Category: Uncategorized

This was my first good night in weeks — maybe in months, if you count the fact that my body seems to have decided it was allergic to France in general — so of course I’m still a little zonked, which makes no sense whatsoever, since I slept in my own bed (instead not sleeping in the bathroom) for the first time in a week or so.

I was talking to my son about that, because yesterday, as he was leaving for the hospital before dawn, I ambushed him on the stairs and said “what is abdominal pain here?”  He said “gas.”  And he was right.  I had of course been scaring myself with ideas of rotting livers, failing kidneys, who knows what?

And I told him, “Yeah, but in the middle  of the night when it feels like you’re alone in the world, it fells like you’re dying, even if all you have is the sniffles.  Every new ache is a fear.”

That was the problem, you know?  Is that you’re alone and, in my case I was trying not to wake my husband up, every little thing magnifies into a major issue.  There is something we call in our family “the three am terror” which boils down to something or other that could go wrong, but in the middle of the night, you know it WILL go wrong and in the worst possible way.

Say you bought a motherboard for your computer and you’ve heard the same type of motherboard has been known to catch fire (shush, I had that happen on one of my laptops.  Leading to my waking up going “Dan, why is my laptop smoking?”  “Shush, you’re dreaming.”  “No, it’s smoking.”  “Oh, sh*t.”) and in the middle of the night, you imagine it will catch fire, set fire to the laptop, catch fire to the papers on your desk, and when you come back from a grocery store trip, the house will have burned to the ground taking everything you own, your cats and your kids with it.

That terror is so vivid in the night, that you feel like I should get up and tear the mother board from your computer right now.  But if you go “Three am terror” and wait, and look it up in the morning, you’ll find out the motherboards used to do that 10 years ago, but there hasn’t been an incidence in ten years.

I’ve noticed something interesting as the right gets more connected, gets more places to discuss things and get together, the less prone we are to conspiracy theories of the truly insane variety.  Say, the FEMA camps or the coffins that whoever it is bought.

It’s easy for a small and isolated group — and none of you has any idea how isolated we were if you didn’t live in the pre-internet days — to suffer from three am syndrome.  If you thought you were alone, the only person who came to the conclusion that socialism/communism didn’t work, even while all organs of information touted their wonders, you’re going to trust the few other people you meet who agree with you.  And it will attract nutters, of course it will attract nutters, because believing what you do requires you to go against all the socially accepted sources of information.

So while a lot of people it will attract are those who always verify and poke and check, a lot of them will be the sort of people who want to build a bridge across the Atlantic, and know it will float because it is made entirely out of soap.  And the problem is when you’re isolated, it’s hard to cut out the nutters, because there are so few of you.  The isolation makes you vulnerable to crazy.

At the same time… what the heck is going on with the left?

I mean I expected them to walk back the crazy scare mongering of prison camps for minorities, women and gays after Trump was elected, because, well… that’s what happened when Reagan was elected, and when Bush was elected.

Instead, they seem to have gone crazier and to think the rounding up is just around the corner and that maybe it’s already happening (yes, I know Hillary is an old woman and listening to old people raving is silly, but she actually imagines that Trump is SOMEHOW having journalists killed and no one knows.)  They virtue signal that they accept everyone, as opposed to the rest of us who… accept everyone.  They take knees and fight really hard in the “resistance” against something that isn’t happening.

It sure as hell sounds like the three am terrors.  Only, they can’t be having them, can they?  I don’t believe for a moment that the left, the real convinced left, not the ones who go along to get along, are 50% of the nation.  I think they were more than that, thirty years ago, or so, because there was still a working (for values of working) communist block that could be idealized, and because the idea is so attractive.

But even though the real horrors after the fall of the USSR were never really reported in the US, enough percolated, and a lot of people looked at that and were horrified.  And since then there has been steady chipping away, and only the very rich who visit Europe on luxury package tours can even imagine that euro-socialism is better.

There have been too many moments of eye-opening shock, no matter how little our media reports them.

And the schools now have to resort to referring to all government as socialism, in order to have the kids graduate with the illusion they’re socialist.  But that illusion doesn’t last long once they hit the real working world.  And then there are more and more kids being homeschooled every year, who never even go through that transitory phase.

I don’t think they’re fifty percent.  I think their presence is amplified by the media, by the schools, by our industrial-cultural establishment which is uniformly to the left of Lenin.  Oh, and by vote fraud, which is why they oppose any initiative to curb it.

I think they run around maybe 25%.

But the thing is they’re behaving more like they’re ten percent and attracting every nutter, every person who wants to build bridges out of soap.

In their screaming, their paroxysms of fear, they behave like a tiny blog in a sea of mainstream blogs, the one blog where everyone is sure they uncovered a conspiracy by the lizard people of Alpha Centauri to take over the Earth.  They ignore all the contrary evidence, they tune out anyone trying to calm them down, they scale their panic up and up and up.

Is it possible for 25% of the population to become seized by a three am panic?  Perhaps because what they’ve always done doesn’t work now?  Is that “small enough to be crazy?”

At any rate, I wish they’d go to bed and sleep it off, because trying to talk to people who are panicking is exhausting.

And it’s probably just gas.

 

The good news is that this isn’t apparently an auto-immune attack but stomach flu of some kind.

The bad news is that spending the night in the bathroom is not conducive to getting up early and ready to work.  I’m more or less okay now, but haven’t yet showered, and am only demi-caffeinated.

The good news is that the idiots are self idenfying.  From the NFL taking a knee in response to…. G-d knows what.  Apparently “I’m black, and even though I’m a millionaire, you’re mean to me.” or perhaps “I liked how much attention the idiot who took a knee got and I want that attention.”  to Star Trek STD cast members taking a knee in solidarity with the NFL because “well, we have no clue why, but it has something to do with being anti-Trump and stuff. Besides, a lot of players are black, so they’re obviously right, and we denounce ourselves.” “Besides our show sucks, and if we’re uber left we can convince the rest of Hollywood it was great but no one watched it because we spoke truth to power.”  (Aka Rolling left and dying.)

And then there’s this.  No seriously, a guy with a high school education, probably with “athlete’s breaks” is calling half the nation uneducated.  This is the old, old bullshit of “if only you were educated, you’d be progressive” leading to all the idiot-flakes saying “educate yourself” when you disagree with them.

Some gems from that one:
“At the end of the day, I don’t think a lot of people was educated,” he said.
“I’ve done things for my daughter and realized I shouldn’t have gave my daughter that many damn Skittles.”

“And am I saying that the people of Ohio wasn’t educated?”

“”Am I saying that some of the other states that voted for him was uneducated?”

Actually what LeBron James is proving is that you can get a High School diploma in America while being a complete moron.

So, the good news is that they hear their own echo chamber ad nauseum, they’ve lost track of any opposing opinion, the media has lost all integrity and the left thinks they’re winning without realizing they’re just disgusting the normal people out there.

As Ace of Spades put it, they used to try to appear “just like you” and that led us to think they couldn’t be bad people even though they advocated appalling things.  Now they’ve lost track of what “normal” is.

