No, not that one.  I mean, the idea that anyone or anyone in great numbers is particularly outraged because the actress hired to play The Little Mermaid is black is honestly ridiculous.

The fact that that “controversy” was started by a “troll account” and more people slapped it down than not, leads me to believe Disney was counting on controversy to push the film, and when they didn’t get it they made it up. Pfui.

Sure, there are people who are outraged about the casting, but for most of them it has absolutely zero to do with race. For most it has to do with the fact that the live version won’t look like the “real” i.e. animated Ariel. And never mind that to look like that, most live women would have to carry their guts in a handbag.

That’s not a race, or even a really rational thing. It’s the way you defend the memories of your childhood.  I’m fortunate in that I didn’t have a TV till I was 8 and other than little improving movies shown by our church, I didn’t watch a movie in a theater till I was 14. (Asterix the Gaul.) So it’s really, really hard to “break” the memories of childhood for me.  Though honestly, given my druthers, I’d take ALL the “improved and updated” Enid Blyton books and make a big bonfire. That stuff is just wrong.  As wrong as J. K. Rowling’s Tweets that drive my boys insane. (“Wizards poop how? Just shut up, lady.”)

No, for me what happened to the Little Mermaid when the movie was made was the REAL tragedy.  Btw, it’s not even a memory of childhood, that.  I only read the fairy tales during a weird folklore-interest period somewhere around 12 or 16. (I don’t remember. Also, there might have been two periods.)

The thing is, it struck me, at the time, as very weird that Disney was doing The Little Mermaid, because it’s not, like Cinderella or Snow White a love story. It’s a growing up story. (Yes, it also has very strong Christian undertones, but most of all it’s a growing up story.)

So, of course Disney changed it into a romance. Which made it all wrong.

Recently Peterson was giving some explanation of how females grow up based on the little mermaid and used the Disney version which made me yell. A friend reminded me 99.9% of people in the US know ONLY the movie version.

But the thing is that the original story is such a perfect allegory of a girl growing up.  This is somewhat obscured in our day of idols and celebrities. Girls often develop a crush on a celebrity or a fictional character, so things don’t work the same.

Due to growing up in pre-history, I had an emotional arc that was exactly like the little mermaid, and my guess is when the story was codified it matched most early adollescent girls.

For those not informed: the mermaid falls in love with the prince, rescues him from drowning but he never knows.  She then trades her aquatic kingdom for land and every step on land feels like walking on knives. Also she’s mute. With those handicaps she can’t attract his love, but there’s also indications she’s too young: he treats her as a pretty child, not a woman. If she can marry him, she’ll become fully human and acquire a soul (which merfolk don’t have.)
The prince marries someone else, and she faces dissolving into foam. Her sisters give her a magical knife. If she kills the prince with it, she’ll be allowed to return to her former life. Instead she throws the knife away and becomes a “daughter of the air.” (some kind of benevolent spirit.)  If she does well at that, she’ll then have a soul.

Now this strikes many people as a not at all happy ending, but it is.

To anyone who’s been a young girl in a traditional society, we know d*mn well what it’s like to fall in love with someone completely our of our reach: a creature from another world.

Young girls, fourteen or so, fall in love with older boys.  Not terribly older, but those we perceive as “men.”  In my case he was 4 years older, which might as well have been 20. Our worlds were completely different, and he viewed me as a little kid.

For that man’s sake, the girl transitions between the comfortable world of childhood and the world of a young woman.  She walks on knives and loses her voice. (Seriously. It felt like that. It’s a sort of acculturation, which is always painful.)  And if she’s lucky, she gets treated like a sort of pet.  As in, what young men do when faced with a child of either sex who adores them.

If she’s very lucky, she also overcomes her jealousy of the woman that man picks, and embraces her destiny as a full grown up being, one who will eventually have a soul of her own, and contract an alliance with a man more suited. Or not. As she pleases, being a grown up with her own soul.

Perhaps that story makes absolutely no sense in this day and age, as between movie-crushes and the fact that sexual-emotional maturity is pushed on girls earlier and earlier there is no dreaming ‘underwater’ garden of childhood for them, and no innocent early teen crushes. In fact, they’ll be encouraged to date boys their own age, by the age-segregated schools.

Maybe the little mermaid, the original, is a memory of a process that no longer happens.  (Whether it’s good or bad that it doesn’t happen is something else. I think it made for more solid, grown up women than the current frantic pseudo adulthood. But maybe I’m just yelling for the youngsters to get off my lawn.) And maybe Disney made the right decision when they turned it into a somewhat juvenile love story.

But to me the movie lost the power and sweet-sadness of the original story, the understanding you can’t always get what you want; that obsession doesn’t give you any right to another person’s love; and that it’s part of growing up to love and lose.

I think that’s what made the story so strong and poignant.  It’s something you can sort of read in the statue of the little mermaid.  A growing up girl, looking back with nostalgia but also understanding on the childhood she lost.

As we all do.

 

There are moments — how can I deny it? — when my Roman ancestors get up and march through my mind, sandal-shod feet echoing off newly built roads and pointing everywhere going “Ist, ist, ist” (the indicative pronoun for something foreign and disgusting, and incidentally close to the Portuguese for “this” “isto”.  Which tells you everything you need to know about what the first Romans to come to the Peninsula found and thought.)

And somewhere behind that is the idea that we’re going to need crosses lining every major highway in the West before this is solved and the barbarians pacified.

Believe it or not this is not a political post. It doesn’t even begin to be a political post, unless you consider the matter of incentives and punishments, which, like everything else these days goes into politics.

What I’m talking about is the recent outbreak of young people filming themselves licking, spitting into or otherwise tainting food afterwards returned to the grocery shelves.

I first came across this in a report of prize idiot alleged entertainer Ariana Grande who filmed herself licking doughnuts on a display and returning them to the case, while talking about how much she hated America.

Since then, in the manner of all destructive pastimes of monkey-see monkey-do peculiar to our species, it has gone generalized.

In a way the alleged entertainer was correct. It is a way to hate America. More fundamentally, it is a way to hate and destroy civilization. And humans. And really, everything humans care for.

