Unintended consequences are the bane of social engineers. They are why the “Scientific” and centralized method of governance never worked and will never work. (Sorry, guys, it just won’t.)

Part of it is because humans are contrary. Part of is because humans are chaotic. And part of it is be cause like weather systems, societies are so complex it’s almost impossible to figure out what a push in any given place will cause to happen in another place.

This is why price controls are the craziest of idiocies. They don’t work in the way they’re intended, but oh, they work in practically all the ways they’re not. So, take price controls on rent. All they really do is create a market in which housing is scarce, landlords don’t maintain their property AND the only people who can afford to live in cities that have rent control are the very wealthy.

BUT Sarah, you say, aren’t rent controls supposed to make them affordable. Yeah. All that and the good intentions will allow you to go skating in hell on the fourth of July weekend.

Let’s be real, okay? I saw rent control up close and personal in Portugal. Rents were controlled and landlords were penalized for “not keeping the property up”.

In Portugal at the time, and here too, most of the time from what I’ve seen, the administration of property might be some management company, but that’s not who OWNS the damn thing. The owners are usually people who bought the property so it would support them in old age/lean times.

To begin with, you’re removing these people’s ability to make money off their legitimately owned property. And no, they’re not the plutocrats bernie bros imagine. These are often people just making it by.

Second, people are going to get the money some other way, because the alternative is dying. And people don’t want to die or be destitute. So they’re going to find the money. I have no idea what it is in NYC, etc, but in Portugal? it was “key buying.”  Sure, you can rent the house for the controlled price, but you have to make a huge payment upfront to “buy the key.” From what I remember this was on the order of a small house down payment. And if you couldn’t do that, you were stuck getting married and living with your parents.  And if you say “greedy landlords” — well, see the other thing you could do was leave the lease in your will. So the landlord didn’t know if they’d ever get control of their property back, and they needed to live off this for x years (estimated length of life.)  So, that was an unintended consequence. The kind that keeps surfacing in rent-controlled cities in the US.

The same applies to attempts to “help” the homeless.  Part of this, as part of all attempts to “fix” poverty is that the people doing it, usually the result of generations of middle class parents and strives assume the homeless and the poor are people like them.

To an extent, they’re correct. The homeless and the poor are PEOPLE. But culture makes a difference, and culture is often based on class and place of upbringing. And the majority of humanity, judging by the world, might be made to strive but are not natural strivers. Without incentive, most of humanity sits back, relaxes and takes what it’s given.

Look, we’re a scavenger ape species. Sitting back and eating what you have is a good survival trait. Because the tribes of overachievers, who actually went out and hunted might live better, but if they don’t stop hunting when they already have three giant mammoths rotting in the cave, they’re just going to starve next month when there are no more mammoth.  So, given no incentive, humans do not work. Most humans. Yes, some of us are broken. And the incentives changed enough over the last hundred years that the broken ones thrived. But that doesn’t mean most of humanity wants to strive for the heck of striving. (And those of us who do tend to be more neurotic than a shaved cat, to be honest.)

So when you assume that poor people are poor because “they have too many demands” (look up bee sting theory, I covered it, I THINK on this blog) and therefore become overwhelmed, you go in entirely the wrong way and the results are epic and unintended.

Which is why our programs to deal with the poor or worse the homeless mostly create more poverty and homelessness. And the people running it refuse to process the results because “that’s not what should be happening.”

Look, every minimum income that’s been tried results in less productivity, greater poverty (people try to live within the free money, no matter how tight) and just general aimlessness and squalor. But very smart people will keep insisting on them, because it’s not the way THEY’d react to minimum income.

Anyway, so, I’m highly amused with the press’s crusade to make Covid-19 into the black death.

Note that I’m not saying there won’t be deaths.  There is a potential for a high number of deaths particularly mid health care workers and the elderly. As someone who has friends in both groups, and frankly who catches everything that crosses the street and usually catches it twice and really bad cases, I am of course concerned.

But the numbers are not black death. The high estimate, back of the envelope, among friends, if the US goes like the Diamond Princess is around 1 million.

The US is however not likely to go China, or Italy. We just don’t have the same systemic weirdness those countries have. And Diamond Princess is absolutely the worst case scenario.  We’ll probably get a “bad flu season” hit, which is STILL hundreds of thousands.

The panic itself, though, is going to cause damage to the economy and eventually deaths.  Because the economy is not “greed” or “you want money”, it’s how we live. There are going to be people laid off who are stressed and weakened and might die. There are going to be supplies that don’t reach those who need them because of economic turmoil and panic. And all of that — all of that — is goofy. And not needed.

But you see, the press is on the side of the social engineers. They’re trying to engineer panic and ruin, because then they can get the party of the “best people” who “know what they’re doing” in power and — they think, for a stretch goal — get universal health care in too.  So they’re pounding the drum and screaming black death as hard as they can.

For a comparison to how they treated the Swine Flu, which is probably on the same level but hit the young instead of the old, read Lilek’s excellent post.  Only, you know, the Swine Flu it was their precious social engineer in charge, not Orange man bad. So, there was no panic. None.

The problem is the press is…. well… let’s say most members of the 4th estate (Lord, was there ever a more vainglorious self-appellation?) were never as bright as they thought they  were. And it’s not got any better by hiring for political conformity with the social engineer crazy.

I’m going to point out a few things they might have not thought of:

You can’t keep the panic up forever, unless there are body-collection carts making the rounds. You just can’t. You can only inflate the few casualties so long. Sooner or later, people are going to tweak.

And then two things happen: First, they notice that you age, once again, not just lying but being crazy. And you lose a little more of your ability to convince people. Probably well before the election.

People are being stampeded into telecommuting. The thing is, dear media, once that happens, you can’t put it back in the bottle.

For two decades now, telecommuting and distance learning have been perfectly possible and even, frankly, beneficial. What has held it back is managers afraid they don’t know how to manage at a distance, corporations who think mega cubicle farms are a great way to be “important” and a general sense that only us, ne’er do wells, work in our pajamas on the sofa (I’ll have you know I’m wearing a sweatshirt and yoga pants. Never mind.)

If the panic lasts even two months (and the press will ensure it does before it collapses under its own weight) that reluctance to telecommute is going to be blown to hell. For one, once workers taste of THAT fruit, just anecdotally, 90% of them LOVE it. (The other 10% have very annoying children or spouses.)

And in the wake of the financial panic and wobbles, corporations are going to notice that they spend a lot less money when most of the workers work from home. At some point, they’ll also realize that they need much smaller facilities if they need facilities at all. And hey, money.

This will cause all sorts of other things, which I think will lead within two years to an exodus from the big cities everyone has crammed into because it’s where the jobs are.  I think in turn this will lead to a world the social engineers really don’t like.

Other side effects are not going to be pleasing to them, either. I think this ends up killing bookstores. And since that’s the only hold the traditional publishers have on the market… well, wave bye bye, it’s been nice knowing them.

And btw, not everyone is stupid. The difference in how the virus was handled here and in Europe, no matter how much the media screams and hollers, is not going to be centralized government health care looking good.  In fact, it will probably bury the idea once and for all.

And the one thing ALREADY becoming clear is that we can’t afford to do business with totalitarian countries that will lie to us, or to have completely open borders to them. Or really to anyone. You can scream “racist” all you want, but nationalities are not races, and viruses don’t care. The end of this will be sensible border control. Sorry if you won’t like it, media, you brought it on yourselves. You could have treated this like you treated swine flu, and not hurt the economy, but your senseless fury against Orange Man Bad is leading you to all those unintended consequences…. We’ll enjoy them.  We don’t know about you.

Other unintended consequences MIGHT come from the virus itself, including the fact that, apparently, there’s far, far fewer drugs coming in, which is having an interesting effect in our urban fauna.  And who’ll know what the unintended consequences of THAT will be.

Stay calm. The one thing we know is that historically the unintended consequences always bite the social engineers in the butt.

Buy stocks of popcorn.

 

 

We live in a very weird time, in which people don’t even seem to think of lie and truth as things, but instead seem to believe whatever pleases them best, and run with it. Only that explains the abundance of contradictory beliefs the left holds to, and the fierceness they hold to them.

Honestly I think part of it is that the adherents to the self-proclaimed party of science, most of whom have never taken a science class more complex than what I took in 9th grade (if THAT) have read something about quantum and about observations and beliefs influencing the outcome, and don’t realize yeah, sure, this applies at the quantum level (which is smaller than whatever they can imagine) so that, yeah, sure, if you believe that wave is a particle, or whatever, it might just be so. But you can’t — well, they tried — levitate the Denver Mint by the force of your belief. And believing you’re brave at resisting orange man bad doesn’t make you anything more than a nuisance at which the rest of us roll our eyes.

The problem with this primacy of belief over truth — and tell me, how many times have you come across someone who yells back to reasoned facts “well, that’s what I believe. You can’t tell me what to believe!” (Which is true. you can believe all the counterfactuals you wish. There is a term though for believing — wholeheartedly believing — things you know are not true.  It’s called madness. It never ends well) — is that it ends up corrupting people’s morals as well as their minds.

We’re thus treated to the spectacle of the left saying that the COVID-19 will be “Trump’s Katrina.”

Okay, the sheeple (shabbies) are excused from this, but how many people on the left can AVOID knowing that Katrina was in fact nothing to do with Bush?  That it was not a federal disaster, but a local one? That the local people wouldn’t take federal help.  And that, for that matter, a lot of the bullshit going on was highly imaginary. Like the disaster that was the superdome? Mostly memorex created by the TV stations and “news.”

In that sense it tracks pretty well, honestly. I’m tired of watching the left saying Trump should have acted, etc, etc.

Other than blocking flights from China — probably much too late but ahead of everyone else, really — and releasing emergency funds, what part of this is Trump’s to do?

It’s insane to say “We should be more like China” or Singapore, or whatever. First, no, we shouldn’t be more like China, because we don’t even know what China is like, and neither does ANYONE else.  A characteristic of totalitarian regimes is that information is falsified all up the line.  The other countries “doing all this so well” are small countries, and not divided polities with local control.

Which frankly is good. For us. It means that if some local governments mess up, the whole nation won’t be dying.

Screaming “But Trump” is tiresome and just another form of Orange Man Bad.

Are we in for it with COVID-19?