I can’t find the link, but I’m sure one of you will.  (I linked it at instapundit, I think.)  The thing is they’ve lost track of what the average person thinks, and so they think pushing brightly hair colored gender-indeterminate super heroes (for instance) will cause us to accept weird-hair-gender-indeterminate-feminists, instead of turning away from comics.  Or they think that having barely literate sport stars and unhinged singers/actors lecture us on how bad Trump is will make us side with them instead of going “Oh, good Lord, I don’t like him that much, but if you hate him…”

The bad news?  The bad news is how far the long march through the institutions has got before they thought they were safe to come out of the commie-closet.

I don’t know how one deals with a communist like Rapone.  I’ve been told being a communist is not an objection to being an officer in the United States Army.  Well, if it’s not, it ought to be.  Anyone who believes in the communist manifesto and also that communism will win (briefly, before everyone dies screaming?) cannot in good faith take the oath of allegiance to protect and defend the Constitution.  This is the same reason convinced communists shouldn’t be able to become US citizens.

The good news?  The good news is that the more they think they already won, the more they crawl out of the closet, the easier it is to isolate them and counter their years and years of undercover work to undermine the republic.

They are only effective while they’re buried and hidden.

Seriously, they’re doing our work for us.

Be not afraid.

*Forgive me for being so late and doing a BFP — I’ve been having a recurring and weird problem that is probably the next step in my body’s attempt to kill me, or that might “just” be the result of my idiotically becoming dehydrated by forgetting to drink water — anyway, it took most of yesterday’s afternoon/evening.  And I woke up really late today.*

The Grandchildren of Imagine – A Blast From The Past Post From August 2014

The other day here, someone brought up “Imagine” under if everything we think we know is wrong, then…

Imagine is one of the songs which gets me talking to the supermarket loudspeakers, and not in a good way. If I’m alone in a section I might go so far as to give the speakers the double middle finger. (The others are mostly Phil Collins.)

The problem with Imagine is not that it’s lousy, kitchy, superficial art (it is) or that I tend to like songs that have a bubbly meaning on top and more layered meanings underneath (“I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell. I know, right now you can’t tell, but stick around and soon enough you’ll see another part of me.”) I also like plenty of songs that are objectively tempests of sound and percussion signifying nothing.

No. What really gets me going about Imagine is that its pretty, shiny bobbles of concepts are infantile, wrong AND pernicious. And also that it is largely the same concepts I was raised with (not by my parents, but my brother, his friends, the schools, the popular entertainment, etc.)

Take for instance that “Imagine there’s no religion…. Nothing to live or die for, a brotherhood of man.”

Oy.

Where to start?

 

Imagine there is no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky

Imagine all the people
Living for today

He is of course, fluffy and confused, and then the next verse is about nations and we have:

Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
That sort of refers to nations, but bringing religion in, gets us the idea people kill for religion.

Most people start on the Evangelical Christians get boiled out of shape by that verse – which was probably Lennon’s intent – but let’s, do, examine why eliminating religion is such a good thing “Nothing to kill or die for”. Uh…. Really?

Yeah, okay, we had “Wars of religion” that lasted for centuries. But to be fair, most of the wars of religion only got that way because the cause was co-opted by various princes, kings and countries. And I’m not even going to go into the Crusades as war of retaliation, or the West learning that the only way to stop a religion that promotes itself by cutting off heads is to have a religion that cuts off heads, which made the reformation a kettle of fun as the state seized control of the whole thing as a means to enrich itself.

Let’s go instead into the post-religious world. Whether they dressed it in religious shibboleths or not, WWI was not religious. WWII was not religious. The cold war’s “little” flareups, the millions of people who died in the camps, etc, none of it was in the name of G-d, but in the name of the state.

So for someone in the seventies (?) to be crooning about the brotherhood of man that would ensue once no one had religion is not just appallingly shallow, bordering on stupid, it’s also a crazy denial of facts that were already in evidence.

Turns out, humans being tribal, what ensues if you remove religion is not a brotherhood of man, but tribalism for other reasons. And once the higher objectives of religion and the idea that we’re all created by the same G-d and therefore brothers and sisters are removed, what ensues is not a great family, but – as in those countries for whom atheism was a state religion –humans as utilitarian work machines, humans as fertilizer, and humans as food (during the engineered famines. Look up Holodomor. It dare you.)

So, you say, no nations.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

 

We’ll leave aside the fact that it can or cannot be achieved. It’s not something that has been achieved in… ever. Yes, I know some fluffy libertarians think that the nomadic tribes that roamed around without established location were “equalitarian” and had no kings and no concept of nation. This only ignores the evidence of all grave goods and the experience of anyone who’s lived in a large family.

Never mind. Let’s establish that there were no Nation States. Is this by any chance a sign there was peace? Well, no. See again under “humans are tribal.” The graves we discover from that time do not speak of peace. No matter what you heard about the nomadic past of the US, the Amerindians weren’t children of nature, living in peace. In fact, anyone who has raised kids knows better. Humans not only are tribal. Humans have a will to power, a will to either be admired or admire, to either control or be controlled. Humans seek it. We’re Odds and goats and a little different, but still. You can’t even say that in their vision humans would have to be sheep, because sheep fight intruders, too.

That impulse can be controlled but not eliminated.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

Do I have to dissect this piece of crap? It’s not even wishful thinking, it’s irrational babbling. You’d think a grown man, no matter how many interesting substances he was snorting, injecting and smoking, would have realized possessions are not the only thing people strive for. For a lot of people, power over others seems to be the driving motive.

But let’s leave that aside. HOW do you enforce the “no possessions?” Humans like things, and humans will take and hold things they like – pretty baubles, interesting stones. Humans will make things too and those they are even more attached to. “You didn’t build that” is the cry of someone who has never built anything and is jealous. Oh, yeah, jealousy. Another thing that precludes “universal peace.”

To have your state with no possessions you need to have someone making sure no one else has possessions, and that person, of course, will have possessions, because human (and we’ve seen this pattern over and over in human history.)

But beyond that, who is going to enforce “no possessions” if there are no nations.

Don’t answer. I know the nightmare answer to this. I once read a document from the Weather Underground on how they’d organize the US after taking over. It was all “soviets.” You’d belong to a soviet for each of your characteristics. Take me, for instance, I’d be in a soviet as wife, one as mother, one as Latin, one as woman, one as writer, one as…

These soviets would have representation, but not the individuals, who were supposed to help the soviet come to positions through “struggle sessions.” Those of you who have read about the Cultural Revolution are shuddering right now, and if you haven’t, do. I suggest the first hand accounts of people who escaped it.

So, none of these concepts or their children-concepts (“No patriarchy” and “PIV is rape” and a million other insane ideas that proceed from believing that religion – something that has been with man since we didn’t quite have language – is just a plot of “priests” and can easily be discarded; that nations and nation states can be abolished without just as pernicious entities appearing in their stead; that possessions are things you can just say you’re done with, and also that these three things are the only cause of violence) are so stupid that a blind child can see their asinine idiocy.

