Yes, husband CAN do it, but he’s actually very, very busy right now.)

I am sure that others of you are far more productive.  And some of you are sitting on your hands due to the planned assassination of the economy. Well, don’t be.  We’re the ones who build.  Do what you can, where you can. Try the crazy things you can try NOW.  It will help ensure we come out of this okay if we’re okay financially.

Most of all, above all, BE NOT AFRAID.

Every indication is the people are all right.

Build, plan, prepare.  Remember, plan A, plan B, plan C and pray we never need plan D, but have it ready anyway.

And as Robert A. Heinlein’s bastard child, Lazarus Long, said, “Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.”

Now go work and build. Because we’re Americans. That’s what we do.

 

 

 

 

 

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  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 MARY CATELLI: Magic And Secrets.

Tales of Wonder and Magic A woman, sent to a far off duchy, finds a mysterious wolf haunting the forest, and learns there are secrets no one even suspects. Playing with props for amateur theatricals has more consequences than any of those doing it dream. . . act with care. A king’s tyranny sends a woman searching desperately for a legend of lions, there being no other hope.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY:   Under the Earthline (Martha’s Sons Book 3)

With only a slender hold on their alien world, human settlers from a marooned starship inhabit a single terraformed valley. As technology frays, as the second generation of settlers cannibalizes its past, and as the governor cancels elections again, tension grows between the city and the western farms.

One Dawe son dead, one in exile, and Thaddeus Dawe now slated to serve as a hostage for his younger brother’s crimes, Thaddeus has a task. He must locate the colony’s last terraseeder for the secret enclave another brother works to carve from the northern wilderness. But with the governor’s men harboring no love for Dawes, and First Landing’s bureaucracy and its preeminent practitioner having other plans, Thaddeus is not the only one whose life is at risk.

A tale of adventure, loyalty, and love.

 

 

 

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.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: TOP

It is an odd fourth of July.  Colorado has banned fireworks, not an unusual event, except for the fact this Spring, while not the wettest we’ve had, has been wet enough that I mowed some mushrooms in my lawn yesterday.

More disturbing is the fact that this is the first year I haven’t heard “practice illegal” fireworks going off.  Then again son says he heard them a week ago, so it could be my hearing which is increasingly bad.

But here and across the nation, a lot of gatherings, parades and other events have been cancelled.  And of course the crazy idiots have tried to convince everyone celebrating the fourth is “White Supremacy” because, you know, a nation that has actively discriminated AGAINST European immigrants since the 70s at least, a nation who took people that at the time were considered not white like Italians and Irish is the very definition of white supremacy.  One wonders what Oxacan ditch weed they’re smoking, and did they sprinkle it with mescaline first.

But the truth is, actually, that none of the poor critters knows anything about history. All they know is the pablum they were fed in schools, mostly a bunch of victimhood just-so stories designed to make them hate their own country.

However the thing to remember is that there are very few of them.  I know it doesn’t seem like that, but truly, we have maybe a hundred thousand people rioting and destroying property, which in a country of 350 million is very few.

Yes, the media tries to bloat them up and make them seem very important.  Remember the big fuss over OWS and how a lot of the leaders ended up with million dollar book contracts for their very important stories?  In most cities, there were maybe a dozen mentally-ill looking people on the street corner. But the media made it sound like the uprising they hoped it would be.

Having seen the pictures of the idiots who tried to block the highway in Colorado Springs, this is Occupy Wall Street 2.0, only with younger and more female, and more addled-looking participants.  (All of them white, btw.)

This is causing cancellations of celebrations, and causes media and corporate personalities to kiss up because, you know, they believe the media — also known as drinking their own ink — and they’re terrified they’ll get killed by the revolutionaries if they don’t kiss up.  They bought into the Marxist mythos that the revolution WILL come, and that the oppressed will kill the rich and powerful, and blah blah blah. It’s never been true. All the Marxist revolutions soft or violent were/are always acts of theft writ large. That’s all it is. They are actually worse for women, children and the young, not to mention minorities.

But anyway, that’s why the celebrations are being cancelled.

Thing is, do you need celebrations?  I love the fireworks, they’re the high point of my year. But is it needed?

Of course not. We live in the greatest country on Earth, the one founded on freedom of the individual and control of the government by citizens.

An ideal so lofty will have its hickups and we’re living through the end of one.

The end, you say?

Oh, sure.  The taking over of the schools and attempting to turn each generation against America was already in place when I was an exchange student in the 70s and we were told in our books how uniquely oppressive America was, and how freedom was a lie and the American dream was dead and how we were despoiling the environment.

Despite that, despite full control of the media and a unified narrative, their ‘active’ corps is maybe a few hundred thousand (not just the rioters, but their support personnel and those who are in vocal support not out of fear, but because they believe.)  That’s not even one percent.