Who the hell knows. I don’t. I don’t think so, and not just because our medicine is way better than China’s, and frankly Italy’s (no, I don’t want to hear it. I really don’t want to hear it. Italy is not much better than Portugal, which means even amazing medical staff is in trouble for lack of funds/machines, etc.)  I also think honestly it was here way before there, and that the results haven’t been THAT lethal, though probably a lot of deaths early on got counted as flu.

But would I be shocked if in two weeks we’re maxed out on ICU and medical personnel are getting very sick? Waggles hands.  Not particularly.  A little.

I’d honestly be surprised if that’s true ALL OVER, but not if it’s true for our big cities, where social distance is non-existent and a lot of the conditions are less than ideal.

I’d  be surprised if the outcomes for anyone under 80 is as bad as in China, but not for over 80, and there are a lot of people over 80. More than most of us realize.

Of course, whatever happens, EVEN if the crisis is only in San Fran, say, the media is going to pound that drum and make it seem like it’s all over the US and stoke a financial panic which WILL kill more people than the flu in the long run.

And perhaps give us a socialist president — you think Biden is different from Bernie? AHAHAHAHAH.  His cabinet would be Obama’s third term. — The only way we get out of that is by shooting our way out. Which I don’t want, if I can help it.

But, it’s all out of my hands. Like so many things are.

When half the nation doesn’t believe objective truth exists, they don’t even realize they’re telling poisonous lies.  And people love themselves a good panic. Particularly with themselves as potential victims.

Hold on to the sides of the boat. The water is going to get rough.

Wash your hands, keep distance if you can. DO NOT PANIC.

In the end we win, they lose.  The question is only how far away the end is.

Yesterday I got caught up in a Facebook argument about public libraries and care for the homeless.

Well, I sort of got caught up – sort of, as usual I missed most of it, because a) I was hanging out here with you reprobates b) the time normally devoted to writing was devoted to sleeping.  [Long disquisition on what was going on at the time elided.]

This discussion got me thinking, and btw, you are warned this might be the world’s longest blog post because I’m zombified and therefore can’t write short to save my life.

It started with a fan linking a bunch of us to a site about libraries.  What he said was sort of true of me, though not really.

I have a very odd relationship with libraries.  First, to begin with, unlike most of you, I didn’t fall in love with a public library in childhood.  I didn’t, because there were none.  Portugal has a system of public libraries, and in fact, if you look on line, there is a picture of a very ornate library in Portugal.  When that was making the rounds of the net, all my friends linked me with “wow, you must know that place inside out.”  Well… um… the place was in fact in either Lisbon or Coimbra, which most of the time I was growing up were a tediously long train journey away.  So even had they been libraries as Americans view them, I probably wouldn’t have visited them that often.  And I’ll confess I was, briefly, for a few months, familiar with the Porto branch of the same library system.

The reason I was familiar with it, will explain to you why I wasn’t more familiar and the difference between Portuguese libraries and American ones.  I spent a few months, every free moment after school, in that library tracing the fluctuations of currency through the sixteenth century in Portugal.

See, the libraries in Portugal are repositories of original material – some of it very old.  If you want to do anything that requires primary sources you go to the public library.  The entire system is the equivalent of the section of libraries here devoted to local history and documents.

As in those, you can’t check books out, and quite frankly, you wouldn’t want to.  The few fiction books in there are those considered of historical and/or literary value.

There are of course other libraries, most of those being rather small and confined and private.  Most parish houses have a lending library at least for young people.  A lot of youth clubs have libraries.  Schools from middle school up have libraries.

Unfortunately, it is all tainted by the rather nose-in-the-air attitude that culture is something that’s too good for the common folk and also that the common folk must be protected from “trashy novels.”

With the best good will in the world – and remember I’m the kid who read Thomas Mann at eight simply because I was bored out of my gourd and those were the only books I could get my hands on (in the attic) which hadn’t been read yet.  Same reason I read Camus at 11 – I found myself hard pressed to discover anything in most of those libraries that I wanted to read.  Most of it was moral tracts and improving works, and it was therefore as dusty as it deserved to be.

I think I once found a book about a Portuguese Queen in my High School library which was only half bad.  I “think” because I might have dreamed it.

By the time I’d started tutoring I’d come to the conclusion not the only difference but a considerable one between me and most of the people I tutored was that they’d grown up without fun books.

This was particularly bad when the kids I got were geniuses (most of them were.  Not all) born to families of poor-but-honest-and-definitely-pious peasants.

Portugal is an odd country.  It is said that every Portuguese has a book of poems stowed away somewhere that will never see the light of day.  This is probably true – at least to some extent.  I would be very shocked if the guy up the street who forced his family to live in medieval squalor and farmed by medieval methods had one, but you never know.  Those romantic poets can get weird.

At any rate, most Portuguese will at the very least pay lip service to books.  It was a shock to me when I came to the states and people saw me reading and asked me what I was studying for.  In Portugal a lot of people read in the train, though for working class young men, in my day, that was usually comic books.

However, a certain class of people… let’s call it the wanna-be middle class, views it as their duty to keep their kids – particularly their daughters – from being corrupted with “trashy” stuff.  Portugal being a country with two feet, two ankles and heck, at least up to the chest in the past, “trashy” is anything written in the last hundred years, which hasn’t been given the imprimatur of either “intellectuals” or “the church.”

My family was always weird, in that mom disapproved of books about imaginary stuff (I think younger son takes after her, though he likes the meatier SF and some mysteries.  He prefers books about how things work/worked, and real history and stuff) but dad was addicted to who-dunnits and adventure books (Captain Morgan and Sir Walter Scott were his.)

Dad had spent all his pocket money since he was eleven or so (and this is a man who walked over an hour to school because buses were too expensive) in the used bookshops (known in Portuguese by the rather romantic and I suspect Arab-origin name of Alfarabios.  Normal bookshops were librarias (places containing books.)  I have no idea what Alfarabios means, etymologically, but like bazaar or kiosk it has a romantic taste in the tongue, a suggestion of something exotic and strange.)  Those weren’t very common when I was growing up in Portugal, because culture taints buying used with the same sort of low-class feel as selling your stuff in pawnshops.  But dad was broke, and he had to read.

His library was augmented by inheritances from his grandmother and great grandmother both of which I’m given to understand though nothing of feeding the family on vegetable soup for a week so they could buy the new chapters of the novels they were following.  (These were sold in chapters, with a hole on top, hanging from a loop of string attached to a pole.  The bookseller came through village hawking his wares, and sold novels to people a chapter at a time – they probably couldn’t have afforded a whole book at once.  They sold fun stuff – I think our Sir Walter Scott was originally bought that way – and villagers bought it, and once they had a book, they’d save and send it to be bound up.  This system had ended LONG before my time, but the expression “string literature” for cheap, accessible, exciting adventures stayed in the language.  My dad often teased me with it when I was little and devouring Enid Blyton by the yard.)  Then as my brother and I started reading, we started pooling our birthday and Christmas money to buy paperbacks: science fiction and mystery, mostly.  And since my dad still devoted most of his money to books – it was his secret vice.  Other men blew money away on drink.  He spent it on books – we learned to coordinate and strategize purchases.  This meant, yes, that my brother and I often bought dad the books we wanted to read for his birthday and read them very carefully and wearing gloves before we wrapped them for him.  It meant also that when going to the book fair, which takes place in large cities for a couple of weeks in summer, outdoors, in tents, and where books are usually offered starting at half price (and old stock that was in the back MUCH cheaper) we had to compare lists.  “Okay, I’m looking for this, this and this are they on your list?”  We also would do the first walk then call home and ask the others if they (if they’d gone before) had already bought x y or z.  This was hard learned.  The year I turned fourteen and had some money I’d made (it might have been the year I ran a neighborhood newspaper) and my brother had money from tutoring, we went to the book fair separately and ALL THREE OF US brought home the exact same books, which was a total waste of money.

But, anyway, when I realized a lot of the peasant kids I taught needed more fun books, I began starting libraries or enriching the ones that existed.  I convinced my Portuguese and English teachers to back me up in adding an SF section to the High School library, for instance.  It required them to convince the librarian that translations and science fiction at that could be “worthy”.  It leaned heavily to Bradbury, but I sneaked in some Heinlein under the radar.  I also started lending libraries in two groups I was involved with.  Whether they lasted past my improvement Bob (Heinlein) knows.

Coming to the States was a shock to the system.  First of all, my host family had no books in the house.  None.  I don’t mean to imply they were stupid, they weren’t.  But their entertainment ran to TV and magazines.  I suppose dad had technical books but there was no reading-as-fun.  This was odd even amid neighbors.  Dan’s family down the road always had books lying about.

But just as I started to go on a jag of withdrawal, my host mother said something like “Well, for heaven’s sake, why don’t you go to the library?”  I was still new and didn’t want to be rude, so I didn’t tell mom that I didn’t want that KIND of boring.  Instead, I let her take me to the public library.  And I fell in love.

Books.  Not just fun fiction, but fun non-fiction.  Who knew people would write things like the life of Shakespeare and other history, and books about quasars in ways that common people would want to read them?  (They came to Portugal, too, eventually, but at that time popular non-fiction was news to me.)

Yes, it was sort of like locking a kid in the candy store.  I ended up volunteering at the library because that way they’d trust me to take more books out, and besides, I’d discover stuff I’d never seen before.

Then I went back to Portugal and, shaky from withdrawal and also wanting to keep my English up, discovered that American tourists, bless their wealthy hearts, often abandoned the books they’d brought over to read over summer (understandable, since that meant they had more room for stuff bought cheap in Portugal.)  I’ve read more thrillers and beach romances than I care to admit to, but it kept both the English and the reading bug sharp.

Back in the states, newly wed and frankly broke, I both developed an unhealthy relationship with a used book store called The Bookworm in Rockhill, South Carolina, and I learned to drive PRIMARILY so I could drive to the library.  In Charlotte we routinely borrowed books from three branches, and when I was bed-ridden with Robert, Dan took our biggest three suitcases (the ones we took when traveling to Portugal) down to the library sale, with strict orders to fill them to the top and in the order of SF, Mystery, historical, nonfiction consisting of biographies, history and science.  I think he bought out MOST of the sale and all in those categories.)

Then we moved to the Springs and we were somewhat beyond broke.  I’d also abandoned 2/3 of my books when moving from the Carolinas (truck space) which left me HUNGERING for books.  Yeah, I had the local bookshops free-bookshelf where they put the books they didn’t think they could resell.  I used to go early in the morning, with Robert in a carriage, to snag the most readable stuff.  But there is only so much gothic romance a woman can read.