Civilization could be considered the way that humans changed — tamed — themselves so we can live in vast quantities, close together.  The city requires a different discipline from the ape band, which had maybe fifteen individuals, whose lives were brutish, nasty, short and infinitely dirty. To improve that, it started with behavior that allowed us to live in larger groups: software in the head that allowed to consider ever more extended family and eventually strangers part of the ‘band’, and ways to keep food clean, and ways to control our tempers so that we didn’t all spend all of our time killing each other.  Ways to share, and ways to behave that increased trust between total strangers.  This included trusting those who handled and sold your food.

We can argue forever on the matters of population, ecology, or even whether too much cleanliness is a good thing.

The thing we can’t argue aoubt is that civilization is what allows us to live in the numbers we do, the long lives we do, the relatively healthy/productive lives we do.

And we can’t argue that sharing your body fluids with strangers is a good way to transmit illness.  Nor that doing it when the strangers are unaware is a violation of others’ rights and frankly biological terrorism.

If you hate all that, if you hate humans that much, if you hate civilization that much, if you’re one of those who talks about culling the Earth and reducing the population of humans to sustainable levels? My answer is always “you first.”

If you think you’re so special that you’ll take this kind of action to bring it about? My answer is again “you first.” (Possibly very first, if I catch you at it. At the very least, if male, you’ll sing soprano the rest of your miserable life.)

Look, we shouldn’t NEED tamper proof packaging. Yes, I know we do. But we shouldn’t. Part of the tenets of civilization is that something like this should be unthinkable. You don’t taint water and food. Even cats don’t shit where they eat.

But if we’re going to need ALL tamper proof everything? You’re adding to the cost of it. And also this type of prize-idiot will find a way to get around it.

You need to civilize humans. Because you can’t barbarian-proof civilization, unless you take out the barbarians.

Civilization is that state in which you trust strangers will observe minimal rules designed for the survival of all.

Part of where the wheels come off this is when you don’t civilize your own kids. EVERY civilization that handed off kids to be raised by strangers not their parents has regretted it. Some have collapsed and been replaced by others that DO civilize their kids.

As for us? Sooner or later this will have to be corrected.  The sooner we correct it, the less violent the correction.

If we don’t act now, with courts, with social disapproval, with disgust, yes, it will take crosses. Or stakes. Or unimaginably worse punishments before this type of action becomes unthinkable again.

And we’ll get there.  We’ll get there, sooner or later, because what’s not going to happen is for humanity to go quietly into that good night. Never did, never will. If we fall, something else will rise up, which deals with the barbarians swiftly and decisively.  If you’re a barbarian you should note the West is not your worst option. Not even close.

If you think you are, you lack the imagination to forecast what might come after.

Trust me, it will be worse.

Be told.

 

*Sorry this is so late. I came home mildly con-crudded but it took the turn for the much worse overnight and I think I might need a nap to get through the day. I’m slow and stupid today, and trying to finish short stories that are grossly overdue.  This post by DR Loss is fascinating, or at least I found it so. Back tomorrow – SAH*

From Generation Unto Generation by Douglas R. Loss

 

A philosopher friend of mine, Jim Schwartz, gave a presentation at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop’s 5^th Interstellar Symposium in Huntsville, AL, in October, 2017.  In it, he asked some probing questions about the morality of forcing future generations into prescribed lives and roles aboard interstellar generation ships: https://youtu.be/5pfZkGSE1WM.

 

A couple of months ago Jim and some others had a section in Futures about space colonization, in which philosophers and social scientists supposedly debated the question, “Should humans seek to exploit and/or colonize space? If so, how should this be done?”  To my mind this was in irrevocably flawed question to start the debate with, as it assumed that any human expansion into long-term settlement of space would necessarily be exploitative and would be colonial in nature.  Predictably, at least half of the academic respondents didn’t even bother with the proposed question but just used the “debate” to ride their hobby horses de jour.

 

Still, the philosophical and moral questions they ignored are interesting ones.  Another philosopher friend of mine, Nick Nielsen, and I decided to start an email dialog roughly about how this might all work out.  Nick’s initial thoughts were that we might make an attempt to revive some of the original meanings of the term when colonization in classical antiquity meant the splitting of a wealthy city by the creation of a new city which was thought of as a “daughter” city (the original wealthy and populated city being the “mother”). This was the Greek model of colonization around the Mediterranean. When the Romans controlled the Mediterranean Basin, the meaning of colonization changed, as the Romans would settle retired soldiers, often in purpose-built cities. Such cities could, by definition, defend themselves as they were populated by former soldiers. In neither of these ancient instances did any negative connotation attach to the idea of a colony.

 

The above ideas could be combined with ideas taken from Fustel de Coulanges’ famous monograph on ancient cities, in which he makes a sharp distinction between the ancient cities of the early Greek period and the cities of later classical antiquity. This theme could be elaborated to note further mutations in the role of cities since the ancient world. Cities founded in artificial settlements in space or on the moon or other planets would represent another stage in the mutation of the theory and practice of the city.

 

Nick considered these to be much better models of what will happen with human expansion beyond Earth than that oft-invoked cautionary tale of 19th century European colonialism during the Great Game.   He also noted that a roundtable called “No Planet B” is scheduled for CASCA-AAA (A joint Canadian Anthropology Society and American Anthropological Association conference) in Vancouver this November with this as its premise:

 

As a planetary species we live together among the rising seas and blazing fires of climate catastrophe. Meanwhile techno-capitalism is birthing a new space race out of an emergent Silicon Valley Military Industrial Space Settlement Complex.

 

Rather than face up to the reality of many-species suffering, climate refugees, wars, colonialism, and artificial scarcity of capitalism, globalizing Silicon Valley elites work on plans to leave the Earth and “colonize” other worlds or flee to their heavily secured bunkers on our planet.

 

As Nick said, this pretty much ticks all the boxes of the emerging anti-space settlement sentiment in elite discourse. Of course, these folks see themselves as rebels against any and all elites. He said he  could rant about this, but that that wouldn’t be as productive as answering a couple of questions:

 

1. Is it possible to talk to people like this?
2. Will any of this matter, or will boots-on-the-ground establish the facts that we will later rationalize?