BUT and here’s the important thing, they were embraced and promulgated by the intelligentsia: those controlling your entertainment, your communications, your education. (We won’t point out their semblance to soviet propaganda probably caused that.)

It is assumed in most things that these three principles and everything that comes from them is “right” and that we deviate from them at the risk of “sin” (Not sin, sin, since we’re not supposed to believe in religion, but a secular sin that leads everyone to point and call us stupid.)

These ideas amount to a wholesale discarding of western civilization and of everything that’s been believed and written about how to integrate human nature with civilization without destroying either.

And we are up to three generations raised since these became not just fringe (they have been there since there’s been humans writing, and yep, mostly they’ve been fringe) but the core and center of our education in civics.

We’re now up to the grandchildren of Imagine, people so far gone that the precepts of their grandfathers are these nonsense assumptions; assumptions not only unproven, but proven wrong and impossible at least in this world we live in.

John C. Wright wrote a brilliant (natch) essay on the uglification of art. He approaches it from a … ah… theocentric perspective. (One of the reasons I admire John is that he doesn’t shy away from explaining how his belief works, even when this belief is obviously based on religion. He won’t be shamed by Imagine.) I’m a little different. While I am, as I’ve said, a woman of belief, the way I was raised requires I explain my beliefs and ground them without resort to my faith.

So, here’s my explanation for the uglyfication of all artistic pursuit. These are the children of Imagine. I’m not going to say that the SONG is to blame, understand (I must explain this for the wandering SJWs who read this) but rather the philosophy behind the song, a kitchy, irrational faith prevalent in progressive circles.

The belief in that nonsense and in the nonsense that derives from it makes people’s lives NATURALLY meaningless and horrible.

Look, if you’re going around believing you must eradicate possessions and religion and nations ALL the time, when these things are patently impossible, you’re going to be miserable. If you attribute every setback you suffer to “the patriarchy” or “the oligarchy” or whatever you’re blaming it on these days; if you attribute your dissatisfaction and hunger to the fact other people have more – that is the recipe for ending up in a private hell of envy and resentment.

And this explains the tone, the purges, the sheer anger you encounter in progressive cycles. They can’t enjoy their lives or build anything until oh, possessions are eliminated, and there’s “a brotherhood of man” and every step taken towards that seems to have the opposite result.

Take, for instance “I’ll try everything once.” Or “I will not obey my husband” both precepts promulgated by this sort of hatred for the past of Western civilization. If you live by them, you’re going to end up broken and miserable. (Translation for the SJWs who read this blog: No, dears, I don’t mean that you should always obey your husband. He’s human too. (Well, yours. Mine is a living god. Yes, I AM joking.) I mean that sometimes there are reasons to take his opinion over those of your best friend, your hairdresser or the cashier at the grocery store. More reason probably. After all, you married him. But the women liberated across to your “prescription” refuse to take the opinion or advice of any man, because patriarchy. Which is why they end up miserable.)

Most of the SJWs I know are miserable. At best they hold on to the trappings of “normalcy” by pretending REALLY hard. But they feel either guilty or failures or ineffective, because they’re not living up to their ideals.

Hence their stories, where everyone is miserable, and all of life is pointless, and their works of “art” where every shred of beauty must be eliminated.

They think they’re holding up a mirror to the world and showing that everyone is really, really broken and those evil people who pretend to be happy are really the worst (this is why “hypocrite” is the worst insult in the SJW vocabulary.)

They don’t realize in the end they are just holding the mirror to their own lives, and that those of us who are, in fact, happy and fulfilled, and who are in fact in the majority, just ignore them more and more, until their screams of rage occur only in their own little echo chamber.

Now, is that work complete? Not yet. They still have the education, and other bully pulpits and they’re still twisting the young into non-functionality.

Which is why we have a lot of work to do. Three generations of stupid pap are enough.

Teach your children well. Read, write. Enjoy. Rebuild the foundations of society that they’ve been chipping at for generations.

Living well and living on are the best revenge.

 

 

 

 

Yesterday in a thread discussing the crazy idiocy of “taking a knee” to protest the US in general and our lack of perfection in particular, I  made a comment about how they’re protesting in name of perfection that doesn’t exist (though idiots might have convinced them it does.  I mean, people who haven’t lived in Sweden like to claim it is perfect) and running down the most just country on Earth.

It never fails.  If you make a comment of that kind, you’ll get someone trotting out the “inequality indexes” according to which the US is no good, very bad, horribly unequal.  It’s sort of like the pavlovian reflext of threatening libertarians or non-socialists, really, with “no roads for you.”

But in this case, it’s even more puzzling.  Okay, so roads are at least self-obviously necessary, even if they don’t flow from the bounty of the ever-loving heart of Marx.  But why is “equality” self-obviously a good.  I.e. why should any sane, thinking human being care about statistics saying we’re unequal or give a good goddamn that we aren’t?

The equality promised in the declaration of independence is predicated on two things: equal standing before G-d and, aspirationally, “equal standing before the law” (this is always aspirational because no, a perfect state doesn’t exist in anything involving humans.)

It is not, has never been, will never be “equality of results” or “equality of possessions” or even “equality of social standing.”  It can’t be.  It’s impossible to guarantee or even attempt that, so long as human beings aren’t widgets.

Do you think that any Portuguese immigrant who came here at 22 and married an American would be writing this article thirty years later?  No?  Then why would you expect equality of results in anything else?

Take the class of first graders I started in, back in village school, in 1968.  We were all girls.  Though we all thought we came from extremely different backgrounds, in retrospect, looking back, we all looked alike, we all dressed alike, and we were all more or less at the same social level.

I knew how to read, mostly because I was so much younger than my only sibling and my cousins, that I was bored out of my gourd but honestly, by the end of the year we all knew how to read and cipher decently enough.

So… are we all equal now?  Are you kidding me?  Those I know about range from France (my long-lost best friend) to the US, to faculty in a Portuguese high school, to village housewives, to… well… dead (at least three, alas.)  The rest I have no idea how they turned out, because our lives diverged shortly after fourth grade and never converged again.

Does this mean that there is something broken with the system that produced us?  Sure.  Plenty.  But none of it is responsible for how differently we turned out and how unequal our circumstances.  Only each of us is responsible for how she turned out.

In the same way, throughout our married life, Dan and I have had friends who made more or less the same we did, and lived more or less on the same salary.  None of them had the same lifestyle.  Some were better off, some worse.  Few people — like me — decided to compensate for their profession/staying home with kids not paying by refinishing furniture, making clothes, and generally spending time instead of treasure.  And at least one couple in our social-economic level at 22 are probably millionaires now, because they devoted all their time and attention to making money: investing, financing, that sort of thing.

It’s not what you start with; it’s what you make of it.  People end up very rich who had none of the advantages, not even a degree that paid any money.  And people have ended up very poor who were born with a gold spoon in their mouths.