Sure, the very young believe what they were taught in school. But few are so wealthy and protected they don’t realize it’s a load of bokum somewhere along the line, which is why “the crazy things Academia does” has been a running gag in the culture for a long time.

And things are changing. The narrative has less and less power every year.  2016 was when they got notice that they no longer could really control most of the people.  I’d bet it’s got worse since then.

In their fury to get Orange Man Bad, the NPCs are taking axes to the institutions that gave them ANY power at all:  Sure the lockdown temporarily increased the power of the media and the “expert” bureaucrats.  But only at the risk of destroying a big swath of what credibility they had remaining.  They had ONE bite and chose to expend it in that stupid manner. Now they’re talking about locking us down again, and my guess is they have no clue how gleefully such orders will be disobeyed.

And apparently it’s spelling the death knell to a lot of colleges.  As for lower education, well…. looking at their new rules for ‘how to turn your kid into a neurotic mess while pretending to teach them’ including the ones who want to put the kids in plexiglass bubbles, I doubt existing schools can service more than 1/3 of the enrolled kids. Which is good, because that’s about all the ones that will remain after the first semester.

They are also creating a great anger amid the normal people who just want to be left alone, earn their keep and live their life.

Look, I’m not saying it’s not getting worse. It is. They’re like cornered rats. They know if they lose in November, their criminal syndicate will be exposed and taken apart.

All I can say, though, is that all of their strategies have so far backfired to an astonishing degree. It’s like they’re hitting themselves on the head in an attempt to hurt us.

There is a reason for that.  None of the crazy things they’re doing are the actions of a confident ideology, or even one that thinks it has a future.  They are the equivalent of drinking the koolaid when your ideology goes off the tracks. (And yes, a lot of it has to do with being controlled by foreign interests who JUST completely fail to get America.)

They are now openly declaring their hatred for all of us since we won’t let them have their little VERY red wagon.  This is not the way one wins. Period.

Yes, we have work to do. Yes, they might manage to fraud their way into power (though my guess is that will blow up in their faces.)

Are things great? I wouldn’t say so, but they’re getting better.  Sometimes — she says looking up at a house more full of boxes than when we first moved in, with bits of construction stuff all through them too — you make the biggest mess when you start fixing long-term problems.

The Marxist idiocy has been galloping through our culture since before WWII.  Beating it will not be instant.  Fortunately we’re aided by the fact that they are suffering from fourth generation lack of competence.

But we are fighting back. And it’s much harder to undermine a culture once you expose yourself as an enemy.

This is not the end. This is not even the end of the beginning.

Read the declaration of independence.  Have your own celebration.

And be NOT afraid.

I was going to write a post I was, but life went sideways, as it will in 2020. Only maybe not, as it’s not bad, precisely. It’s just annoying.

You see, I had a sequel to Have Spacesuit dictate itself to me in my sleep. All of it.

So? says you.

So, of course I can’t sell it, so it’s sunk costs. I resisted as much as I could, but it was broken sleep, and I finally woke up enough — kind of — to roll to the computer by the bed (I being displaced form my office, just now, since it needs painting and flooring) and write the first three paragraphs.  After which, I decided to mow the lawn till the urge to just write the whole — unsalable by virtue of being unauthorized fanfic — mess out passed.

The lawn took very long because I had to deal with some issues.

And now we have a get together to go to, kind you don’t postpone.

And when I come back there will be a post for PJM to finish.

So. I’ll post tomorrow.

Meanwhile, beginning below with the caveat that I get details wrong on my own worlds, and I’m sure I got some wrong on this one. Meh.

It’s not for money and it’s three paragraphs. Call it an homage. As I said, I know it’s not something I can sell.  Will I write it? Lord only knows. Probably not because I hate wasted effort. If I do, no one will ever know.

Now, if I could just download it onto electrons?  Well…. it’s already all in my head.

BUT we don’t have the tech.

So how it happened was like this: Mother-thing needed help.

Wait, I’m telling it all wrong.

I had this workshop in the Mojave.  There was a house too, attached to it, but most of the time I ate and slept in the workshop. So, as you can imagine it was pretty well locked.

Mother kept saying someday girls would find me. I didn’t know she meant it literally.

I was very shocked when the door popped open. I mean, I’d made those locks.  So shocked that I jumped, so I had my hands on two of my guns.

Then stopped.  She was tall and red headed and mammalian, and wore this simple, molding jumpsuit thing that made her legs look like they went on forever, particularly atop those platform boot things that all the ads shows women in these days.

Mother says it’s expensive to look that cheap.

 I looked up to her face, where her lips were slightly parted, and her big eyes looked at me in shock.  She had freckles across her nose. She panted a little at me, and said, “Stop it, Kip.  Mother-thing needs our help.”

The picture fell into place like one of those puzzles you look at and know suddenly where every piece goes. I let go the guns and said, “Peewee!”