So I used the library.  We lived downtown, in a student apartment, and the library was thirty minutes walk away.  I used to make that walk every other day and the pouch at the back of the carriage was full of books for the return trip.  The library was also where I sought refuge on weekends, when Dan was watching the kids, to get a little bit of writing done (longhand.  No laptops.)

This was the period where my relationship to the library (practically living there) was the one described in the stuff the fan posted.

When we moved away from downtown that relationship became more distant.  I still did some library sales (it was at one of those I found Dwight Swain) when I was aware they were happening, and I still went to the library when the preliminary hints of an idea started bothering me.  Say “something about Africa.”  This allowed me to read forty or fifty books for free before I decided if the idea worked.

The last time I read the library out of books in one section was … must be 6 years ago (I was homeschooling the kid.  Might have been seven) when I was considering the idea of a series about women of the War of the Roses.

A little earlier, while we were working on the other house to get it ready to sell, I borrowed audio books at the rate of two a day.

But even then it wasn’t as essential as it had been, once upon a time.  I could now find the precise book or books I wanted on Amazon and often very cheap even with shipping.  This became more so with electronic books and the possibility of sampling a lot in the free section.  Also the preliminary reading on some theme or other can be done on line.

So, a year ago I needed to find information on a particular Romanian ruler, whose name evades me now.  I found hardly anything on line – a page or two – and usually just mentions in the books I could get hold of.  So I thought “library.”

My older son and I set off on an expedition.  It will show you the kind of hopeful idiot I am, that I took a shoulder-sack, convinced we’d fill it.

I should have known better.  The last time I tried to WORK at the library – four? – years ago, I couldn’t, because the place was full of homeless AND social workers interviewing them at a volume usually reserved for public speaking in a crowded room without microphones.

But they still had books!

A year ago… not so much.  Oh, there were still SOME books, most of them put in places they shouldn’t be and a lot of them missing that should be on the shelf.  BUT half of the space was taken up with music, games, videos and other things that, last I checked, weren’t BOOKS.

The library was also serving as an informal, ersatz homeless shelter, which made me afraid of going to some of the lower levels and looking for stuff.

I found not one book to check out, not even a tangentially relevant one.  I won’t be going back.  And while I’m sure the suburban libraries are better in terms of not having patrons urinating in the corner, I can check the stock on line and they too seem to be going video/game/music.

However, the festivities on line started with Bill Quick saying that his own library was unusable being full of homeless.  I concurred.

Enter the bleeding heart brigade, saying that if we had better services for the homeless this wouldn’t happen.

Bill immediately pointed out he lives in San Francisco, possibly the city with the BEST homeless assistance services.  And I pointed out that Colorado Springs is known in the region as having some of the best assistance services (many of them private) from soup kitchens to shelters.

We were then accused of being heartless and wanting to sweep poverty and need under the rug.

So…  I know it took me this long to come to the point, but I wanted you to realize what libraries as they used to be in America can mean not just to me but more so to people who have no books at home, and the theory of comparative scale of use.  (Also I’m ill and writing long is much easier than writing short.)

First let’s start with the fact that homelessness as it exists in America isn’t poverty.  In fact part of the problem with it is that it ISN’T poverty.  Look, regardless of what you’ve seen on the movies or tv, most homeless are not families fallen on hard times.  Yes, there are some of those now, but most of those while technically “homeless” aren’t living in your local park.  They’ve just taken over mom and dad’s basement, moved onto a friend’s living room or whatever.  Terrible – I’ve been JUST short of that at least three times in my married life – and humiliating, but NOT “stand in the park and wheedle on yourself.”

90% of the homeless in America and the hard core ones are people with mental health issues, people with drug abuse issues and people who have found they can live without having to do anything for it, and can be “free” and outside society.  I’ve overheard conversations in the park, and I suppose that most of the people who “dropped out” in the sixties are dead, but a lot of them are alive and going from soup kitchen to free clinic, with a bit of begging in between.

Yes, there are entire families in this system, including homeless children – but for them to stay in it, the parents need to have some sort of serious issue.  Otherwise, even if they can’t find work, there is assistance available to get them at least into public housing, which, nightmarish though it is, is not living in the park.

I’m not going to pretend this doesn’t happen to normal families too – see where I came very close to that level and more than once too – but normal families usually tend to bounce back.  They go through a few months of mess and horror, and then they claw back to some semblance of normalcy.  (This might change as our economy dives and programs of necessity get cut.  The ones for the DESERVING poor will be cut first, of course, since they rarely riot.)

The problem with this is that when people get appalled at the conditions the homeless live in and start offering “homeless services” there is an entire network, not just of homeless but of social workers who direct the homeless to the cities with better services.

I swear to you and I’m not even joking that right now there are plenty more homeless on Colorado Springs streets than in Denver, despite the Springs being much smaller.

The Springs also has its soup kitchens and other services downtown and within easy walking distance of each other.

This means downtown businesses are closing, except for bars and restaurants which can control access.  And that the library is of course a place to camp in the cool/warm during the day.

It means more than that.  We moved within easy driving distance of downtown, because when we lived downtown when we first came to Colorado Springs, I used to take walks every day.  When we moved to our little mountain village, without these, I gained ten pounds a year.  I used to love walking downtown, dropping by the deli and the three bookstores (only one left, and it’s MOSTLY a restaurant now) checking out the other little shops which ranged from yarn to weird import crafts.

Now those are gone.  Worse – the last two times I walked downtown alone (i.e. without commanding the muscle, aka older son to go with me) someone FOLLOWED me and I had to employ stuff from my childhood to lose them.  Once it was a large and addled looking male, and yes, he was following me.  And once it was TWO large and addled looking males.  For the icing on the cake – not related to this, but from a blog entry – I clicked on the sex offenders registry.  Yes, I know, a lot of people there are there because someone accused them and was never proven.  Our local one at least has notes on whether it’s accusation, trial or conviction and also whether the crime was against children or adults.

The downtown zipcode is FULL of registered sex offenders who’ve done hard time and who have committed their crimes against adults.  The faces are very familiar from my walks, and yep, one was the guy who tried to follow me.

Which means, if I walk I take the boy with me.  Even then at least once some guys tried to flank us.  You see, the vagrancy laws are not being enforced AT ALL because the city is “compassionate.”

Let’s talk about compassion – most of the shops downtown were mom and pop operations and many had been there since right after WWII.  But when customers are afraid to walk around (and when the stupid meters with requirements you move every two hours make it impossible to park close by and just go around the more popular area, because city planners don’t understand you don’t shop downtown like at the mall) and when you can’t keep homeless from coming in and peeing on your books, the stores either move elsewhere and close.  Which, arguably destroys wealth.

This same “compassion” makes it impossible for women and children to walk downtown in their lawful pursuits.  This same “compassion” makes the library which could help a lot of kids fall in love with books as we did, and meet other people who like books (even if they are reading them mostly online) into a dangerous no-go zone.  This same compassion is emptying the smaller office buildings that don’t have doormen.  The office I rented, which was the only one I could afford, eventually became unusable.  These are the times they are, and a lot of small businesses are going under, so when I moved in the office building was half full.  Only you know how it is…  small businesses, we worked odd hours.  Sometimes when I was there there was only me and two or three other people in a building with forty or so offices.

And then other people started moving out.  I didn’t understand why until the day I was alone on my floor and I came across a clearly homeless guy in the hallway.  I’d seen them there before.  They usually roamed in and roamed out, and you walked past them.  Only this one was… well… feral.  There was no human in the eyes.  I barely got into my office ahead of his jump for me, and then I was stuck there until I was sure he was gone (which took a lot of looking through the bulls-eye) which was about four hours, and the room didn’t have either water or a bathroom (those were down the hall.)  I had the presence of mind to play one of my audio books – with male voices – loud enough to sound like I had a guy in there with me (I talked in between) and he moved off very fast.

After that I didn’t use the office and let it lapse when the rental ran out.  That building is now completely empty and for sale.  Is that compassionate to the owner who is btw an immigrant and not particularly wealthy?

Is it a matter, as someone once preached at me, of my wanting “poverty and deprivation swept under the rug?”

Oh, h*ll no.  If these homeless people were the kind of down at heel families or working-class people the movies depict them as, I’d feel sorry for them, but I would NOT want them swept out of the public view.  Poor people – no matter how much maligned poverty is by being accused of causing crime or whatever – don’t usually try to attack people and rape them, poor people aren’t evil.  They’re just poor.  I know.  I’ve been poor a lot and some of my best friends are poor.

But instead, most homeless are … feral.  The sort of people who don’t recognize the social compact and don’t care about the rules of society.  At best they are insane and unpredictable (read My Brother Ron by Clayton E Cramer, for a look at what many, many of the homeless are like) at worst they are drug addicted and … how do I put this?  Contemptuous of those of us who play by the rules, have jobs, and make an effort for a living.

And that’s the problem.  The problem is most cities and private charities misdiagnose the issue.  They look at their mounting unemployment and they think “we must do something to help these people.”  Heaven knows that’s true and getting worse.

But then comes the non-judgmental gospel of the age, where you can’t judge, and you can’t ask what these people were doing, require that they keep clean, require they see a psychiatrist in order to get food.  No, you can’t do any of that because that would be discriminatory.  So you just give freely and as much as possible.

And the vultures come.

I pity the REAL “homeless due to need” families that have to raised kids in that kind of hell.  They should get help, but they shouldn’t be forced to get it next to sex offenders, chronic drug abusers and people who frankly couldn’t give a d*mn about getting out of that situation and getting better.

And I pity the businesses who have to cope with this invasion by feral humans, supported by other people’s money but not feeling the slightest obligation to other people.  And I pity the children who will never get to experience public libraries or the guidance of a friendly librarian.  And I pity the women and teens who can’t simply take a stroll downtown.  And I pity the owners of downtown buildings who aren’t wealthy enough to hire doormen.  I pity the drug addicted/mentally ill (often a covalent group) who don’t find guidance or help in keeping up with their medications and becoming functional again.

Compassion?  I’m full of it.  But not for those who are feeding the beast of dependence.  Not for those who make it possible for people to live off society but not in it.  Those false bleeding hearts just want to feel good about themselves.

And by being kind to the cruel and parasitical they are much more than cruel to the kind and helpless.

I have a doctor’s appointment today and meant to cue a blast from the past, but Murphy has been unusually active and time got away from me. More later.

May I ask whose brilliant idea it was to indoctrinate new generations on the need to have fewer children?