The only way you can guarantee equality of results is to have the government dictate exactly how much money you can make and how far you can go.  When the government interferes in the economy to the point no one can ever be poor and no one can ever be rich, then yeah, you have greater equality.

But here’s the thing, I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts that every one of those countries with greater equality, their rich live about at the level of our upper middle class.  If that.  Sometime ago I read in an article that for each social level in the US you have to subtract two levels to get the equivalent in Europe.  In my experience this is exactly true.  Their upper middle class lives more or less like our lower middle class.  Their lower middle class live like our poor, etc.

Understand this is not “disposable income” or “how flashy can they get” — Europe can get very flashy indeed.  It’s more comfort, health, food, day to day ease of living.

Take air conditioning, for instance, even if you can afford it in Europe, you can’t afford to turn it on unless the heat is truly unbearable, because the governments, in the name of saving the Earth or worshipping Gaia or whatever, make electricity and fuel so expensive.  Here?  Most people have a temperature controlled environment, and most people use it year around.  In fact, the one year we spent without in a climate that needed it we were truly “poor.”

I’ve also visited supermarkets in Europe.  I remain amazed that Europeans can afford to eat.  Yes, food here is cheaper, and the variety more abundant.  The same applies to every consumer good.

Frankly, even though I enjoy Europe, it’s always at least slightly uncomfortable, which always makes me happy to be home.  Even our service people are more uniformly nice to every customer.  Our public accommodations are more responsive to complaints.  Our hotels are more comfortable (seriously.  One of the best hotels in Portugal was somewhere below Embassy Suites in Denver.) Our cars are more comfortable, too, since most have air conditioning and heating (it takes effort not to have heating in the car, but my dad’s car when I was growing up didn’t have it.)

So, is America more unequal?  Oh, sure.  I think we live middle-middle class, and even one level above us means vacationing abroad, better clothes, going out to eat more and not just because it’s someone’s birthday, or you’re sick and can’t even, or you’re away from home.  And we’re miles above where we were thirty years ago, where if I bought a $5 book, we had to eat pancakes for dinner for a week.

But regardless of the clusters we got ourselves in (we’re both creative) when newly wed (we were paying off the birth of the son, on COBRA, a three day delivery with emergency Caesarean and three surgeons) I know even there we lived better than my friend who married a Frenchman at about the same time.  We had some close shaves but we never actually went hungry, and our son certainly didn’t go hungry.

What I’m trying to say is, I’m completely at a loss as to why the INEQUALITY should matter.

Did it matter to me during the worst year of our lives, when we were broker than broke, in Columbia SC and thought we’d never dig out from under?

Sure it did.  Up the hill from us was a development with very nice houses and a lake (it occurred to me some months ago our new neighborhood is much like that without the lake) and we loved to make sandwiches, go park there and eat, just to bask in the nice surroundings.  It was good to know that better things existed than the shitty place we were in at the time.

But didn’t it make us mad?  No.  Why should it?  Just because we were tight as hell and worried about surviving, didn’t mean we wanted everyone in the same place.  Why would we?

And this is where we get to “inequality” and indexing it is the sanctifying of envy.  It is giving envy the veto over civil society.  People who care about or protest over it are a bunch of whiny kindergartners screaming “but I wanna.”

Yeah, sure, there are countries where the inequality means something.  North Korea, say.  Or Cuba.  If you’re a party member, you live well, while everyone else drowns in the gutter.  But that inequality matters not because it’s great, but because the baseline is so low.  I think we can admit that like “perfect equality” if it existed, “everyone drowns in the gutter, but a few people have mansions” is the sign of despotism.

And before our European readers get confused, no, THAT IS NOT THE US.  Despite all the whining about the 1% a) the 1% vary year per year, and there’s great mobility in general and b) our poor aren’t dying in the gutter.  When you hear the sob stories your TV showcases of poverty in America, remember what you’re not being told: almost every case is self inflicted and involves drugs, alcohol or other forms of impairment.

In fact not so long ago, a liberal activist tried to go and “live like the poor” and found that to remain poor he had to continuously turn down private offers of help.  People wanted to give him clothes and furniture.  People wanted to feed him.

The few genuine, undeserved cases of true hardship in the US are usually as ours was when young and stupid, a case of simply not knowing where to go or how to ask for help.  Years later, in a less pinched but uncomfortable situation, we never hurt nearly as much because we knew things like the club you could join that bought food from restaurant supply stores and sold it to you at cost.  You could feed a family of four on $30 a week about fifteen years ago, and not eat badly at all.  I suspect the same existed when we were young and stupid, but we didn’t know it.

However, the base level, the safety, cleanliness, food and comfort of the poor in America is higher than the poor in just about everywhere else.  Sure, of course, our rich are also extravagantly, bizarrely rich, roaming around Europe and offering to buy whole countries and turn them into parking lots, but so what?

The theory that revolutions happened because of inequality is bushwa.  Sure, socialist/communist revolutions might happen, but they happened whether there was inequality or not, because the Marxist hasn’t been born who can’t instigate envy over the smallest differences.  Envy is, after all, THE Cardinal virtue in their system, the one through which they hope to bring about paradise.

But once communism is installed and inequality greater than ever no revolution ensues.  (After all, the bureaucrats need to be rewarded for working tirelessly for the people, comrade!)

So we can establish that inequality causes neither discontent, discomfort, anger nor revolution.  Marxism does.

I suggest instead of keeping inequality indexes, we keep Marxism indexes.  They’re more expressive of discontent, malice and real danger.

Remember children, the less Marxism, the better off your country will be.  Stay vigilant and keep in mind envy is a sin, not a virtue.

Then do the best you can.

 

 

 

 

 

*I’m afraid the Oyster’s promo being late is the result of my computer.  I had it last Sunday but my email wouldn’t pull.  So, it’s my fault – SAH*

Sunday 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:dependent

 

Long Waited Promo by Free Range Oyster

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Winter Glory

In the cold, forested North-lands—redolent with the aroma of pine, shrouded in snow, and prowled by ice tigers and trolls—Ivvar seeks only to meet his newborn great-granddaughter.

Someone else has the same plan.

Traversing the wilderness toward the infant’s home camp, Ivvar must face the woman he once cherished and an ancient scourge of the chilly woodlands in a complicated dance of love and death.

Ivvar’s second chance at happiness—and his life—hang in the balance.

Alma Boykin

Shikari

Shikari Book One

Adventure! Exploration! Martinus the m-dog! Lost cities and conspiracies! Strange creatures! And homework.

Shikhari, the most-distant human colony world, home to the Staré and Auriga “Rigi” Bernardi. While on school holiday, Rigi and her cousin Tomás Prananda discover a ruined city hidden in the forest. Their find strikes a spark that threatens to upend everything humans think they know about Shikhari’s past, and about the native Staré.

Meanwhile, back in school, Rigi’s determination to do well collides with the nastiest bully on the planet, Benin Shang Petrason. His father has the faculty and administrators under his thumb, allowing Benin to run rampant. If that wasn’t enough, Rigi’s big sister has discovered boys. If it weren’t for Martinus, Rigi’s new m-dog, Tomás, and their eccentric Uncle Ebenezer, Rigi wouldn’t know what to do.