 

The Stories We Tell – by Dr. TANSTAAFL

When our boys were little, there was always bedtime stories.  We bought tons of books for them, but they picked the stories they wanted every night.  Afterwards, in a ploy to stay up later, they asked questions about the stories, and we discussed them.  How we framed the stories for them taught them what we thought was important, and how we viewed the characters and their motivations.  The Little Engine that Could kept trying when the going got rough and wins in the end.  Love You Forever was about family love and relationships.  Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel was all about work and problem solving.

During their childhoods, there were stories about the family, emphasizing different characteristics.  Snippets of information about our ancestors and how we came to be. A great-grandmother who overcame cultural sexism to become a legislator, a great-uncle who fled the old country for aggravating the rich family in town, grandparents brave and adventurous enough to emigrate around the world for a better life for their children.  The stories continued as we raised the children; almost running out of gas near the Canadian border, getting lost and then unlost on hiking trips, falling out of the raft right in front of the rapids. Some of the stories were active, a gestalt of our reactions to different events.  What do you do when the call is bad in a peewee soccer game, how do you react to a bad grade, how do you solve a travel crisis, how do you treat people who are not doing what you need?  How we chose to look at these events and frame them into the larger picture of who and what we are has a huge effect on our happiness and success in life.

Why do some people shake off bad news and keep smiling?  How does something that happens to all of us, derail some individuals?  Is it all genetics?  Is it all luck?  Is it parenting?  I think part of the difference is in the stories we tell ourselves.  Our internalized stories give us the blueprint for our reaction.  I can’t fold to a misogynist because great-grandmother stood up to them.  Dad never whined when the call went against him, so I can’t either.  I can find a solution because our family is good at thinking outside the box.  If I get lost, I will be found again, and this is what dad always did.

Part of being a physician is sometimes giving good news, sometimes bad news, and hopefully not too often, terrible news. The stories people tell themselves can be a source of inspiration not just for themselves but to those around them. Or the stories can help set people up for failure or pull them to a place nobody wants to go.  One patient was sure that since all the males in his family died young from heart disease, that he would also.  So he kept smoking and refused cholesterol medicine, because what’s the use.  One mother who was the eternal optimist, always thought her child was doing great, despite her handicaps, and raised a child who thought she could do anything, because mom said she could.

What is the story we are telling now?  For the last 3 months, it’s been DOOM, DOOM! Stay home, it’s not safe, millions will die! The world outside your house is not safe. An invisible killer is stalking you. You or your loved ones could die. You have no control over any of this, and your fate is in someone else’s hands, perhaps the person who walked by you without a mask, or the “experts” who can tell you when it will be safe to live.  What are the stories children are hearing now?  You may die and the people you depend on, your parents, have no control over the danger out there in the world.  This is how the world has to be now.

Recognizing and treating psychiatric disorders is part of our training.  Generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, agoraphobia, depression.  Today’s news seems to have come up with a way to induce these disorders.  This is not something we have ever seen.  The stories being told are an effective way to create psychiatric dysfunction in a large percentage of our population.  Even worse, in the children, the stories are too immediate.  They have no lengthy novel of normalcy to fall back on.  The current short stories are all they remember.  Will we raise a generation of neurotic, agoraphobic, depressed children?

Individually, within our circle of family and friends and within our larger communities, we have a choice. We can echo the stories of DOOM, or tell a different story.  The story should be there have been epidemics before and there will be again.  We are endlessly creative and will figure out a way to treat this illness, or prevent it eventually.  We all are mortal, and how you live is as important, if not more so, than how long you live. We can figure out ways to protect the individuals at risk, and Americans are the most generous people in the world, and can support people who are hurting as needed.

This is not the end times, unless we choose to tell ourselves it is.

 

My mind works in a weird way, a statement that I’m sure has all of you amazed and confused :-P

My current audio book to listen to (I prefer books I’ve read before) while doing baseboard work is Starman Jones.

And yesterday I stopped just at the point where they’re going into a transition in space, and the stars look all weird, like they’re bunching up.

Later, in a group, a friend posted a thing about a book on the coming technocracy and how a few technocrats were set to control opinion and what everyone thought and felt, just like in 1984.

At which point, I realized the picture was all wrong and we were looking at it upside down and just as with optical illusions (click on the picture) when you see it, you can’t unsee it.  (My opinion, btw, as a long time owner of cats is that the cat is going up.  Those stairs look remarkably like Portuguese stone stairs, and that lip is not unusual in those. But that’s neither here nor there.)

Look, 1984 was an amazingly accurate picture of the future, if one looks at it from the point of view of mid-twentieth-century tech with some improvements.

That’s not — thank G-d — the world we got.

To an extent, a few technocrats controlling opinion and dictating what was evil, or outside the pale is what we had till round about the mid nineties.

Look, mass control needs mass media. A splintered multitude of voices doesn’t lead to mass anything.