No, no, don’t answer. I’ve read a lot of science fiction written in the mid twentieth century, and I know.  The thinking parts of the culture in the dawn of the current era of abundance had time and leisure to get all panicky about excess population and how we were killing the planet, and a lot of other rather emo nonsense.

Also I went to school shortly after the middle of the twentieth century, and was lectured in every class about how the human race needed to find a way to stagnate…. er… to “keep population the same or reduce it.”

The only good thing about that rank stupidity was that it was marginally smarter than the tripe they pulled on my kids, where they tried to convince the kids to sign agreements they would never reproduce when they were thirteen.

Future generations, if there are any, will stare in awe at our magnificent suicide, and at the strange assumption that because we’d just had a baby boom, future generations would continue to reproduce at the same level…. forever.  Again, I think it was the ease of communication, and the exponential growth of a class that worked with their minds.

The Bible says something about the heart being deceitful…. but it has nothing on the mind.  Things you teach kids when they are very young tend to be unquestioned, unexamined and forever believed.

One of the things the last few generations have believed with absolute panic certainty is that each of us needs to do his/her part to REDUCE the human population.

The other thing they have believed with credulous certainty is that the population figures from the UN are accurate, instead of being — at BEST — guesstimations, and accurately at worst a steaming pile of bull of excreta completely imaginary.

To an extent I absolve my fellow Americans, at least those born and raised in the US for believing the smelly poo the UN numbers, because they are, after all, residents in one of the most efficiently organized countries in the world.  Stop laughing.  No, seriously, stop laughing.  Even the vaunted German efficiency (and I’m not sure they were ever that efficient, except they believed they were and projected that image) has decayed markedly.  And as for the British, please don’t go there.  No, I don’t think they were ever that efficient to begin with.

The thing is that as sideways and upside down as we are, over our vast territory, particularly when coordination and central organization are needed (or intrude, anyway, as we’ve seen in the case of tests/vaccines/etc.  Question: How many of these unexploded IED of uneeded and inefficient centralization did the last administration leave submerged in the law code, ready to blow us to kingdom come at an unexpected event? Don’t answer that. I like to sleep at night. And the problem was that these were the children of the mid century who refuse to believe that centralized isn’t better. Or perhaps they’re just pigs for power, greedy to get their command on.) we do remarkably well. Not great, but remarkably well. Compared to everyone else, that is.

The problem is people born and raised in America tend to assume that this is the baseline for humanity. Having been raised in a country where the Italians and the Irish are considered self-controlled and remarkably efficient, I’m always in awe of this strange, if admittedly enchanting delusion.

I’m not a hundred percent sure while people in other countries, like, say, Portugal, think that the population “count” makes any sense.  No, I’m serious. I don’t get it. Unless it is a rock bottom assumption that EVERYONE must be more organized then them. (Bizarrely it doesn’t even begin to be true.)  I know that they tend to believe our federal government has machine-like control over every aspect of civic and cultural life in the US (no.  I’m okay. Really, I’m okay. Let me have some water so I can stop laughing and type again.)

Only this illusion allows people to believe that — what is it now? 8 billion? Yeah. It’s about as accurate as climate modeling into the far future.  Computers and GIGO rule! — population count the UN puts out.

Seriously, guys, WE who are computerized, have a civic culture where people report a lot of their stuff whether it’s needed or not (is Thomas Jefferson spinning in his grave fast enough to power all of Virginia yet?) AND where most, if not all, of our births take place in the hospital, have only the most general ideas of how many people there are in the nation.

This is because — I’m not sure when, because I haven’t looked into it — at some point our politicians realized that having MORE people in their state/districts/etc gave them more power.  And they did what they always do with things that give them more power and control. They started fudging the reckoning.

It was most blatant under Clinton and Obama — the party of unbridled governmental power! Maybe they can use that as a slogan: “Our candidate is a walking poster for the memory unit of a nursing home, but we just want power” — whose administrations both insisted that “we must add in an arbitrary — computer generated (are we sure the computers don’t have it in for us) — number of people that are “undercounted.””

Guys, I looked at the numbers they were adding at the time. I also lived in one of the cities they added numbers to. Let’s just say at that time we didn’t have nearly that many either homeless or immigrants.  Now we might have that many homeless but — hint — they were attracted at the time of pot legalization, they weren’t spontaneously generated by the sidewalks and asphalt. They came from elsewhere, where my guess is they’re still counted.

And that’s not considering most of the Latin countries south of the border are undoubtedly still counting the population we’re supposedly undercounting.

So, here’s the thing, multiply that by… well, the countries of the Earth. Our politicians have incentive built into our system (and a few bad decisions by the Supreme Court) to over count us.  That doesn’t even begin to tally the incentive that countries that are net recipients of international aid have to over count their people. Remember most of that aid is calculated per-capita.

“Oh, Sarah! But look at all those immigrants. Surely they are reproducing massively!”

<Falls on the floor laughing. Then laughs some more.

Guys, no. Those cultures are just bizarrely, massively, EXPLOSIVELY unable to provide for their people.  And the west opened their doors. My guess is that each of those immigrants is still being counted at home, too. And probably their families are much higher on paper.

There is a game which everyone has heard of and social workers and others have seen play out in real life: welfare families in certain areas “borrow” children.  I.e. some children are share over several families, to boost the numbers and the payment.  This is certainly true for a lot of the illegal immigrants, because there is no way to keep accurate records/count them.

The insanity of giving welfare to illegal immigrants is another thing that will have the future going “Did they start putting LSD in the water then?”  But it’s worse than that, it was the explosion of unimagined prosperity in the 20th century. It gave humans illusions that they could make the world into paradise, and that there was no reason not to distribute the surplus to EVERYONE.  (The world doesn’t work that way, and being given unearned wealth most destroys humans. Never mind.)

Now, why did the west open their doors?

My guess is because our leaders have some inkling of how bad things are in terms of how many people are in the upcoming generations.  My guess is that they are becoming scared, because — get this — nonexistent people cannot have children.

As much as most people like to pretend I’m crazy when I say I think our world population is already falling (why this would be any more crazy than the UN’s baseless assertion that we’re drowning in babies, I don’t know) that’s what the actions of the government of EVERY developed country are doing.

They are in a desperate fight for resources: the biggest resource of all: PEOPLE.

The west is willing to take welfare cases and illiterate peasants, in the hopes — I would guess — that their children will be productive citizens.

Except that this is the government. Centralized governments. Remember what I told you about the efficiency of such an institution?

The imagined elites composed of technocrats are so far removed from third world peasants that they don’t even GET the massive difference. They also don’t get the difference in culture. They have — after all — traveled abroad and met their counterparts, and they’re ALL the same, right? there’s no real difference, right? (I think they’d find a difference, if they married into those cultures, but never mind.)

But cultures don’t work like that. And importing vast numbers of people from dysfunctional cultures is not going to end well.  Because when you import a group the culture lingers. And these cultures are what’s technically known as fucked up non-functional. So non-functional, in fact, that they can’t provide for their new generations, even when those numbers are falling. (Look, guys, apparently women in the Middle East have used the internet to find the rhythm method and vote with their wombs.)

Socialist/welfare/”blue model” governments need ever growing populations. Their dominance came in the mid-century, when that was the assumption.  They are trying to bring in people who’ll look after the aged, and contribute to the ponzi scheme their societies have become.

But they don’t understand people very well, since I think most such technocrats are lizard beings from Alpha Centauri (well, what IS your explanation.) So they’re madly competing for WARM BODIES.  Which, since they’re being attracted with welfare and hand outs are doing nothing but collapsing the grift-and-moralizing systems faster.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that humanity has never been in a situation where each individual family had an incentive (economic, regulatory — well, guys, when you can’t leave the precious darlings alone for more than 2hours, and can’t let them walk to the park by themselves at ten, what do you think that does — emotional and propagandistic (that climbing population)) to have fewer children; where each “blue” government in its own territory had an incentive to REDUCE population, because each citizen is a LIABILITY who will require health care, welfare, etc. etc. etc., and yet where each of those countries also desperately needed a higher and higher population every 20 years, to be able to keep existing.

I don’t even know what to say to the situation, except that the West, in this as in everything else, is forging new paths. Now, they’re new paths in self-destruction, but what the heck.

It won’t last. Whatever comes after, this won’t last. It won’t last because it is at war with itself. And the way it seems to be breaking is the people of the various countries getting annoyed at the imports who refuse to fit in. And refusing to pay for welfare.

Which …. I don’t know. And the important thing is that no one does. Between our a amazing prosperity in historical terms, falling birth rates and a completely insane would be technocratic class, the only thing I can promise you is that we’ll live in interesting times.

 

We had a computer crisis this morning.  It’s been a slow-mo thing around the house. I think was an update. Render computer also working now!
But it took a good two/three hours, and then… other things intervened.

Please forgive me. I’m postponing promo a week.

*”Why the return of the Free Novel In Installments?” you ask.  Mostly for the same reason I wrote Witchfinder in installments on this blog: because it’s Saturday and I don’t want to think of a topic to write. Also because I want to be able to write my posts for PJ on the weekend, which means I don’t want to have to write non fic for myself as well on the same days. This has the great advantage that once I’m done with a novel, I can publish it and get money.
This novel is a sequel to Witchfinder between it and Rogue Magic (which will get finished in installments after Witch’s daughter is finished.) I started it in 2015 and was having trouble because well…. because I was losing my mind to a combined effect of hypothyroidism and sleep apnea. Which had the side effect of not being able to remember names which is a problem when you have a lot of characters in a novel.
Some of you might remember this beginning. Or not.  Some of you might not have read Witchfinder.  It’s fine, because this stands on its on. Like all my series novels.
Meanwhile if one or more of you finds him/herself with time on his/her hands, I really need a “bible” for Witchfinder.  And before you set about rewriting the KJV to include a magical world, what I mean is that I need a compiled, itemized list of: Characters (both the ones in it and the ones mentioned, and like a paragraph description, both physical and what they do/did and their relationships to other characters), Places (brief description/history), Historical events (brief description,) objects (books, etc. that are part of the world building) and brief description. If I’m going to be working in about eight series (and I am) I need this for every series, and I don’t want to take a month just to do that.  Of course, if no one else has the time, I’ll go ahead and do it. Okay. Now, to recap what I have on this, and then next week a new chapter – SAH*

 

Witch’s Daughter

Sarah A. Hoyt

 

The Letter

 

It has often been said that dead men don’t talk.  In Avalon, this wasn’t necessarily true.  Dead men could talk if a reasonably talented necromancer were willing to risk the death penalty for reanimating a corpse.