But someone believes that Rigi and Tomás’s find is too dangerous to report. And that someone threatens the children, their families, and their uncle. That someone has just met their match.

Mary Catelli

Through A Mirror, Darkly

What lies behind a reflection?

Powers have filled the world with both heroes and villains. Helen, despite her own powers, had acquired the name Sanddollar but stayed out of the fights.

When the enigmatic chess masters create a mirrored world reflecting her own home and the world about it, it’s not so easy to escape. All the more in that the people of that world are a dark reflection of all those she knows.

Karl K. Gallagher

Torchship Captain

Torchship Trilogy, Book 3

Michigan Long blackmailed her enemies into joining the war against the AIs. Now the secret she used is leaking out and the Fusion is shattering. Caught in the middle of a civil war, she will have to use any weapon that comes to hand—her wits, her ship, her mate.

 

I should be giving you the next installment in either Rogue Magic or Dark Fate (Grant in Portugal.)  I should…

There is about a million things I should be doing, instead of telling you I should.  Here’s the thing: whatever writing (or other business) is accomplished these days is accomplished in mad working dashes between spots of feeling not so good and being unable to muster the energy to do anything.

Normally this would be a bad sign, but the dashes are growing and the spots shrinking, so we’re on an upward trend.  Which is good, because still on the up slope of 50 it shouldn’t be this bad.

The thyroid is being treated (I think we’re nearing right dosage) and the eczema is not erupting as frequently (which is good because pred made me gain weight and lose my hair, which is NOT the look I was going for.)  I’m getting back into regular walking and the asthma strikes less — yesterday I managed not to use the rescue inhaler even once.

Guardian is progressing, though interrupted by a bunch of crazy body-crap.  When it’s done, I’ll finish the fourth Dyce (An inlaid Death) and get it up, then do two Darkships as fast as I can, so you guys don’t die waiting.  I have a Black Tide novel to write, also, but frankly I want to do something in my worlds for a change.  Then there’s the Dragons, something called Mirrorplay (taking the name of an old fantasy novel which will probably be called Horse and Bull or Igniting the Stars or something when it comes out.) and then… well, there’s the second of vampire musketeers, the sixth of musketeer mysteries (though the sales on that don’t encourage me to write a ton more.  We’ll see) and eventually more Tudor queens.

All I want for next year is a body that doesn’t crash every two weeks like clockwork, and we’ll be fine.

On the home front, we think it will be two more years with the boys (at least partially) on the paycheck.  When they fly solo, it should stop our sudden money crunches and depletion of savings and THAT will be less stress, which in turn might help the health.

For the foreseeable future I’ll continue working for PJM (links to the two articles this week here and here.)  Unless they kick me out, of course.  If you have anything you want me to write about, please send me a note.  I might or might not cover it, but particularly if it’s related to something recent I very well might.  I’m not as plugged in to daily news as I should be, because… well, look at my work schedule.

On Rogue Magic, I’m rewriting it third person because it’s cleaner, and also cleaning up the plot.  I’ll put up the revised “to now” version, then finish it here on Saturdays.  The same with Dark Fate, which I’ll do after I finish Guardian (only you know, not changing it to third person.  I don’t know what day I’ll do it.  It might end up crammed on Sundays, who knows.)

So, that’s where things are.  Other than being seriously frustrated with my body, I’m okay.  Yes, I’m sure when medical son moves out I’ll get fewer viruses.  Though he’s doing his clinical year, so we only see him minutes a day, I’m sure he brings home stuff to share.  OTOH if I can exercise and get healthier, I’ll withstand the onslaught better.

Anyway, I’ll leave you to have fun (I know you guys can) and go work.

 

 

I think part of the problem our “friends” on the left are having is that when the mask slips once you can hide it.  When it keeps slipping it becomes …. obvious.

I come from a far distant time, called the seventies.  Perhaps because everyone was doing mescaline-like-substances, the seventies were crazier than those of you who weren’t adults then can even imagine.

One of the strangest things was how everyone assumed communists and socialists were the GOOD GUYS.

Sure, there are some people who still vehemently believe that.  They are either children who were treated like mushrooms all through school and who haven’t yet popped out of their indoctrination, or people who have some reason to hold on to this nonsense.

But in the seventies — and I’ll admit part of it was probably because the newsmedia proclaimed it and there was only one newsmedia — these ideas were mainstream.  They were considered sane.

Being a conservative — or, like me, simply an anti-communist — in the seventies was fighting a rear-guard action, with the certainty we were going to lose.  It was like being one of the warriors at Ragnarok.  You fought as hard as you could and you knew you’d lose.

The assumption was that communism was more efficient.  Central, top-down planing just eliminated waste more, which is why we needed it when we were all heading for the world of “make room, make room.”  Most anti-communists opposed communism because they thought life under it would be worse for the individual, but agreed that due to its incredible efficiency it would win out.

This wasn’t me, btw.  Perhaps because I lived in Europe.  Perhaps because by the age of 14 I’d never been present at any newsworthy event that the press reported right.  (And I’d been present at a few newsworthy events by then.  BTW, the track record continues.)  Also, I’m not by nature a very trusting person.  I looked at the glossy pictures of Soviet Life and I could smell a rat.  I knew that it was impossible that a regime which de-emphasized THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL HUMAN could be good.  Finding and reading the Gulag archipelago was actually a relief, because it confirmed for me that I wasn’t, actually, completely batshit crazy.

BUT most people are more trusting than I.  And they want to believe that the people who smile to their faces have good intentions.

Those of you who are young and who get furious with the Republican establishment: I FEEL YOUR PAIN.  But remember people like McCain came of age before I did.  Opposing communism was this doomed gallant fight you had no hope of winning and weren’t supposed to.

BTW, despite the defenders of “socialism with an human face” socialism is getting more and more amalgamated to communism, as it should be.  Everyone always knew it was a phase “on the way to communism” and in fact the communist countries always called themselves socialist (while the European “democracies” call themselves social democrat and are on the same greased chute to hell.)

The thing is they are the same thing.  They both take away from the individual that most fundamental of rights “the pursuit of happiness.”  Life, liberty and property usually follow.

Beyond all the tragic misunderstandings about human nature, socialism, communism and all societies in which the state arrogates for itself the right to control the daily life of individuals “for the good of all” (as opposed to “for common defense” or “to keep peace” at a distance, mind, and not in minutia) it fails because the good of all can be defined anyway you want.  The “all” like the “none” has no specific voice.  Leaving aside who counts the votes (and in the US that’s almost impossible, given the serial corruption of voting rolls) there are polls and interpretations and the massaging of public opinion to say what the “people” should say.

When they had full control of the press, this got really weird.  And in countries where blogs aren’t as prevalent they still do.

But here, we’re ah… talking truth to power.  Which seriously disturbs the left narrative of the happy people of Brutopia being incredibly happy with its wise planners.