Yes, I can see how the illusion is fostered. We see media and technocrats, in the pocket and service of the left (partly due to “excellent” educations in Marxist higher education institutions, partly due to the fact that they still perceive leftism as a positional good — note that this is no longer NECESSARILY so and several positional good by mouthing lefty platitudes have backfired on entertainers and businesses recently. I can’t begin to tell you how shocking that would be in the mid nineties.) shutting down dissenting voices, and trying to enforce a single point of view.

We’re also going through an unfortunate period when a lot of the big online concerns are in effect monopolies.

And we tend to forget the de-facto monopoly of big newspapers and news and narrative fostered by those from early 20th century to the 90s or so. Hell, we tend to forget that all of mass communication and entertainment were controlled by a small group of people who all enforced strict opinion control and narrative, not as a conspiracy, but because they’d been brought to believe that “all smart/decent people believe x.” And the more unified the narrative, in blunt and subtle ways, the harder it was to be a dissenter.

I can honestly say those of us who arrived at dissenting positions went not through one, but through several dark nights of the soul while we examined and reexamined our assumptions.  And it usually involved living through something and seeing it drastically misrepresented by the unified narrative TM.

The narrative was all encompassing and inflexible, and trust me on this, even if you had a dissenting opinion you felt like you were utterly alone, and there was nowhere to turn.

This is how “nationalism” became the cause for WWI and II (instead of its kind of obviously being central planning and government control. And elites disconnected from the people.) This is how socialism became the unquestioned way of the future, and we all knew we’d run out of resources and life would go smaller and more bleak forever. Etc. etc. ad nauseum.

This splintered.  And yes, the big tech monopolies are trying tor rein it in.

Let me interject here that both things becoming monopolies and attempts at opinion control are old, old sins of the human breed.

It was happening with newspapers and TV too. It had already happened to radios. And let me talk to you about book publishers and their ever narrowing circle.

It is part of humanity to get in the habit of buying from a brand, or a type of thing.  My family used Tide and drove Fords for instance. It was a given. No argument.

And in the case, of say, Amazon, let me interject both as a writer and a reader, they make it way easier. It’s easier to put a book up with Amazon (though I swear they’re making it more complicated every month) and it’s easier to find something I wish to read with Amazon search than with any other online retailer.  This is before the advantages of the tiny new Kindles, which I can slip into a jeans pocket, and often do, because of my horrible fear of not having a book on hand while out.

However, things change. The monopolistic empire gets sloppy.  Amazon is already showing cracks in what used to be its gold-plated customer service. Publishers of old more or less committed suicide because they didn’t have enough competition and decided they could control what people wanted to read. Monopolistic newspaper empires were in real trouble before the net kicked them in or around the fracas.  And even all day news stations were losing credibility and viewers before the internet revealed most of them were just running fiction under the guise of news. (To be fair to them, so were most newspapers.)

What we’re seeing, and what makes it look so scary, though, is that it’s all accelerated.  It took almost a century for people to realize that newspapers had become monopolistic echo chambers. Now we’re seeing this in social media in decades.

But the thing to remember — the really important thing — is that once you look at the picture and see the old lady instead of the young woman, you can’t stop seeing the old lady. What’s seen can’t be unseen.

The early burst online told a lot of us we weren’t alone, and hell, we might be in the majority.  We who don’t agree with the established narrative. We who know the horrors Marxism has inflicted on the suffering world. We who know their scroll of revelation doesn’t agree with reality.

Yeah, they’re trying to stomp us out of existence online now.  With indifferent success, as we keep popping up elsewhere.

Because once we see it, it can’t be unseen. It just can’t.  And companies that try to control opinion, just end up destroying themselves.

Look, the total control, the all seeing and encompassing state was a creature of mass production and what Sabrina Chase delicately calls “the entertainment-information mass industrial complex.”

They’re awkward and wrongfooted in this new climate/this new technology.

What they’re engaged in, from the mass arrest of Winnie the Flu to the mass insanity of riots for nothing over things that had already been resolved, are attempts to regain the saddle.

And they succeeded, beyond my expectation at least, with Winnie the Flu, though I note that every day I see fewer panicked eyes in the grocery store.  Panic seems to linger harder in Europe — which makes sense, the blog revolution never happened there, and I can’t even explain why — but here every day it fades a little, despite their countervailing efforts.

You see, the entire mass arrest was designed not just to crash the economy, but to recover the glory days post-9-11 when we spent all day every day in front of a news channel, to find out what would happen next.  Because people weren’t going out at all, and were cut off from normal interaction, it worked. A lot of them were watching tv and day and even sensible people were buying the nonsense. (And it’s going to take a while to dismount, because people hate admitting they were wrong.)

But their victories come at increasingly high prices these days.  Their clever-fool mass arrest (to be fair, the initial one might have been the result of faulty information and panic, but the prolongation was definitely idiots enjoying power) gained them an audience, and “experts” who cavorted and writhed with pleasure in the limelight while helping cause panic.

