Category: Uncategorized

*Normally I don’t like to do more than one guest post in a row — as you know — but I’m running this series for several reasons.  Some of them are mundane.  I’m on the final push at refinishing the library system, and frankly ready to be done with it.  Also so tired, I fall asleep when I sit down.  My house hasn’t been cleaned in a month and looks like a construction zone (I’m cleaning today) and we have practice grandchildren visiting tonight.  But more importantly, now Bill is done with the editorial part of his articles, and does a deep dive into what I call “the data of the horde.”  I think someone should do that and it should be out in the public, before the inevitable confrontation at the border and the hasty attempts at out-pallywooding Pallywood by our media.  And so, I’m running this and another tomorrow.  After that I’ll be back. – SAH*

Examining the Migrant Horde- Pt 1—Planes, Trains or Automobiles? by Bill Reader

There’s a lot of discussion going on about the logistics of the migrant horde on its way up from Latin America. There are tons of unanswered questions about this group, and hopefully by the end of this series of articles I can at least begin to provide some answers. This is not intended as a be-all, end-all set of articles. This is intended as a good starting point. It is my fervent hope that this inspires continuing efforts by diligent journalists on the ground.

There are several things that are worth discussing with this group. First, how are they traveling? Is it really all by foot?

Second, what kind of logistical support do they have? How are they organized, and who by? Are they funded externally, and if so, by what organizations? Recall that feeding this many people is a non-trivial task.

Third, how big is the group, and who is it composed of? We’re hearing a lot of competing stories on this subject. For the people purporting to know, one way or another, how do they know? What is their intent—are they trying to immigrate, are they refugees, or what?

In this series of articles, I hope to examine all these questions.

Let’s start with how they’re traveling. While it’s undeniable that the group is spending some period of time walking, an examination of their travel itinerary reveals that almost by definition, they haven’t been walking all the time. And now that some major news sources are actually reporting the speed the caravan is supposed to be going, incidentally, things are only getting more implausible.

Some people in the NYT are dumb enough to write the following in the Article “Debunking 5 Viral Images of the Migrant Caravan”—”Claim: Caravan members are boarding buses and trains instead of walking” which they follow with “Verdict: Mislabeled/unproven”. Technically speaking, that is true for the specific images they chose. These images are mislabeled. Note that they rather specifically dodge around the question of whether these people are taking vehicles of any kind. But their definition of the claim is not only not unproven, it is acknowledged in multiple MSM news sources, and further demonstrated in photographs on MSM sources. And lest we forget, buses aren’t the only vehicle people can ride on, as I will also highlight.

I will quote the following articles. Emphasis is mine:

-“Many hitched rides from hundreds of cars, trucks and public transportation.” –Reuters

-“The caravan, fairly compact in recent days, has dispersed a bit, with different bands of people seen walking together in a line, some boarding buses or trying to hitch rides” – CBS

-“A caravan estimated at more than 7,000 Central Americans, on foot and in vehicles, has been making its way north, intending to travel through Mexico to the U.S. border.” – Murcury News

-“Motorists in pickups and other vehicles have been offering the migrants rides, often in overloaded truck beds”— USNews

-“Thousands of Central American migrants are walking, taking buses and wading through rivers”—PBS

Moreover, here is a photoessay published on NBC. I draw your attention to the following images and their associated captions:

-Image 2/36- Shows a woman sleeping on a bus. Caption: “A woman sleeps with her baby as they travel on a bus toward the United States. The migrant caravan moves in groups either on foot or by vehicle.”

-Image 7/36- People on the back of a truck. Caption “Locals drove Hondurans part of the way.”

-Image 8/36- People getting off a truck. Caption: “A Honduran child cries as he gets off a truck during a new leg of the journey.”

-Image 9/36- Hands sticking through a truck’s side. Caption: “Migrants sit in a truck”

-Image 14/36- People getting on a truck. Caption: “Honduran migrants get on a truck to Guatemala City.”

I draw your attention further to this Daily Mail article showing 7 more images of migrants sitting on trucks. And this video from an independent journalist of people getting into the back of a truck.

This isn’t “unverified”, NYT. This is demonstrable fact. Some of the migrants have been riding on busses, and in addition to that, they’re also hitching rides on passing vehicles as noted in multiple articles and photos.

But there’s more to this. “Okay”, you may say, “So they’re spending some time on vehicles. But that doesn’t make that big a difference to the overall speed of the group.” Well, that can’t actually be the case. See, I decided to examine how fast this group has been moving. Now, while I appreciate that this caravan is sizeable, and people are playing fast and loose with when they actually technically arrive and leave at various cities, per the following news sources, enough people were in each given place at each given time to say that the caravan had arrived there. We can even get an estimate of how far ahead the fastest groups were.

Sources for the bona-fides of the dates of arrival are provided, though at this point it’s more or less a matter of record. First things first. The caravan started in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Sources vary slightly on the exact day they set off, with Fox and USA Today saying the 12th, and Daily Mail saying the 13th. By October 23rd, according to USA Today, they were interviewing people passing through Huixtla, Mexico. We also know that the caravan didn’t take the very shortest route per GoogleMaps, because some of the places noted in the NBC photo-essay—Quezaltepeque, Guatamala, and Chiquimula, Guatemala—are on a slightly more southern route. All told the distance traveled in 12 days—and that’s being generous, counting from the 12th, counting the full day of both the 12th and the 23rd as travel days, and ignoring that the caravan seems to have stalled out for almost a full day when it hit the border starting on the 18th— was 471 miles. That’s a pace of nearly 40 miles a day.

For comparison, I decided to research about how fast a trained infantry unit—notable for not carrying 5 year olds—can go in a day. This discussion on Quora puts a foot march at a 12-20 miles a day on the low end for infantry, with some elite units being able to move about 50 miles a day in full combat gear on good roads. This correlates well with a separate discussion here, which states: “The average soldier should be able to walk at a speed of 6.5kph for 20km carrying 32kg (LBE, pack & rifle)…”. 20 km is about 12 miles, and the same source states that “Humans can easily walk over 20 miles per day without tiring, even when carrying moderate loads and without much conditioning.” Remember, that’s half the speed this group is going by even the most conservative estimates. This simple estimate is consistent with the average speed worked out by the Daily Mail. That essentially random, lower-class Latin Americans, including women and children, would march about the double the distance that humans can easily accommodate, and indeed faster than the average trained infantry unit day-over-day, is suspicious as is, and points to the influence of vehicles being significant. However, it’s not absolute proof.

Still, I can point out one leg of the journey in particular which would have been, in all probability, impossible without assistance from vehicles. For this, let’s consider a few of the well documented stops on that road—specifically, the point where the caravan traveled through the closely-approximated cities of Quezaltepeque, Guatemala, and Chiquimula, Guatemala, through Guatemala city, and on to border town of Tecun Uman. There’s good documentation of migrants being in Quezaltepeque on the 16th. It can be found here: “Honduran migrants, part of a caravan trying to reach the U.S., are pictured inside a pick up in Quezaltepeque, Guatemala October 16, 2018.” Also here: “Honduran immigrants travel north near Quezaltepeque, Guatemala, on 16 October.” These appeared to be some of the people at the front. Photos of the most substantial part of the group going through nearby Chiquimula appear on the 17th, per CBS (image 3/56), and here is a different picture of it from NBC (image 13/36). And also at both links, note separate pictures of people departing Guatemala city on the 18th, both on foot, and by vehicle. Meanwhile, on the 18th, the first people had arrived at the Suchiate River in Tecun Uman, according to PBS: ” On Thursday, hundreds had walked to the river’s edge where they sang the national anthems of Honduras and Guatemala,”. Remember that, readers. I’ll come back to that. But spoiler alert, these aren’t exactly poor Ellis Island arrivals looking to become good Americans. And of course, on the 19th, enough had made it to Tecun Uman as noted by the WSJ, as noted by Time, and so on— to push down the fence by force.

From this we can infer a couple of things—the leading edge of the caravan was maybe a day ahead—that is, both between the 16th and the 17th in the nearby towns of Quezaltepeque and Chiquimula (the two are about 19 miles apart), we can find early photos of small groups about a day before the main group came through. The pattern is repeated again with small groups arriving at Tecun Uman on the border on the 18th, and a critical mass capable of knocking down the border fence being present on the 19th.

Second, we have separate photos and independent sources confirming the presence of the meat of the migrant horde in Chiquimala on the 17th, Guatamala City on the 18th, and Tecun Uman on the 19th. The distance from Chiquimala to Tecun Uman, passing through Guatamala, is 255-272 miles (depending on whether you ask GoogleMaps for walking or driving directions), meaning the main part of the group went an astonishing distance of almost 90 miles a day over these 3 days, and again, that’s by the most conservative estimates. That’s much faster than an elite military unit, much faster than any group could conceivably walk for such a sustained period. If they did not eat, sleep, or stop for any reason, and traveled midnight to midnight, that puts their average speed at 3.75 miles per hour. That is traveling at just shy of what our source above refers to as “forced march speed”, 4 mph. And again, that’s assuming they did it for 3 days, continuously, midnight to midnight, which we know for a fact they did not. For one thing, that NBC photoessay above shows them bedding down in a gymnasium on the 17th.