But Michael had never heard of a dead man who wrote letters.

The letter lay on the breakfast table, next to the only setting on it, on a silver salve between the spoon and the porcelain creamer.

Michael Ainsling, youngest son of the late Duke of Darkwater and brother of the current titular, eyed it suspiciously, while he took his seat.  His eyes widened slightly at the name of the sender, then he frowned at his own name in the space reserved for the recipient.

He hadn’t slept well, and dark rings marked the pale skin beneath the dark green eyes he shared with all his male relatives.

A well grown boy at the age when one resented being called such, he had that look boys have when they’ve achieved adult height but not yet had time to fill in. He’d been the quiet half of fraternal twins, his sister Caroline being the garrulous and outgoing half until six months ago.  Then Caroline had been sent to an academy for young ladies, where she was presumably still garrulous but far away from Michael, so that Michael had to do his own talking and endure social interaction.

It had been thought – then – that Michael’s recent experiences had left him too frail to attend Cambridge.  Michael frowned with distaste at the thought, as he folded and refolded his napkin.  He did not understand why it had been thought better to leave him here on the deserted estate.  With Caroline gone, Seraphim — now the tenth Duke of Darkwater and the prince consort of the Princess Royal — spending most of his time in London and Mama having left no one knew very well where, Michael’s was the only place setting at the table designed to accommodate seventeen.

Most of the days he swallowed tea and toast and rushed off to work in his workshop.  Today…  He glared at the letter by his cup.

And realized that the footman who’d discreetly followed him into the dining room hovered near his chair.  “You may go, Burket,” he said, without taking his eyes off the letter.

“Will you need anything else, Lord Michael?” the man asked and made a broad gesture as though sweeping the breakfast spread clustered around Michael’s place setting: fried kidneys and some sort of pie, and toast and butter and something else that looked suspiciously like fish cakes.

Michael didn’t sigh.  “No, thank you, Burket.  I have everything I need.”

Truly he wanted the man gone so he could look at the letter at leisure.  The sender’s name was Tristram Blackley, and surely there couldn’t be more than one of those.  The writing and the paper both looked fresh, as though someone had dashed off the note just this morning.

But Tristram Blackley had been dead for sixteen years.  Michael had studied him among the great inventors of his time, the man who had created the carpetship liners that crossed the air between Britain and the Americas and took the upper classes of Avalon on pleasure cruises the world over. He remembered mama telling him, once, that she’d known Tristram in youth, that he was a lot like Michael himself, always dreaming up new magical machines, but how he’d died young and how sad it was.

“Beg your pardon, Milord,” Burket said, which was when Michael realized the man had leaned over to pour him tea, and had almost poured it on Michael’s lap as Michael lifted his head.

“Thank you,” Michael said.  “But you don’t have to pour my tea.”

Only now the man was buttering Michael’s toast and setting it on a plate, and smiling enticingly at Michael while nodding at the toast as though, for all the world, Michael were a toddler in need of being tempted to his food.  “I know, milord, but you haven’t been eating, and what are we to tell his grace, should he ask?  And he does ask, you know?”

Michael picked up the toast, with what he knew was ill-grace, and took a bite, while still frowning at the letter.  He could well believe that Seraphim worried about his eating and his health and everything else.  And that was nothing to what Gabriel, his older half-brother, once Seraphim’s valet and now the king of fairyland would do.  Those two had always mistook themselves for parents of Michael and Caroline.  Michael was sure someone in the household was in Gabriel’s pay, too, and sent him regular reports.

When you have two older brothers who are far more powerful than you, and determined to protect, cosset and annoy you within an inch of your life, sometimes all you can do is play along.  But Michael wished they’d let him read his letter in peace.

He took another bite, gulped down the tea, which was still hot and made his tongue sting, and then took another bite of toast, doing his best to simulate appetite he didn’t feel.

He had spent a restless and turmoil filled night, dreaming of fairyland and his recent captivity in it, and it was all he could do not to allow a long shudder to go through him at the confused and patchy memory of that dream. That was the problem, too.  In dream and memory fairyland was never anything clear and solid, anything you could rebel against and resent.  It was a foggy, threatening recollection, in which places and people changed shape and essence, and in which pain and worse happened to you without warning.

“That is better,” Milord, Burket said, in the sort of kind, patronizing tone that made Michael wish they hadn’t forbidden duels and that it weren’t frowned upon to duel one’s social inferiors.

“Would you fancy a kidney?  Perhaps a fish cake?”  At Michael’s headshake, Burket stepped back, but didn’t leave, as Michael expected.  Instead, he cleared his throat and looked towards the entrance door to the room, set next to the window that looked out over the gardens.

There was movement, and then two women and a man came in, all of them smiling widely, but all of them looking just the slightest bit embarrassed, as though they were doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The women were Mrs. Hooper, the housekeeper, starched and stiff in her black dress with its immaculate white collar, Mrs. Aiken, the cook, and the man was Dyer, the Butler.

What on Earth could be the matter?

Before Michael could even think to ask, Mrs. Hooper advanced, curtseyed, advanced again, curtseyed again, then beamed at him, again, as if he were an infant in the nursery, and spoke, “Lord Michael, since today is your seventeenth birthday, we thought it only fair…”  She stopped and sniffled, as though she were fighting strong emotion, though Michael had no idea what that could possibly be.  “That is, last summer, Milord, we thought you lost, and we wish you to believe we all hold you in the greatest affection, and therefore…”  She blushed, which gave Michael all he could not to let his jaw drop in astonishment.  Mrs. Hooper had never seemed fully human, much less capable of embarrassment.  “Therefore we got you this gift, from everyone on the estate, to commemorate your seventeenth birthday Milord.”

She dropped a parcel wrapped in silver paper, and neatly tied with a silk ribbon upon the table, just north of the letter from the dead man, then beat a hasty retreat.

Michael’s turn to blush, and to fumble with the paper.  And then he had the devil’s own time concealing the expression of astonishment on his face, and overlaying it with gratification.  “Oh, thank you,” he said, staring at the tiny gold box with the miniature scene of Zeus in judgment worked painted upon the porcelain lid.  A snuff box?  Why in heaven’s name did they think he’d take snuff?  Even Seraphim didn’t.

But he also understood, immediately, how expensive such a thing was, and how much of a sacrifice it had been to the servants to contribute to it.  That colored his voice and his expression, as he stood and said, “I am not good at flowery speeches, but—” He lifted the box and looked it over, “I am most gratified at your kind thought.  Thank you. I thank you most heartily.”

The four of them curtseyed of bowed according to their different sexes, looking gratified, and left.

Which is when Michael opened the letter from the dead man.

 

 

Escaping The Tower

The problem with a wicked stepmother, Miss Albinia Blackley thought, as she stood in front of the mirror, wearing Geoffrey’s clothes, and tucking her abundance of red hair into a hat rakishly set on her red curls was when the wicked stepmother was in fact your real mama.

It was all very well, after all, for Miss Albinia’s brothers – who always called her Al – because Mama was just the woman who had married papa when Geoffrey, the youngest, was seven, and was in fact no blood relation to them.  So they had nothing to be either sorry or worried for.  It wasn’t their mama who mistreated them so.

Oh, it had been terrible for them, from what they’d said, to find that their kind and absent-minded father had married a forbidding and interfering woman who was a powerful witch to boot.

But at least all of them, even Geoffrey, remembered papa.  Albinia didn’t.  She didn’t remember anyone but Mama, the sole authority and arbiter in her fifteen years of life.  Albinia locked the door to her room as she thought this, and sighed, because now she was on limited time.

Mama didn’t like her to lock her door, ever, and there was no point at all imagining that mama didn’t spell that lock, so that she knew the moment Al locked it.  Mama spelled everything and kept track of everything Al did, which is what made this so devilishly difficult.

But spell or not, Albinia must lock the door, to at least delay mama and give her a chance to escape.

Because the thing was, Mama or no Mama, Al must leave and go find the boys.

She didn’t know if the boys had felt this way when papa left shortly after marrying mama. She didn’t know because they never spoke to her of that time, before Al was born.

What she knew was that papa had disappeared shortly after marrying Mama, and had never returned and was presumed dead.

And now the boys had disappeared.  Al didn’t know where, but she knew two things.  One, that mama had made them leave against their will.  And two that wherever they were they needed Al. And at any rate, Al needed them.  Even if Mama was her real mama, Al was not going to stick around and have the full benefit of mama’s attention for the duration. Whatever the duration was.

She scrunched under the bed to find the old sheets she had torn and tied together.  They had to be old and discarded, because that was the only way to make sure they were no longer bespelled.  It had taken her six months to find some and to braid them into a passable rope, in the few minutes a day mama left her alone.

Tying the sheet to the foot of the bed and throwing it out the window was the work of a moment.  Al’s mind ticked where mama would be now.

Even if she were close by, say in her room, as she would be at this time, she had to come up the North staircase, down the hallway and up to the door.  Right now, she would be on the top step.

Al got the magical kit, likewise assembled painstakingly over a year, of discarded bits and ends, so that she could be sure no one had bespelled or could track any part of it.  The hard part of it had been buying the herbs, because she’d had to spend her allowance on them, in a shop at the other end of Wulffen Downs, so that mama wouldn’t hear about her purchases.  And she’d had to wrap them so they looked like candy.

It had earned her a sermon from mama about spending her money on tooth-rotting sweets.  But she had got the herbs necessary for enchantments.   She tied the pouch to a cord under her jacket, and then slipped the few silver coins left of her allowance into her sleeve.

She could now hear Mama’s step in the hallway outside.  Mama was clearing her throat, preparing to call her name.

Albinia pushed the window fully open, knelt on the parapet, and held on to the rope with both hands.  She had remembered to put knots on the rope, and she set her feet on the first one, carefully, otherwise it would be like when she tried coming down from the cliff when she’d been bird watching with Edmund, and had got her hands burned, with the speed of sliding down the rope.

She clambered down the rope as, from above, came the sound of knocks and mama calling “Open up.  Open up immediately young lady.”