What it cost them….  Well, I will be blunt, right here: I don’t think any of the traditional publishers will be extant in 5 years, and I’d be amazed if they’re extant in 3.  Their being owned by European conglomerates, they’ll probably survive, but the question is, when do they cut the American branch off?

Universities?  You have no idea.  If I had money right now, I’d be starting an online consortium that educates in real skills, people really will need, from basic “How to deal with your computer” to writing clear sentences, to–

Yeah, this will need money, because as of right now you need accreditation.  This will change.

Mothers and fathers working from home will be less likely to rent their kids minds wholesale to the poisoned education establishment.

The list goes on and on.  Including cities losing both population and power in the next decade or two.

It’s at best a Pyrrhic victory.  Who was it who said, “Would that we could sell them many such victories at such a price.”

I’m not saying it ice-cream and cookies ahead. I’m not saying we’ll get through this unscathed.

Guys, I’ve read history. Any big transition caused by a complete change in tech is bad news, particularly so when accelerated. I can’t think of any that didn’t get a butcher’s bill.

But don’t look at it the wrong way. Things are not going towards 1984, but away from it.  The vile crap we’re seeing is not new. It’s always been there, but it used to be easier for the left to hide.

Once you see the picture, you can’t unsee it.

It’s possible none of us will live to see a time of greater freedom and individualism, but our grandkids will.  It’s going that way.

Yeah, things are going to get very, very bad.  The left loses a mile for every yard they gain, but they too still believe the future will them, and the saddle is right there, and if they just cut the horse’s legs, they’ll get on top again.

They fight like cornered rats because they are.  We haven’t seen the end of this. Hell, we haven’t seen the  worst of vileness, irrationality and destruction.

And I know it’s hard not to be afraid. But remember, they’re the ones who are afraid. They have reason to.

You, out there, be not afraid.  Lift that torch. Let others see.

 

 

Lay Down Your Bets – a blast from the past from September 12 2012

This is not a post about world building, though it is that too.  It is mostly a post about life – though I’ll come at it through writing, which might make it easier to understand.

It is a cliche, tired and worn, that one has to remind new writers that magic must have a price.  This is because, particularly when you bring in something that doesn’t exist in our world, it is all too easy for young – in age or craft – people to get carried away and think all laws of reality can also be suspended.  While these books can be lots of fun to write, (kind of like those Saturday morning cartoons where your character suddenly achieves the ability to draw things and make them come to life), they are tedious to read (even that sort of cartoon throws in an archenemy or someone who’s chasing the kid to get the wondrous crayon.)

This is where life differs from writing – maybe.  I think – because acquiring that sort of power in real life would be a blast.  Well, okay, maybe it would grow tedious after a while, but frankly that’s the sort of challenge I’d like to have “how can I stop life from growing wearisome while I have everything I want and a magical pony on the side?”

Annoyingly, it is also the sort of challenge no one has.  Not in real life.  Probably part of the objectionable (or obnoxious) nature of the books where there’s no price for magic is that it’s not nice to taunt us with images of a world we can never live in.

In fact, humans so much wish they could live in a world where there’s no prices, that we often pretend those prices don’t exist, because it makes us feel better.

I don’t mean by this the price of goods and services, though the most amoral among us like to pretend that those have no cost either.  This is where the bright idea comes from that one should just take goods and services and give them to other people, in a sort of fairy-godmothery way, because…  Because when you’re a morally blind idiot you don’t realize the people who produced or acquired goods or who provide services pay a price for them – in learning or sacrifice or even a narrowing of life options – and therefore you don’t realize what you’re advocating is nothing less than slavery.  (All objections of course are removed when people voluntarily share with others things or services for which they’ve paid the price.  That’s their choice.)

It goes both ways of course.  Businesses engaging in “Hollywood accounting” (including those in Hollywood) are engaging as much in theft of another person’s life as those in the bureaucracy who legislate that type of theft.

It’s very easy to think “oh, he’d write screenplays, anyway.  And we paid him.  He doesn’t need the extra howevermuch.”  But while the screen writer might have written screen plays anyway, trust me, to get to the point you want to make a movie of it, he engaged in learning his craft, he wrote a lot of unusable screenplays, and he sacrificed time and effort without which you wouldn’t have that play.  So when taking the extra compensation that accountants make disappear, you are in fact engaging in stealing years or months of his life.

No, I’m not endorsing the Marxist theory that labor equals value.  I’m simply saying that nothing of value was produced without labor – or without learning, or without talent, or without…

I’m saying there is a price to magic.  There is a price to anything and everything in life.  You pays your dust, you takes your chances.  And, as I’ve said before, in the end you always get more or less what you want. … unless what you want is the magical crayon that can draw things and make them come to life – because that violates the rules of life in this particular universe.