So either A) not only are they spending time traveling by vehicle, but vehicles of one form or another have played a substantial role, not for one or two small groups, but for the meat of party. This would explain how they are cover distances that quickly during this period, because the alternative is that B) this group of people, which is always pictured as walking in videos, is breaking into a run when the camera is off and somehow maintaining that pace for distances and times that would challenge army rangers. It is almost double the speed of an elite military unit. And you are supposed to believe, I reiterate, that they did this repeatedly, day in, and day out.

Here’s the bottom line—these people aren’t walking this whole way. It’s not just tenuous, or unlikely, it’s impossible. Among those parts of the MSM that are honest enough to admit they are using some kind of vehicle, the story is that they’re covering these distances by hitching rides between walking. I can’t prove that or disprove it. There are certainly a lot of images of people on the backs of trucks if you go looking for them. But in no image did I see more than maybe one or two hundred people on the back of vehicles. Did most of the portion of the group that used public transit use it during these time periods? Perhaps. Were buses provided for by other means? I can’t demonstrate that, either. But I can tell you that anyone selling you that these are people simply walking up from Latin America is staking claim that doesn’t conform at all to the evidence.

Update:

When I initially sat down to write this, the story was still in its infancy. Since then, well, things have come on a bit. On the 29th of October AP reported that the organizers of the horde, then passing through Tapanatepec, were demanding ” safe and dignified” transport to Mexico city, which demonstrates remarkable chutzpa considering these people are largely in the country of Mexico illegally.  It was broken by Fox (video at the link, reposted on another site), but widely attributed to Daily Caller for picking up, and is now reported by a plurality of sites, that the “migrant” “caravan” was boarding charter buses in Oaxaca state. Two interesting sidebars there, though. First, I used another, essentially randomly selected site, because my search engine couldn’t show me the footage on Fox’s site. Second, geographic searches in Latin America have, over the course of following this story, proven to be a nightmare. When following this, you have to be clear that the group is Oaxaca state, not Oaxaca city. All that was as of the 30th of October.

On the 1st of November Fox reported they were in Juchitan, which based on the map they provide would be the town GoogleMaps refers to as Juchitan de Zaragoza. November 1st was also a day of up and down news for Americans. On the one hand, it seems to mark the date the organizers unexpectedly shifted for a Northern route towards McAllen, TX, though truthfully this seems to be the route many American commentators have expected for some time, as it’s the shortest. On the other hand, from the discussion you can tell that at least some in the crowd seem to have been planning to go to Tijuana. As we’ll discuss tomorrow, one of the prominent leaders of the caravan is based there. Also, given that California is a lot more likely to put up with this BS than Texas, it’s hard to avoid speculating, once again, that the point of this caravan is not to actually get in, but to use the group as pawns in the interest of influencing the midterms. The trip is about 800 miles if they take that route. The good news is that the caravan coordinators are also saying its attempts to appeal to Mexico for Buses “failed“, as of October 31st. It’s worth remembering—and I’ll talk about this in more detail—that the best information I can find suggests these coordinators may include members of Pueblo de Fronteras, which given the group has its headquarters in Chicago and is funded by multiple left-wing funding agencies according to InfluenceWatch, is absolutely under fair suspicion for attempts to influence the timing. Even the other major group that may have control of the caravan has reasons it might want to. The article at the link notes the following two paragraphs, which I cannot improve on:

” In the first week after the leading caravan got into Mexico, federal police sometimes enforced obscure safety rules, forcing them off paid mini-buses, citing insurance regulations, added the Associated Press. They also stopped some overloaded pickup trucks carrying migrants and forced them to get off.

But in recent days, officials from Mexico’s immigrant protection agency have organized rides for straggling women and children as a humanitarian effort. And police have routinely stood by as migrants piled aboard freight trucks.”

To which I will add only two other comments—while the story given here sounds plausible, isn’t it convenient that the women and children, depending on how far they get rides, could also be the first to arrive at the border, to be confronted by several Army divisions? I’m not alone in thinking this is the long game of this caravan. Sarah and I have talked at some length about this, and if it follows the history of communist organized protests everywhere (stay tuned!), we can expect a pregnant woman to be shot. We’re calling her Maria De La Cruz, at present, as a convenient placeholder name until she presents herself. Note also that this entire demand—ridiculous on the face of it—seems calculated to get rejected (lest we forget, people who just waltzed in after attacking Mexican cops are demanding things of Mexico), in order to obscure three things.

1- As demonstrated above, this group has been getting vehicular assistance or their prior rate of speed would be impossible, and this rejection doesn’t change that,

2- Given that we saw groups boarding buses, and we know that the appeal to Mexico is not what rendered them, that strongly implies that there is funding coming from somewhere, because bus drivers don’t get to just do whatever they like with their buses (And just to foreshadow, for all that Mexico and the coordinators play up rejection? It could still be Mexico.) and

3- unless those buses have also been stopped, this statement deliberately misleads about how the group is currently traveling. If they’re on buses, they could be at the border very easily before the elections. The 800 miles from their present position to McAllen is a relative breeze by bus. But this may also be a play to spread US resources, by sending the women and children North to McAllen to be a political setpiece while the military aged men continue onward.

It’s hard to tell because the way the caravan chooses its next location isn’t straightforward. Tune in tomorrow to find out why I say that. And in case you wonder why I would think such a thing at all, Protocol Magazine noted that when the April caravan halted in Mexico city rather than continuing to the American border, “Leaders cited the reason for this as concerns for the high numbers of children within the group, as the next stage would involve dangerous travel by freight train”. Which, indeed, pictures at the links in the update show some groups are already doing. Which begs the question, how do they intend to proceed this time?

 

 

 

I’ve discussed already the liberal perspective on the immigrant horde. Now I’d like to talk about the other side of the equation, and help crystallize my own thoughts—and argue from at least one school of conservative thought—as to the flaws with the migrant horde, the philosophical and practical rationale for keeping them out, and the conservative perspective on immigration in general.

The Left plays up that these people come from desperate conditions, as it does in all scenarios like this. As I mentioned in my prior article, the Left tends to blame the United States first for these impoverished conditions and it does so in part because they’ve got end-stage Marxism. As I noted there, the United States is not responsible for the floundering of countries with a long history of socialism and the typically dysfunctional Latin American culture, which runs heavily to corruption of officialdom at every level and serial revolutions in virtually all places where it’s predominant. [Roman culture really.  Darn those Roman colonialists.  We took their form of Republic, but not their culture, which is why we do well enough. The Latin countries… sigh.- SAH]

More broadly, it helps to actually understand what we ask of our immigrants and why we ask it. And in order to examine that question, I’d like to start with something that should be very familiar to all naturalized immigrants—the Oath of Allegiance. What we ask of our immigrants is not only fairly clear, it’s repeated month after month, year after year, every year, by new Americans.

In the most general sense, immigration is how Americans who were born abroad come home. It is Not, with a capital “N”, how foreign nationals, still loyal to their home countries, acquire the nominal moniker of “American”. There is a reason that it is the very first thing every naturalized American must swear. “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen;”. And this isn’t a symbolic gesture. In fact, it is doubly important that we mean it when we make people say it. The US gives its people unique leeway to redefine what the country is—which we will discuss in a moment—and thereby exists only by the grace of a kind of consensus philosophy. To accept the reward, and burden, of being American, is to explicitly turn your back on divided loyalties, and rededicate yourself to the maintenance and furtherance of that single philosophy and its subordinate guiding principles, to the exclusion of all others. Because we are not a nation of place, of race, of faith or of fealty. We are an idea made manifest, and ideas, while hard to kill, are fragile to maintain. Those principles and that philosophy need not be wondered at. They are explicitly notated in the constitution in the least ambiguous way the people writing knew how (they must have done an okay job, it took statists about 200 years to really pick the semantics apart and start interpreting things never intended in its text). And this is exactly why the Oath of citizenship goes on to say “That I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same”.

Having noted that, I will digress for a moment to take apart a particular Leftist trope, as it is cogent. People properly acquainted with the history of the country’s founding will recognize that the US is not in fact, a “nation of immigrants”, or at least not as the term is understood on the Left. The US is a nation of well circumscribed and elaborated foundational principles, outlined in the constitution and meant to be embodied in its citizenry. By corollary, a person who subscribes to, and is willing to uphold those principles, may be admitted as a citizen at our discretion—and the fact that they are an immigrant is not counted against them if they do so. Put another way, we are a nation that is willing to take those from all around the world who understand and believe in our core philosophy, and promise to commit everything to becoming one of us. We are therefore only “a nation of immigrants” in an incidental sense, because nation of origin matters less than caring about American principles—but we have no philosophical obligation nor reason to simply take immigrants because they are immigrants. That’s a self-defeating idea on the face of it. To argue that being from another nation is a reason in and of itself for admitting a person and making them a citizen, not only implicitly contradicts the first line of the citizenship oath, but is effectively simply an argument against borders of any kind—a far stupider idea that I’ve already separately taken to task in the past. Indeed, it’s perhaps even something more radical if taken to its logical conclusion—an argument for forced emulsification of other nationalities with Americans. And yet strangely, once you peel back the risible accusations of racism, and the historically illiterate accusations that we caused the desolation in countries with an extensive history of Marxism, you’re left, essentially, with nothing more than this: that America has had significant contributions from immigrants, ergo immigrants must be an unsullied good in their own right.