She felt the little puff of magic as mama opened the door with a spell, and she moved faster down the rope, because she had to be on the ground, and running by the time mama got to the window.  She had to go to her brothers. Geoffrey needed someone to help him make himself understood when he started stuttering and Edmund was likely to lose everything, including his paints, and Aaron, Jeremy and Joshua would argue about everything, and William was likely to disappear into his music, and Samuel would just go all extremely disappointed…

Albinia looked down to see how far the ground was.  She had measured the tower where her room was situated.  She’d calculated the height to the window five different ways.

But as her stomach sank to her feet, she realized none of that mattered now.  Because she was not suspended from her own home’s window, but from a window open on a façade of glass. In fact, it looked like she was hanging from a giant glass rectangle.  Except that as she looked forward, she could see these were windows and that oddly dressed people were pointing at her and a woman was covering her mouth, but looked like she was screaming something.

Gone was the tower of the manor house on the cliff, overlooking the ocean and the familiar marshes.  Mama.  Mama and mama’s magic!

She could feel as though an abrasion upon her magic, as if something, in this strange place were trying to get through her shields.

Beneath her, there were flashes of moving things that she couldn’t understand and the sound of klaxons superimposed on a low roar as of a million voices.

She had no idea where she was, dangling here, between Earth and sky, on her fragile ladder of sheets.

All she knew was that the ladder ended far short of the ground. More than the height of Al’s tower.

Far above, Mama leaned out the open window, and Mama’s voice called, “Albinia Blackley, you little idiot.  Hang on.  I shall pull you in.”

And Al let go of the ladder.

She let go before she could think. She let go, knowing only she couldn’t stand to go back in and explain herself to Mama.  She let go knowing that she must get to her brothers, somehow, but not knowing how, except that she must get away from Mama and Mama’s magic, first.

She tumbled downwards, head over heels, wondering how it felt to hit the ground so far behind.

Would it hurt?  Would she even feel it?  She hoped she didn’t land on some innocent and kill them, even as air escaped her lungs.

 

Rescuing the Dead

Michael frowned at the letter.  It was undoubtedly addressed to him, by a man who couldn’t possibly have known of his existence, unless he had read the announcement of Michael’s birth in some society newspaper.

Swallowing tea and toast as fast as he could, Michael put the snuff box in his pocket and retreated to his workshop.

Properly speaking, he had two workshops: one in the house proper, a room that had taken his father a substantial portion of the family fortune to build and the other far deep in the garden, where Michael assembled and tested those experiments that might explode or other otherwise cause damage to the family.

The workshop in the depths of the garden, he’d all but abandoned.  Even if a changeling had been left in the inside workshop, it was from the outside workshop he’d been abducted with a cunning spell from the now fortunately dead king of fairyland.  And though Michael was quite sure the present king of fairyland, his brother Gabriel, had no intention of kidnapping him, yet he felt alone and vulnerable in that building.  It had been violated once, and could be violated again.

The inner workshop would be harder to breach.  For one, when it had been claimed from its previous use as a ballroom, it had been lined in leather between two layers of copper, the whole bespelled, forming an impassable barrier to both organic-affecting and inorganic-affecting spells.

In the ballroom, a sort of platform had been built, and up on it, Michael had his sky-observing apparatus, which observations came in handy when calculating what form of spell to use.

The rest of the workshop was machines of Michael’s own invention, many of which now seemed impractical and childish to him.  Take for instance his careful replica of the planet Earth, in brass, rotating in proportional time around a miniature sun.  It had been fun to build, but what practical use was it?

Since Seraphim had visited the strange planet without magic where the Princess Royal had been raised, and brought back ideas for useful machines, like shavers and mixers and clothes and dish washers, Michael had been working hard on magical replicas for such wonders.

The clothes washer was a success, except that the housekeeper had banned its use saying it was an abomination and would run laundresses off their jobs by the score.  However, Seraphim had arranged to have it tested in the royal palace and it was well on the way to becoming accepted in other, less hidebound households than the Darkwaters’.  Seraphim said it would make Michael a fortune.

The automated barber, though…  Michael frowned at his creation standing by the workbench near the far wall of the room.  It was not a little portable thing, as Seraphim had described, because Michael had believed by making it large and capable of giving haircuts as well as shaves, it would be more popular.  Particularly if it could also dress the hair of young ladies.

But all the thing had done, in actual fact, was chase Michael through the house, trying to cut… not his hair.  The bits of his jacket it had got had been enough.  Michael was not sure what had gone wrong with the animating spell, because when a cylindrical, man-high thing is wheeling after you brandishing knives, razors and scissors in its many arms, the only possible thing to do was to run as fast as possible.

Which he’d done, until Dyer had shot the mechanical barber through the head with a fowling piece.  Michael stared at the creature with multiple holes through the space where its directing magic had been.  Well, never mind that.  This was not a good time to attempt to reproduce that… experiment.

Michael perched on a high stool and tore into the letter, breaking the seal which showed – he’d swear to it – a lamb eating a wolf.

The letter started formally enough, “Dear Lord Michael Ainsling, You’ll forgive my addressing this letter to you, though we’ve never been formally introduced, or, indeed, introduced at all.”

And it proceeded strangely, “You might have heard of me, and have some idea that I am dead, but do not let that concern you, as rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Michael chewed the corner of his lip, perceiving that the person who’d written this letter, in strong angular letters, was what Mama would have called an original.  And by original she normally meant that they needed help finding their way across a street, and were none too certain where they might have placed their head that day.  She had been known to describe Michael himself in such a way.

“I suppose it will be a matter of some concern to you how you come to be receiving a letter from me, whether you think me dead or alive, and also possibly some curiosity as to what you can do to help me, or hinder me, or indeed do anything in my case.

“I’ll tell you the truth.  I do not know.  I have cast and recast these runes, and all I can tell is that there is only one person in the world capable of understanding my work – and you must understand what keeps me prisoner here is my own work – and disabling it, so I might perhaps be set free.

“I have never had the pleasure of meeting you and the last thing I’d expect would be the Ainslings to throw any kind of magical genius in the normal way.  I mean, you’ll pardon me for saying so, but your father was one of the accredited adventurers of my time, in more ways than one, meaning he was rather more adept at using other men’s magic all too often in order to use their wives likewise.  And while your Mama was one of the beauties of her day, and indeed a diamond of the first water, I never found that she had an inquisitive and mathematical turn of mind.  But then, of course, sometimes every breed throws a sport, and my runes assure me that you are that.  A magical genius, I mean, not a sport, though I suppose that also.”

By this time Michael’s head was whirling and he felt he should have had rather more than one cup of tea to fortify himself to deal with this very strange missive.  Or brandy for a choice, except that none of the servants would let him have it, or at least not without telling Seraphim. And maybe Gabriel.

“However, before I can request that you rescue me, though I do, of course, request that, I must ask you to find my sons.  You see, the woman I married, in what I’m sure now seems to me like a fit of madness, has applied some sort of spell to them, so I can no longer track them nor communicate with them.

“I’m afraid she means to do away with them and use the lands of my ancestors to form a dowry for her whelp.  And while I have nothing against the mite, who was not born by the time I got confined to this place, and whom my sons inform me is a pretty good sort, in the way young females sometimes are, and not at all like her mother, I do not wish for my legacy to pass wholly into her hands and those of whichever rogue Augusta chooses to marry her to.

“I presume you have a row boat of some sort on your property, as I vaguely remember there was a lake there, in which much boating was done in the summer.  I remember the lady your mother looking very fine in a lace dress upon a boat, in fact.  At any rate, if you apply the formula I enclose onto a rowboat, it should bring you where you need be to start unravelling this knot.

“Since the full extent of the knot laid by the one I must call my lady wife is not known or understood even by me, I must trust in the formula and in the kindness of a total stranger to do what must be done.  And my scrying assures me you’re the only stranger who can do so.

“In full hope, if not trust, of your doing what is needful, I subscribe myself your most grateful and devoted servant, Tristram Blackley.”

Having laid the letter down on his workbench, Michael stared at it, fully wondering whether the person who’d written was the – presumed dead – author of magical carpet travel on a grand scale, or simply a madman possessed of illusions of being such a parsonage.

It was not till he turned the page and looked through the formula, written in a hand that gave the impression of impatience with writing, that Michael blinked, whistled under his breath, and realized that this was indeed the work of Tristram Blackley.

No one else, barring an equal genius, could have come up with such a strange mix of magical formulae, turning a simple rowboat into a vehicle of both magical transport AND divination.

And Michael knew, as he knew his own name, that he would have to try it out.  It was like climbing the tallest tree or exploring the dangerous path of the woods.  He’d like to believe he was doing it for the sake of the unknown Mr. Blackley who seemed to be in a terrible position, but in his heart of hearts, he knew he was doing it for the thrill of it and to prove that he could.

Enough of nights hemmed in with nightmares of fairyland, and of moping the otherwise deserted estate.  Michael wanted to be doing.

 

 

The Kindness of Strangers

 

Miss Albinia Blackley didn’t scream.  Or at least she tried, but as she turned over, her hair falling out and her cap being lost in the street below, it seemed to her that the air robbed both her ability to breathe and her ability to make a sound.  From above she heard her mother scream, but not what her mother said.  From below other screams joined, together with some sort of strange musical instrument that sounded like a crazed goose.

She caught glimpses of the street below, the glint of something like metal but in many colors.  She tried to use her magic to slow the fall, but of course it didn’t work, when she couldn’t even think clearly.

And then from somewhere she heard a male voice.  It said a jumble of words. Or at least the words sounded like a jumble in her, though of course, right then anything would.

Her fall arrested.  Not suddenly, but first slowing down, like a leaf falling gently from a tree onto the welcoming ground.

Only she didn’t fall on the ground.  Or get a chance to straighten up.  Instead, she fell face first onto something hard and wooden.  As she recovered breath, she realized that the something she’d fallen on was moving, gliding rapidly through the air.  Or perhaps not gliding, because…  She blinked as she picked herself up to sitting on the floor of a small rowboat and looked at the boy who was rowing it.  He was tall and dark, and scowling, and plying the oars with a will.  And they were charging through the air, weaving and twisting, while mama screamed above, ever more distantly, and below the screams had changed from a horrified to a strangely excited tone.

“What?” Albinia heard herself squeak.  “How?  Who—”

“Not now,” the boy said, between panting breaths.  “We must get out of here, before the location affects the spell.”

Like that, they seemed to push through… something, and there was the brief cold of what Albinia had learned to call In Betweener.

 

It’s Friday and I don’t feel like doing a post.

The good news — knocks on head — is that I seem to finally be getting over “whatever the heck this was.”  The bad news is that I’m ridiculously late on everything, including promised covers.