 

I replied that I thought that the concept of off-world permanent settlements is being colored very strongly by the terminology being used.  Calling such settlements “colonies” is triggering an autonomic response among the unthinking ideologues.  Of course, their denigration of their conception of colonization is based on the exploiting of indigenous humans in the areas colonized, which wouldn’t be the case in the settlements we’re talking about.  To maintain their outrage, they have to find something else to putatively be exploited.  That’s why we’re seeing them complain about the possibility of exterminating extraterrestrial lifeforms, even though no such lifeforms have been identified, and about the possibility of making scientific investigation of non-living materials and locals impossible (or even just less possible).

 

So my answer to his question #1 was “No.” As to question #2, I’ve always felt that the elite whining about all this is fairly meaningless as they won’t be the ones going or the ones deciding to go. If off-world settlements become feasible and economically and socially desirable, they’ll happen and all the academic caterwauling won’t be any more effective at stopping them than spitting into the wind.

 

I thought it might be useful to try to guide the terminology away from “colonization” and toward “community construction.”  There’s a somewhat long history of intentional communities, constructed communities, etc., that might give us a more rational perspective on off-world settlements, as they’ll be just that, and won’t be nearly as analogous to terrestrial colonization as they are to intentional community creation.

I lived for a few years in Columbia, Maryland, which is an intentional community.  I’m sure there are some folks there who like the place, but I found it sterile and barely a community at all.  To my way of thinking, the designers of said community really hadn’t studied and didn’t understand how functional, organic communities start, grow, and succeed.  I hadn’t actually studied the variety of intentional communities to see what has worked and what hasn’t, but I suspect there would be a good deal of valuable information to be gleaned from such a study.

There are other intentional community movements underway that could be considered analogous to off-world settlements, such as seasteading.  There’s also Asgardia, although I’m inclined to view that as either a hobby by the originators or a scam.

Nick wrote back that he found it interesting that there are so few successful intentional communities (once called communes, and no doubt there have been other names as well), fewer still that endure for a significant period of time and cover a  large geographical area. While in countries with a reasonable degree of freedom there is no legal regime that prevents the creation of intentional communities, nevertheless few are created, and fewer still are successful. One might argue that very small nation-states (say, Monaco or Vatican City) are something like intentional communities, and that our nation-state system of political organization today forces them into the mold of nation-states. He wasn’t sure if this is accurate, but there is no reason that a successful intentional community could not iterate its social and economic model and grow to a great size within a given nation-state. However, this hasn’t happened. Why hasn’t it happened, and would the fact that intentional communities haven’t been successful have consequences for building communities off world?

The artificiality of intentional communities may be an important component of this. While a top-down plan is being awkwardly imposed, people are responding to the actual conditions of life and creating a community from the bottom up that reflects the ordinary business of life, and intentional communities get stuck when the bottom-up reality comes into conflict with the top-down model. We can easily see this happening off world, when a government or commercial enterprise seeks to establish a presence according to the model approved by the higher ups, which works well on paper but which clashes with conditions on the ground. Governments and companies can impose their will (something intentional communities usually try to avoid), but this, too, leads to conflict, and often also leads to independence movements.

Following the foregoing, one could say that a colony, in the narrow sense, is a community in which the top-down model prevails, while a settlement is a community in which the bottom-up model prevails. Civilization has its ultimate origins in bottom-up social organization, but the later stages of a civilization (once a social, political, and economic model has reached maturity) tends toward the top-down. Nick said this is how he would define it, but whether anyone else would want to adopt these usages is another matter (and not likely).

Part of the problem with terminology surrounding “colony” and “colonization” is a peculiarly American obsession with language. We all know that governments and large companies in the contemporary world hire consultants to try to arrive at linguistic formulations that serve their interests while alienating as few as possible, though it was Nick’s observation that this surface-level debate has little traction outside the western world. People usually know they are being sold a bill of goods.

He agreed that, when the technology is available and the enterprise can be financed, off world enterprises and associated human communities will happen, regardless of the language used to describe them, and regardless of how they are conceptualized, and when society changes enough over historical time there becomes a real question of identifying institutions of the past with institutions of the present. He mentioned again the differences between Greek and Roman colonies and the European colonies established in the course of the Great Game. One could say that the linguistic continuity masks a multiplicity of differences that matter. Any future communities that might also be called colonies would also have this linguistic continuity covering over substantive differences on the ground.

It is human, all-too-human to want the linguistic continuity because this gives us some orientation in the midst of a changing world, and it is similarly human to engage in more-or-less similar enterprises over time, even under changed conditions, so there is justification for the extension of traditional language to new activities. By definition, off world human communities will be historically unprecedented, but we will talk about them using established language and think about them in terms of our existing conceptual framework, though our language and our concepts will slowly shift to accommodate our behavior. Top-down linguistic and conceptual revisions are about as artificial as top-down social organization. Esperanto has its enthusiasts as well as its critics; it is the intentional community of languages. Nick would bet on the success of spontaneous and fragmentary innovations of language and conceptual framework that change our way of thinking on an evolutionary scale, scarcely noticeable within a human lifetime, but adding up to substantive changes over historical time.

I did a bit more investigation into what I’d called “intentional communities.”  At the time I hadn’t realized that that was a term of art for artificial communities created with specific social purposes as their defining raisons d’etre.  What I was thinking of was more what’s often called “planned communities,” like Columbia, MD or Reston, VA.  Or come to that, the great majority of retirement communities or gated communities that are springing up these days, or even the company towns of yore.  As I live just a stone’s throw (almost literally) from Alcoa, TN and a short drive from Oak Ridge, TN, company towns are pretty familiar to me.

It seemed to me that a major difference between intentional communities and planned communities is that intentional community membership is generally based on an acceptance of the social raison d’etre while planned community membership is based on a contractual agreement between the member and the controlling organization.  Whether the planned community be a company town, a gated community, or a retirement community, an individual or family will only be allowed to reside there by agreeing to fulfill contractual commitments.

This seems to me to be a likely organizational tool for off-world settlements too, as the local environments in which the settlements exist will not be forgiving of casual modifications of, or abandonment of, agreed-upon facilities.

I recognize that this sort of organization might be chafing to many.  But if there are multiple settlements with somewhat varying contracts for membership, self-sorting may occur.