Why must our oath be this way? Why do we have such a high bar? Well, as the US uniquely has as its nucleus only a set of ideas, it is uniquely invested in the ideas of its citizens. However, paradoxically, to embody the freedoms it represents and depends on, the US is expressly set up to minimize its ability to influence, change, and enforce the ideas of its citizenry. This includes ideas antithetical to, or even hostile to the US. Indeed, the US government cannot and should not arrogate to itself the ability to enforce a particular belief, even, unfortunately, the ones necessary for the US to survive— like free speech, freedom of association, and the right to bear arms— the last explicitly in case someone less cognizant of why the government must never stoop to enforcement of one viewpoint comes to power (On which point a sidebar is warranted— this is not the same thing as members of government expressing a viewpoint. Presidents are representatives of a party, parties are partisan affairs. Expressing their own beliefs, acting in accordance with them, is normal and expected. Indeed, it’s what we vote for. Trump is well within his rights to call things like he sees them, as often and as partisan as he likes. So was Obama. So was Bush. But when Obama’s IRS started targeting conservatives, that was enforcement of his viewpoint. That was highly unacceptable, and remains one of the worst marks of ignominy on a presidency marred by a long list of them.). This naturally raises the point that the United States is in constant peril from its own permissive philosophy.

There is, therefore, a countervailing force, and one that must be strenuously maintained. As by definition, the US cannot come to her own defense without ceasing to be what she stands for, her people must. The concepts upon which freedom rests are borne on the shoulders of her citizens. To permit the US to continue existing, it needs a vanguard of people who understand the core philosophy at its foundation, the principles on which it is based, and who will defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic—just as it says in the oath. The domestic enemies are more common than people realize, and they are neither mass shooters nor fake bombers. There is no policy decision that will legislate crazy people out of existence (Although on the other hand, Carter starting the de-institutionalization policies that eventually led to the closing of the insane asylums probably did not make the situation better. However, given the tone of the modern Left, it’s just as well that the bar for institutionalizing people against their will is a very high bar, as the Left has gone firmly crazy, insist nonetheless that they’re sane, and some people—I pray not enough to do real damage— are naive enough to take their word for it. Sooner or later the inmates may get the key to the madhouse.). Rather, domestic enemies are properly understood in this frame of reference to be champions of ideas that—if implemented—would result in the collapse of the American experiment. Our defense against these, within the strictures of our laws, is at the debate table and ballot box, but that it is conceived as non-violent does not make it non-important.

Indeed, one of the strengths of American democracy was that it was conceived in a way that allowed us to resist the proclivities of humans to centralize and plan-from-above, which have been destroying societies at least as far back as ancient Greece.

It is also remarkable in how undramatic it was in its conception, admitting the probability that people with some flawed ideas are not flawed in all ideas—that extreme measures to silence a person because of disagreement, even totally valid disagreement over things that are an existential threat to the nation, would throw many babies out with the bathwater and render the country draconian and uncomfortable in the meanwhile.

Ironically, even this idea, the underpinning of a civil society that is truly a civil society, turns out to be one that domestic enemies can ablate with enough ignorance, which is why Google and Facebook have turned to openly flirting with censorship (And, I note parenthetically for those who would “punch a Nazi”—and who strangely do not proceed to black their own eyes— that the non-violent intention behind this well-functioning system is no invitation to your continuing untrammeled in your antics. Nowhere is it required philosophically to continue non-violently in perpetuity even when violence and extra-legal intimidation and actions against our will are visited upon us. Indeed, that was rather the point of the rebellion. We are not a holy sect; we maintain a right to self-defense. I am very proud of conservatives as a whole for their character in the face of flagrant abuse of our system by the Left, most recently embodied by the smearing of Kavanaugh. I remain extremely hopeful that the Right can push back on the Left long enough for the Left to have some marginally sane, non-socialist leaders emerge, and that the Left does not push things to the point where the Right must either submit against their will or fight. It will not go well for anyone.)

The United States must have the right, given the above, to moderate and decide who comes in. This must be the case because people who maintain ideas of statism, centralization, and other concepts that contradict the foundational principles on which the constitution is based, can pose a serious threat, which I’ll elaborate on in a moment. While the US must suffer these people who arise natively, and count on the aggregate wisdom of the voters to maintain American principles despite them, it is by no means required to suffer the same from those seeking to come in. Immigrants are, first and foremost, supplicants, and whether you like it or not, bear the weight of intrinsic suspicion because their first loyalty, almost by definition, was not to the United States. That they were always Americans, born in another place by misfortune, is an extraordinary claim—we ask they provide extraordinary evidence, and that means jumping through our hoops. Incidentally, compared to the rest of the first world—Hell, compared to Mexico, as many have pointed out—the evidence we ask for is not even that extraordinary. These new Americans, we do not hold to the lax standards of people born here. They are starting anew, so we ask that they demonstrate anew their understanding and commitment to the principles that are at our core, as if they were among the founders themselves, rebelling against their own home.

The threat posed by people who do not understand our principles exists because, to best serve its mission, the US government was also conceived with formalized, strictly constrained methods of changing its structure. The point was that it should not blow with the wind, riding every fad that ran through the country. It was meant to be ponderous, difficult to change, requiring massive consensus among the people’s representatives—a point firmly lost on the 111th congress, incidentally, which used what could at best be called a procedural loophole to pass ObamaCare, and at worst simply did so illegally. As they have sown, so far, so they have reaped. We will see what transpires next week.

At all events, the US is permitted to change, with the intent that it do so along lines that better serve the freedom of the individual and the ability to live with a minimum of governmental interference. That is what makes the decision to free slaves a good one, and what makes propositions like “Medicaid for all” such bad ones. This flexibility, in the hands of a populace overly ignorant of the principles they live under, or at the capricious whim of people who worship at the altar of collectivism, becomes vulnerability. And it is vulnerability, as noted above, the US is by no means obligated to bear. We are not here to be misused and abused as a mere resource for any old huddled masses. We are interested only in those that truly yearn to breathe free—with all the responsibilities that entails.

I will note in closing that the last three generations have increasingly made me wonder if it is not time to consider abandoning birthright citizenship for all people in the United States, not just people from foreign soil. Increasingly I notice that it seems as though key knowledge about why America exists, and what it represents, has either been lost or deliberately manipulated to fit a neo-Marxist, class-struggle worldview more neatly. The assumption of the 14th amendment was that American citizens could, in general, be trusted to raise good American citizens—and while probably there have been like-minded curmudgeons like me in all generations, I will note nonetheless— I see little to persuade me that that is actually happening as intended. The Left is already trying to scare their base by saying Trump is contemplating an executive order to end birthright citizenship for all. That, at least, we’re safely assured he won’t do. He said his legal council endorsed the executive order, and that would simply contradict the 14th.

But since they have come to mention it?—well, what a good idea.

*My friend Bill teaches a branch of liberal arts, at a State University, which precludes his talking or even writing or possibly thinking too loudly about his opinions.  This means I’m almost his sole outlet for (usually text) rants.  When I say “a friend and I were talking” Bill is one of the two friends it might be.  Something about the migrant horde has got him the wrong way and he’s done a series of articles for me.  He says it better than I could, so I hope you don’t mind the guest posts- SAH*

Through the Leftist Glass

Bill Reader

            As someone who lives and works in a very liberal environment, I can’t help but hear their view on matters. That includes thing like the Migrant Horde. Sometimes, it’s difficult for me explain to my fellow conservatives why their arguments don’t seem to connect at all to either the Left or Left-of-Center independents. It’s not that the arguments are bad. It’s that there’s a whole other set of premises that even relatively rank-and-file Leftists accept without really thinking, and if you don’t even acknowledge those premises—more specifically, if you don’t bring fire on them—you aren’t going to make any kind of a dent.

Democrats will view this as a pure pejorative, and yet this is, as I hope to demonstrate in some depth, simply a description—the Democratic view of the world is Marxist. It’s not thoroughgoing in the same way that the average Republican does not have an encyclopedic knowledge of the federalist papers (or the anti-federalist papers, which I would argue are also an important part of that puzzle). It’s the sort of relatively superficial understanding of the term that leads Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez to identify as socialists. However, there are certain ideas about how the world is organized that Marxism takes on faith and pigeonholes available data into the framework of instinctively.