So, I’ll get to those and finishing a few stories, and….  well, I suppose the house needs dusting, really.

So, today, for your amusement “Covers you can get from Pixabay, which are basically covers and ready to go.” And hopefully spotlighting a few artists. Who knows? maybe one of you guys will even decide to hire one of them.

 

So first, this artist:

I don’t know if the artist s rendering stuff, or using pieces of what other people post, and it’s obvious some of this stuff isn’t cover-quality, but a lot of it IS. And honestly even the so so, depending on genre, would be covers anyone would be proud to have 10 years ago.  Things have changed, a lot. And for the best. It’s easier and cheaper to to get decent art than ever before.

This artist, I linked before. He’s notable because ALMOST EVERY ONE OF the IMAGES IS COVER WORTHY.  There just aren’t many.

And THIS one is unusual because this stuff is done with filters. Good filter use is not always easy to find. Honestly, if I were doing fairytales, I’d be looking at this portfolio a lot.  Of course not every image is right for that genre, but a lot are.

Another portfolio, pretty much all cover-worthy. Just not many there. But I’m sure you can contact the artist, if needed.

This next one I’m going to spotlight because these are handdrawn, and at least in the picture, the artist seems pretty young.

Again, good for fairytales and YA (mostly because of the type of drawing, not because there’s anything wrong with it.)

Anyway, stuff for you guys to play with, while I go do stuff that resembles work….

 

I had no idea what to call this post.  Calling it “if you go to the past take wipes” seemed a little over the top. Also didn’t fit on that line.

Mind you, I’d advise the same if you go traveling, even not in a time of Kung-flu. But that’s because I grew up elsewhere, and I’ve traveled.

In a previous post, I mentioned that when the American left started screaming that the right was accusing Chinese of the “stereotype” of being dirty, I was flabbergasted.  I often don’t get American stereotypes at all, often leading to really weird situations, where someone assumes I’m judging them by stereotype, while I have no clue what I’m talking about, not even a little bit.

I think certain stereotypes and taboos you have to be a toddler in the country to imbibe.  Or at least live with someone who isn’t a mathematician and whom — sometimes — you have to inform of the assumptions built into his own culture, because he was too busy daydreaming about numbers to notice something as silly as people.

But the dirty thing? We actually asked all our friends, and they all looked back at us wide-eyed and said something like “WHAT?”

Turns out, apparently, that yep, Chinese culture isn’t up there on the personal cleanliness scale. Which shocked me, since Japanese and Koreans are. (One of my closest friends as an exchange student was Japanese, and we had friends from Korea at one time.) And the Chinese family we knew very well when we lived in Manitou was as clean as anyone else.  Of course, they were from Hong Kong.

The insanity, on the part of the left, of course, is not that they “fight the stereotype” (see above, not all Chinese have issues with cleanliness and individuals should be judged as individuals) but that they demand we not speak about it, because it’s cultural. And if you say anything bad about a culture, you’re “racist.”

These later-day heirs of Hitler seem incapable of understanding that culture isn’t born with the person, it’s something acquired. Which means to change a culture you don’t need to kill everyone who carries the same genes, you just need to make enough impact on two or three generations.

I was going to say it was one of the mysteries of the left that they could believe this, while at the same insisting on social engineering to change us into the perfect, communist race. Then I realized, no. That belief has been bought into coherency.

You see, for four generations, they’ve controlled the education system, and more importantly the arts, entertainment and reporting system, and yet they haven’t managed to make us all into ardent communists, and their perfect subjects.  Which is why they hate us, with a burning a passion. And why they’ve gone on their deranged, racist campaign to eradicate “whiteness” which they blame for their defeat.

Dear Lord, in the 21st century, with history and anthropology proving this insane, these arrant idiots believe that cultural characteristics are inborn in people. Of course, they also believe that “capitalism” is kind of an evil curse that descended on civilization along with its twin “patriarchy” instead of getting that TRADING is natural in humans (maybe some apes, too. We’ve had indications) and that patriarchy is just what happens in the wild, when one sex is much larger than the other. Because someone has to protect the pregnant women and the children from the wild animals, and barring moral precepts to curb it, force is addictive.

If one of you invents a time machine, go back in the past and strangle Rousseau with his swaddling clothes.  But if you go, take wipes. Because the past is filthy. Not by their lights, but by ours.

Which brings us back to China, cleanliness, culture.  None of which have nothing to do with race, because I don’t care where your ancestors came from, the past is filthy.

You see, you can influence a culture, but usually not the way you mean to — hence the left’s increasingly enraged frustration at their ability to “engineer” society — and it takes a long time. The other thing it takes is the “benefits” of the change you’re trying to make showing up, and making the new generation SURE that something is worth it.

This is where the left has failed, btw. The erroneous model of society as a mechanism that the industrial age brought us, made them think that it was best to have a “central manager” and also that they could change the machine, replacing “pieces” at will. And elementary schools when they went universal (where I came from that was the forties. I think it was earlier here) gave them the illusion it could work.

There are certain things you can teach kids: ways of talking, of presenting themselves, of counting change, of memorizing train schedules (well, we DID. It was required to pass fourth grade. I invite you to imagine what kind of hell that was for the dyslexic kid who inverts numbers) that work, in the very short term for that person. They also give the kid a sense of superiority over his/her parents, those backward fools.  This is btw, how first-generation communist take overs get the very small kids to tattle-tale on their parents, those backwards enemies of the state.

But the thing is, those are small things, and mostly things you do in public, okay? And they pay off for the person immediately. It often, however, doesn’t pay in the long run, and when the kids grow up, if they see what they were taught was a lie, they will turn. Boy, will they turn. Which is how the left keeps losing generations.

Anyway, let’s suppose it’s something real you’re trying to teach the kids.  In my mom’s childhood, Portugal had undertaken a massive campaign to curb rampant TB.  So, people could get arrested for being barefoot in public.  This is because everyone SPIT in public. Just on the street.

It didn’t work, because like most laws it didn’t take in account that what it was legislating might be impossible. You see, most people couldn’t afford shoes. Not as often as they’d wear out from being worn anywhere. So workers would carry their shoes and put them on when they saw the police or — the more sophisticated — wear a shoe at a time, carry the other one, and claim the other one hurt their foot.

By the time mom told me these stories, they were weird, because in my generation everyone wore shoes.  You see, if you had money for shoes you wore them, because you’d seen the benefits, to wit: you got sick less.  Mind you, I think all of us lived in rubber flip flops in summer.  ( I spent a ton of time trying to fix ones that broke, too, and I wasn’t unusual.)

The change, a minor one, “wear shoes in public” (the North of Portugal has a climate reminiscent of London) took hold as long as there was a reason and it was feasible. It only took two generations.

Other changes had clearly taken/have taken longer. Look, Portugal is not cut off from mainstream Western knowledge. We knew the germ theory of illness. It’s just that it’s not something you can SEE. By definition, bacteria aren’t visible.

So when I was a kid, my family which took a bath once a week (look, we had no running hot water. It was an endeavor) and washed hands, face, neck, arms and undercarriage every day were considered freakishly clean.  The clothes we changed once a week (except for underthings that got changed every day) were considered “almost too clean to wash” by our washerwoman.  TRUST ME, by our standards here and now, they were filthy.

People there, now, as far as I can tell, have American-style hygiene.  And yes, I know what you’re going to say, we might be too clean, hence all the immune and auto-immune issues. And maybe. But that’s not the point.

The point is that Portugal had known how disease was transmitted since the late nineteenth century, but it took internalizing the change — repeated generations of seeing the benefit — and far more affluence than our ancestors ever had to penetrate.

Because culture is a hive-mind, composed of the docile, the stubborn, and the medium.  And because a hive-mind, resistant to change UNLESS IT SEES THE BENEFITS. If you think of it as an autistic 2 year old, who wants to do things exactly the same way everyday, you won’t be far wrong.

And honestly, if it sees NO benefits? It won’t do it. No way, no how.

Now, my mom’s childhood friends died in droves from TB, from typhus, from other epidemic and endemic diseases that can be solved with scrupulous hygiene. But where and when she lived, they didn’t have the means to change the way they lived, even if they wanted to. You can legislate economic facts, just like you can legislate rain. What you can’t do is make the laws of nature obey you.

So, they lived as they always had and attributed illness to other things because…. what are you going to do?

I suspect to an extent that’s what is going on in China, btw. They are much wealthier than they were, but like all communist societies wealth is unequally distributed. Most peasants might be better off than when they were starving under the lash of Mao’s deranged rule, but they’re still desperately poor by Western standards.

Grandmother used to say “you don’t have to be rich to be clean.” It pains me to say it, but she was wrong. You either have to have a modicum of wealth, or spend your whole day battling grime. For instance, our house is decently clean and I work at it far less than she did. Usually a day a week will do it, because I don’t have to do it with brooms and brushes, I have a vacuum, which means I have electricity to support it (I don’t think grandma’s house electrical system could have taken it.) And I’ve long since learned the equation: trade money for time.  As in, I can buy effective cleaners, and make the cleaning really quick, or I can use cheap stuff, or make my own, and take…. forever. Which eats my life.

But for many people in China the trade is simply not available. Period. They don’t have enough money to do that.

So they live in an environment that makes them more tolerant of every day dirt, which means they don’t notice it. That’s the part where dirt enters the culture.  And they’re vast enough, they don’t see that other countries are cleaner or the benefits from it “they live longer and healthier lives.”

I’ve seen all these at close quarters as my generation (and possibly only my circles for all I know) was the first where the dime dropped in Portugal. Even though they’d known of bacteria since the late nineteenth century.

Heck, even here, the dime hasn’t fully dropped.  Don’t believe me? Lurk in a public restroom for a few hours sometimes. Many people do not wash their hands after using the bathroom. And, mind you, they’ve been told this since what…. birth?

Culture changes slowly. It doesn’t mean it’s genetic. It just means that new habits/ideas/ways of behaving take time to percolate through society, one collective neuron at a time. And that benefits must be obvious for it too work.

Also that culture — like a recalcitrant toddler — sometimes learns what you don’t want it to.  Lie to it enough — by forcing it to say things that contradict its lying eyes, for instance — and you’re going to hit a point where they simply will not believe you. Nor, for a while, anyone else trying to command them.  Which might be the point western culture has reached, honestly. It’s ten seconds from starting to run around screaming “I’ll never go to bed again.”  And considering the bed the left has been trying to put it to bed with a shovel, that’s actually a good sign, I think.