Again, I’m drawn to the literature on “seasteading,” even though seasteading is only at the very edge of nascency.

The balance between top-down organization, which at some level will be an absolute requirement if the settlement is to be able to sustain human life and a continuing biosphere, and bottom-up organization, which will be an absolute requirement if any true sense of community is to develop, will be interesting to observe.  I wouldn’t pretend to be able to design a feasible and functional interface between these two organizational modes, but I think such an interface will become one of the necessary and defining characteristics of any successful off-world settlement.  Or any seasteading, for that matter.

Nick replied that one can think of intentional communities as civilizations in miniature, with the pretext for the community being analogous to the central project (the social raison d’etre) of a civilization. The pretext for a community can be a pretty low bar, such as a single interest. For example, a nudist colony has as its central project nudity in the public spaces of the colony. That’s a single-interest central project. Other intentional communities might have a more complex central project, like people who participate in renaissance fairs and seek to reproduce past ways of living.

If we look at it like this, the low success rate of intentional communities can be considered equivalent to the claim that civilizations don’t scale. When you make a civilization and its central project too small, it just doesn’t work well. However, the problem with this is that it would place a big question mark on the origins of civilization. If civilization doesn’t scale well, then how did they get started? And we can’t consider the origins of civilization to be a rare or unusual thing, because multiple civilizations independently emerged in widely separated geographical regions. So there’s an idea, and a problem with the same idea. The imperative of survival is probably key. If a nudist colony fails, usually no one dies.

Nick said he considered company towns as particular instances of intentional communities with a low bar to pass: employment in the company whose town it is. The social raison d’etre is the success of the company. A contractual arrangement may be thought of as a formalization of a social raison d’etre, much as the law is a formalization of some baseline social agreement on what is acceptable and what is unacceptable within a given community.

He agreed about the self-sorting of membership in various off world settlements, and if off world company towns exhibit sufficient diversity and variety, that might be sufficient. Any one company town has the motivation to pull together when it is in rivalry with another company town. When a company town fails, the former residents usually distribute themselves among nearby company towns at a lower level of status, or leave the area entirely. That in itself is a motivation for everyone to be successful in their first choice of company town. The balance of this calculation changes, however, depending upon the supply of labor. If labor is tight, conditions will be good, and individuals will be incentivized to leave for another company town. This mean less loyalty and less likelihood of pulling together. If labor is abundant, conditions will be worse and individuals will be incentivized to stay where they are at.

This observation suggested an interesting tension: moving people off world will be expensive, so labor will be tight. Companies will be incentivized to move enough people off world that they can be more choosy about their labor and not be completely at the mercy of a workforce (which could, for example, unionize, and bring work to a halt in an economically disastrous way).

To return to the example of law, with Roman law and constitutional law we have a top-down model of jurisprudence; with common law we have a bottom-up model of jurisprudence. To this day, England has no constitution, so its legal system is primarily bottom-up, but the tradition of monarchy, and the borrowings from Roman law inject some top-down concerns. The US began with a constitution (if one doesn’t count the Articles of Confederation) so its legal structure is primarily top-down, but the tradition of popular sovereignty injects some bottom-up concerns. This is what we see in most societies: a primary model that is supplemented by subsequent revisions. Nick expects we will see the same in the future, with off world settlements starting out as top-down entities that are later supplemented by bottom-up concerns.

Once there is a critical mass of a human population off planet (and we don’t know what this critical mass will be), then there will be the possibility of alternative forms of social organization coming into their own. Given the incentive by companies to move more people off world in order to assure an ample labor supply, the very action taken to retain top-down control could lead to passing the critical mass after which top-down control will become impossible.

This discussion was a lot of fun, but I realized that we hadn’t actually addressed either Jim Schwartz’s morality questions in the above-referenced presentation at the TVIW symposium, or the question about whether or not to “colonize” space that was raised in Futures.

The question of the morality of committing future generations to lives aboard generation ships or other extraterrestrial settlement from which they have little or no possibility of leaving is one worth examining on its own.  As to whether humanity “should” “colonize” space, that’s just academics virtue signaling to each other.  If and when it will make sense economically and technologically, it will happen, and all the whining in the world won’t make a bit of difference.

Nick commented that anything that we do in the present to set up a world for the future commits future generations to living in that world without their consent. This is true if we put them on generation ships, and it is true if we confine them to Earth. An argument could be made (though he would not maintain that this is a definitive argument) that we have a moral obligation to follow out all the possibilities of the first “pulse” of industrial civilization, as we may not get a second chance. If we don’t open the door to the universe to our descendants, they may not be confined to Earth, which may be seen as a greater error than being confined to a generation ship.

Nick’s greatest concern for existential risk is what he has come to call “sustainable dystopia” (https://geopolicraticus.tumblr.com/post/182270083427/sustainable-dystopia-a-form-of-permanent) in which we ensure that things can go on indefinitely, but there is no possibility of broadening horizons or any hope for the future other than more of the same.

As to the future generation question, I’m drawn to pioneer movements of all types in the past.  When poor people took passage from Europe to the New World in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, they knew it was virtually impossible for them to ever return, or for their progeny to go back should they want to.  The lure of freedom and economic betterment convinced them to make the voyage, in the belief that whatever the consequences for them and their offspring, their lives would still be better than if they’d stayed in Europe.

Nick said that if memory serves, Edward Glaeser in his book The Triumph of the City characterized moving to a city as making an investment in discomfort in order for the children of those experiencing the discomfort to have better lives. This was true for pioneers in the 19th century, it is true for people moving from city to country in the 21st century, and it will be true for people moving into space in the coming century.

This moral question isn’t one of absolutes, but of probabilities.  If the lives of future generations must be taken into consideration when making such decisions, the only reasonable way to phrase the question is, “Will doing this make my progeny better off than if I don’t do it?”  If the question is phrased, “Do I have the moral right to compel future generations to live with the consequences of my actions?” and the answer is “No,” then there is no moral justification for any action, ever.  If the answer is “Yes,” then any action is justified.