Here’s something that I would lay excellent money on—while we’re happy to take the media to task for identifying the Horde as migrants or refugees depending on the convenience of the moment, I strongly doubt that the average person on the Left cares. The Left does not identify the suffering of people in 3rd world Hellholes as the result of the idiot social policies in those locales. Intuitively, that makes sense. They can’t, because from Cuba to Honduras, from Mexico to Europe, the social policies are largely some variation on, and to a greater or lesser extent represent, the desired social policies of the Left itself.

Rather, the Left sees these manifestations of radical Leftism as evidence that these places are run by the “good guys”. They look elsewhere for the source of the troubles that hound these places. And the place where Marxism cuts in, and organizes their world view, is that in doing this, they see the most prominently prosperous and least socialist place happens to be the same place— the United States. The obvious conclusion, in their minds, is that other places are poor, and the United States is not, because the United States stole its wealth from the places that are poor. Apply some window dressing to that fairly rudimentary cognitive bias, cover it to a depth of about twenty feet with out-of-context examples, arguments against a standard of perfection rather than a standard of existing alternatives, and friendly, one-sided peer-reviewing, and you have a whole field of study—cultural imperialism.

And while the Left will complain that calling this Marxist is an overreach, cultural imperialism itself, certainly its explanations for why it impoverishes the third world, indeed require you to accept certain core tenets of Marxism. First, that value is best measured in a combination of raw resources, and work. The organization of work, the direction of work towards specified goals, is either excised from the Marxist perspective or outright villainized. It is exploitation, surplus to requirements. A CEO can do nothing worth millions of dollars, including, for example, the careful, difficult, and successful stewardship of billions of dollars in resources that none of the workers in his or her (But not xir, because that’s idiotic) factories could not do. Rather, management is assumed to be valueless if the actual work to create the product isn’t done by the manager. It’s likewise why Marxists advocate for the constant hampering or obfuscation of free markets, which in turn removes the ability to direct work towards sensical goals and replaces it with work towards government-defined goals. The goals still succeed or fail in relation to how close their outcomes are to the underlying reality but, in their new context, officials have the ability to blame on their opposition failed results more rightly attributed to the social engineer’s own meddling.

Which is a problem, you see, because while places like the United States have considerable natural resources and considerable manpower, what we really provide is ideas. Which is to say, our success hinges on making it as convenient as possible to direct resources towards new and unexplored market exigencies, and to organize resources around filling them. Where the materials and the work come from that help shape these dreams into physical facts are increasingly incidental—they can and do come from everywhere. We may occasionally find ourselves in uncomfortable or uncertain positions. When we finally gave attention to China’s market hijinks— thereby addressing the trade war we were already in in earnest, rather than taking the calming panacea of assurances from what is at the end of the day a geopolitical enemy with a diametrically opposed philosophy— it shifted the economic landscape. The best relative value for work and raw materials may land elsewhere. The ideas are flexible, however.

Marxism can provide no insight into these machinations. To them, what is made rightly belongs to the most proximal people who make it, as do the tools that make the things. These people are meant, under classical Marxism, to rebel against the unnatural order where this does not obtain, to thereafter be organized first by a dispassionate central government, then later by themselves, through unspecified magic involving the government withering away. What this means in practical terms is that people who mostly could not name the major exports of Honduras on a bet, instinctively believe that exploitation by the first world, and more specifically by the US, is what has reduced them to abject poverty. The first world, and the United States, must be taking something from them that is keeping them poor. Whatever key thing they export, we don’t pay enough for it. And never mind that the sale price is a piece of information arrived at by indexing what a person’s competitors are charging and what the buyer will actually pay—which is to say, economically their true complaint is more that the relative value of the bananas, say, to the people buying them, only goes so high. Anyone talking seriously about trying to “fix” this economic “problem” ought also to be prepared to explain to Americans why bananas should cost twenty dollars a bunch. Not than any amount of explication would help, when Americans turned to experimenting with plantains and the effective price of a banana became zero dollars, because nobody would be willing to buy them anymore.

Or else the first world is exploiting the third world, by buying and using cheap labor in the area—ignoring the fact that if the labor were not cheap, then given the inconvenience of having the labor done abroad, the labor would not be practical to have done in the area at all. To the Left, it is generally better to have no economic opportunity, and not be “exploited”, than to have economic opportunity that pays less than, say, an American living in completely different circumstances on a different continent would get. Or I should say, this is true unless Donald Trump is talking about incentivizing hiring the American worker, in which case they complain about us not hiring the foreign worker they would then complain about us exploiting.

And in these examples you will note, thereby, the second underlying Marxist assumption, which is a natural extension of the first. If only work and raw materials constitute the value of a product, then value is absolute. It is detached entirely from what a person is willing to pay for the thing. It is detached from where it is done, occasionally excepting the work and resources required to move it somewhere else and other times not, depending on the regime. It is detached from the regulatory environment that makes it harder or easier to do. It is an inherent property of the thing, and how that original value is established only the good lord knows. [Adam. In Eden. When he named the animals he also fixed price tags to everything-SAH]

I have heard, and I know for a fact that you too have heard, the Left railing against the above two things for exactly these underlying reasons. The first generally comes under the heading of “fair trade”, and the second comes under the heading of “third world sweatshops”. These kitten fits don’t make an ounce of sense economically. Whether a person is apt to explicitly call the workers of the world to unite, or use these disguises, they are invoking the same concept. Namely: value is absolute, the world over. Competition is a lie— if people in the third world are paid less for the same work, it is not a representation of them offering services at a price that competes with what the US offers— the US companies that buy the service are exploiting them. And if you infer from this that applying this rule everywhere would make life unbelievably more expensive, uncomfortable, and difficult, and make items like tropical fruits from far-flung provinces virtually inaccessible, you certainly haven’t been listening to Leftist Millennials, who agree with you— but believe this is necessary to end exploitation. We would indeed be worse off, for our sins. The fact that we would, in all probability, still have all the microchips, the technology, and the commodities, but they would now be much more expensive and available only to the very wealthy is lost on them. That applies to the poor in the third world too, incidentally—those cheap phones that are becoming so ubiquitous that kids in Iraq have them are only available at the cost they are because of the globalized economy. They would likely never even be developed without economies that let people take risks on new technologies like smart-phones—meaning cooling it with the regulations and letting people compete to offer better or cheaper things. But even if they were, they’d be in the hands of el presidente and his posse, not the proletariat. But at least the third world, bless them, would still have all their tropical fruits.

That is one explanation they believe for poverty abroad.  Another, even more implausible, is that it is the fallout of years spent under colonial rule during the discoveries. Someone must have taken everything of value that was there and shipped it out, so that the people there had nothing to work with. In a world of economies run on fiat currencies and now on electronic blockchains, where gold is valuable mostly for circuit boards and jewelry, they continue to attribute modern-day misery to Spaniards digging up and shipping home shiploads of gold hundreds of years ago. Never mind that, in response to the iron laws of economics, all this likely served to do was reduce the relative value of gold in Spain by making it less rare. [Did. One of my history projects was tracing the devaluation of a particular coin as a result of the discoveries- SAH] Or was it years of the colonial boot keeping people on the banana plantations, oppressing them until they could not live an independent existence? Poor Canada, so subjugated under the British boot that when said boot tried to kick them out they remained permanently affixed to it, somehow miraculously dodged a bullet, I suppose, because they were as colonized as anyone. Speaking of gold, someone just remind me where the Yukon is located? And Japan, which didn’t really have much in the way of resources and was nuked besides—and then had military emplacements put in it by the people who nuked them, speaking of colonization—through some inexplicable mechanism, nevertheless became one of the world’s largest economies. The mind boggles. Benefits of a dark pact with the Hentai monsters, perhaps?

Or from yet another angle—we put a thumb on the scales in their elections, don’t we? We uphold one candidate or another, and so on. So really, they’re currently vassal states, and therefore all of the problems they face do not proceed from their social system or from hundreds of years of backwards culture, or modern adoption of idiotic Marxist principles of—well, funnily enough, of the kind increasingly encountered in StarBucks, so perhaps we ought to hold onto our lattes. No, the moment we supported so-and-so over whatsisface—whatever the latter believed, however insane or hostile or socialist—we inherited all the problems of their screwed up system. What we call “minimizing the damage” they call “policing the world”. Never mind that when we have policed local areas of the world, as noted above, it seemed remarkably stabilizing. Given the relative success of Germany and Japan one is tempted to ask if it would help to install some military bases.

It seems comical, and I make light of it. But the truth is, this is the organizing principle of the leftist mind. To them, by one or all of these routes, we have sown the wind. They believe we have, in fact, achieved the enviable position of putting all our proletariat some distance away, and erected a border as a kind of protection. Viewed in that light, the border is not a necessity to prevent the tragedy-of-the-commons dissolution of our way of life, and it’s not a peaceful and unambiguous way to establish mine and thine, but a barrier to justice. That is why the Left does not particularly care whether these people are refugees, or just out and out random South Americans come calling for all the stuff we “stole”. The Left is dandy with the concept of helping them redistribute the wealth. They don’t see themselves as giving other people’s stuff away, they see themselves as moving incrementally towards giving it back. If all of South America started marching North, demanding everything the US has down to the territory, at the root of everything? The Left would regard that as fair, just, and no more than we ultimately deserve for the years of “exploitation” as delineated above.