Do you want to be the best runner ever?  Well, you exercise, you practice, you put in your effort and you’ll be a very good runner.  You might not be the best ever – or the best in your team – because you have the wrong body type, or because you fall and break your ankle, or…  But you’ll still be a million times a better runner than you were when you started out.  The same goes for playing an instrument, for writing, for any of the arts, crafts or sports.

Most people understand that price.  Most people even understand what we’d call “the price of fame,” where the character becomes ruler-of-the-world or the most famous musician since Elvis left the scene to open a diner in Arizona.  That type of price has been shown again and again in movies, and even though it’s a variant of “poor little rich boy/girl” we know it by heart now.  You become rich and famous, and spoiled, and you lose the contacts in your small town, and your best boy/girl (or for the more edgy movies, both) sends you a Dear John.  You either chuck it all to go back to your origins (happy ending) or you die of an overdose (unhappy ending.)

But Sarah, you say, I never want that kind of fame, so why should I consider that kind of price?

I don’t want that kind of fame, either, and – Praise the Lord, Brothers and Sisters! – I’m very unlikely to ever achieve it.

However, what most people – myself included a few years ago – fail to grasp is that there is a price to more mundane achievements, too.  For instance, having children.

Robert and I were talking yesterday about some woman about my age who said she had to find herself.  Although I despise that trite phrase, when Robert said “How do you EVEN lose yourself?” I had to point out you do.  You can’t help it.  When they’re little you’re not you, you’re mommy.  H*ll, even when they are teens, you still are giving up a major portion of your life to being mommy – to being the adult.  Someone has to do both of those.

I remember the first time I went to the grocery store without the kids, because they were old enough to be left at home alone.  It felt weird.  It was like I didn’t know how to be in the store alone, by myself, anymore.  My habits of shopping from when I was childless were quite gone.  Ditto, the first time I took a walk alone.  The first time I sat down and read a book because I wanted to (and the kids were both at school.)

It’s not just time or habit, either.  During those intensive child rearing years, my thoughts were different.  I wasn’t me.  I was Robert-and-Marshall’s mother.

As the child-rearing pressures ease (do they ever go away completely?) I’m starting to re-find myself; to see the outlines of the person there, who is Sarah Hoyt, not Robert-and-Marshall’s mother (though she is that too.)  This is not the same as the Sarah Hoyt many years ago.  For one, she doesn’t look nearly as good anymore.  For another…  She’s changed through the years and the experiences.

There’s a price.

When I chose to really try to write and publish, I started devoting vast chunks of time to it.  This means I lost some of the kids’ childhood.  There were days I wanted to just take them to the park and watch them play, but I was on deadline.  There were times I wanted to sit around and enjoy them, but I had writing to do.

Now, a lot of what I paid to have a writing career was dictated by the boundaries of the old model.  However, Indie will have its own boundaries too.  Sure, you can write and put things up there, but if you want to sell significant number, you’d best learn the craft.  (And if you haven’t read Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer, why NOT?)  And that will take time.  More than that, it will take effort.  You’ll emerge on the other side, not just as a selling writer, but changed.  Years will have passed that you weren’t even aware of, and you’ll be a different person.

This is true even if what you choose to pursue is a more normal career, like, say, cab driver or server.  You will have to train, and then you’ll have to practice and your rewards are likely to be commensurate with your effort.

The same is true for every hobby, at every level from casual to serious.

Achievement – magic – has a price.  It always has a price.  Mostly what you pay is your ability, your vitality, your time, your life.  But you also pay all the things you could have been doing instead.  For instance, when I chose to be a writer, I chose not to be a translator anymore.  Now if I tried to be a translator, I couldn’t.  The ability is gone.  To get it back would take almost as long as to learn it in the first place.

Ah, you say – but I won’t pay. – I’ll just sit here and do nothing.

But then you pay the price of doing nothing.  You won’t learn, you won’t do, you won’t BE.  In the end, doing nothing, choosing nothing, deciding nothing has the highest price of all.  You find yourself pushed aside from the world.  You find you have in fact paid your life, your time, your talent… for years and years of doing nothing and being nothing.

So, when you’re considering doing something, learning something, trying something; when you’re considering what you wish to concentrate on; when you think one path has no cost and the other is expensive; when you shy back from doing things and take the path of least resistance, remember – everything has a price.

Yes, sure, magic has a price.  It might take years of the magician’s life.  BUT if he doesn’t use the magic, he might instead lose his home, his friends, his kingdom.  He might have to live out his life in vile slavery.

Everything has a price.  Action and the lack of action have different prices, but nothing is free.  TANSTAAFL.

You pays your dollar.  You takes your bet.

What will it be?