As I mentioned a while ago in a comment to an earlier post by Sarah, Professor Randy E. Barnett of Georgetown University wrote an 80-page section on “Constitutional Legitimacy” in his 2004 book, “Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty.”  In it, he examines the concept of “consent of the governed,” and whether and why the Constitution is binding on us who were born to citizenship in the US.  Naturalized citizens have in fact consented to be governed by the Constitution, but natural-born US citizens have in general not affirmatively consented to be governed by the Constitution.  I mention this all just to let you know about it; there’s no way I can summarize 80 pages of closely reasoned legal philosophy here.  Just be aware that such questions are not being ignored, and that they are somewhat analogous to the question of the moral responsibilities to future worldship generations.

I hope this intrigued you, and would love to hear your responses to it.

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

FROM BLAKE SMITH:  A Capital Whip: A Pride and Prejudice Sequel

An invalid for much of her life, Miss Anne de Bourgh has precisely one accomplishment: carriage driving. She is proud of her skill with reins and whip, and justifiably so.

But when another young lady moves into the neighborhood, and challenges Anne’s place as the most accomplished driver in Hunsford, Anne must prove to herself, to her beloved horses, and to her family that she is worthy of the name de Bourgh, and she does not shrink away from a challenge.

FROM ALMA BOYKIN:  Clearly Familiar: Familiar Tales Book Five.

Wandering wolverines, catfish in the sky, owls that can’t fly straight… Welcome back to the Familiar world, where magic and the mundane coexist (and collide).

These short stories introduce some new characters and revisit familiar (and Familiar) ones, including Morgana and Smiley Lorraine, Dr. William Lewis and Blackwell, and Shoshana Langtree. Sorcerers gone mad, heavy weather, and the thin line between insanity and magic, all standard fare in this Familiar place and time.

CEDAR SANDERSON:  Possum Creek Massacre (Witchward Book 2).

Renowned for her witch hunting skills, Detective Amaya Lombard knew that being summoned from the coastal rainforest of Oregon to the backwoods hollers of Kentucky meant the case was something special. From the moment she arrived at the magic soaked scene in an abandoned farmhouse she knew how bad it was going to be. She had no idea just how complicated it was going to get, professionally and personally. Now she must catch a killer before they catch her. The roots of evil plunge deeply into the past, and the blood soaked history of Kentucky’s witch warded houses and barns may hold the key to keeping her alive in the present.

FROM J. M. ANJEWIERDEN: Armored Heart

May returned home from the Second Augment War having left parts of herself behind, emotionally and literally. An inventor at heart, she built herself cybernetic legs to regain her mobility, and then a suit of powered armor to regain a purpose in her life as the superhero Escuda.
But can she balance being a superhero with a love life?
The country’s most celebrated superhero, Steel Patriot, has moved to her town. Sure, Escuda will be able to work with him easily enough, but can May get his attention, while also dealing with a new breed of supervillain on the rise?

FROM CHRIS CHANCY: Tell No Tales.

Some nights it just doesn’t pay to rise from the grave….Corbin wants to uncover the truth behind her death at a demon’s hands. But her memories have been shattered by the grave, and even with footloose Sighted mechanic Devon Fortunato helping her search for answers, a restless ghost is up against the darkest spells and lies of the living. If they can’t unravel who sabotaged the Cunning Folk circle’s spellcast defenses, the child Corbin meant to protect will suffer a fate worse than death. Corbin’s notes hold clues, but the broken circle would rather die than admit the truth….

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: time

(And yes, with illustration, because FB takes last illu and I don’t like giving some promo advantage for no reason.)

I woke up this morning to no clothes for lack of laundry…
So, this post is being typed by a woman in a voluminous robe.
House needs cleaning and short stories are late as heck.

So discuss California doing the Tilt Boogie. Between that and weird reports from yellowstone, are we going to catch the big one, actually?  Or is Denver just going to become beach front property?

Anyway, have fun. All the posts in mind are too complex to do RIGHT NOW.

I’ll be back.

A Place to Start By Amanda S. Green

Yesterday, we celebrated the 243^rd anniversary of our nation’s independence. The road here hasn’t been easy and there are a number of people, including a number of politicians, who would dearly love to see this be the last anniversary we celebrate.

Too many want to erase our past because it isn’t “convenient” or “comfortable” by today’s standards. Works of art are being painted over in major cities because they might make someone feel uncomfortable. The names of authors and literary innovators are being stripped from awards because they acted within the norms of their day, norms that are no longer “accepted” today.

This attempt to erase history doesn’t cure the so-called problems of the day. All it does is bury it and prevent us from learning from past mistakes. Instead of burying our heads in the sand, we should be taking a hard look at what happened and why and find the best way to prevent it from happening again.

It means standing up to the loud voices of the vocal few who demand the sanitization of our history and looking long and hard at their motivation. It means often putting ourselves out and taking stances that might not make us any friends in the other camp but that will spark those who have yet to make up their minds to think about the issues and the facts behind them. This is something Professor Thomas Sowell does very well, and we would all be better off if we’d follow his example.

But how do we do this? That’s the million-dollar question and one I’m still looking for the “right” answer to.

What I do know is this, we have to take that first step. We have to read him and others who share his world view. The problem is it is easy to be scared away from many of Professor Sowell’s writings if you aren’t already familiar with his work. After all he writes about—gasp—economics. If you’re like me, your eyes glaze over and you get terrible flashbacks to bad college Econ classes at the very thought of reading anything dealing with economic theory.

Honestly, that was one of the reasons I didn’t start reading him sooner. Then I lucked into reading some of his newspaper columns. I’d missed them because they weren’t hitting the press down here, at least not the newspaper my family took. Once I found his articles, I started searching for more of his work to read. That lead me to his books and, well, the rest is history.

I guess this is all a way of saying I have a starting point for you if you’re a little intimidated at the thought of starting off with one of Sowell’s other books. That starting point is a collection appropriately titled “Controversial Essays”.

This collection lets you pick and choose what topics you’re interested in. Professor Sowell covers everything from economic to racial to education to social issues and everything in between. Also, these are shorter essays than you will find in many of his other books, making for quicker reads. And that is what makes this an excellent starting point if you haven’t yet begun reading Professor Sowell.

So I will start with the end of the book, entitled “Random Thoughts”, to point out not only how astute Professor Sowell is but how keen his sense of humor happens to be.