Hence, you aren’t going to dissuade them even with robust arguments that these people are not refugees. On some level, you excite them. They would be quite happy to get confirmation that these people came with violent intent. You can hear it in the way they phrase things. Note the military imagery CBS paints for its audience when they say the migrant horde “marched on through Mexico like a rag tag army of the poor”, and consider for a moment that their readership is meant not to be hardened by the military framing of people marching towards what is technically said readership’s own border, but heartened by it, sympathetic to it. But even if they were merely refugees, they see us as the ultimate cause of what they are refugees from, so they think it’s our responsibility. And they don’t care about the expense, because they think ultimately in paying the expense we are paying them back. In point of fact, precisely because of the Marxist muddle-headedness they are suffering, they conveniently render themselves unable to process almost any cogent argument.

If you really want to start—or keep— taking this thing back, start going after the Marxist muddle-headedness itself.

 

Halloween Costumes, Not Halloween Skinsuits

By: Madona Lucine

I’ve been aware of the controversial nature of certain Halloween costumes since just such a controversy erupted at Yale three years ago. You remember that, yes? The controversy that began with an email and ended with two members of the Yale faculty resigning during the ensuing media storm? I will confess to a sizeable amount of blissful oblivion regarding Halloween costumes, because until I had kids Halloween wasn’t a holiday on my radar. I didn’t attend costume parties during college, so the controversies surrounding blackface and beer pong orgies without consenting young women wasn’t on my radar, either. Oh, those didn’t occur? Surely they did – we live in a rape culture, after all…

I digress.

I will also profess ignorance of the online “mommy” community to a limited degree. Since I generally eschew overhyped groups of the sort that populate social media, I never bothered to sign up after my first child was born. Given the saturation of “mommy” blogs, however, I can’t completely avoid them, and even find them useful, in a way, when I’m trying to figure out what mothers immersed in our current popular culture are talking about.

To say that I’m disappointed by these mothers’ superficiality is the understatement of the last decade. Hell, it’s an indictment of my generation.

Let’s take, for instance, a post that recently appeared on the corporately-owned Scary Mommy site, called PSA: Don’t Let Your Kids Dress Up In These Costumes. The post’s author, a mom who adopted four children, discusses the reasons why kids of one skin color shouldn’t wear Halloween costumes which represent fictional characters of another skin color. Yes, you read that right.

Since this controversy has now entered its third year, at least by my reckoning, the arguments urging me to avoid cultural appropriation in my children’s choice of Halloween costume haven’t gotten any smarter. Matter of fact, they’re not only rehashes of the original claim, which was stupid and racist to begin with – they are stupider. I’d even go so far as to say that the claimants’ attempts to kill as many of my brain cells as possible with their justifications have collectively approached their peak.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/ in The Atlantic points out that progressive activists of the type that would be most enthusiastic about cultural appropriation tend to be “rich, highly educated, and white.” So too, it seems, is Rachel Garlinghouse, the author of the Scary Mommy post; her four adopted children, ironically, are black. So when she says she’s okay with one of her children dressing in Halloween costumes from “The Black Panther,” I suppose it’s understandable why she’d feel this is appropriate. What’s inappropriate is a “rich, highly educated, and white” mother telling any other mother why adopting traits from another culture is bad.

Let me count the ways why her reasoning is bad. Wakanda, the land inhabited by T’Challa (aka Black Panther) and his people, is a made-up African country. However, Wakanda has all the hallmarks of African culture and magnifies a historical depth that isn’t present in most other superhero films.

… So while my seven-year-old daughter will proudly portray Black Panther this Halloween, I don’t think the white kid sitting next to her in class should. For the same reasons why a child not of Polynesian descent should not dress up as Moana.

Hunh.

I’m scratching my head here. Are you?

She’s okay with her child donning the Black Panther suit because A) her child is black, B) Black Panther is black, therefore C) her black child can don the costume. However, her child’s classmate is white, Black Panther is black, and therefore her child’s white classmate can’t be the Black Panther for Halloween. It’s the misappropriation of another person’s culture…even though she’s using the classmate’s skin color as her justification for why a white child couldn’t possibly be immersed in black culture. Every white-looking rapper out there, especially Eminem, call yo crib.

I don’t know if the concepts of skin color and culture are deliberately confused on Ms. Garlinghouse’s part, although I suspect it’s not done willfully. [They’re confused in schools starting in elementary.  When they asked for an essay on the family’s culture and older son wrote about geeks and scifi cons, he got slapped with how it was supposed to be about where his ancestors came from.  That got a letter from me and… it got ugly before I threatened them with showing the corrections this idiotic teacher was making on my son — by then a professionally published author — ‘s papers. But yeah, the left confuses genes with culture.  Just like the alt-right the ctrl-left is daft that way- SAH] Every social treatise I’ve read over the last three or four years on the subject of cultural appropriation has been put forward by an earnest (white) progressive on behalf of the poor, non-white, uneducated schlubs who’ve never set foot in the Hamptons (see, everybody, I can stereotype with the best of them!). Sure, they’re not steeped in the cultures their parents left behind when they immigrated to this country. Of course they wouldn’t appreciate a fair-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed child dressing as Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia in “The Black Panther” for Halloween. Noooo, a white boy cannot be Maui from Disney’s “Moana,” because only Polynesian demi-gods can have oily, frizzy manes and tattoos covering every inch of skin and screw up everything, which is why some not-a-princess has to save the day.

Of course not. The earnest progressive is nothing if not omniscient and proficiently knowledgeable in the cultural histories and traditions of the post-colonial, non-European peoples they promote in the West these days. [They’re not really knowledgeable of any culture beyond Germany and Scandinavia, and a little of England and Italy at the most stereotypical level.  TRUST me hon, I deal with this a lot – SAH]

Laid it on too thick for you? Then let’s talk about the reality of this ongoing farce.

I wish these progressive types would at least acknowledge that cultures which are not appropriated by society at large eventually cease to exist – as in, no trace of them can be found on the planet. They are not remembered fondly by anyone, because they’re not remembered, period. Your random Amazonian Indian tribe hidden from the modern wonders of the twenty-first century will remain hidden for good reason. Additionally, lamenting the misdeeds of the European colonizers who are still remembered and memorialized by everyone, even the grudging progressive, does nothing to further the non-white cultures whose contributions to society are only known because they were appropriated in the first place. And let’s not even mention that humanity being fruitful and multiplying was the death-knell of the claim that any culture would remain ethnically pure or insulated from the influence of other cultures.

But what does any of this have to do with Halloween costumes? you ask.

If the smallest minority is truly the individual, it’s astonishingly insulting for Ms. Garlinghouse to lecture me or any other parent on the Halloween costumes their children are allowed to wear due to, ahem, “cultural misunderstandings.” I certainly didn’t miss how Garlinghouse’s article was couched to appear as well-meaning recommendations, which is the mommy blogger MO, as far as I can tell. Provide suggestions I never asked for, because you have the platform on which to publicize those suggestions and be paid for it.

On this platform, might I make a suggestion of my own, Ms. Garlinghouse?

Speak for yourself. Your suggestions for the appropriate Halloween attire, in the context of your kids and their skin color and yours and what’s currently popular in American culture, mean nothing to me. Zilch. Nada. Oops, just appropriated a Spanish word there. Bad me.

This Halloween, my kids will be dressing up, respectively, as Disney’s version of Rapunzel and the Queen of Hearts. My children look nothing like either of these characters, although I giggle at the thought of my oldest yelling “Off with her head!” every other sentence. In the day and age where other parents are willing to give their kids space to express their preferred gender pronouns, I consider allowing my kids to dress as whatever they want to be for Halloween, especially if it’s a character of another race or whatever, to be a small thing. An extremely small thing. I have nothing against your kids dressing as the female Black Panther or a Disney princess who isn’t Pocahontas. Nothing whatsoever.

Allow me the same courtesy of not caring about whether or not your children’s Halloween costumes are culturally appropriate to the situation.

And if you can’t do that, remember that I’m not one of the people who decided to turn this molehill into a mountain. I hope and pray you’re prepared to proverbially die on it.

*Sorry, I was trying to get the garage cleared of my ongoing painting project to park cars in during the ongoing snow storm.  Not only did I fail, but I’m really late with this and have a ton other things to do – SAH*

Nobody Knows Not’ing- A Blast From The Past from March 2013

This is not a post about writing.  It is actually a post about epistemological uncertainty.  Put down the dictionary.  Do not throw it at my head.  It’s early, I haven’t had coffee and before I’m fully awake I talk almost exclusively in jaw breaking words.  This is not a brag.  It’s a logical result of my background.  Mothers don’t let your daughters be brought up in Latin languages.

Hold the line a moment.  I’m going to get coffee or this could yet become tedious.  (Become?- Ed.  Shut up wretch – Sarah)

However, what started it was Dave Freer’s post yesterday, comparing a writing career to a muddy river (we always knew there was a load of … er… mud in this profession) and describing the changing scene as the floods of ebooks come down from the mountains.