And they don’t know what to do.  And the mask keeps slipping.  They say things like they want to restrict the first amendment.  Or they burn their own college to prevent a talk by a single, mostly harmless fabulous faggot.  OR they armor it in case the little Jewish man and his talk will physically attack him.  They see Nazis everywhere.  They start banning people on the net.  They defend the NHS.  Yeah, that same NHS that forced a baby to die when his parents had the money to try a last ditch treatment for him.  Because the “right to die with dignity” is in their constitution, and the pursuit of happiness isn’t.  You see, they love death more than we love life.  (Where have I heard that before?)

Now Hillary says she wants to contest the elections NOW.

A lot of people are discouraged by this, and by the soft acceptance of the antifa property destroyers and head breakers.

BE NOT AFRAID.

If the left were secure they would be keeping their mask of “reasonable people” in place.  A friend of mine, in the run up to 04 said they become louder as they start losing.

We haven’t reached peak loud yet.

Get yourself a beer or a soda and a bunch of popcorn.  Things are about to get interesting.

Prepare yourself in case your area is one of those where things get violent.  And other than that, just smile.

The pictures from Soviet Life lie burning in the ruins of the dream of a planned economy.  The defenders of socialism now try to claim spiritual virtues for it, just like the defenders of the free economy used to object to planning on almost aesthetic terms.

A man — or a form of governance — may smile and smile and be a villain, but sooner or later the mask slips and shatters, and boy, howdy, has it.

Now we can look on the monstrous form we knew was there all along, and possess ourselves in patience as our less politically aware brethren catch on.

In the end, we win, they lose.  Never doubt it.  This is no time to go wobbly.

 

 

Ever since Obama made his speech about how “you didn’t build that” because even if you build a business from nothing, you have roads, we have a curious madness on the left.  Every time you say anything about socialism or mention that government is too big, you get someone yelling at you that if you want freedom you don’t need roads.

There was a meme a friend of mine put on a facebook group some months ago (and which I didn’t steal because I’m stupid) which perfectly showed this.  There was this pissed off guy rolling up what was clearly a bad layer of asphalt on a road and the caption was “Libertarianism?  Well, you won’t be needed this.”

Yesterday I came across this when I shared on Facebook my PJMedia post about the corrupting nature of socialist governments (most of Europe) and a guy commented that hey, a little socialism was good, it was a lot that was bad, and then used the quote about government being a good servant but a bad master, but applied it to SOCIALISM.  He actually gave as an example of things that the government allowed us to have ROADS.

Seriously, I’m starting to think this is some form of psychosis, like Obama spoke and replaced the contents of these people’s heads with an obsession about ROADS being a thing of socialism.

Of course there were roads long before socialism.  There were roads under every possible form of government, because humans have to get around.  Roman roads, under both the republic and the empire were a thing we still envy, built for the ages.  And they were certainly not socialist.  (Not that any of us would want to live under their system of government, either, but that’ doesn’t matter because every system of government had roads.)

The road thing is particularly puzzling since I know that colonists in the Americas put up roads and that my parents, under the (then) National Socialist regime paid to have their road paved.  (They and their neighbors, of course.)

He also refered to the government monopoly over roads, which made me scratch my head, because as far as I know there is no such thing.  As a proof, there are tons of private roads.  More importantly, in condo-like developments, with the entire neighborhood being managed, the roads are often owned by the association/people who manage the condos, not by any government.

A saner example of things “we need government for” would be schools and even then he would be crazy.  Though the government has arrogated for itself (by means of accreditation authority) the right to tell you what your kids must learn and how it must be documented, there are enough homeschoolers doing fine despite that.  And there are private schools.  And my husband’s ancestors, in the 1600s in CT took up money to build a school house and hire a school master.  (Not a light undertaking for fishermen and farmers living hand to mouth.)

Beyond the obsession with roads, it seems like everyone under thirty thinks that any form of government is socialism.  This is so staggeringly stupid it makes my head hurt.

The genius above, then came back to enlighten us that to him “I think” socialism was power to the government and crony capitalism was power to the corporations.  Those were the only forms of government and we needed a bigger state to keep the corporations in check.

WHAT IN HELL ARE THE SCHOOLS TEACHING?

Crony capitalism often affects socialist governments, because the government controls so much it can give exemptions and benefits to large corporations.  It is a creature of large government as much as socialism.

Corporations use government to destroy up-and-coming competitors, and governments use corporations because it’s easier to control the assets without owning them.

And there is a cure.  The antidote is a government that is small, relatively powerless, and kept in check by its citizens.

Something, say, like our founders intended when they wrote the constitution.

Perhaps our young should learn about it, and why it was needed, instead of you know, getting their ideas about government from their profound and painful ignorance of history (“I think”) and the speeches of a fourth generation red diaper baby.

Nah, I know, that’s just crazy talk.

 

[For those of us too broke or cheap — or yes — to have gone to totality to see the eclipse, Stephanie Osborn provides a lovely recap.]

The Great American Eclipse from the centerline

By Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

(All images in this article courtesy Dr. Robert R. Murphy, M.D. and Patricia Murphy, R.N.)

 

On the afternoon of 21 August 2017, the Moon entered its “new” phase at the exact same time that the Sun, Moon and Earth experienced a syzygy.

It’s called a solar eclipse.

This would be my second total eclipse, but my first TRUE total eclipse: when I was in graduate school studying astronomy, a total annular eclipse (an eclipse which occurs with the Moon at apogee, the farthest distance from Earth, means it doesn’t completely cover the solar disk, and leaves a ring, or annulus, of visible disk) tracked across Atlanta GA one summer in July (if memory serves). So one of my fellow astronomy graduate students and I had picked up and made a road trip from Vanderbilt University in Nashville to Atlanta, with full blessing of our professors, as well as loaned portable telescopes equipped with objective solar filters. That in itself was an adventure, but today I want to talk about the most recent experience.

Having planned ahead, we spent the night at my parents’ house in the country a little south of Nashville TN. On eclipse day, I found myself, ISO-certified eclipse glasses in hand, with several family members and any number of new friends at the small Smithville TN Municipal Airport, FAA Identifier 0A3, elevation 1084.3ft, latitude 35º 59’ 07.6” N, longitude 085º 48’ 32.8” W. Normally this small regional airport would be closed on Mondays, but it was open especially for the astronomical event we were all there to witness. We were a stone’s throw from the center line, and per my Solar Eclipse Timer app (ain’t technology great?), would experience fully 2 minutes and 35 seconds of totality around 1:30pm local time (Central time zone).

By the way, for those who don’t know, the Moon’s shadow during a solar eclipse travels in the near vicinity of 1000-1200mph on average, though depending on the geometry and the curvature of the Earth under the eclipse path, it can go as slow as some 7-800mph and as fast as 8000mph or more. For this eclipse, maximum velocity occurred as the shadow was crossing the west coast in Oregon, at around 2,200mph; minimum velocity — thus longest duration — occurred in Kentucky and Tennessee, where it slowed to just over 1,300mph. It was already speeding up again by the time it crossed the East Coast in South Carolina, at nearly 1,500mph.