The first big Washington scandal of the 20th century was the Teapot Dome scandal of 1921, which led three members of the Harding administration to commit suicide. Today, they would just consult their lawyers and spinmeisters, and then start making the rounds of the talk shows in order to confuse the issues. (CE, p. 301)

Ain’t it the truth?

Take HRC’s e-mail scandal. Before instant media coverage and spin—please, take media spin and preferably bury it far, far away—there is little doubt Clinton would have resigned and left the public eye. Instead, with media backing (not to mention the support of the DNC), she ran for president. She came too close to comfort to being the person sitting in the Oval Office.

Politicians use scandal as a springboard for their future plans instead of actually taking responsibility for their actions and withdrawing. While I don’t advocate that they kill themselves, think about how much better our political scene would be without these SOBs and the media spin that keeps trying to “rehabilitate” them.

In a democracy, why should one group of citizens carry more weight than a similar number of other citizens, just because they are willing to take to the streets and block traffic? (CE, pp 301-302)

When I read this quote, I thought about some of the BLM protests that shut down major roadways, putting who knows how many people in danger because they couldn’t get to medical help, etc. I thought of some of the Antifa protests as well. Why do certain local governments allow them to get away with behavior that is against local and possibly state law and yet crack down on their more conservative counterparts? Why does the media allow this inequity to go unchallenged? (I know the answer but these are questions we need to be asking just as loudly as the other side screams it is their right to act this way.)

It is bad enough that so many of our public schools offer nothing to challenge smart students. What adds insult to injury is that, when these students become bored and restless, this boredom is given the fancy name “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” and the students are drugged with Ritalin. (CE, pg 302)

This hits one of my hot buttons. I know, I know, I have more than my fair share of hot buttons, but education is right at the top. I was one of those smart kids. In those classes where I got bored because the district would rather dumb down the curriculum than give teachers the ability to adapt to meet each student’s needs, my grades went down. I got in trouble in some because—duh—bored and acting out. Why? Not all those teachers would let me read when I finished the assignment. I had to sit there and “act like a lady”. SNORT!

Fortunately, this was before the knee-jerk reaction of educators and counselors was to label a kid ADD or ADHD. We got detention or more work assigned to us. Our parents were called in for meetings with the teacher. But at least we weren’t drugged.

Unfortunately, the desire to move standards to the lowest common denominator continued and that is when the labeling and medicating began. Our public school system has fallen when it comes to quality, mainly because the state and federal governments have pushed themselves further and further into what should be a local issue. We’re not talking funding, we’re talking test result requirements, someone in Austin telling a district in El Paso or Blue Mound how to teach students they’ve never seen. If it doesn’t look good on paper, it must not work. That is the attitude these pencil pushers have and it has ruined more than one generation of students as a result.

Because of the neglect of history in our educational system, most people have no idea how many of the great American fortunes were created by people who were born and raised in worse poverty than the average welfare-recipient today. (CE, pg 302)

Not only duh, but DUH!!!

Of course, if we actually taught this, it might undermine the welfare state we’ve been moving toward for most of the last century. The liberals don’t want that and the media, the liberal mouthpiece all too often, obviously doesn’t want it either. We, as conservatives and libertarians, have been silent too long on this issue.’

Sure, we’ve taken steps to protect our own kids from this form of brainwashing. We’ve either homeschooled or we’ve supplemented their education with materials to counter the propaganda they get in school. But that doesn’t help those who aren’t in a position to get the same benefits as our kids. Instead of simply withdrawing from a system that is broken, we need to find ways to fix it. It means getting involved with our local school districts, with finding out about state school boards/boards of education/whatever and it means letting our voices be heard.

The other day someone—and I’m looking at Sarah because I think it was her—made a comment that these loud voices we keep hearing belong to a relatively small number of people. It reminded me of the “silent majority” speech from my childhood. Or to put it another way, it is time for us to stand up and let our voices be heard.

More than that, it is time to stand and demand we be heard. We are not just old white men. We are people of color. We are female and male, gay and straight and everything in between. We simply happen to not believe in the propaganda that everything from the past is evil and we have to erase or rewrite history so it conforms to today’s so-called standards.

Ask yourself who sets these standards. Now ask yourself why we stand by and let them do so unchallenged. Then remind yourself that it isn’t really unchallenged. 2016 showed that. A large group of our fellow Americans stood up and let their voices be heard at the polls. The liberals are still trying to erase that election because it didn’t go the way they wanted it to.

Are they pushing us toward a second American civil war? The answer is yes. What is uncertain is how far things will go. Will it turn into a shooting war or will it be one determined at the polls and in the courts? Time alone will tell for certain. In some ways, I feel they won’t be happy until shots ring out. But then I look back a few decades and see that as bad as things are right now, it is nothing like what we saw in the 60s in parts of this nation. It certainly has nothing on what parts of the country saw in the 20s and 30s. The difference is the media and social media.

So we act now. We act by reading authors like Sowell. We spread their work as far and wide as we can. We learn from them, not only when it comes to facts and theory but in how to present them. But most of all, we speak out. We let our voices be heard. We show up at the polls, not just to vote but to be watchdogs. We use social media and conservative media outlets to shed light on the tricks and antics of the other side. We use boycotts of program sponsors the same way liberals do and let’s start with Nike (okay, that’s my pet bitch right now. I’m tired of seeing them giving in to Kaepernick and giving him more and more credibility).

Next week, I’ll be off the meds from my surgery and better able to give Professor Sowell’s work the attention it deserves. I’ll spend a couple of weeks discussing his “Controversial Essays”. After a brief interlude for something a lot less palatable (and there’s a lot to choose from), I’ll return to Sowell’s latest book.

Until later!

 

We are not done.

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

Sure, our left has gone rabid-insane to the point that they actually declare themselves “democratic socialists” (What kind of an idea is that. You vote for people who’ll expropriate more than half the country. Sure thing. And then what? Can you vote them out? No? Then it’s just socialism-socialism. Same old tripe with new stuffing.)