I commented with what Dan has told me before: right now writing reminds him of computers in the seventies.  Nobody knows anything and anyone who tells you he does is lying.  We’re living on the wild frontier and as yet there’s no data, only anecdote.

No one knows why some books take off on Amazon and some are left behind – Not even Amazon who IS trying to figure it out.

In what is going on in writing, right now, this is understandable.  The field is being hit by catastrophic change, so everything is moving very fast, in all directions.  In October the years before last, I went to Oregon and took a course on how to put up books.  Things have already changed so much, in terms of format, software, covers, as well as pricing, that I’m running to catch up and people whom I told how to do this who are still following my instructions are certainly doing it wrong.

As is, I’m lagging behind on things like getting on Kobo or – for  the relevant stories – All Romance.  I simply have no time, between the traditional career, new writing, doing covers for the back list (was fighting to get the backlist back!) and then getting hit by a series of bugs since… October?  (Actually mid September.) to keep up with the fast pace of changes.  I dip by my writing blogs when I can, but I should be doing it everyday.  And just keeping up with the changes in writing would be a full time job, let alone writing and all the other administrivia.

(Now I should confess I’m never very good at administrivia.  Even in the old model, I had the times I was writing, and the times I was sending out/keeping records.  The two never seem to happen in my mind at once.)

THAT however is neither here nor there.  Even the people who are plugged in 24/7 don’t know much, because there is no systematic collecting of data that presents a coherent picture.  Even Amazon can’t give us a coherent picture, and they’re sitting on the firehose of data.  Because… everything is changing, very fast.  Before the blind men can assemble the data and describe the elephant it’s turned into an emu.

In this environment you get a lot of spinners.  What is your clue that you’re being spun and that things are not what they say they are?  They often keep repeating things, and moreso they repeat them without any seeming awareness that they’ve said this before and it turned out not to be true.  So we get the repeated, screamed “Amazon is really going down, this time sweartagad it’s true, and paper books are coming back, and we’ll have full control of the distribution again” over and over and over again from the traditional publishers.  And then they say it again.

The other thing is misuse of numbers.  How misuse?  Oh, stuff like telling you that the growth in sales of ebooks has slowed down but spinning it so you think that fewer ebooks are being sold, instead of the logical and inevitable development that the PERCENTAGE of ebooks being sold can’t keep doubling forever.  (No?  Well, imagine it grows by 50% one year, and it was 50% of all ebooks sold.  In the next year it will stop growing, inevitably.  Why?  Because it’s now 100% of the market.  Does this mean ebooks are done?  Well, no.  It can’t be.  They’re a 100% of the market in this scenario.)

Most people don’t understand numbers and shut down their brain when numbers are mentioned.  Also, they have a firm faith in mathemagics, which means “math says so, so it’s true.”

If by now you’re going “but I’ve seen those signs on the economy at large”  — this is why I told you this wasn’t a post about publishing.  It’s not a post about publishing because the same thing is going on in the economy and society at large.

I’m getting very tired of starting to read articles, even in reputable investors’ journals that start with “The US economy is improving markedly, but will the world’s economy drag it down?”

Is the US economy improving markedly?  Who knows?  As in publishing, nobody knows not’ing.

Yes, I have my opinions.  Yep, the stores are boarded, every other one, in our city, but then again, you know, our city is making such stellar management decisions (Art on the streets, but no money for lighting crossstreets, for instance.  Or jacking the price of parking downtown up so much – and making the period you can park for only half an hour in some areas.  This is the work of people who don’t understand the experience of shopping downtown and think people drive down, go to a shop, drive to the next one – that only bars and nightclubs survive because they’re open after parking meters shut down.) that it could easily be  a localized thing.  Of course, I have friends all over the country, and yep, a few have lost their jobs, and found other jobs.  But then again, my friends tend to be not only college educated but also the sort of strivers who can turn their hands to a hundred different things.

The children of friends and neighbors have come home because they can’t find jobs/got laid off, but of course this, dire though it is, is not universal.  Some have jobs.

I do know the Hoyt household is pinching very badly.  As in, we’re holding on by our fingernails, and the fingernails are starting to bleed at the edges.  But then, we have two sons in college, and even though we’re doing the thing on the cheap, with them living at home, no one said the thing was cheap, after all.  And last year we were hit by a series of disasters that cost us about 30k in savings, which means we’re about to be very broke, and the taxes due.

I have sort of a sense this is normally not as a bad, that we’ve recovered from bigger expenses in the past sooner.

Most of all, I KNOW – and yep, it’s a know – that regardless of the claims that there is no inflation, our grocery bills have doubled, and that we’re not eating twice as much.  I also know (or suspect) inflation hasn’t doubled the prices of things, just the things we buy specifically.  (Meat, veggies, cleaners.)

I also know that hanging by the fingernails though we are, we’re relatively well off compared to other people, even other employed people.  (Having no debt except the mortgage does help.  Even if that means you have to drive ancient cars and pay for the repairs.)

And I know that in the same way, the rest of the world is hurting more than the US.  How much of this is their misguided policies, and how much the fact that when the US sneezes the rest of the world catches pneumonia, I can’t tell you.  I can only tell you that since the US is the main consumer, the tightening of purse strings here hurts everyone.

And I can tell you that no one I know is making big, extravagant purchases.  Everyone I know is going “one more year on the car, hopefully.”  And “One more winter on this coat” and…

In the case of the economy of course people have the data.  To an extent.  But are the data they’re looking at the relevant data?  For instance, finding that unemployment has stopped growing… is it true?  Well, no, they drop the long term unemployed.  So, as with ebooks, eventually, if they lay off everyone and wait long enough we’ll have 0% unemployment.  But no one will be working.

The problem is that the people who have the data, the people who analyze the data and the people who report the data are not even close to the same people.  If someone tells you something about their field, you believe them because you assume they know more than you do.  But what they say might not be what you hear.

What I’m saying is that even without ideological intrusion, it’s perfectly possible that journalists are lying to us without meaning to.  They’re not good with numbers, that’s why they didn’t take STEM degrees.  And they might not get what they’re being told.

Do I think this is true?  Well, no I don’t.  I think there’s a rich and yeasty combination of ignorance and malice.  Why?

Because as with the publishing houses, we see the hysterical repeated screaming and the seeming ignorance that they said this before and their predictions failed to come true.  So we get “Summer of recovery” and “Son of Summer of recovery” and “Son of Summer of Recovery, Enter the dragon” each one peddled with the wide-eyed credulity of someone who thinks we’re all stupid.

We also get the “Things are getting better” and “This time they’re really getting better” and “Happy times are here again,” even though truthfully there is no sign of anything better for us or anyone we know.

At the same time, other things have totally vanished from the headlines.  For instance, how many of you know that Egypt is sliding into dangerous radical Islam?  Well, on this blog probably a lot of people.  Out there?  Bah.  The man on the street will tell you “Arab Spring” and have a vague idea this means they’ve gone all democratic and that the veils have come off.  Or something.  The camels are dancing with the sphinx and it’s a miracle of Ramadan.  Or something.

And the average journalist would go along with them.  Not just because it suits their ideology, but because they think it’s true.  Then there’s the ideological skew, which, yes, is there.  When 98% of journalists sign on to the “progressive” agenda (and we won’t go on how it’s partly because the humanities have been taken over by the Beasts of Marxism, or this post will never end) they’re going to try to push it, of course they are.

And in that sense, it can’t be said we have a free press.  Not when progressives are in charge.

Oh, look, yeah, no journalist is going to get thrown in jail for saying something the administration doesn’t like.  But he’s going to get crucified by the other journalists, have his reputation trashed – even if he’s a legend of reporting – and probably “never work in this town again.”

This is why in fields like journalism, where the “progressives” have taken the commanding heights of being able to hire and fire (and they always hire and fire by ideology.  Unlike the rest of us who look for other attributes) people like me stay in the closet or risk limiting or losing their career.  (You don’t see that on the other side, btw.)

When your entire news is coming through people who, if they tell something that is unpalatable to the people currently in power, might lose their ability to make a living – how good do you think that information is?

And we can’t, of course, any of us, know everything.

In fact, it might have come to the point that we can’t, any of us, know much of anything.  The firehose of information is full on and despite the dreams of those who thought 1984 was a manual, that doesn’t mean people can control everything or have a full picture of how you’re supposed to vote if they just hit you on the diaper issue, because you bought diapers last week.  No, what that vast amount of information means is that nobody knows not’ing.

When we get the direct data, we get too much and a lot of it contradicts itself.  When we get it filtered, we get it according to what the media mavens want us to see.  (Look, as a writer I know this.  I’ve mentioned before – I can take the same character and present it in a way you see him as a hero or a villain.  Take Kit Marlowe: working class boy, made good, indications he was in favor of freedom of expression – yay.  But then take double agent, weirdly heretic (and I mean weirdly, and often ignorantly), possible pedophile (there’s some doubt if boys is really boys or in the sense of “dancing boys” who are usually men), almost certainly a sadist, at least in his dreams – ew.  And then add: Possible secret Catholic? False coiner? Work-for-hire writer?  What?)