But this means even “good” changes dictated from above will have a higher barrier to cultural penetration. Which sometimes isn’t good.

To what extent did Mao’s madness (and the not so sanity of his successors) make it so the Chinese people don’t really care if they hear that “hygiene is essential” or — knowing the style of the PCR — You must cause a thousand flowers of cleanliness to bloom?

As for our left: the very fact they assume cleanliness or lack thereof is RACIAL means they’re completely off whatever rocker they ever had. It also makes them repulsive and mad eugenicists.  And it makes us less likely to listen to them — as a culture — or really to anyone, should we need to in the future.

Which is of course a problem, because cultures aren’t the most rational things around.

How do you counter it?  I don’t know. Ignore the left. Wash your hands. And don’t panic.  If you follow the prescriptions of the left and ignore the different cultures, you’ll panic, because, well “the kung flu will kill us all.”

It won’t. Our herd immunity is way higher. The kung flu might make us sick as dogs and cost us productivity as we drag around with a fever for six to eight weeks.

But this too shall pass.  Including the crazy, anti-human and racist ideas of the left.

Because like a not completely insane toddler, the culture might run around eating dead bugs, but will stop if they make it sick. And if its nanny keeps instructing it to eat dead bugs, sooner or later its’ going to stop listening to the nanny.

And that too is a good thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Poor Starving, Burglaring Father And Other Fantasy Tales – a blast from the past from May 2013

So, yesterday Glenn Reynolds linked to this story at Hot Air about a home invader (IN TEXAS!) who was so unfortunate (as well as stupid) as to lock the son of the homeowner in the gun closet…  Hilarity ensued.

Only, as I was getting ready to go out and unable to work in those ten minutes or so, I thought it would be a good idea to read the comments.  Which was fine too, except…

Except that I came across something that made me sit down and think.  In fact, I thought all the way in the car to Denver (business) and all the way back, and decided this must be written about.

For those of you not inclined to click on that link, let me summarize.  Story goes something like this: a house in Texas was broken into by three home invaders (a completely different thing from burglars.  Growing up I was always told that the real danger from burglars was to interrupt them in the commission of the crime – please keep in mind that I grew up in a country where gun ownership is not allowed – and so was instructed that, if coming home and suspecting the house was being burgled, I should run next door the neighbors and call the police.  Home invaders are burglars who PURPOSELY go into occupied houses, which is a completely different ball of wax.  In fact, often – from what I read, though I confess I didn’t look at statistics – they’re there for a bit of bizarre sexual assault or other acts of random sadism, as well as property.)

After wrestling with the occupant of the house in residence, i.e. the son of the homeowner, they locked him in the closet.  He got his gun, broke out of the closet, exchanged fire with one of the invaders, the other two fled.  The one who was shot (shoulder and leg.  Cut the homeowner’s kid some slack.  He was probably agitated.  I would be) tried to run, collapsed, was captured.

So far so good and a fairly straight forward story.  And then I hit the comments.

Before I report on this comment I want to point out that from the replies other people made him, he might be a “regular troll” on the blog.  (AFAICT we’re the only blog with active commenters without a resident troll.  This is probably because I’m testy and an overheated Latina.  Deal.  I know it would give us great cache and also that I never let you guys have any fun, but you can MOST ASSUREDLY deal.)

However, the comment bears mentioning because a) if you tell this type of a story at a party, this is almost sure to come back as a talking point.  b) because when I was in college – or high school – while I would PROBABLY not have made this point myself, I would have bought it, hook like and sinker.  c) because not only it’s not a valid “counterpoint” but it’s not even a sane one.  d) because nine times out of ten someone not politically involved will buy it sight unseen.  e) the reason people will buy it.

So, now that you are ready – the comment was made by someone named “nonpartisan” and while I can’t find the comment itself (you can search!) it was quoted enough for me to get the gist of it.  Apparently this critter opened with a gambit that he didn’t think burglars deserve death.  And either in this comment, or in another, he identified himself as a Harvard Law graduate.  The commenters make much fun of this last.  They shouldn’t.  Having received an excellent liberal (!) education in Europe, this seems perfectly plausible to me.

But here’s the part of the comment I could find:

what if you know for a fact that the burglar is unarmed, would you kill him?

a burglar could be a father who is unemployed and at his wits end at finding options to provide for his starving family. Not every burglar is a violent, armed psychotic rapist.

nonpartisan on May 18, 2013 at 9:01 AM

This is exactly the type of story my text books, from middle school on were full of.  The criminal was a misunderstood soul, an exploited worker, down on his last dime.  We were hammered with comparisons to medieval people stealing a loaf of bread and being hanged for it.  (Suburbanshee will know better than I, but I’ve come to doubt those stories too.  The Arab world might punish first-time thieves, but I sort of doubt western civilization did.)

When someone brings up a story like that, I’ve been conditioned to feel a pang and go “well, what if…”

Why have I been conditioned to do this?  Well, because that’s a plot for a Hollywood movie, and, beyond my text books, it’s been tossed at us a thousand times in movies and mysteries.  (Did any of you watch Boogie Nights?  Might be one of the worst movies ever made.  We watched it for the same reason we watched a lot of cr*p.  It was in the dollar theater.  Unfortunately once we paid for it, we had to sit and watch it, because Dan feels wasteful otherwise.  No, don’t ask.  It’s a thing.  Anyway, from what I dimly remember, Boogie Nights has that type of thing, where they decide to rob a store, because they’re desperate and stuff.  More on that later.)

We all know about the honest-but-desperate father who goes and robs someone for money to feed his starving brood.

We all know of him – but does he exist?  I’ll remind you that we all also know of Santa Claus.

Right now, off the top of my head, I’m going to say that not only doesn’t he exist, but that if he ever existed, in history, it was probably before the eighteenth century.

Look, in normal human beings there’s  a huge stop before “commit crime to solve my problems.”  There just is.  It might “simply” be fear of retribution, but it’s there.  And when one thinks of “committing crime” and is desperate enough to break that taboo, there are a bunch of things a normal human being would do LONG before burglary, let alone home invasion (which as we said, is a different animal.)  There’s swindling someone.  If you don’t have the brains for that, there’s credit card number theft.  There’s even, up the scale, mugging.  (You get your loot in money.)  Further, burglary, let alone home invasion, is a fairly sophisticated crime.  You have to know how to break and enter.  This might have been easy in a medieval hovel, but these days it’s not so much (Okay, I can break into a house in five minutes.  I never claimed to be nice.  What?  Mostly to not be grounded for coming home late.  “But mom, I was in bed all along.  Maybe I was in the bathroom and you missed me?”)

Second, once you break into a house, your chances of walking off with a bundle of untraceable bank notes are slim.  Most people simply don’t sew money into the mattress.  So, if you’re breaking in for money to feed your children (snort) you’re going to have to convert whatever you find into cash.  (I’ll note that I have never heard of ANYONE breaking into a house and making off with the contents of the freezer, so if it’s food they want, they’re going about it the wrong way.)  This means you need to know fences, or you’re going to be a one-time burglar.

But before that let’s look at how an otherwise law-abiding person could get desperate enough  to become a burglar in order to feed his chil’uns.

Kids, I’ve been broke.  I’ve been so broke that merely being broke would be a relief.  At one point twenty years ago we spent six months paying our Visa with our Mastercard and vice versa.  Twice, we parked in front of soup kitchens, then decided we were NOT desperate enough to go in and went home hungry.

The idea of robbing another person NEVER EVEN OCCURRED TO ME.  In that situation, the hierarchy would go something like this: charities/soup kitchens.  This by itself, might be enough to hold us, until we could get back on our feet.  (who was that guy who moved to a town with his girlfriend and found he couldn’t starve even if he tried to?)  Friends and relatives.  No, I don’t care how broke your friends are, you can usually sleep on the sofa.  Unemployment/Federal/State assistance. (This might come first for most people.  Even for us, unemployment would.)  If you exhaust all of these, if you lose your home, there’s still the charity of strangers.  Look, our city supports a large (!) and colorful (dirt is a color!) population of homeless which I GUARANTEE haven’t done a lick of work in years.  NONE OF THEM IS STARVING.  (And most of them are also not burglars or even muggers.)  There’s soup kitchens.  There’s informal soup kitchens (college students host a dinner for the homeless near my house every weekend.  No. Don’t get me started.)  There’s begging on the street.

And if you’re not going “but all of those are demeaning.”  Yes, they are, but they’re not VIOLENT crime.  And which would you rather be?  A beggar or a burglar?

Neither, right? But begging is at least honest, and I’d bet you most NORMAL people would do that.

It turns out, weirdly enough, that a small percentage of the population commits 90% of the violent (or potentially violent) crime.  It’s not need.  It’s something broken in them.

A lot of these people are heavy drug users or mentally ill.

That said, I’m the first to say our mental health system is broken.

IOW you’re unlikely to find a starving father of four in your home unless he’s also mentally ill and POSSIBLY also an acid dropper.

The problem is that someone with that combination and willing to commit a violent crime has no breaks.  (A lot of mentally ill drug users just want to sit in a corner and talk to the lizards because they’re awesome and stuff.  The ones who get violent are inherently very dangerous.)

So, should you shoot someone who breaks into your house?  Yep.  What are the chances of your killing an otherwise innocent man?  Next to none.  What are the chances of you getting killed otherwise?  VERY high.

So, how come that comment, or the gist of it would have got even me to hesitate when I was much younger?

Because in a million stories, movies, novels, we’ve been sold the story of a creature that if he ever existed is vanishingly rare – so rare that his sightings are more scarce than those of Bigfoot.  – the “poor but honest, desperate father, driven to crime to feed his brood.”

And people tend to think of stories as things they’ve lived.  They “experienced” it.  So, of course, it’s true.

It’s a great story, of course, but I bet you it was much rarer in Victorian times.  (And if you read the bios of Victorian criminals, the being it depicts was almost as rare.  People would go to the workhouse, horrible as it was, rather than commit crimes.  Unless they were one of the few who PREFERRED crime over anything else.)  And it was even rarer before that.

What it comes down to is people have to be told these stories, and be told them over and over again, before they will be scared of defending themselves lest they hurt others.

Civilizations don’t commit suicide unless they’re brainwashed into it.  And destroying a civilization starts with corrupting its story tellers.

Go you, look closely at the stories you tell and make sure you do no harm.

Oh, yeah, and be not afraid.