Our left has gone so insane that to bring about their imagined utopia they have decided to bypass the constitution with tricks to achieve “popular vote” thereby erasing the nature of our country as a constitutional republic, our interests as semi-autonomous states, and rule us from NYC and LA, with a franchise in Chicago.  Because yeah, even more than fraud-by-mail popular vote is an invitation to fraud. Our voting has never been clean. Ever. And with “popular” vote you don’t need to be able to cheat everywhere.  Just two or three foci of infection, voting 500% of the population (even Boulder is not that blatant but I’m sure some places in CA or the North East can and will be) and you’ve got the president you want.

And the presidents they want.  Just reading excerpts of Kamala Harris’ book gives me the creepy feeling you get when touching something unclean.  Her career of ignoring laws and running roughshod over everyone not in position to either bribe her or scare confirms it too. And look at AOC, primary among the young hopefuls for another presidential race in the future.  Occasional Cortex is not only dumb as rocks, the three brain cells she possesses she uses to fabricate bullshit about illegals having to drink from toilets. (And yet, somehow, not agreeing to just leave and go back where they came from. I guess these economic “refugees” were doing worse than drinking from toilets at home?)

Yes, it’s got far more fraught. People we used to be able to talk to are now unreachable behind the wall of indoctrination and just repeat mantras about “Children in cages” (Hello, Obama) or whatever. And anti-but really-fa is gamboling in the streets. They want to silence us and cut off our access to social media.  Lizard being Zuckerberg wants to make sure the results of the election are “correct” this time.

And this is just at home.  I don’t like the crackling noises coming off China. And whatever Russia is up to, you know it’s never good. They’re like the Vizir Iznogoud, who wants to be Caliph instead of the Caliph. They think ruling the world is their national destiny, when in fact being Iznogoud is their national destiny and their convoluted plots and strange machinations would be amusing if they weren’t dangerous for everyone, including them. Because they are, of all Europeans, worst at accessing countries-not-them and can’t figure out how we’d act or react.  Obviously. But they still cause trouble. And Europe is always and ever curiously vulnerable to them.

Look, I’m not saying it will be easy — I’ve never said it would be easy — and I’m not saying there won’t be clashes.

I’m saying the horrific point to which we’ve come is a good thing. It’s a good thing because it’s a sign they no longer have a death (and it was a death) lock on the industrial-communications complex, to include entertainment, art, and news.  This creation of the age of mass manufacturing, mass communications, was taken over by the left almost from the beginning, and the unified truth it proclaimed was moving us steadily left, at such a clip the next step was 1984-land.

New tech came just in time to unseat them. And it’s shaking them to the core, and pushing them to take off the mask far too early, and run around being crazy in public.  It’s horrifying to see what lurked behind sedate personas. But it’s good. Now we know.

Even education, their ace in the hole, is slipping through their fingers.  Oh, you might not notice much, yet. I did only because my kids ended up in “elite” gifted programs, i.e. the ones where the indoctrination was more intense (yes, they learned more of other things too) because this is where the new generation of “thought leaders” was being created.

Now, I’m the sort of mom who doesn’t volunteer, but did take the kids out for food, or brought them home for food after school.  Between older son and younger son, a difference of three years, things changed.  First, most of the kids in 11th and 12th grade in these programs were homeschooled. 11th grade was first time they were in public school.  And second, most of them treated the indoctrination like chewing gum. They chewed, but did not swallow.

There are other forms of information available, and the smart ones are finding them. They’re also discovering that the “system” they should be rebelling against is not some imaginary 50s conformity but the people who enforce speech and what they can and can’t do.

Now put yourself on the other side. 20 years ago they had it all, and all their readings (remember they drink the ink of their own cooked statistics and polls) showed things going their way.  Now, because they refuse to believe (perhaps can’t. Human cognition is amazing) that minorities, the young, and other “classes” created by their thought system aren’t “naturally” on their side, the world has stopped making sense.

They seem to be running with “it’s a nefarious plot, and they really want socialism.” But they realize to get it they need fraud. Fake-but-real votes? Which– Well… Perhaps they too are Iznogoud.

Which brings us to socialism.  Believe it or not, socialism and its big bad cousin, communism (there’s less difference between the two than the left admits. It’s a continuum.  Yeah, I know, “but in communism the state owns the means of production.”  Cute, but since in socialism the state controls it with regulations, six of one, half a dozen of the other. Same hammer and sickle sh*t in the end.)

Believe it or not once upon a time these were not only hot new “scientific” (despite the fact Marx never got closer to science than the fungus culture between his unwashed ears) systems.

It was self-obvious to the culture of mass production that centralized planning would work better, keep people fed and happier better, and increase innovation.

The fall of the Soviet Union put paid to that illusion (because despite the cracks and leaks, people still tried to believe in it) and send the left careening towards something that looks uncommonly like international fascism.  You know, the government controls everything with regulations, and tries to control your mind and thoughts, but we’re all one nation…

That lasted until it became obvious one-nation won’t work. This is in the process of proving itself in Europe, and if they actually HAD any young people (okay, they have some, but the proportion is dismal) it would already be playing out in fire and blood.  It might yet. My generation seems to still have life in it, and the understanding they made a horrible mistake and sold their children’s minds for a pot of message — and never had grandchildren — is starting to work on them like a hammer on an anvil. My guess is there’s still enough life left in them for fire and blood.

But it is bleak. It is very bleak. Because nations in Europe are nations of soil and blood, the convulsion to come will leave them maybe barely enough to rebuild. Also their mentality is different, it always was. They’re King’s Men. They give their loyalty and service to the leader, who then looks after them. This is dangerous, if you don’t find the right leader, and they’re having a heck of a time with that.

Here? This is not even the end of the beginning.  Yes, we’re being invaded. Yes, our idiots are trying to make love of our nation into “white supremacy” as though America were ever solely a white nation (depending on how you counted “white” which varied through the centuries, we might never have been majority white.) They’re trying to destroy our constitution, in one last, bizarre spasm of socialist fervor.

And?

We always had people in our midst that wanted to be European. And they ran usually 20 years behind the times.

The fact that they’re so open, so loud, so desperate, so fraudy means it’s the last spasms of a very bad system that would stomp on the human face forever.

Note I didn’t say it would be easy. I never said it would be easy.

But the system created here, in Foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadephia in 1776 has created the freest and most prosperous nation in the history of humanity.