Ideologically bent information was what kept the USSR quiescent so long. They knew they were hurting, but they thought the rest of the world was worse.  How could they know it wasn’t?  Most of them couldn’t travel abroad.  All they had was the reports of a press who wanted them to believe things a certain way.  Which meant they believed what they heard, and they thought bad as things were it was inevitable, and a free market would be worse.

The people here are told, in the same way, that what we have is a free market, and that’s collapsing from being free (not from over regulation.)  And then, of course, they think socialism must be better. But even those who see behind that, can’t get the relevant data to know what’s happening in other areas, particularly areas they’re not experts in.

We’re all low information voters.  Worse, it’s highly possible the government is a low information government, something more terrifying than their drinking their own ink, even if they’re also doing that.

This is a problem because the idiocy of the government can affect the recovery (which I don’t believe exists) or make the recession (do I hear depression?) worse all without their knowing what they’re doing, and without any clue of which direction they should be headed in.

Like a skier caught in an avalanche things are changing too fast and neither us nor those in charge have any clue which way is up, even though we’re all p*ssing ourselves.

Just knowing how the writing field is changing is insane enough a job.  Knowing how the entire economy, all the tech, etc. is changing requires a brilliant mind and more time than any of us has.

I go on general principles and what I know has worked from history: for a country this side, I support less regulation, more freedom and more regional solutions (on the principle that those closer to the problem see it better.)

But do I KNOW for a fact how things are changing?  Not on your life.

Which of course means that those who favor centralized government must prove to me why they know more than the rest of us and why they think they have the information to run everything.

Once more we come to malice or incompetence and the answer is “yes”.  They are malicious because they favor power for themselves and their cronies, which necessitates central-control which is hampered by ignorance and makes everyone worse off.  Which brings us to malice again.

Nobody knows not’ing and I’m tired of their pretending they know everything.

Brief update for the Sarah Spotters: I was at No Pasaran on March 8, but got sick, didn’t read blogs and wasn’t aware of it.  Also, I’ll be at PJM lifestyle with the writing thing this afternoon, and of course I’m being a fraction of insty (where mostly I do the late night posting.)

And apologies on being so late.  We have a furnace-fixing person in the house.

Paying it forward is a well known principle of all Heinlein fans, since he advocated it so strenuously.

I know why too.  Coming up in writing, even now, but particularly under trad, you needed so many people to give you a hand up that it was impossible to pay them all back.  Impossible, particularly, unless you became a mega bestseller, since a ton of the people who helped were bestsellers.

Sometimes you managed it, little by little.  The first person to give me a chance at magazine sales eventually asked me to be in an anthology that didn’t pay but was HIS labor of love, and I could say yes (even if it came at the worst possible time, as I was very ill.)  Other friends I’ve helped promo or done work with.

But that’s not the idea anyway.  In the field as it was — and to an extent still is — without formal education or rules of admittance, you had this generational chain link.  My mentors helped me because they’d been helped (one of them by Heinlein!) and in turn I’ve helped everyone I can because I’ve been helped.

That’s one form of paying it forward.  And don’t discount me, okay?  It’s a very important one.  Without it, while the field would no longer collapse, we’d all be stumbling in the dark and learning everything from scratch.  In indie that includes “what works for promo.” and “How to format things” “What’s good pricing” etc.

But there is another form of paying it forward, and it occurred to me that’s what I’ve been engaged in for the last month and change.

That’s when you put yourself through hell, so that you can take it easier later.

It can be relative hell “if I finish the report/job today, I can take the weekend off.”  Or it can be what I’ve been doing, working at things that aren’t my specialty for way too long, and not being able to sit down and write (which is driving me bonkers” because once this is done, we can then have a much easier time as long as we live in this house.

So, we’ve replaced the flooring in the room where the former owner’s cat had marked and which our cats had turned into a pissoir.  That was insane work, because I had to KILZ the room several times, and repaint the walls which had pulled the moisture up about three feet. Then we had to lay in the flooring (Dan did all the measuring and cutting.)  And then I had to polyurethane it.  THREE TIMES It’s right now waiting a sanding and a final coat (I need to go to the store for another can of poly.)

We also bought the shelves (about half of them half painted, to organize the library.

Let me explain that while I don’t mind these jobs, and they’ve been great research for Dyce (I really needed it, honestly.  It’s been too long since I’ve done remodeling hands-on.  Like 15 years.  I mean, we rehabilitated the Victorian before selling, but that’s a different kind of job than making/building/refinishing.) I don’t mind doing them on the weekend, like two weekends a month.  When they stretch to a month, full time, then I do mind them, as they interfere with the writing. Also, I’m too old for this stuff full time and my body rebels.

OTOH…

OTOH, polyurethaned wood floors, as opposed to the dying carpet will save me much time both in housekeeping (I will be able to clean with a swifer cloth) and in cat-endurance.  Our cats are all over 9, and geriatric cats pee EVERYWHERE.  with wood floors and rugs I can take outside and hose down, my housekeeping will take a fraction of the time I now spend with the carpet cleaner.  And I won’t live with pissy smells which are depressing.

In the same way, the library being set up and our books organized will save me both time and money. Because I won’t rebuy books because I can’t find them.  And when a project occurs, I’ll be able to do the research instead of spending half my time looking for the books.

So, in a way, the time I’m spending now will save me more time later.  It’s not spending, it’s an investment.

This is way harder than paying it forward to someone else, though.  I understand why so many people (and cultures) have trouble with the concept.  You have to weigh in things that haven’t happened yet, and a future you can’t be sure of.  This is why cultures with uncertain property rights (or rights to life) have more trouble with it.  And why I’d never have done that if trad were the only option.  I mean they could stop buying me tomorrow, out of the blue, so more time next year might not help.  Now, barring unforeseens, like sudden death, which can never fully be excluded, it will.

Now if only I hadn’t woken up tired enough to go back to bed, I’d feel way better.

But I’ll do what must be done, because, yes, I can conceptualize the future.  And I’ll work hard today for an easier time tomorrow.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY:  Like a Continental Soldier.

The starship Valerie Hall failed to reach the terraformed world of its original destination. Instead, it found a habitable substitute where the settlers split into two factions. First Landing devolved into a rude replica of medieval despotism. Seccon might promise more.

Or so hope Gilead Tan and his companions.

Gilead spent three centuries in cold sleep, held there by a First Landing custom that decreed only one sleeper could be awakened every fifty years. Once awake, Gilead freed two dozen of his fellows—all soldiers like himself—and led them into the wilderness.

Close to two hundred civilians still lie trapped in the decaying cryo-cells of First Landing. Their captive slumber haunts him.

But despite its vaunted freedom, Seccon has one rule. No one goes back to First Landing.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Oddly Familiar: Familiar Tales Book Four.

Ah, October, when the ghosts, and spirits walk, and the Off Ramp of Doom falls quiet. Too quiet…

Lelia Chan and her Familiar, Tay, continue learning about magic and what mages do. When a customer drops a strange silver disk in Belle, Book, and Blacklight, it starts a chain of events that pull Lelia deeper into shadow magic. André Lestrange and Rodney return to help sort out the off-ramp. Someone else returns, someone who wants to open doors best left closed. Lelia and Company have their hands and paws full dealing with the forces of darkness and bad jokes.

Evil walks on All Hallows Eve. It’s up to Lelia and Tay to send it back where it belongs. Or else.

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: star

Nobody knows anything!

Honestly, this should be the motto for our times.

And it is a shame and a rebuke in the face of journalists.

I’ll be honest, they were never very good at reporting anything.  Particularly in the first heat of the reporting. Any incident I was actually present at, let alone any incident I knew anything about was reported so wrongly all my life, that it might as well be another universe.

This was even when the things reported on were stuff like a school show, the village’s new gardens, or the death of someone who was a marginal public figure and whom my family happened to know.  (They had everything wrong, other than the fact he was male and had once been alive.)

When you add the madness of politics to it, and the fact that the press is not only uniformly leftist, but that journalism schools now teach (I swear I’m not making this up) the highest calling of a journalist is promoting “social justice” you have not only something that doesn’t resemble reality but which is often antithetical or toxic to it.

And people are choosing to believe their lying eyes.

You’d think the press would have caught a clue after eight summers of recovery and stop reporting wholly imaginary stuff.

Ah! we should be so lucky.  They’re sure if they shout long enough they’ll achieve full cooperation.  And to be fair to them, they’ve managed to put any number of raspers past the public by dint of repeating them brazenly.

I see even right wing or unaffiliated publications repeating the nonsense that this is the “Obama recovery.” Which ignores… our lying eyes.  The only thing I can say is that fewer people buy this than the ones who bought that Reagan’s boom was due to Carter and if Carter had only one more term, we’d have been great.  (We gave Carter Junior two terms, I think in part because of that.  And people know what happened when we tried that one weird trick.)