Sorry this is so late. I got up this morning ready to give the last coat to what will be the household accounts office, so we can move furniture in on Wednesday, So I can do what will be my office over the weekend.  And then I remembered the stairs to the basement needed to be Zinzered (Totally a word. Like Killzing only more so) because grandcat did a number on them when older son was at work or school and not spending the requisite time with him. (Which in D’Artagnan’s mind means, of course ALL the time. 24/7)

By the time I looked up it was 12:30.  And now I shall try and go work, though not absolutely sure I have enough energy.  In the past I’ve found a nap helps reset the mind after hours of physical labor, but one also doesn’t like to employ it. It is admitting the body is getting old, I guess.  We’ll see.

Because I was working on the stairs, my mind was ranging over a bunch of things, including the old tale of the garden, and of the entity that offers that you shall be “like gods, knowing good from evil.”

For some reason this seems to be an unavoidable temptation of mankind, the sort of thing we can’t resist, just like we can’t resist the feeling that whatever one has should be divided equally.

I suppose it makes perfect sense from the point of view of a clever ape.  In the ape band, if things aren’t divided equally — say the hunt or the produce of foraging — then someone will grow fat, and someone will starve. We are, after all, as a species, scavenger apes. Which means that most of our ancestors, since well before we became human and throughout our past since that time lived at the edge of starvation.

At the same time, being clever apes, we want to know. we need to know. And we want to know what the rules and are and what we can impunely poke at, and what will turn and sting us into next Wednesday or the next turn of the wheel for that matter.

We also, being clever apes, and scavengers, distrust the good times.  We hate it when things are going too well, people have fat babies and there’s peace on the land.  We hate it, because as every scavenger knows too many fat babies mean a time of famine around the bend. It’s unavoidable. There are only so many resources. You have too many scavengers, and the food supply is stripped bare, and then what?

All of this probably explain the 20th century. Well, as much as anything can besides “Dear Lord, that lousy century!”

Because through the wars, the horrors, the killing by the numbers by government fiat (which we show ourselves quite ready to continue this century, by the way) life was pretty good, for most humans.  You know, in raw terms of food and fat babies, humanity was doing pretty well.

Except —

Except the Cassandras were out full force, and often spurring on the government killing by the numbers — and still trying to do it — alarmed at the number of fat babies.  We won’t go into the various theories of Paul Ehrlich. Honest, the man is impressive. How can you be wrong so consistently? It’s like ALWAYS guessing the wrong number in a set of two. By pure luck, sometime, he should be right. By accident even.

And we won’t go into the climate doom and gloom, because honestly, I’m forever astonished at anyone my age who takes it seriously. Because in my lifetime we were going to freeze to death. I bought it then. How could I now? All the smart people and scientists said so.  And the prescription was socialism.

Oh, they didn’t call it that. They call it being sensible and careful and sustainable. What it amounted to, to the kid who read science fiction, was belt tightening on a global scale.  We all needed to live small lives. Ask permission to have kids, earn permission to live in a little cubicle and eat our ration, and be happy for it, because without that we’d all freeze to death by the early two thousands.  Oh, well. It was just my luck, the time I’d been born into.

At the same time we were running our of oil, out of gas, out of coal, out of minerals. Out of everything.

And then a funny thing happened.  Not only didn’t we run out of any of those things, but learned to use them better, found new deposits, but the weather didn’t grow markedly colder.

In the middle eighties, the consensus pivoted in the space of a year to “We’re all going to boil to death.”  Perhaps by then I was more cynical.

I’d realized a few things.  Like, we weren’t running out of anything, and Paul Ehrlich had rolled snake eyes again.  Another was that the prescription to avoid boiling was the same as to avoid freezing. More socialism. And the other was that these prophets of despair didn’t want us to go to space. No we had to “learn to take care of the Earth first.”

That seemed weirdly moralistic. More a religious position than a scientific one. Because, really, who judges when we “learn to take care of the Earth?”  The Earth seems to be doing okay, honestly, humans or not.  How many trees do we need to plant, before we can have a colony on Mars? What sense does THAT make?  Or as I used to put it — to much sputtering — “I don’t think we’d ever have learned to take care of Europe, if we’d not struck out to other continents. Or if you go back far enough, to take care of Africa, before homo sap migrated.  That’s not how any of that works. You don’t learn your language properly before you learn another. And knowing other planets is what will allow us to take care of the Earth. It’s just the way it works.”

Anyway, I think that’s the other, third flaw of the human brain, born of our biological heritage. We’re jumped up scavenging apes. We can’t help worrying about how bad things will get now that they’re good. If there’s enough food today, there won’t be tomorrow.

Unfortunately add intelligence and shake, and what you get is people convince that they ARE like gods, knowing good from evil, and that they get to tell everyone else what they can do and what they can’t.  That of course, being the other curse of apes. You want to be the band leader. Fraught as it is it’s the safest position.

Well, except those of us who are broken apes, and feel safer by ourselves, in our own branch.  I don’t think any of us would have survived too long out in the wilderness, though.  A solitary ape is known as “lunch” to too many things.