What you’re witnessing in our own corridors of power (ah!) is just a late hit rebellion against the system itself. These are people who would be leaders, receiving your fealty and service and extending you their “gracious” condescension.

Well, we do know how to deal with those, by George!  We’ve done it before.

And we still have children, though the Obama Recession put a hit through our birth rate.  And some of them can even think.  Besides, our system is such we can always take other children, even those of the invaders, and make them ours.  We just need to stop cringing and mumbling about micro-aggressions, square our shoulders and believe in our nation, its founding principles and its ideals.

Sure, we’ve fallen short. What human endeavor hasn’t? But look at what we’ve achieved so far, and how much it scares the purveyors of oppression.  They’re raving insane, out of their funny-hatted heads, acting like the lunatics they always were.  And now we can see it.

Let Europe deal with itself. As for us, we’re going to get over this — perhaps with some set backs, sure, but we’ll fight.  We’re a fighting nation — and clean out the socialist infection from our body politic, our laws and our minds.

And then we’re going to the stars. Because that’s where we belong. It’s right there, in our flag.

Our flag is still there. It will continue to wave through the perilous night, even when all that illuminates it is enemy fire.

Be not afraid.

 

 

As you guys know, my minder says that to avoid con-crud, I must take two days more or less off, and the high holy holiday (the 4th) completely off.

I’ll do a promo post later, but for now…

On our plane out there was a medical emergency (which freaked me, because I thought it was a MECHANICAL emergency) and they announced “Is there a medical professional on the plane?” Only I understood “is there a mechanical professional on the plane?”

Once I figured out I wasn’t going to die right then, or perhaps live through younger son having to patch up the plane in flight, other thoughts occurred.

I confess I still haven’t come up with an explanation to the following announcement: “Is there a published novelist on board?”  I mean, what emergency COULD require that.

Some are self obvious, like say “Is there a vampire hunter on board?”

Or “is there a plumber on board?”

Write no more than 200 words in the opening for a story that starts with a really unusual “is there an x on board?” announcement, and explains why (while setting up the novel or story hook.)

Go!

Even if husband has told me I’m not writing for the next three days, and I’m not even going to complain.  2 cons in 2 weeks is REALLY tiring, particularly when the first was a teaching con.  Teaching is fun but takes it out of you.

So for the next two days I’m going to hang out, sleep and imitate the vegetable kingdom.

Some random thoughts:

I didn’t get to see Emily Nelson — not that I remember at least (most of the con is a blur) — which makes it one year out of 7 I’ve actually seen her.  Worse, when Steve said hi, I was plotting with Jeff Greason (you’d only LIKE to know why) so I couldn’t talk.

Next year at Liberty con!

Other passing thoughts: two cons, two weekends? Too much. I got there pre-exhausted.

More serious thoughts: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE if you’re talking to amuse yourself on an airplane, no matter how much your seat mate likes it, try to keep your voice down. Seriously. And you might think you know a lot about some subject, but if there is some controversy, still keep your voice down.

Being stuck in front of a gal for almost four hours, who wouldn’t STOP and lectured CONTINUOUSLY on history (she knew nothing about) and the theology of MY religion (Which she knew a lot of things about that just weren’t so. As in, yeah, she’s one of us, but one of those who read from the little red book, not the 2k yo one. I could only imagine her holding forth on either Portugal or SF/F as a more annoying thing) is something very akin to torture, particularly if this person is PROJECTING her voice.  The idiot seat companion who encouraged her (judging from after-landing conversation) couldn’t be heard as long as he was sitting.  (I mean I could hear him rumble, but… who cares if you can’t hear the words.) She OTOH.

It interfered with my attempts at reading. Wouldn’t allow me to sleep. And she wouldn’t ZIP IT.

My annoyance went from a great desire to turn back and tell her “Lady, if you want to hold forth professorially on your ill-formed opinions, get a blog like the rest of us, and then people can ignore you.”  to a desire to turn back and stuff my entire jacket in her mouth. And if the flight had gone on another thirty minutes, it would TOTALLY have happened. I’d be in jail now, but I’d never be convicted by a jury of the tired, jet lagged and annoyed. It might have turned into Murder on the Airplane Express.

And then we had to wait to debark, and the guy who’d been sitting next to her started extolling her intelligence while she patted herself on the back for reviving the “forgotten art of conversations on planes.” The sheer lack of self-awareness.  Don’t be that gal. Or guy. Or small furry animal.

My cats… my cats have been trying to figure out how to surgically attach themselves to me.

Greebo continue scolding me in my sleep and — I THINK — his, as he mutter-mutter-muttered all night long.

As soon as I have a firm writing schedule, I shall talk to him about it, and give him Martin Shoemaker’s bribe-tuna.  So he can concentrate on keeping me on schedule.

And now I’m going to go er… not-write.  Looks over shoulder.  Someone tell my husband I’m definitely NOT writing.

 

 

Sorry, I didn’t post yesterday or Saturday. Turns out this Guest of Honoring is hard work.  I kept seeing things my friends were doing, on Facebook, and going “Seems like a great con, wish I were there.”

But it was good. It was very good. As always my friends at Liberty con were very nice and very sweet, and I had a great time.

I’m three quarters asleep as I write this, and there might or might not be con crud in the offing, but I’ll be home by late afternoon (anyone want to join us for dinner at Pete’s?  No, that’s not serious. We probably won’t be awake enough for it, and anyway, who wants to have dinner with a zombie author?)

Oh, there is a Portuguese Restaurant, in Chattanooga, and because they chose the name Bela Lisboa (the city that is the rival and enemy of the one I was born in) it pains me to say that they’re quite good. They have a few dishes that I make differently, but you know… If you’re in the area, give it a try. (They are slow on the service if you show up with a contingent of your closest friends,which we did yesterday dinner  (I think there were 32 of us.)

I probably won’t resume my duties at instapundit tonight, but I should be back on tomorrow.  I should also be able to do a real post tomorrow, but if not I’ll put up the writing challenge and something fun.

And now it’s time to close the bags, hug whoever is still in the lobby goodbye, and head home.

Except for TVIW (which is not exactly a con) I’m done with conventions for the year.