But the left continued pushing.  There was their attempt at selling Hillary.  There is their continuous, made up insanity on … well, everything Trump does.  There is the added insanity of #metoo.  There was the cheering of the abolishing of presumption of innocence over Kavanaugh.  And now there’s the crazy with the boomless bombs.

Look, I don’t doubt this guy is a Trump fan.  But he’s also a multiply convicted fellon, who is convinced chemtrails are killing us, hates Monsanto, and seems to have participated in a march of support for Hillary.  Viewed in that context, he’s just one of the nuts floating in the American punch bowl.  Considering there are three hundred million of us, we can’t help but kick out the utter nutter now and then.  And his support of Trump might as well be a love of My Little Pony of Where’s Waldo. And he might as well have sent the bombs in that context.

Except… except these are still fake bombs.  And things keep kicking up that make no sense, and that might be true or not.  Like, some of the bombs were supposedly delivered by messenger, (is that true or a rumor? who knows?)  Like, the people who received them didn’t act like anyone receiving a suspicious package.  Yes, I’ve got them.  As a minor, almost not-public figure, I can tell you I put it outside the house and call the police, or attempt to verify the sender on the return address sent them to me. I don’t take pictures and handle the thing extensively, and post them in social media, to create a stir.  Because, you know, if they blow up I’m dead, at least theoretically.  None of the recipients acted that way.

BTW IF the packages were delivered by hand, shouldn’t there be security cameras of the packages being delivered?

And then there’s the FBY agent telling us these are not hoaxes and they’re very serious.  Really?  AFAICT (again reporting is unreliable and I wasn’t there) the “pipe” was plastic, which by definition makes it a non-serious bomb.  But also the detonator wasn’t, since the digital clock had no alarm.

If all of this is true, the bombs COULDN’T go off unless the recipients knowingly detonated them.  And if they went off, the most the plastic shrapnel would do is scratch someone.

Are these things true?  Who knows?  It’s not just what we’re not told, it’s the left’s crazy demand for civility when their partisans have actually injured and almost killed people, and been cheered on by the likes of Nancy Palsy, Maxinsane Waters and Cory Spartacus Booker. It’s the press’s obsession with this to the exclusion of the real misbehavior of say…. oh, antifa.

More importantly, it’s the very serious treatment given to the idea that a youtube video called Innocence of Muslims was responsible for the 9/11/12 Embassy attacks and the death of ambassador Stevens. Something everyone now knows for a fact was not only false, but completely and utterly false.

I’m told that 11 people were shot in a Synagogue in NYC Pittsburgh , and that the person who did it is a bearded white male.  Of course, I think the chances he yelled something about a snack bar before that are 100%.  But maybe not.  And maybe it won’t be reported that way even if he did (he could be a convert.)  If he didn’t, if he has creditable links to the fringe right, I want you to think about this very carefully: HOW on Earth would two marginal (very marginal) “righties”  go berserk JUST before the election, in time for the left to wave the bloody shirt?

Can you say Reichstag fire? Can you say “by any means necessary?”  Can you say “most mental health professionals are leftists and have access to nuts?”  Can you say “we can’t even trust reports of affiliation?” Sure, I knew you could.

Nobody knows anything, but the smell I’m starting to get is not good.

It’s two weeks before the elections, and not only are we blind and flying by instruments, but the instruments are leftist and are guiding us to the ground at speed.

If they win this way, you know this train doesn’t stop short of civil war station, and that will be sooner than later.

Strap in and brace.  And pray, if you believe in anyone to pray to.

We’re in for a h*ll of a ride.

 

I’m a bleeding heart libertarian.  Yes, I know how that sounds.  But it’s true.

Particularly when it comes to animals, plants and creatures who can’t defend themselves.  I will very carefully transplant aspen volunteers that grow too close to the foundation.  Chances are they won’t grow elsewhere, but at least they have a chance.

I spent my childhood dragging home baby birds that had fallen from the nest and sometimes having to defend them from mom who thought it was more merciful to put them out of their misery and also that I was “only prolonging their suffering.”  Since life is suffering, she was right, but I raised about 50% of them.

There are two main differences between me and bleeding heart liberals.  One, I’d never try to do it at someone else’s expense (but the fact that they do this might come from two.)  And I understand evil.

I’m just evil enough — not in practice.  My character is saved by being too lazy to do the evil I think on.  If you really upset me, I won’t go out of my way to help you.  Weirdly you’d be amazed how often that is revenge enough — that I know there is evil in the world and people who do evil.  That evil doers don’t need to be twisted, beaten or victims of society.  And that even those that are might simply have got into enjoying evil and can’t be saved no matter what you do.

My brother is liberal and at least when he was young he started by not understanding evil and therefore taking all the wrong conclusions.

I realized that today because I was thinking of an occasion in which I acted in self defense and how my brother would disapprove, because the person attacking me was homeless and drug-addled, and I’d piled on to that injustice by beating him with a dictionary.

Yes, he would literally save his pity in the circumstances for the “poor man” who would probably have raped me if I hadn’t defended myself.

This eventually led to his being very upset at George Bush for “threatening poor, mad, little North Korea” without taking in account that North Korea is poor because it’s mad and that its madness takes the form of crazed communism.  But see, they are small and powerless, so they must be the ones who need his pity.

He’s not alone.  At least in the beginning a lot of liberals become addled about morality because they can’t conceptualize evil or someone doing evil because they want to, or someone enjoying doing evil.  Therefore they look at people doing evil, from the mundane family tyrant to the dictator of North Korea and see … well… a wounded bird.  And think if only we “make that right” then evil will stop.

This is why the liberals have come up with cute things about only whites being able to be racist, and why they’ve convinced themselves they live in a white supremacy (seriously, these people have never seen a white supremacy.)  Because this explains a lot of the criminality in the black community.  (Of course so do broken families, but that goes against the leftist dogma of not being repressed and also doing whatever the hell you want without regard for your kids. Oh, and could be laid at the feet of family-destroying welfare policies, and heavens, how could liberals be guilty of anything?)

This is why they’re convinced males have “privilege” because …  well, because.  That one doesn’t make a ton of sense because criminality in women is way lower.  OTOH many women are mean in petty ways, and obviously, it’s society that’s to blame.

The problem of going down that path, unable to SEE evil or acknowledge its existence, is that it eventually turns you against the good.

Since evil will always be with us, liberals need to continually invent oppression to justify it.  And eventually they want to punish all those “oppressors” because, you know, they’re creating evil and not letting the left “heal the world.”

It’s not just that they, as Reagan said, know lots of things that just aren’t so, but that the admirable inclinations of their hearts aren’t corrected early on.  No one ever explains to them and SHOWS to them that yes, there is evil, evil without first cause and some humans are evil and almost all humans can learn to enjoy evil, as the bleeding heart liberals eventually do, too, when they’re “punishing” the “oppressors.”

Just once I’d like them to step back and realize what they’re enabling are the evil people and the dysfunctional cultures, and if they win they’ll be the first victims.

They made a desert. And they called it peace.  In this case it would be “they made hell on Earth, and they called it justice.”

I hate chaos, which is weird because most people perceive me as working best in the middle of chaos.  But it’s not … precisely true.  I love the “controlled chaos” of very, very, very busy. My happiest years (except romantically.  I didn’t have Dan yet, and I can’t even imagine that now) were in college, when I was going to school, tutoring AND had a busy social life.

Partly, of course, it’s that I am a depressive and also an introvert.  These two feed off each other, because if I get my wishes, I sit in a room, with my own thoughts, and when they turn to depression, there’s nothing I can do. And the depression feeds the introversion.  The bottom stage of this is me in a dark room both physically and metaphorically.

And my portion of hating chaos can also feed depression, because I can lock myself into a girder of obligations that leaves no room for variation.  So, it’s difficult.

I’ve learned the signs:

Wanting less and less to have people around till in the final stage, I can’t endure MY FAMILY around, and isolate myself even from them.

My work becoming more noise and motion than work.  I am at the computer ALL the time, but nothing gets done.

But I also have “silent depressions” — not as much as my husband, whose depressions are always silent — in which I just channel to the least productive possible things, and feel perpetually out of sorts.

What works:

Forcing myself to go out.  The going out might be just a walk around the block, where I see maybe one person and their dog, but it seems to help.

Sunshine helps.

Weirdly, starting a PHYSICAL project where I have to give it my all and go to bed exhausted helps. (You’d think it didn’t.)

Coming up with a for-the-love project I do in the evenings (and which isn’t too messy, because chaos) helps.

So does taking an hour and a bit before going to bed and just watching something with Dan.

Keeping all of this going is difficult, particularly as my internals tell me we need to be alone and very, very quiet.

Part of the problem is I hate chaos. So in the middle of a protracted self-administered cure for depression, life is upside down and sideways, and that might push me into depression again.

All this to say: My house looks like a construction zone but I’m only mildly depressed and obsessive about the elections.

However, it might be time to bring it all in, put away the paints and resume the writing schedule and the — relaxing — walks.