I have friends who run terminally ill computers.  I’ve done it myself in the past.  Now that writing pays, even if irregularly (Dear Lord, I need to stop flooring rooms and start writing more, because indie does pay, and so does PJM…. indie more, but PJM faster) I usually don’t fool with computers past the point the they fail me twice. But in the bad old days when I was just starting out, I normally inherited my husband’s computers, once they started sputtering (or we bought them from his job when they upgraded. That’s how the boys got their own computers when Marshall was 3. Which prevented my losing half the workday because the toddler wanted to play the Winnie the Pooh game.)

Because husband is a genius with computers (he just is) he found ways around the damage of computers that weren’t working very well.

Sometimes he wrote programs, that made the computer not get trapped in dead sectors.  Or at one time he (at least tried to) made me use Linux, because the computer was too slow for Windows.

I’m glad we don’t have to resort to that now. The computer fails twice and I point out we need a new computer. (Though I’m a little nervous at replacing three computers with one. I hate single points of failure. Well, I still have the travel laptop, at least.  That will do for writing, if not for rendering or publishing work.)

But there is no such workaround for humanity.  Maybe in the distant future we can get rid of the persistent illusions that are part of being human.  This idea of “fairness” and omniscience and, oh, yeah, that doom is just around the corner.

Perhaps. I wouldn’t trust anyone capable of doing that, mind, capable of tampering with the very essence of what being human means.

Those of us who are religious believe that eventually there will a New Heaven and a New Earth.  Which ultimately means new humans. We believe something will happen, and the good old hardware will be fixed or fix itself automagically.  And, well, if there is an engineer who put us together, then it’s okay if He fixes it, I guess.

But  I’d be really leery, as my fiction probably shows, of any humans trying to fix the old hardware.  Why, even with computers which are orders of magnitude simpler than you or I, and even with as good as husband is with computers, I always tense when he says “oh, it’s just the motherboard.  I’ll get a new one and–”  Okay, it’s been years since he’s made the problem worse. But it can happen.  I know that. And then the computer catches fire.  (No, seriously. Two of mine so far.  Yes, it’s my fault for all the heretical stuff I write, like this post, I guess.)

So, what is to be done?

I don’t know.  So far, we know that the flaws of mankind can be compensated for with software.  And the best software, so far, seems to be called “Western Civilization.”  At least in terms of leading to fat babies and lots of food.  Sure, it also led to government by the numbers, and killing by the numbers, or as we call it around here “20th century.”

But the thing is, it’s hard to tell how much of it is the software “Western Civilization” and how much is the flaws in the hardware.  The Zulus, who were virgin of the software, left enough corpses strewn around Africa that some of them form the basis of hills. And the things the Chinese got up to in their history are best read about thy those with a strong stomach, and not after lunch.

And then there’s the virus of socialism, which takes advantage of the hardware’s flaws of “fairness” and “knowing good from evil” and “oh, no, too  many fat babies, famine around the corner.”

In fact, the Marxism/Communism/socialism virus is almost too perfect, slots too much with the human hardware flaws to be accidental; just like Western civ and bourgeois values might be too perfect, leading too assuredly to enough food and fat babies to be accidental.

Maybe.

Or maybe cultures, like species are subject to evolutionary law and the best adapted one emerges the victor.

Which would mean we win, they lose. In the long run. The very, very long run.  But neither of us will see it.

I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. I’m not the engineer, and I’m not the software designer.  In fact, I’m not sure any of us is qualified to design software at that level. All attempts at doing it seem to result in a lot of dead hardware.

I do know that if the program is not running on “Respect individuals, don’t hurt them and don’t take their stuff” it ends up in a lot of broken hardware.  A lot of it.

I do know that I cannot be like gods knowing good from evil.

And I will fight against anyone in the grip of the illusion that everything can be made fair, who thinks they can hurt people and take their stuff and somehow bring about paradise.

I’m not the Engineer. I’m not the software designer. But I can read print when its engraved in all the sorry history of mankind, and elsewhere too.

And in the garden there was a serpent….

Do you guys ever wonder if time is circular, and if those writings, metaphorical, of course, are the result of many-times-experience of mankind?

Man, if that is true, we must be the worst students ever.

Of course A Canticle of Leibowitz posited something like that, but the idea was that it was all designed to warn about nuclear war and how to avoid it.

Bah. No nukes needed. To destroy civilization, the inherent flaws of mankind suffice, and are plenty.

“You shall be like gods, knowing good from evil.”

It always leads to destruction and death, and the dark of night, and sweating while laboring to extract our livelihood out of dirt.

Perhaps this time we can avoid it, yes?  Perhaps we can take the old snake and make a pair of shoes out of its skin?

Probably too much to hope for, but at the end of the Pandora Box that’s 2020 maybe some hope remains.

Route around the damage. Write a new program.  Not the same old stupidity again.  Let’s try new and exciting stupidity.  Let’s go elsewhere and try our all too human flaws.

Enough is enough. They shall not pass.