The maximum totality duration possible was 2 minutes, 40 seconds, which occurred very near Hopkinsville, KY, which area is the stomping grounds of my youth… but which was over an hour of additional driving, with nowhere to stay overnight, as my family has moved away from the area. Our duration of 2:35 was therefore not shabby at all.

We arrived at the airport around 10:00amCDT and set up chairs, a small awning, and a table with plenty of food and drink (sandwiches, chips, a veggie tray, several kinds of dip, cookies, brownies, iced tea, lemonade, water — all well chilled; yes, we know how to tailgate!), which we gladly shared with the airport staff and volunteers, as well as several emergency responders stationed at the airport. The airport expected up to 75 planes that day, all there for a special eclipse “fly-in.” I’m not sure we had THAT many aircraft, but I’d say we had easily in the near vicinity of 50, and the planes averaged 2 persons per, some more, some less. A few larger planes carried entire contingents of a dozen or more. Observers ranged from as near as Knoxville TN, to western Texas and beyond. I’m pretty sure I heard someone mention they flew in from Ontario, Canada.

The morning dawned bright and clear, with no rain forecast, but there was some cloud cover, mostly light high cirrus haze and some pop-up-type cumulus. As the day progressed and the heat increased, the percentage of cumulus cloud cover increased substantially.

Eclipse timings are defined by four principal points: first contact, second, third, and fourth contacts. These are geometrically defined; first contact is when the leading edge of the Moon first “contacts” the near side of the solar disk; this is the beginning of the eclipse event. Second contact is when the leading edge of the Moon first “contacts” the FAR side of the solar disk, and this marks the beginning of totality. Third contact is when the TRAILING edge of the Moon first “contacts” the near side of the solar disk, and this marks the end of totality. Fourth contact is when the trailing edge of the Moon “contacts” the FAR side of the solar disk; this marks the end of the eclipse event.

First contact was scheduled for 12:00:44pm CDT.

The temperature at the time of first contact, according to my weather app, was 94ºF. Cloud cover was substantial, and partly obscured observations of first contact, but not enough to prevent the observations being made. First contact occurred at roughly two o’clock on the solar disk (meaning, if the Sun were a clock face, the Moon touched it at the numeral 2).

 

The eclipse proceeded steadily after that. Little was noticeable at first, though the “bite” taken out of the Sun grew larger and larger. At about the halfway point, the ambient light got “funny” — the sky grew marginally darker, and there was a sensation as if the illumination was dimmer. My impression is also that it tends to be slightly skewed to blue shades, but that may be only my eyesight, and is subjective.

 

As totality approached, we began to realize that the cloud cover was diminishing steadily, most likely as a result of decreased heating/evaporation from the ground providing for less and less water vapor for cloud formation. However, there was cloud cover around the horizon except in the direction of the approaching lunar shadow (roughly NW), where a distinct gap, surrounded by two cloud banks, made itself apparent. The temperature was also dropping noticeably; with 45 minutes still left to totality, my weather app indicated we were already at 90ºF, and it was continuing to drop. At 30 minutes to totality, it had dropped to 88ºF.

As the sky darkened, the entire horizon took on the colors of sunset. I made a pinhole camera by punching a hole in a paper plate, to show some of the children that had gathered to watch with their families; it showed the progressing solar crescent quite nicely. At only 15 minutes to totality, we spread out a white quilted tarp for observing the diffraction-pattern “snakes.” There was nothing left of the cumulus clouds overhead, only a faint, high cirrus haze, which did not obscure viewing to speak of.

Second contact, and onset of totality, was scheduled for 13:29:20 (1:29:20pm) CDT. I called out a countdown to totality for the lay observers. Just before full totality was reached, my father spotted the diffraction pattern on the tarp, reporting that it lasted for a scant five seconds. Some observers with large camera optics reported Baily’s beads — the last glimpses of the Sun through mountain valleys on the rim of the Moon. My aunt captured the “diamond ring,” an illusion produced by the last rim of the solar disk still visible at the moment that the corona begins to become visible. (This also occurs at the end of totality; she captured both.)

 

 

 

At the beginning of totality, some wags at the eastern end of the airport’s E/W runway began setting off a fireworks display in celebration; it appeared to be electronically controlled and quite the nice display, what little I saw of it. I suppose, had I been sitting behind it so I could see it against the backdrop of the eclipse, I might have enjoyed it more. But I had no problem with the already-jubilant atmosphere to which it added a bit of ambiance.

The sky at the airport was clear and cloudless, though there was still a broken ring of clouds around the horizon. The minimum temperature I observed on my weather app was 81ºF; it was quite comfortable and a slight breeze appeared to spring up. (Temperatures can drop during totality by up to 25ºF; the general consensus of the observers was that the weather app was lagging badly and may not have displayed the actual low temperature. We felt it was likely in the mid-to-upper 70s during totality.) At this point, unaided viewing was safe and possible, no protective devices needed.

The sky overhead was dark — enough so that the runway lights automatically switched on, as did the light illuminating the wind sock, and all street lights visible in the vicinity — and Venus was easily visible to the WNW of the eclipse; I also caught averted-vision glimpses of Mars (currently on the far side of the Sun from Earth in its orbit), and of Mercury (my first ever view of Mercury; I have never been in a location with unobstructed horizons whenever Mercury was at maximum elongation and therefore visible at sunrise or sunset). The entire horizon, the full 360º, took on a post-sunset look, with the deep orange right at the horizon rapidly fading through yellow and green into deep blues; a brief chat with an amateur astronomer confirmed my impression that the sky appeared to be some 45 minutes after sunset.

Given our position in the middle of the tarmac, there was little in the way of animal activity to observe; however, the ubiquitous cicadas ceased chirping, as did the birds, and save for the fireworks on the far edge of the airport, and a few human murmurs of delight and awe — and my occasional call-out of information — the experience was almost eerily quiet.

Third contact and the end of totality occurred at 13:31:55 (1:31:55pm) CDT. Again, I called out a countdown for lay observers, to ensure eye safety; at only a couple of seconds to end of totality, I called out, “GLASSES ON!” and just as I donned my own, I saw the outgoing “diamond ring.”

 

 

 

The sky began to lighten as rapidly as it had darkened. Temperatures, however, remained depressed according to my weather app, though it soon began to feel quite hot once more. I suspect that there may have been a lag in the app, though I cannot verify it. At any rate, according to the app, an hour past third contact, the temperature was still only 84ºF. The sky did remain amazingly clear except for that same high cirrus haze. Only in the last half-hour before fourth contact did the cumulus clouds begin to re-form. Ten minutes prior to fourth contact, the weather app showed the temperature had risen to 88ºF.

 

By this point, all was almost back to normal with the sky and the world, at least in our part of it. The casual observers had begun departing at the end of totality, and the airport became relatively quiet, except for a few hardcore observers like myself, determined to stick it out until fourth contact, and the airport staff. Every thirty seconds or so for the first hour after third contact, an aircraft took off. My family, not quite as hardcore as their professional astronomer, began to break down our “tailgate” and load up, leaving the chairs and the awning for last, to provide rest and shade as the temperatures ramped back up.

 

Fourth contact, the end of the eclipse, was at 14:55:52 (2:55:52pm) CDT. The weather app still showed only 88ºF, but it felt considerably hotter, so I suspect it was still lagged. Cumulus cloud development was still underperforming, though it was gradually starting to rebound.

 

My estimation of the temperature as fourth contact passed would set it being at least the equivalent of the temperature at first contact: 94ºF. It did get marginally higher than that as the afternoon waned, though not by much. My estimates indicate it may have reached as high as 96ºF at Smithville TN.

Once fourth contact passed, we packed up the chairs and the awning and headed out, thanking our hosts along the way and donating to the airport’s upkeep. (It’s always courteous to help out the hosts.) We had an hour to drive to reach my parents’ house, where we took advantage of the facilities, as well as the air conditioning and ceiling fans. By the time we reached their house, the cumulus cloud cover had already reached and marginally surpassed its previous, pre-eclipse extent.

We allowed about 15-20 minutes to cool off in the excellent air conditioning, then headed home to Huntsville AL. So swollen by eclipse chasers was the traffic, however, that the nominal 1:45 drive took fully 2:40 to travel; the first leg of the drive, normally taking 20 minutes, took a full hour. Needless to say, we were glad to be home.

But I don’t regret the traffic, the long hours, the heat — any of it. Already scientific discoveries are starting to flow back from the data obtained during the eclipse, and much is being learned about such matters as the solar corona, how it behaves, and why it stays so hot (the corona has a temperature of several million degrees Celsius, whereas the photosphere, or visible “surface”, is only about 6000ºC).

The memories? Well, those are priceless.

 

 

 

Stephanie Osborn, award-winning author, is a 20+-year space program veteran with multiple STEM degrees. She has authored, co-authored, or contributed to 35+ fiction and popular science books, including The Weather Out There Is Frightful: Solar/Space Weather and You; Burnout: The mystery of Space Shuttle STS-281, the Displaced Detective series, and the new Division One series.

So recently, for no reason at all (coff) I’ve been thinking that if there were a way to create the worst possible fictional villain it would be to create someone who always exonerates himself of all blame: if he lost a tennis match, the sun was in his eyes, even if it was at night.

This has never been one of my problems.  Even when the game is rigged, I tend to assume I should just have played better.  Yeah, I say that politics played into my career puttering in place for years, but only because compared to some of the extreme-left “luminaries” my production quality and amount are astounding, not because I was/am entirely blameless.

No matter what is arrayed against you, you can always work harder.  And I did not work nearly as hard as I might have in an ideal world, because my priorities were different.  Sure, I want to work, and I want my writing to do well, but I could never convince myself that my career or progress in it was more important than the raising of my kids or the happiness of my marriage.

I don’t regret those choices, but from the point of view of career they are unfortunate.  (And if truth be told probably the reason that, to the extent this happens — and it’s not as much as the usual suspects maintain — women tend not to reach the very top in many fields.  Because the very top demands a single-minded devotion that frankly isn’t good for you or your relationships, and which men– for whom the social script is to do well in career — are more likely to abuse themselves with.)  If I had a dime for every time a male colleague told me “You should just lock the door, stock the freezer with pizza, write like the wind and let the guys take care of themselves.”  And from the point of view of career they were right. From the point of view of me, they weren’t.  So, now that I have a little more space, and the guys can at least cook for themselves, I’ll do what I can.  And if I don’t reach as far as I could have, my fans will have to forgive me.

Forgiving myself is a little harder, because the broken part at the back of my brain doesn’t understand I’m human, I have limits and there’s only so many hours in the day.  Though I’ve achieved a healthy (not) splitting and mostly I’m mad at my body for breaking down all the time.

This is possibly not the sanest thing in the world, but at least it doesn’t make me hate everyone else, and lock myself in a castle of paranoia.

When you do that; when everything that happened to you was the fault of someone else, you lose your ability to self correct and to figure out how to procede.

So, say, if you descend to the point of blaming four men you left to die for sabotaging your political career, you should seek help, and by that I don’t mean “financing for a future political run.”

Look, the feedback in this world isn’t perfect.  As we’ve been told, sometimes the wicked flourish like the green bay tree.  But I suspect that flourishing is illusory.  I suspect if you truly give in to your inner egotism and assume you’re perfect and anything you fail at must be someone else’s fault, it slowly eats you inside.

There’s only one way to raise someone to be unable to admit ANY fault in their own downfall, except for humble brags.  You have to raise them in the absolute certainty of their own perfection and invincibility.  I know a lot of people like that.  Personally and closely I know one other such person, who fortunately didn’t turn her ambitions to politics, but who, instead, has a string of broken marriages and infidelities between those marriages whose only admission of fault is that she thinks she might be “too giving.”  Having seen the way she screws exes to the wall, and not in a good way, the only thing I can ask is “giving of what, heartburn?”

In that case, I happen to know the person was raised to believe herself utterly perfect.  If something went wrong, someone was found to blame for her failure.  If she didn’t perform as expected it was always something else.

What she became is only logical. When you think you’re perfect, then everything that goes wrong must be someone else’s fault, and everyone MUST be to blame for your failures.

Kind of like communism, on a society level.  When you’re almost a religion and believe your form of government is absolutely perfect, then when it fails it must be that people failed the government.  This is what fills graves.

On a personal level it rarely gets that far, unless one of these critters manages to get  a post of responsibility and power, like, say, Secretary of State.

Most of them don’t rise that far.  At worst they are incompetent, self-righteous bureaucrats, many of whom make our bureaucracy a living nightmare, because there’s at least one of them per department of anything you need, I swear.

The thing is, knowing how you create these people, and knowing how prevalent “self esteem” education has been in our system the last thirty years, we’re going to see a lot more of this.

Only the left could decided that instead of teaching people to be good at things, we should just teach them to have supreme confidence in themselves, as though actually learning skills were an incidental, painless thing, requiring no work.

As usual, they were precisely wrong.  And though the creature that inspired this post was ahead of her time, there’s a lot of her kin on the way.  Some of whom will get power, sooner or later.

The only way we survive this is for a lot of us who know we aren’t perfect to study and work, and find ways around, over and under the institutions they’ll cause to collapse.

Oh, and teach your children well.  If you can, teach them to see the factors that go into their failures, and to forgive themselves when they fail.

But if you can’t do that, at least teach them they aren’t perfect.

As someone who tends to shoulder all the blame and try to lift all the worlds on my shoulders, it’s not a healthy way to be.  BUT with all that, it’s infinitely more healthy than blaming everyone else, and being eaten inside with hatred and paranoia.

Teach your children well.  Don’t trust the schools to do it for you.  And remember self-esteem is the result of pride in what you’ve done or achieved.  If it’s not that, it’s just insanity.